NCORE Student Webinar Series - September 2019 - Navigating academia in PWCs and Universities

Описание: Drawing upon experiential and academic knowledge, this session serves to provide strategies for first-generation students of color (SOC) to navigate predominantly white academic institutions. Experiential knowledge will center on the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and ability, aiming to share lived experiences to illuminate differing trajectories of success. Strategies include mentorship, mental health seeking behavior, identity-based student group campus spaces, safe and inclusive spaces, and bias incident reporting systems.

Krystal M. Cruz is completing her final year of doctoral studies in the Department of Health and Behavior Studies, Program in Health Education at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Education, Health and Psychology—Teachers College, Columbia University—the oldest and largest graduate school of education in the United States. She is honored to be the doctoral student of Professor Barbara C. Wallace (Princeton ’80), her doctoral advisor and academic mentor. Professor Wallace is the first African American woman to move through the ranks and gain tenure in the history of TC, doing so in 1994 and her tireless advocacy for institutional change informed the TC President's 1999 Taskforce Report which ultimately led to the establishment of the TC Vice President’s Office for Diversity and Community Affairs.

Following in her doctoral advisor’s footsteps, Krystal co-founded the Teachers College Student Senate’s Diversity and Community Affairs Committee in 2015; and, subsequently, expressed tremendous heartfelt gratitude to the entire Teachers College, Columbia University Student Body, that elected her to be their University Senator for the 2017-2019 academic school years in the most highly participated Fall General Election in the history of the Teachers College Student Senate where she served as TC’s representative on the Columbia University Senate on the Libraries, Rules, and Student Affairs Committees, respectively.

Krystal is a Bill & Melinda Gates Millennium Scholar, a Committee Member of Columbia University’s Office of University Life, Race, Ethnicity & Inclusion Task Force, Campus Conversations Working Group; and she contributes as a mentor at The Roger Lehecka Double Discovery Center at Columbia College, headed by Kecia Hayes (TC ‘96), to enhance higher education opportunities for local low-income and first-generation college bound Manhattan area youth to ensure high school graduation, college enrollment and completion.

Krystal is also the Founding President of the United Nations Association of the United States of America Columbia University-wide Chapter and is currently affording Columbia University with the pathway toward becoming the 17th university worldwide approved to work with the United Nations as an officially recognized Non-Governmental Organization in active consultative status with the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs’ Economic and Social Council; as well as the UN Department of Global Communications to raise public awareness about Sustainable Development Goals among other UN-sanctioned activities and global issues.

Prior to Columbia, Krystal studied Global Population Health at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon while contributing towards a health program reform project at the UN Field Office in Lebanon. She previously worked at Newsweek Magazine in both the International Editorial as well as Marketing departments and also contributed at The International Women's Tribune Centre at 777 UN Plaza at the UN Headquarters in New York City, to help provide services to organizations working to improve the lives of women in the Global South, particularly low-income women, in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe and Western Asia.