Cal State Long Beach (CSULB) is in its eighth year handing out research fellowships to graduate students through its Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF) program. This year, eleven students—one doctoral and ten graduate—will receive $9,000 throughout the academic year to further a research or creative project within their respective fields.

“Many graduate students have to work to support themselves or take out student loans in order to complete their degree,” said Cecile Lindsay, vice provost and dean for graduate studies, stated in a release. “Our goal in creating [these fellowships] was to enable some of our highest-achieving graduate students to focus full-time on their study and research.”

Initiated to not only encourage competitiveness amongst graduate students currently attending, the fellowships were also created to incentivize higher quality students towards entering one of CSULB’s 67 masters programs, its doctorate program focusing in education and the university’s two joint doctorate efforts—a PhD in engineering and applied mathematics with Claremont University and the just-inaugurated Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP), a Consortium of the Schools of Nursing at CSULB, CSU Los Angeles, and CSU Fullerton.

Each student was selected on the merit of their proposal, their academic background and a mentor reference. The variety of subjects that will be advanced is not relegated to a single area, instead reaching into programs ranging from business administration to civil engineering, musicology to applied physics.

“I want to explore how business regulation interplays with the small business world,” said fellowship recipient Christopher Beckom, currently working towards his MBA with future plans to obtain his JD in business law. “I hope to learn a great deal about California Employment regulations and how California Employment regulations affect the customs and practices of small business owners. I will research how California Privacy rights, as they apply to hiring practices, affect the policies and practices small business owners with regard to employee hiring and selection.”

In some cases, the fellowship has granted the student the resources to complete a full thesis rather than be relegated to a comprehensive exam, which lacks the research for a specific project.

“I have decided to study the experiences of African-American female undergraduates pursuing science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) majors,” said Ashlee Wilkins, currently obtaining her MS in counseling. “[This] along with strategies aiding in their persistence, resilience, completion and advancement into STEM based graduate studies. There is a major gap within the literature for the aforementioned population, thus I hope my research can help bridge the gap.”

Beyond the simple academic prestige of being able to focus on a specific area of study is the financial backing–a luxury that none of the recipients ignore.

“I was ecstatic when I found out I had been selected for the fellowship. I was with my best friend when I found out, and we both cheered and hollered in the middle of Baskin Robbin’s,” stated Danielle Slakoff, who is expected to complete her MS in criminal justice next year and is studying how media attention is heavily geared towards missing white women and children more than it is towards missing minority women.

“I heard great things about the program before I applied,” Slakoff continued. “I was told that it would be a great benefit both to myself and my research. I was hoping to be a part of a fantastic program, and I wanted the opportunity to advance my research without needing to worry about myself on a financial level.”

All of this year’s recipients will submit a progress report in June 2013 highlighting the work they have done.

The 2012-13 CSULB Graduate Research Fellowships were granted to the following additional students as well:

  • Kirsten Byrne (M.S. civil engineering) is studying the effect of air and gas pocket entrapment on the hydraulic performance of sewerage pressurized pipelines;
  • Mindy DeYoung (M.S. industrial/organizational psychology) is looking into training job-seeking college students to avoid detrimental uses of social networking sites and ways of optimizing job marketability;
  • Sarah Grefe (M.S. applied physics) is conducting an optical investigation of single particle QDs using a novel high resolution optical technique;
  • Maria Theresa Hu (M.A. musicology) has titled her research “The Tenth Muse: Sappho Operas Lost in Time”;
  • Allison Hunt (M.A. anthropology—applied option) is studying military sexual trauma (MST) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD);
  • Thanh Luong (M.S. math education) is looking at “Questions, Responses, and Assessment Tools Associated with Khan Academy Instructional Math Videos”;
  • Jody Pritchett (Ph.D. engineering and industrial applied math) is researching machine vision and motion detection with applications to robotics;
  • and James Salassi (M.S. kinesiology—exercise science option) is studying data obtained during/after high intensity interval training of cardiac patients.