Veronica Fematt, alumna of UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School, has been named the assistant director of UCSB’s McNair Scholars Program.
“I am excited to return to UCSB and continue working with underrepresented students who want to pursue a graduate education,” Fematt says. “This position was a perfect fit for me because I am passionate about demystifying the college-going experience, creating a more inclusive environment for underrepresented students in higher education, and diversifying academia, which are also goals of the McNair Scholars program.”
The McNair Scholars Program prepares qualified undergraduates for entrance to graduate programs in all fields of study. The goals of McNair are to increase the number of first- generation, low-income and/or underrepresented students in doctoral programs, and ultimately, to diversify the faculty in colleges and universities across the country. To do so, scholars have the opportunities to participate in academic year and summer research activities; attend courses, seminars and workshops on topics related to graduate school preparation; complete a research project under the guidance of a faculty mentor; and present their research at local, regional and national conferences.
Veronica Fematt earned her Ph.D. with an emphasis in Educational Leadership and Organizations in the Department of Education in 2017. Prior to her current position, Fematt was the Policy and Practice Dissemination Coordinator for the Center for Evaluation and Educational Effectiveness at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). In this role, Fematt was responsible for cultivating and maintaining working relationships with multiple stakeholders across the CSU system, the California Community College (CCC) system, and the U.S. Department of Education to disseminate key policy, practice, and methodological lessons from the CSU HSI-STEM Systemwide Research Project. Before CSULB, Fematt was a Postdoctoral Scholar and Lecturer in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at the UCSB where she developed and taught a catalogue of courses with a specialization in Education and Chicana/o Studies (e.g., Chicanas/os in Higher Education, Critical Race Theory in Chicana/o Education). Her research focuses on the community college transfer experience with an emphasis on campus climate issues such as, the stigmatization of transfer students and the manifestation of transfer student microaggressions and stereotypes at selective institutions. Her most recent work focuses on the experience of Latinx students in STEM fields.