Kindling the Spark

By Josh Duke

Lara Perez-Felkner has had a busy year.

In March, she became a member of the National Science Foundation’s Quantitative, Computational and Mixed Methods (QCM) Cohort. The prestigious cohort brings in experts from across the nation to help increase the participation of historically underrepresented groups like women and minorities in STEM and data science. Then, just two months later, she was named a Student Experience Research Network (SERN) 2021–2022 midcareer fellow. SERN began in 2015 to provide resources, education and more to enhance the student experience, as well as to identify and promote education policies that improve equity, opening up new opportunities for students.

Both honors recognize the exceptional nature of Perez-Felkner’s career, but both mean she will be even busier in the months to come. “It has not been a quiet summer by any means,” she laughs.

On top of her planned research projects, she now finds herself meeting with national colleagues each week in trainings, meetings and professional courses that teach her innovative methodologies in quantitative and mixed methods research. Such professional development will undoubtedly help her with her research going forward, but it also means that the summer will hardly be any respite from her busy school year.

Yet speaking to Perez-Felkner, you wouldn’t get the sense that she’s tired. If anything, these accolades renew her energy in a career that already excites her. “Even though I’m human and I make mistakes, and there are always times that you can teach better and do more and be a better mentor, I remember there being a spark very early on,” she says.

“I still have [that spark] with me on a daily basis. I want to be in a place where things happen—where you can be inspired by students and try to inspire them as well—and be in this place where ideas are a currency and are what’s energizing people for the possibility of making social

change, innovation and transformative ideas. I think being a part of a university, even if it was in a very idealized way when I was younger, is kind of magical and a really tremendously fulfilling job.”

DESTINED TO BE A DOCTOR

Perez-Felkner is an associate professor in FSU’s higher education program and has served as a co-chair of the Latinx Faculty and Staff Collective at FSU. She is also a member of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) iChange ASPIRE Alliance Team and a member of the President’s Taskforce for Diversity and Inclusion at FSU.

Her research focuses on career and college outcomes for young people, particularly the various social contexts that shape their early professional lives. “There are tons of reasons why folks’ opportunity structures and the stability they have in adulthood—and the possibility to pass on stability and wealth and opportunity to their children—is there for people who go to and complete college. It just isn’t in the same way for people who don’t,” she says. “Once I realized I wanted to study education and the social sciences, I wanted to understand what facilitates opportunity for students to be able to go to college, and a college that they’re likely to be able to graduate from and be successful in, and to be welcomed and successful in places where they traditionally have not been seen.” When she started her own college career, she thought she wanted to be a different type of doctor, and she began studying to be a medical doctor or a medical researcher. Partway through her college experience, she realized that the questions and research that excited her pulled her away from medicine and into the world of higher education. “There are a lot of places where you can have an impact on people’s lives,” she said. She discovered that researching access to college and the opportunities students have available to them was something that could make a huge difference, particularly as she watched the concept of the “traditional” college experience evolve.

THE IMPORTANCE OF STEM

A good portion of Perez-Felkner’s research relates to STEM, whether it’s access to careers or the experience studying STEM subjects in college. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of her education, she acts as a bridge between social sciences and hard sciences. “I feel like I do a lot of code switching in my life and have gotten comfortable with it, but I’m also comfortable and happy to be in that space and understand the kind of language differences between folks who are in the lab-based sciences and the way that they think about research and innovation and the ways that we think about that in other spaces, like higher education research.” Because of her passion for both STEM and social sciences, she takes great care to ensure that information does not get lost in translation, which is a frequent challenge of interdisciplinary work. “I make life fun by being interdisciplinary,” she says. She also studies STEM careers and education because she recognizes that these career paths can change lives, but also have unique roadblocks that have hindered certain populations. “Those are spaces that are very high-earning and really transformative for individuals and their families, but they’ve also been exclusionary in a lot of ways by race, ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic status in particular, and sometimes the intersections of those identities.” She points out that opportunities in math and science can be difficult because “the kinds of opportunities or lack thereof compound over time. The STEM fields in some ways are a microcosm of all the challenges of all the things that happen in education, not just specifically in these fields.” For instance, some students have access to a particular type of math class during their K-12 experience or opportunities to learn programming, while other students might only gain access to these opportunities much later in life—if at all.

She sees her work as possibly helping creating interventions “that can allow people get back on an on-ramp. More people exit than enter, but there are opportunities and interventions that allow people to enter these fields, so it doesn’t have to be a hard stop of ‘you didn’t take this algebra class in eighth grade so that opportunity is forever closed to you.’”

THE BIG PICTURE

With the interdisciplinary nature of her work, Perez-Felkner has a unique vantage point to see how various factors influence one another. For example, as she is researching access to opportunities in STEM, she is also looking at basic needs and security among college students as part of her work with the Southern Scholarship Foundation. The fact that she is bridging these two research areas and running these two projects at the same time has allowed her to draw connections, sometimes even on an individual level.

She mentions working with some students, “who are economically disadvantaged, who are low income and have a need for housing scholarships. Many of them are pursuing STEM careers because of high motivation to have more stable incomes for their families and to have a good return on their educational investment of time and family resources. They have very different schedules and needs, and sometimes hidden costs associated with labs.” For these students, even something like having a part-time job can be challenging, as the dynamic nature of part-time employment conflicts with the fixed schedule of research labs.

But just as she can more easily spot challenges, she also identifies positive change in her areas of research. She has noticed that “there has been more of a centering of attention and investment on equity. Sometimes it’s happening at the department level, sometimes it’s happening in mentoring relationships.” After the disruption and stress caused by the pandemic and the renewed focus placed on equity and dismantling systemic racism, Perez-Felkner says that she’s been “energized by the kinds of conversations that have been highlighting and focusing on some things that have been bubbling up for a while.” More and more, she is hearing important dialogues on “ways to bring people up instead of just continuing the status quo.” Many of the problems she studies are institutional or deeply rooted in society and do not have easy solutions. Addressing these issues is a slow and difficult process, but she hopes that the topics and important conversations taking place—on opportunity, equity, racism—continue as we move forward.

“I think there’s momentum that I hope we hold on to as we try to come back to normal, or the new normal,” she said. “There’s a lot that needed to happen in our reflections this past year, and it’s going to take continued work. My hope is that we keep engaging in that work because it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes continued investment.”

If there is one thing for certain, it’s that Perez-Felkner is not afraid to do the important work—to offer a unique perspective, to create new ideas, to help bridge the gap between STEM and social sciences. While asking the big questions and diving into complicated matters is far from easy, doing so seems to invigorate her and strengthen her resolve that her research can really make a difference. After all, for people like Perez-Felkner who have found their spark, part of the joy in life is the labor of turning that spark into a flame.