Roman Ruiz, PhD Student in Graduate School of Education

My name is Roman Ruiz. I'm a second year PhD student in the higher education program. The direction that I want my research to go is really understanding college access, but through a spatial dimension and I think about place and I think about why place matters to accessing higher education. And…So coming from Arkansas, I think about the context of where I was situated in Arkansas and the kinds of institutions…So, financial institutions, economic institutions, cultural institutions, educational institutions…Are very different than sort of the environment that I'm in now being in Philadelphia, right? On an east coast city, at a premier Ivy League university with the cultural and economic resources of a major metropolitan area. The opportunities that I have are so much different than I did in Arkansas.

Place matters in the sense that, you know, we still live in an era of segregation based on class and income and race and ethnicity. So, getting at why my interest in higher education and college access is…One, I worked as a practitioner so…For three years, it was my daily job to work with low income, first generation high school students. I worked in a pre…Early intervention program so I worked with students in seventh grade through twelfth grade and so I could really see from planting the general seed of letting them know that college is an option in middle school up to the senior year where you're actually implementing everything that we had taught them, right? How to apply for college. How to write a scholarship essay. How to choose among your choice head of colleges.

So I sort of saw the whole gamut from middle school through high school. But, more importantly, it's sort of the personal lived experiences that I've had. So, I'm a first generation, low income college student. So, no one in my family had ever been to college. No one had ever achieved a higher education. And so, for me it was totally unprecedented, right? And so, just looking at sort of the trajectory of my life and the arc of where I've gone and in relation to that of my siblings and my family members, it's totally different. And so, what was that sort of mechanism that caused that change in trajectory? Well, it was higher education. 

If I'm just one example, I think about, well, on a macro level, how can we…You know, there are more students like me. There're more low income, first generation, racial minority students just like me across all parts of the United States. And, what can we do systemically from a policy perspective to make sure that they have just as much opportunity as I did?

I've been really fortunate to have had the opportunity to attend Penn, particularly GAC. So, within GAC, there're seven divisions and so I'm in the higher education division. So the faculty in higher education division are national thought leaders and researchers in the areas of access and equity in education. And so, I feel like, sort of my personal interest and sort of my passions for the kind of research that I wanna do are very well supported by all faculty members here. And so, it's actually a really intellectual and engaging, but also warm and enriching environment to do this kind of work because we have faculty who are just as committed as I am to these issues. And it's just really interesting to work with someone whose passion align with yours. And so I feel like it's a really rewarding experience.