Alanna Gillis, Research

Research Interests

Research questions:
- How did first-year students choose to attend an expensive residential university despite the uncertainty of being able to experience the standard experiential learning model?
- What do students expect will be their successes and challenges for their first semester and how do these compare to the actual experiences of their first semester of college?
- How will the covid-19 pandemic affect institutional policies and how will those changes impact the students’ transition to college?
- How do these challenges vary by race/class/gender of the student?
Design: Longitudinal in-depth interviews with 30 students at St Lawrence University in Sept 2020 and (intended) Sept 2021

Research questions: How do students choose their college majors? How does this process reproduce inequality by race, class, and gender?
Design: Longitudinal surveys (n=1,1,00) and in-depth interviews (n=50) with first-year college students at UNC-Chapel Hill
Major findings:
- Student orientations to choosing a major differ by race, class, and gender and these orientations change over time as students learn new schemas for choosing a major (i.e. based on career, intellectual interests, or match with student skillset)
- Students often get stuck in ill-fitting majors because they feel compelled to choose a major before they have much (correct) knowledge about what that major means and entails
- Students feel uncertainty during parts of the major choosing process, and these times of uncertainty are critical junctures for inequality reproduction

2010 - present