Dr Yvette Jean

I was born in Massachusetts but was raised in the Arizona desert. After high school, I attended Arizona State University, where I majored in Justice Studies. As an undergrad, I had thought that law school was in my future, but somewhere along the line, I realized that I was more interested in issues of justice than the law itself, so I continued to look at other career possibilities. This is what led me to enter the graduate program in sociology at UCLA.

I was new to sociology when I started graduate school. What I discovered was a new way of seeing and understanding the world. The types of questions sociologists were trying to answer energized me. I wanted to be a part of that! 

Here we are, many years after I started down that path at UCLA, and I still feel exactly the same way: Teaching sociology feels like work that needs to be done. It feels essential in that way.  I’m so lucky to be the one who gets to do it!