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Jeanette B. Ruiz stands with a hand on her hip in the middle of Shields Library courtyard. She is wearing a blue T-shirt with a colorful graphic that says #firstgen college grad UC Davis.

Jeanette B. Ruiz named faculty lead for UC Davis First-Generation Initiative

  • by Jenny Carrick

First-generation UC Davis students and their allies gathered Nov. 8 to form a human No. 1, showcasing the first-generation community at UC Davis as part of the National First-Generation College Celebration. Expanding that support to include first-generation faculty, UC Davis Undergraduate Education recently named Associate Professor of Teaching Jeanette B. Ruiz to lead the First-Generation Initiative into its next phase.

Julie Sze is a professor in and chair of the department of American Studies at UC Davis, and is the founding director of the Environmental Justice Project for UC Davis’ John Muir Institute for the Environment. Her research investigates environmental justice and environmental inequality; culture and environment; race, gender and power; and urban/community health and activism.

Immigrant Families, American Dreams - Julie Sze

 

JULIE SZE grew up in New York City’s Chinatown, where her father worked in the restaurant industry after emigrating from China. She attended a “striving immigrant school” oriented toward success in math and science, and was expected to go to college in preparation for a professional career. “This is very typical for a working class Asian immigrant family– it’s tied to the narrative of the American dream.”

Milmon Harrison is Senior Lecturer in African American and African Studies and Associate Dean for the Division of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies. He earned his BA in Sociology from UC Davis in 1994 with highest honors and a departmental citation. His research and teaching interests include sociology of religion; the Black church in America; American race/ethnic relations; social stratification; and the representation of African Americans in popular culture.

Milmon Harrison

FROM THE principal’s office to a successful dance career to a seven-year college journey, Milmon Harrison’s path to being a professor was full of the unexpected. A New Orleans native, he grew up in Hunter’s Point and the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco before moving to Stockton and attending middle and high school in Lodi. “That I would end up being a professor is so weird to me because even though I was a smart kid, I didn’t always do well in school. I was easily bored and would always talk to my friends.

Susan Rivera is Professor in the Department of Psychology with appointments in the Center for Mind and Brain, the MIND Institute, and the Center for Neuroscience, and leads a lab that researches human neurocognitive development with an emphasis fragile X syndrome, autism and Down syndrome.

Susan Rivera

Growing up in the industrial city of Gary, Indiana, Susan Rivera never dreamed that she would one day head a neuroscience lab researching cognitive development. “College was always part of my plan,” she says, “but as a means to an end. All you think about when you’re growing up poor is having a solid job.” Rivera’s parents had migrated to Gary from Puerto Rico so her father could work in the steel mills. The youngest of thirteen children, her family was loving and happy, but there was no money to spare, and no guidance for getting into college. “I had to do that on my own, and I was a little clueless,” she says. Fortunately, she ended up attending Indiana University – Bloomington, a top public research university.
John Terning is a Professor of Physics at UC Davis with extensive postdoctoral research at Yale, Boston University, the University of California Berkeley, and Harvard. He is also a former staff member at Los Alamos National Lab and the author a graduate textbook on supersymmetry.

John Terning

PHYSICS Professor John Terning grew up in Canada, the son of parents who emigrated from a small town in Norway where an eighth-grade education was the norm. His parents expected him to make the most of the free higher education offered by their adopted home country.

Joseph Sorensen

From Poverty to Poetry: Education as a Pathway to a Better Life - Joseph Sorensen

 

I GREW UP in San Francisco in impoverished circumstances.  Both of my parents were food-service employees, but by the time my two younger siblings were school-age, my father was an addict living on the streets and my now-single mother was on welfare struggling to raise three children.  School was a haven for me, but also a place where I could clearly see the differences between my own circumstances and those of my peers.  I was lucky to have close friends and caring teachers who believed that education was a key to success.  For me, that meant a

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