Major: International Studies

Award: Woodrow Wilson Fellowship

I applied to undertake undergraduate research at Hopkins because I had a question that I wanted answered: why is it that gifted education programs are often ignored as a policy tool to close the achievement gap? Of course, one of the largest troubles facing America today is the lack of opportunity afforded to the residents of lower-income minority communities. It’s something that’s deeply affected me because I’ve dealt with it myself.

As a low-income Afro-Latino student who went to school in Mississippi, although I appreciated the work my gifted teachers had done, I understood that something was wrong. Though it was 2011, my textbooks listed H.W. Bush as the current president and Pluto as a planet. I’d known that this was a problem of political institutions – even if I didn’t know the words at the time – but I never fully understood either the problem or its solutions. I reasoned that at Hopkins, it would be my goal to come to this answer. I realize today that there is no clear answer, but I’ve gotten closer to understanding the issue that underlay my childhood education. 

My Project

When I began this project, I had assumed that gifted education was an unconstrained good, and I never understood the political opposition to expansion of those programs. Although I still hypothesize that gifted education has a positive impact on racial inequality when done correctly (at least backed by American data, although this becomes more questionable outside the U.S.), I now understand why some view gifted education as contributing to racial inequality. This realization has impacted my broader hypothesis of the excellence gap, and it has required me to include an understanding of cultural competence in my ideal gifted education system. 

Over summers and the senior fall semester, I often committed 10 hours a week to research. I also worked in education research outside of the Wilson Fellowship, regarding low-income students and the SAT. 

Challenges and Gains

The most challenging part of research is discerning what you actually have the capacity to produce research on. When I first began doing research, I had so many ideas. Choosing one is the hardest part, especially in social science research. There are so many variables and hypotheses that have been raised about so many societal ills, but you need to pinpoint just one to have an actual actionable research question! 

When my initial proposal was accepted by URSCA, I immediately locked in my matriculation to Johns Hopkins. Of course, JHU is a top research university, but on top of that, it has the Center for Talented Youth and employs an array of scholars on gifted education. Thus, not only did I gain valuable mentorship, but I also gained real-world experience in conducting both quantitative and qualitative research. I was able to leverage this into employment outside of campus in research positions. I also made many friends from the Wilson Fellowship program, and I was able to experience presenting a conference in Hawaii.  

I never expected to learn about the racial hierarchy in Singapore of all places! A deeper understanding of theories on race and education led me to question what was actually going on in Singapore’s gifted education system, which I had ironically cited as a paragon of racial equality in my original proposal! 

What do you plan to do after you graduate? 

I’m planning on going into education law, whether this be in an American jurisdiction or in international development.