Institute a Key Source of Minority Graduate Students for MSU and the College of Education

When Aroutis Foster first began considering attending graduate school, his interest in technology led him to think about applying to institutions like Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Michigan State University wasn’t in the mix. The same was true for Nia Nunn-Makepeace, Hakim Khalel, Michelle Vital, Melissa Gomes, and Lorraine Gutierrez. Thanks to the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers (IRT), however, all of the students are now pursuing their studies at the College of Education.

“It’s hard to say where I would be if I hadn’t been involved in the IRT, but I definitely wouldn’t be at MSU,” said Foster, a doctoral student in the Learning, Technology and Culture program. “The reason I say that is because I was looking mostly at East Coast schools.

“It was through the IRT that I got to meet people from MSU. Their interest in me was great and the program was really good, so I decided that this was the place for me.”

Over the past decade, the IRT has been an important source of minority graduate students for MSU. The institute’s goal is to increase the number of African-American, Latino and Native-American students pursuing advanced degrees for teaching careers in order to diversify the pool of potential faculty members at the high school and college levels.

The IRT identifies talented minority students in the humanities, social sciences, or education who participate
in an intensive four-week summer workshop at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. The program also advises and assists college graduates or graduating seniors on applying to graduate school.

The project works with a consortium of the nation’s top universities, which pledge to actively recruit IRT graduates. MSU has been part of the consortium for 10 years, and over that time the College of Education, the College of Arts and Letters, and the College of Social Science have accepted more than 30 IRT students.

Only a handful of universities have accepted more IRT students than MSU.
“The IRT has been a wonderful experience,” said Michael Koppisch, a professor in the Department of French, Classics and Italian who along with Dean Carole Ames, Associate Dean Cassandra Book, and Assistant Dean Sonya Gunnings-Moton have recruited IRT students. “It has allowed us to recruit exceptional graduate students who we otherwise would not have known about. It’s been good for MSU and it’s been good for the students.”

IRT students at MSU. Back row, from left: Carlos Aleman (history), Khalel Hakim (curriculum, teaching and educational policy), Louis Vital (student affairs), Randall DeSuze (American studies). Front row, from left: Aroutis Foster (educational technology), Melissa Gomes (counselor education), Nia Nunn-Makepeace (school psycchology).

Currently, MSU has one of the highest numbers of IRT graduates it has ever had at any one time. In addition to the six students in the College of Education, six other students are enrolled in the colleges of arts and letters and social science.

“Recruiting talented minority students to our graduate programs has long been a priority, and the College of Education’s affiliation with the IRT has been very effective,” said Book, who first began attending the IRT recruitment weekends 10 years ago. “These are some of the best and brightest students in the country and I am proud to say that we’ve managed to recruit many of them to MSU.”

For Nia Nunn-Makepeace, being an IRT graduate is a source of pride. She was one of 30 interns last year who spent four weeks at Andover at what she called an “academic boot camp,” getting a grounding in the rigors of graduate school.

It was also where she first learned about MSU and the college’s school psychology program. Now completing her first year as a doctoral student, Nunn-Makepeace is even more appreciative of the IRT experience.
“The most valuable aspect of the IRT for me was the ability to form a community with the other IRT students, and feel that it was okay that I didn’t know everything,” she said. “The IRT allowed me feel that it was alright to question and analyze things at my own pace.

“It was an intense experience, but it was great.”