I am enjoying extending my mentorship beyond the students at City Tech to include graduate students in the CUNY system. This mentorship allows me to share support and guidance for professionalization, and I look forward to continuing to foster meaningful mentor relationships with CUNY graduate students.
- Isabella was a student in Foundations of Queer Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, Spring 2023. I mentored her outside of class regarding publication practices. She wrote a book review for the seminar and published it in The Sociological Review in August, 2023. She emailed with the following message:
- Citation: Irtifa, I. (2023, August 8). Greater than the Sum of Our Parts by Nada Elia [Online]. The Sociological Review Magazine. https://doi.org/10.51428/tsr.vxmk6941
- Another student in Foundations of Queer Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center (Spring 2023) reached out to me in Fall 2023 with the following email:
- I’m reaching out to you because I was wondering if your offer to help out former students from the foundations of queer studies course with general mentorship-related things is still on the table? I want to thank you for being one of the few professors I had this past year who created an educational space where I truly felt like I was able to be my authentic self and grow as a student. I had a very difficult time navigating my first year in the critical-social psychology PhD program at the graduate center. I had many unfortunate experiences that made me realize I’m mostly going to have to rely on scholars outside of my program to be the supportive peers, allies, and mentors that my program has failed to provide many of its students. I’ve also been considering alternatives to not finishing my program and continuing my work elsewhere. By chance have you ever read the book Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia As A Woman Of Color by Lorgia Garcia Pena? That book has really helped me out this past year and it really taught me the importance of building a community of scholars who are dedicated to protecting each other from forms of institutional violence in academia. If you happen to have the time and capacity for it, I would greatly appreciate it if I could talk to you sometime either in-person or virtually to discuss potential strategies I can use for navigating my PhD program and meeting like-minded scholars within the CUNY system.
