Vanessa Witenko, who received her Ph.D. from the Department of Education at UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School this June, is one of two inaugural winners of the Dean’s Graduate Mentoring Award. Witenko was recognized for distinguishing herself through her excellence in and contributions to undergraduate research supervision and for encouraging others to become involved in these research efforts.
Witenko worked with advisor Dr. Karen Nylund-Gibson in the research area of Education Leadership and Organizations. Her work focuses on educational inequality in U.S. K-12 public schools through the lens of sociological theory and mixed-methods analyses. Specifically she looks at racialized school tracking and how Latina/o students are disproportionately assigned to the basic/remedial track, while White students are disproportionately assigned to the honors/Advanced Placement (AP) track.
“In academia, there’s so much pressure to publish that there usually isn’t much incentive to mentor,” Witenko told UCSB Grad Post recently. “With this award I’m being rewarded for work that is often not rewarded – and that feels good. It’s a step in acknowledging all the extra work that graduate students do. So, I share this award with all my fellow graduate students who have also mentored students when they stayed late during office hours, walked a distressed student to the counseling center, bought a hungry student lunch, reviewed their cover letter, wrote a letter of recommendation, and when they listened, and listened, and listened to a litany of stresses, confusions, and undergraduate epiphanies, all while attempting to progress through a graduate program.”