Mellon Mays Alumni at UC Berkeley


Sometimes the path to completing the doctorate may seem distant, especially when undergraduates are attempting to determine their major or graduate school direction. However, programs like the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) recognize the need for academic encouragement in the form of faculty mentorship who provides significant intellectual and personal guidance and insight to research and life in academia. Moreover, through the UC Berkeley MMUF program, graduate students who were former MMUF scholars also mentor current undergraduate Fellows and are woven into MMUF program activities. MMUF alumni who are located at UC Berkeley as post-doctoral researchers are also available as resources for the members of the UC Berkeley Mellon family.


Alia Pan is a recently minted PhD in English, and Ayana Arce is a post-doctoral fellow in Physics who recently accepted an assistant professor position at Duke University for Fall 2009. They recall their experiences as MMUF scholars and as Mellon graduate students, providing inspiring words to students who ultimately desire to enter academia.


Alia Yap Pan, PhD, English
Alia Yap Pan is one of the 261 MMUF PhDs to date. She received a doctorate from UC Berkeley's English Department focusing on twentieth century American literature with her dissertation "Remembering Bodies: Subject Formation in the Neo-Plantation Narrative." Pan was first welcomed into the Mellon family as a sophomore at Wellesley College. Alia reports that she always had a knack for English and was driven to matriculate into graduate school to answer certain questions about race and gender. As an undergraduate the MMUF program provided her with a purpose and direction in academia, supplemented with financial assistance. However, the Mellon program made a significant difference in Alia's experience as a graduate student when she was able to network with other graduate students and meet one of her mentors, Dr. Gary Okihiro, professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University and the founding director of Columbia's Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, through Dr. Lydia English, the retiring national MMUF program officer.


Pan comments that being a part of the Mellon family encouraged her early on to keep writing as a scholar. This was possible not only because of the financial support the Mellon Foundation provides for graduate students at every level of their graduate school career, but also because she was surrounded by a community of really "cool" peers whom she felt comfortable having frank, honest discussions about race and different theories. She highly recommends Mellon fellows to attend conferences because she enjoyed being around incredibly intelligent people of color who shared their experiences about being a minority in academia.


Despite the support that the Mellon family provided, Pan cautions that "graduate school is not easy" and "it does not mean you cannot do something else just because you are a Mellon fellow... If you get into MMUF, [realize that] it's a great opportunity. Take advantage of it. People want to help you." She encourages both undergraduate and graduate students to find a mentor who can be honest and reassuring about their work, as she was fortunate to find in Dr. Abdul JanMohamed, her former mentor at UC Berkeley during graduate school. In addition to finding a mentor with whom you feel comfortable, Alia encourages students to get involved with professional development early in their graduate school career by pursuing new and interesting ideas to publish and present at conferences.


Alia Pan is currently the scholar in residence at the UC Berkeley's Center for Race and Gender (CRG) where she helps run the writing group. She is also a member of a multi-campus research group on food and the body. While staying involved with the writing group and publishing her work, she leads a busy life outside of academia with her husband and two children.


Ayana Holloway Arce, PhD, Physics

In Fall 2009, Ayana Holloway Arce will join the approximately 44 Mellon PhDs teaching at MMUF schools after recently accepting a faculty position at Duke University. As the Chamberlain Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Arce concentrated on experimental techniques to identify and measure the properties of heavy unstable elementary particles such as the top quark, in order to search for unexpected interactions. She was also involved in the preparation of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. In addition to her contributions in Physics, Arce has been an instrumental contributor to establishing the MMUF program at UC Berkeley.


Ayana joined the Mellon family as an MMUF scholar at Princeton University with the encouragement of her undergraduate and MMUF faculty advisor, Dr. Daniel Marlow. She found the intellectual connection with her MMUF cohort extremely helpful, who was an interdisciplinary group of students with similar traits of curiosity, talents and hobbies. It was also during her first summer as an MMUF scholar that she was introduced to her current research activities through a joint UC-Mellon program at the LBNL. The following summer, she was able to visit Physics departments at Oxford and Cambridge. Because of her opportunities as an undergraduate, Arce highly recommends taking advantage of the travel funding that Mellon offers. She believes that undergraduates will broaden their perspectives better by being able to present their work to an academic community outside of their home universities.


After receiving her undergraduate degree, Arce pursued her doctorate at Harvard University. As a Mellon graduate student, she enjoyed graduate student conferences offered by the SSRC because they were excellent opportunities to meet a diverse group of scholars outside of her field that were having similar experiences as she in graduate school. At the same time, the program provided funding support for her to be able to concentrate on her thesis as she traveled. Arce encourages graduate students to write a paper as soon as they can, even if it's a review paper with their professor. "It was extremely helpful to go through the process, from A to Z," she explains. "It's helpful to learn [this process], and it's not taught early enough."


By being in the Mellon family, Arce was able to meet some of her best friends in academia and recruit young scholars. "One of the strengths of the Mellon program is not just the fellowship funding available for research, but the human element that the program has [when] engaging mentors and graduate students to build a community." Ayana truly admires the dedication of the program to support students of color to enter academic fields. As an MMUF or Mellon scholar, she wants students to keep in mind that the Mellon program is making a commitment to Fellows that lasts their whole career that is, "Once a Mellon, Always a Mellon."



Mellon Associates:
     Leigh Raiford, Assistant Professor, African American Studies

Berkeley's recently minted PhD:
     Alia Yap Pan, English (2008)
     Vincent Lloyd, Rhetoric (2008)
     Saul Mercado, Anthropology (2008)
     Kevin Black,English (2009)

National Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship
     http://www.mmuf.org/

Social Science Research Council
     http://www.mellonmays.ssrc.org