Jeanett Castellanos serves as pipeline

Having just completed her Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Higher Education at Washington State University, Jeanett Castellanos is quite proud of the fact that she is the first in her family ever to go to college. In fact, she is among the first generation of her Cuban family to be born in the U.S. She states, "Being an ethnic minority woman from East Los Angeles, I did not have access to the technological resources available at a major university like this one." Now that Castellanos does have that access, she intends to make the most of it-both for herself and for her students. Her career goals include going back to California and working in one of the state university systems. She wants to try to provide the access to educational technology and support that minority students need. "I want to provide an opportunity for scholars to help inner city kids, to serve as a pipeline to that community, just as the community served me," she declares. For Dr. Castellanos, that means serving the university system as an administrator, perhaps as Dean of Students in the beginning, with a hope of someday becoming Vice President of Student Affairs. "Not president," she explains, "because presidents don't have enough contact with the students."

Student contact is extremely important to Castellanos and she intends to continue teaching even after she achieves an administrative position. For this reason, her experience here at IU was particularly valuable to her. The course she taught in the Higher Education Department was the first course over which she had complete autonomy. Entitled "Minorities in Higher Education," it covered many of the administrative and policy issues facing minority students, faculty and staff. About her students, Dr. Castellanos has nothing but praise: "The students really contribute and we get very different perspectives and great dialogues in relation to race, gender and other minority issues." She also got to know several IU faculty members quite well and is planning to present a paper with colleagues from IU and from Washington State at the annual conference of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. "I feel very lucky because I have had the opportunity here to make connections with scholars whose research I have used."

Future plans for Castellanos include participating in a culture audit at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas to help that institution improve its campus climate. Castellanos feels that efforts such as these are very important; she claims that we need not only to increase diversity on university campuses, but must also have some means to measure the success of the programs we put into place. We must have ways to tell if and how those programs are working.