Psychology doctoral student wins national award for best scholarly paper
As a Mexican American woman studying in a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) field, Norma Garza Reyes is well-qualified to speak about the difficulties Latinas face with regard to representation and inclusion in STEM.
Garza, a doctoral student in experimental psychology at The University of Texas at Arlington, recently earned an award for Best Scholarly Paper from the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (AAHHE) at its annual conference, held March 10-11 at Nevada State College in Henderson, Nevada.
Her paper is titled “Nepantla aquí, Nepantla allá: The borderlands of identity from Mexican-origin women in STEM.” Co-authors are Sarah Rodriguez, associate professor of engineering at Virginia Tech, and Maria Espino, a doctoral candidate in higher education at Iowa State University.
Nepantla is a term that was first used by the Nahuatl-speaking people in Mexico that roughly translates to “in the middle of” or “in the space between”. Garza first read about this concept in the works of the late Gloria Anzaldúa, a Latina author, artist and cultural critic who used the word nepantla to describe her feelings of being in between American and Mexican cultures.
“I decided to take this framework and apply it to Latina students in STEM,” Garza said. “Latina students are very underrepresented in STEM fields, as well as other fields, and I thought to apply this framework to see if there was that feeling of being in between their Mexican culture and STEM culture. We found that this phenomenon does come up with Mexican-origin women in STEM fields.”
With their paper, Garza and her co-authors aimed to “understand how Mexican American women in STEM utilized Anzaldua’s borderlands of identity to successfully navigate between Mexican American cultures and STEM cultures.” Their study puts a focus on the concepts and theories that humanize Mexican American women in STEM in higher education institutions.
“I was extremely excited to win the Best Scholarly Paper award,” Garza said. “This was my first paper submitted to a conference, as well as my first talk at a conference, so it kind of validated the work I did. I am also very grateful to my principal investigator, Sarah Rodriguez, for guiding me through the experience and another co-author, Maria Espino, for her help and input.”
The paper is under review to be published in the AAHHE Special Section Issue of the Journal of Hispanic Higher Education.
Garza received help funding her research with a grant from UTA’s Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL) and its Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program. CIRTL was founded in 2003 with support from the National Science Foundation and is comprised of 38 research universities around the nation. Its goal is to improve the teaching skills and increase the diversity of future STEM university faculty members.
AGEP is focused on improving doctoral student experiences with the goal of creating a more inclusive environment for graduate students in order to increase the number of underrepresented graduate students and postdocs interested in and prepared for faculty careers. Panos Shiakolas, associate professor in the UTA Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, is director of UTA’s AGEP program.
“Winning this award would not have been possible without my involvement with the CIRTL AGEP grant at UTA,” she said. “I would like to acknowledge and thank Prof. Shiakolas for his genuine interest about my personal and professional growth as a Latina student and for his mentoring through the years. His efforts to secure funding to support me for one academic year allowed me to intern with Prof. Rodriguez, a CIRTL AGEP collaborator.”
Garza’s research with Rodriguez led to two conference papers — the AAHHE paper presented in March and a paper presented at the annual conference of the American Society for Engineering Education in Minneapolis in June. She also presented a poster at the AGEP national conference in February 2021.
“By joining CIRTL AGEP, I have learned a great deal of information related to underrepresented students in STEM,” she said. “Even though I am an underrepresented student as well, I did not know the full extent of what underrepresented students experience. It gave me an additional purpose and the will to challenge the systemic barriers in place that keep underrepresented students out of STEM.”
Garza was born in Monterrey, Mexico and came to the United States with her family at age 7. Among the places she lived while growing up were Houston and the Rio Grande Valley, the latter being where she attended college at UT Pan American (now UT Rio Grande Valley). She became interested in psychology when she took a class in high school, and the interest grew when she joined two psychology research labs at UT Pan American.
“This led me to want to continue the research path in psychology, with a focus on political and social psychology,” she said.
She was also a member of Pan American’s honors program and completed an undergraduate honors thesis along with her B.S. in Psychology, which she received in 2015. She applied for and was accepted to UTA’s B.S. to Ph.D. program.
At UTA, she earned an M.S. in experimental psychology in 2018 and then started work on her Ph.D. in experimental psychology. She has worked as a graduate teaching assistant and as lab manager and graduate research assistant in the Personality and Social Behavior Lab. Her faculty advisor is Lauri Jensen-Campbell, associate professor of psychology.
Garza’s doctoral research focuses primarily on political psychology, in particular about attitudes towards immigrants and voting participation. With her dissertation she is developing a scale and a couple of studies to address why Latinos have some of the lowest voter turnouts of any demographic.
“I am interested in these topics because I am an immigrant myself and have not always felt welcomed in this country, so I wanted to research what are some of the causes of these attitudes,” she said. “Also, growing up an immigrant made me extra aware of immigration laws and the political system surrounding them. I feel like I know more about this than the average person and can use it in my career to benefit others.”
Garza plans to complete her Ph.D. next year and would like to work in academia but is open to other fields such as political polling or political research.
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