A William T. Grant Scholar, Schneider has mentored twenty doctoral students, some of whom have gone from being advisees and research assistants to co-authors and colleagues. He has also advised and worked with other underrepresented graduate and undergraduate students as part of his Scholars research (the Shift Project), as well as through the McNair scholars program and a training program for underrepresented undergraduate students interested in demography. Still, Schneider is acutely aware of how little he, a White man, knows about the challenges his students and mentees of color face. With this grant, he will pursue three learning goals: 1) to learn to maintain close and connected mentoring relationships that foster the development of students’ independent research agendas, 2) to develop strategies for providing students of color constructive and developmental feedback that does not undermine trust, and 3) to develop his toolkit of practices for advising junior scholars of color to extend beyond using his own experience as the basis for his advice. The award will support Allison Logan, a multiracial queer Latina doctoral student in her 5th year in the department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Logan’s research examines the impacts of direct state interventions into child well-being by comparing those aimed primarily at low-income families, such as welfare assistance and/or child protective services with those aimed at a larger range of families, such as parenting classes for divorced parents.
With this grant, Schneider will learn to grow mentoring relationships that foster the development of students’ independent research agendas.
