Vanesa Estrada was still in elementary school in Oxnard when she realized "I was a good student, and I could study anything I wanted," but she was a college intern at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., before she settled on what "anything" would be: the interaction of social class, race/ethnicity, and urban environments. In particular, she became interested in housing as "a key to understanding the racial landscape of a city, levels of segregation, and access to resources like schools and jobs," says Vanesa. "Homeownership is the main component of wealth for most families—it's important for socioeconomic mobility."

Vanesa had known all along that "I wanted to apply my talents to work I thought was important for society," she says, but as an undergraduate, "you don't know all the career options and how to get there." She came to Stanford University in an interdisciplinary human biology program leading to medical school. By the time she left, however, she was "more interested in the big picture issues, especially concerning social inequality and public policy—all those research questions that need to be answered in a smart, intelligent way."

These experiences prompted her to pursue a PhD in sociology, and after visiting several campuses, she settled on UCLA for graduate school. "Talking with graduate students about their experiences in the program helped me make my decision," she says, and she was impressed by the strong, diverse faculty in sociology. Arriving in September, she had only a few weeks to find an adviser and develop a proposal so that she could apply for the Ford Pre-doctoral Fellowship. She quickly connected with Professor Robert Mare, who "was just beginning a new line of research in segregation and residential mobility," she says, and she joined his team.

For her master's thesis, Vanesa used the recently completed Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey to examine segregation and residential mobility patterns: How did the racial composition of various Los Angeles neighborhoods affect the likelihood that respondents of different races would move there? Through statistical modeling, she found that although socioeconomic and demographic characteristics could account for some of people’s neighborhood choices, there was "still a tendency to self-segregate into racially similar neighborhoods that cannot be explained by other factors."

In other research co-authored with fellow graduate student David Cort, Vanesa studied mortgage lending in Los Angeles, finding not only that minorities are less likely to be approved for mortgages than whites, but that their loan is more likely to be approved if they're buying a home in a Black or Latino neighborhood, rather than a white neighborhood.

For her dissertation, Vanesa has decided to return to the study of racial differences in homeownership. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics, based on interviews with a national sample from 1968 to 2003, offers the opportunity to broaden her geographic perspective beyond Los Angeles and to identify changes over three decades. Her goal is to examine why the racial gap in homeownership has remained stable despite efforts to encourage minorities to become homeowners. Through simulations she also hopes to identify what factors affect the home ownership gap and identify possible policy strategies to increase minority homeownership.

Vanesa learned about the Ford Fellowship from Simon Weffer-Elizondo, a former teaching assistant and Ford Fellow at Stanford, currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. He told her the award meant "more than just getting money every month—you'll be connected to this wonderful community of minority scholars."

Simon was just the first of those contacts. At national conferences of Ford Fellows in 2002 and 2003, Vanesa had an opportunity to present her work and get feedback. "It was really different from other conferences I attend because it's so interdisciplinary," she says. In 2003, Vanesa's topic was issues in the measurement of discrimination, so "I had to think a lot about translating my work and making it non-technical." Through the national conferences, she also met Cynthia Feliciano, a former Ford Fellow and UCLA graduate student who is currently an assistant professor of Sociology at UC Irvine; she was an important mentor in Vanesa's first years of graduate school. And, when the national conference was cancelled in 2004, Vanesa helped Brendesha Tynes put on a regional conference at UCLA.

Having passed her qualifying exams, Vanesa will focus on her dissertation for the next year or two. With her Pre-doctoral Ford Fellowship's tenure ending, she'll be applying for a dissertation year fellowship or perhaps a postdoctoral appointment. Then, she'll be looking for a job at a research university; "professors get paid to think and write—what a great lifestyle." In the long run, she may add some consulting work, she says: "I really loved working at the Urban Institute."

Published in Fall 2005, Graduate Quarterly