When she found herself in "my quarter-life crisis," juggling three part-time jobs with no particular direction, Lucy Arellano looked back over her 25 years and thought that her undergraduate years at the University of Michigan was probably the "most impactful event in my life." To a young woman born and raised in East LA, the environment in Ann Arbor was "the biggest shocker," she says, "dealing with a new climate in both senses of the word—racial and the weather. We had to learn to walk on ice."

Lucy managed quite well, fulfilling requirements in three majors over the course of five years, but it was a challenge. "I was in the prime of my teen years, away from home for the first time," she says. "It was formative and educational at the same time." The question that came out of her quarter-life reflection was: How can I help others in my community do the same thing?

Returning to Ann Arbor for a master's degree in education was her first step. Everyone there "kept talking about Sylvia Hurtado, who was doing all this work on Latino students." Having spent a decade in Ann Arbor, Dr. Hurtado had just left for UCLA and the Higher Education Research Institute. Lucy wasn't far behind, starting her doctoral work in 2006 with Dr. Hurtado as her adviser.

Looking back on her years in Michigan, Lucy felt that the key support for her continued studies was her connections to student groups, especially those for students of Mexican heritage. She thought she might make a dissertation project out of how student organizations affect retention for other students like herself, but quantitative data were not available. Instead, she is using data from the HERI Freshman Survey and longitudinal follow-ups to examine the factors that predict degree attainment for Latino students. Part of the study will also compare students of various national Latino backgrounds.

That done, Lucy hopes to find a tenure track position at a college or university. Landing a job at a research one university "at the beginning of a career would be pretty awesome," she acknowledges, but her main goal is to interact closely with students. In Fall 2009, she was a teaching assistant for a graduate level course, and as she watched the professor work, she sat back and thought: "I could totally see myself doing that."

Published in Fall 2010, Graduate Quarterly