Graduating CSUSB Students Find Social Significance in Their Work

SAN BERNARDINO >> Cal State San Bernardino’s College of Arts and Letters honored Guadalupe Rincon, the Outstanding Graduate Student, and April Baca, the Outstanding Undergraduate Student, at its 2016 Commencement ceremony on Saturday, June 18. The college’s ceremony, which capped the university’s 50th anniversary celebration and was held in conjunction with the College of Education, began at 8 p.m. at the Citizens Business Bank Arena. More than 450 students participated in the two colleges’ graduation exercises. Rincon, who graduated with a Master of Arts in English, grew up as a bilingual English and Spanish speaker. She also became a fluent speaker in German after studying abroad with the California State University International Program as an undergraduate. As a CSUSB graduate student studying applied linguistics, Rincon said she discovered that she could “explore the social significance that multiple languages have on different communities, and that this line of scholarly research could be used to advocate for disenfranchised language groups.” From that, she developed her master’s thesis, “Gatekeepers to the Third Space: Authority, Agency, and Language Hierarchy in First-Year Composition,” which examined the one-on-one relationship between instructors of first-year composition classes and multilingual students in writing conferences. She presented her research at this year’s American Association for Applied Linguistics conference in Orlando, Florida, the Second Language Acquisition Symposium at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the Georgetown University Linguistics Roundtables. In addition to her research, Rincon served as president for the Linguistics Club for two years and also was a tutor at the CSUSB Writing Center. She said both experiences have had a great influence on her. “My linguistic research has influenced my approaches to tutoring and how I interact with students,” Rincon said, “but tutoring also helped discover that I want to teach at the university level, and ultimately motivated me to continue my studies in applied linguistics at the doctoral level.” Rincon wants to apply to doctorate programs at Georgetown University and Pennsylvania State University. She said, “I believe that my academic experience as a tutor, researcher, and student have provided me with the experience and motivation necessary to be a successful doctoral student.” Baca, from Colton, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in art history and had early aspirations of becoming a working artist. “After some time, the process of art-making and the demands for creating work became less interesting to me, leading me to turn my attention to art research and scholarship,” she said. “I immersed myself in the study of art and poured over literary theory in the hopes of being able to contribute to a greater dialogue through my work.” For the last two years, Baca has worked as the program coordinator for the CSUSB Community-based Art program, which provides art programming to parts of the community that do not otherwise have access to art. “The vital role that community-based art plays in both social activism and contemporary art has become immeasurably clear throughout my time with CBA and is something that I would enjoy continuing to do well into my graduate career and beyond,” she said. In 2014, she was given the opportunity to pursue two curatorial internships that provided a foundation for her interest in this field of art. One was assisting in the traveling exhibition “Bridging Homeboy Industries,” which was displayed at CSUSB’s Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art. The other was working with the online exhibition, “On Seeing Online: Circles and Signs,” which was published through the Huffington Post. From those two experiences came an internship in contemporary art writing, which resulted in some of Baca’s articles being published by the online publication Beautiful/Decay and as a contributing writer for KCET’s Artbound. Baca plans to pursue a graduate degree in art, and in the fall she will start her work toward a master’s degree in curatorial studies at the University of Southern California. Eventually, she would like to earn a doctoral degree in art history. CSUSB held three other commencement ceremonies on June 18: The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at 8 a.m., the College of Business and Public Administration at noon and the College of Natural Sciences at 4 p.m.