Find Mentors and Connections

Our community of leaders, researchers, and scholars reflect the diversity of California and the populations with which we engage. We enrich our research and knowledge systems by bringing together a variety of experiences, perspectives, and approaches. Rich collaborations throughout our UCSB community lead to new questions, original discoveries, and novel innovations addressing modern challenges.

Jordan Tudisco

Ph.D. Student, Comparative Literature
Vice President of Graduate Student Affairs, Graduate Student Association

The Graduate Scholars Program helped me immensely with that by helping me connect with faculty members outside of my department and by partnering me with a mentor and other mentees from a large variety of departments. Being confronted to a different set of priorities, fears, hopes, issues, and questions during my mentoring sessions helped me expand my horizon and think about dynamics or problematics that my home department traditionally doesn't think about. In addition, the Graduate Scholars Program helped me reduce my "impostor syndrome" feelings because it showed me that most of the other students from underrepresented populations share similar feelings and fears. By organizing several programs with faculty and staff members from underrepresented populations (and for me, especially LGBTIQ+), the program also helped me have more hopes that I can potentially exist in academia as a LGBTIQ+ scholar.