University of Rochester

Features: Center of Success

As a McNair Scholar encouraged to take her schooling to the highest level, LaFleur Stephens ’02 discovered a PhD would help her eventual career in more ways than she’d ever thought possible.

“I had no exposure to anyone with that degree, or even any idea what one would mean, before participating in the McNair Program,” she says.

Even so, it took the political science major “some convincing” to return to school, after a three-year break to work for a nonprofit hunger organization and a social policy think tank, to earn a master’s degree and PhD in political science at the University of Michigan. Beth Olivares, director of the Kearns Center—which formed the year Stephens graduated—kept in touch during that break.

“She was definitely influential,” says Stephens, who is spending 2013–14 in a postdoctoral position at Princeton University before joining the faculty there as an assistant professor of politics later this year. “In terms of advancement, I’d never thought much about what you could do with only a bachelor’s degree, and my perception of a PhD was that the degree was too far removed from the advocacy and social justice issues that I care about.”

Her research work as a McNair Scholar included documenting the political attitudes of African Americans in the post–civil rights generation, and, in a separate project, examining the gentrification of Rochester. The former morphed into her dissertation topic and current research exploring race, politics, and public opinion.

“Being exposed to this kind of academic lifestyle was vital,” Stephens says. “You really can drive your own research agenda, travel, meet interesting people, and answer interesting questions.

“To this day I speak very highly about the McNair Program,” she says. “Sometimes it’s all about exposure. You don’t know what you don’t know.”