Johanna Lopez Velador knew she wanted to become a college professor after a life-changing course at El Paso Community College exposed her to the field of Chicana/o Studies.
“When I took that class, even though I was born and raised in El Paso, TX, that was the first introduction that I had ever gotten to a literature that reflected Mexican-American history,” said Johanna, a history Ph.D. student now at the University of Iowa. “I didn’t know that it was something that I was lacking in my life … and I wanted to do that for other people.”
Johanna’s enrollment in additional Chicano courses led her to transfer to the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) where she soon took on a double major in Chicana/o Studies and history. But as a first generation college student and older student who started college 10 years after graduating from high school, she still had questions about the process for furthering her education through graduate studies.
A conversation with UTEP’s director or graduate studies covered the basics – preparation for the GRE and an overview of selecting schools, but it was still “very vague,” Johanna said. “I still left not knowing what I was going to do.”
Soon after, the director forwarded her an email about the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions’ (CMSI) Hispanic Serving Institution Pathways to the Professoriate Program.
“I read their description and I was like, ‘Oh my God! This is exactly what I’ve been looking for,’” she said laughing. “So I applied and I got in.”
The goal of the HSI Pathways program is to increase the number of Latino faculty in the humanities. Funded by a five-year, $5.1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the program is on track to prepare 90 students from Florida International University, the University of Texas El Paso and California State University, Northridge – all Hispanic serving institutions (HSIs) – for careers in academia.
