Academic Success Center Director Gabriela Nuño is passionate about ensuring that every student at Stanislaus State receives the support they need to complete their education and degree.
“That is why I entered public higher education — to support the access mission and help close equity gaps,” she said. “I really see education as a path for social mobility. It’s my personal story as a first-generation college student whose parents immigrated from Mexico. Education has been my path.”
Nuño has not strayed from that path at Stan State despite working full-time steadily for the University since 2006, when she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sociology. She earned a master’s degree in public administration in 2009 and is now researching the experiences of Latinx community college transfer students as she pursues a doctorate in education in the educational leadership program.
In June, Nuño’s research project received a boost when she was selected to join the inaugural cohort of the UC Davis School of Education’s Wheelhouse Summer Scholars. As one of 12 fellowship awardees doing equity-focused research on community colleges, she received a $1,500 stipend to support her project. She also gets a chance to present her work at a conference in September and receive feedback from peers and faculty in the Wheelhouse Scholars Network.
“I am really excited about the opportunity to get feedback from researchers who are focused on the community colleges and are big champions of the community colleges,” she said. “That is really huge for me, getting that valuable feedback that I can use to improve my dissertation.”
Her research project is titled “Staying on the Path: The Experiences of Latinx Community College Students with Advising Redesigned for Guided Pathways.” She defended her dissertation proposal in May, and it passed her committee. Now she is working on recruiting students to be interviewed for the project.
Nuño said she learned about guided pathways in one of her classes and it piqued her interest. She sees the concept as a tool that can help Stan State better support transfer students who have left the community college system and moved into the University’s system.
“In a nutshell, it’s a whole institution reform,” she said. “It looks at how to change the college structure and systems to better support students through meeting their goals and completing their degrees. So, it’s about raising completion rates and at the same time closing equity gaps.”
The concept has four pillars, she said, and she is studying the one called “staying on the path.”
“It’s about supporting student retention — making sure students are progressing and completing,” she said. “The strategies include advising, which is a very important part of the pillar. In the Academic Success Center at Stan State, we do advising, so it is a good fit. We can learn about how to foster a transfer-receptive culture at the University.”
Nuño was not a transfer student when she came to Stan State as a freshman 20 years ago, but she learned all about the community college system in her first University job as an admissions counselor, and she believes strongly in the University-community college partnership.
“I am a big transfer advocate at heart,” she said. “Transfer students are close to the majority of our student population. More students from underrepresented backgrounds start at a community college and supporting that pathway to the bachelor’s or beyond is an important function of higher education.”
