Whittier College and the University of California, Los Angeles co-hosted the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship’s Western Regional Conference this month, bringing together scholars from across the region. Over 115 fellows from 17 institutions presented research, attended panel discussions, and more.
“I saw so many wonderful research projects and made really great contacts,” said third-year student Paige Meyer-Draffen. “It was exactly the type of academic setting full of people passionate about their work.”
Established in 1988 by the Mellon Foundation, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) focuses on increasing representation in higher education by working with colleges and universities to identify and support students with mentoring, research, programming, and more. It has produced more than 1,100 doctorates, almost 800 of whom are currently college professors. At any given time, about 800 fellows are enrolled in Ph.D. programs, while the fellowship supports approximately 500 undergraduate students — like Whittier’s seven-member cohort — each year.
It is Meyer-Draffen’s first year in the program. A Whittier Scholars Program major in broadcasting and digital media from Huntington Beach, she researched and created a poster on politics and online astroturfing, when fake accounts flood a space to promote or condemn a viewpoint to mimic grassroots participants.
Meyer-Draffen said the project was intimidating because it involved a contemporary topic. However, she’s glad her peers and mentors supported her, and she highly recommends the pipeline.
“It does a lot for demystifying Ph.D.s, graduate school, and higher education,” Meyer-Draffen said, adding that one of her favorite parts of the conference was hearing MMUF alumni candidly share their experiences in higher education. “It makes it all accessible to a lot of first-generation and low-income students.”
Yasmin Mendoza ’21 — now a third-year Ph.D. student at the University of California, Davis — researches speculative fiction, law, and technology. She pursued her doctorate to increase representation in the education space and was glad to participate in an alumni panel to share the value of the fellowship at her alma mater.
“The fellows got reassurances that people like us can get into these kinds of well-renowned universities,” Mendoza said. “There's really nothing else that compounds the process together in such a way that makes everything accessible to students who, like myself, didn't know about these resources and the steps that you need to take in order to achieve the dream of attending graduate school.”
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