Most college students don’t come by money easily. So when Maria Carreras opened the thick envelope sitting on her kitchen table and read that she had been chosen as a Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Scholar, she was ecstatic.
“I started screaming and jumping up and down,” she said. “Everyone in my house thought I was crazy.
Carreras is one of the most recent Cal State Long Beach graduate students to be designated by the California Pre-Doctoral Program as a Sally Casanova Scholar, which earns her a $3,000 scholarship to aid in her quest for a Ph.D.
Three other CSULB graduate students were also selected to receive a scholarship, including Jiun Shen, who intends to study psychology; Alvaro Luna, who will study comparative literature; and Erica Navarro, who will study educational leadership.
The California Pre-Doctoral Program, which chose 72 Sally Casanova Scholars for 2012-13, awards students annually and was founded to aid economically disadvantaged graduate students who have a keen interest in becoming future Cal State University faculty, according to the CSU website.
Carreras received her undergraduate degree in history from CSULB in 2010, with a minor in classics. She said she hopes to research how private organizations, such as local sport teams, religious groups and regional music and dance troupes influenced children in Catalonia, a region in Spain reportedly oppressed for most of the twentieth century.
She said she’d like to see how these influences helped to form those children’s complex ideas of cultural identity, such nationalism and the idea of a nation itself.
Though Carreras is deeply invested in her area of study, she said many people might find it hard to relate to.
“The most challenging part of my thesis and the subject I expect to research for my doctorate is being able to write something that connects and appeals to a wide readership,” she said. “I hope that people are able to connect to it somehow.”
The research is important, she said, because it will help show how national values are spread to children. With several new nations having formed in recent years, such as South Sudan, Serbia and Montenegro, that information could be useful, she said.
“Examining how children adopt certain values helps explain past and current voting patterns, popular political ideas and general perceptions of self and other,” she said.
As part of the scholarship, the selected graduate students will take part in a research internship program at a doctoral-granting institution. They also will receive the opportunity to attend professional conferences and national symposia concerning their selected fields.
The scholarship even covers the cost of graduate school applications and subscription fees of journals related to the scholar’s area of study.
After spending time in the field, conducting the research necessary for a doctorate and surviving labor intensive months of organizing and preparing her thesis, Carreras said she plans on fulfilling the primary expectation of Sally Casanova Scholars – becoming a CSU faculty member.
“While I am highly motivated on researching and writing on such an interesting subject, I would untimely like to serve as a college faculty and serve a diverse student body, similar to that of CSULB’s,” she said. “And while applying for the grant, I made it a priority to clearly demonstrate my genuine interest in helping a large, diverse student body.”