R. Genevieve Quist graduated from Rice Memorial High School in Burlington, VT in 2001. Having graduated with honors from ILR in 2005, she will be joining Teach For America, a non profit organization that sends recent college graduates into low income rural and urban and public schools to help close the achievement gap that exists between low income children and wealthy children. She will be teaching in an elementary school in inner city Los Angeles for the next two years.

Q. Genevieve, why did you decide to teach in low income public schools?
A. Through the course of my studies at ILR and Cornell, I became more interested in poverty and inequality studies. At the end of my sophomore year, I decided to pursue a concentration in Inequality Studies. The more I learned about poverty, through my research over in the School of Human Ecology and the more I learned about general policy issues here in the ILR School, made me very interested in the issue of childhood poverty.

The United States has greater rates of childhood poverty than any other industrialized country and a lot of that is rooted in problems in the public education system—specifically, the issue of educational inequity. So, I decided to spend the next two years in one of these schools. I felt that it would really be the best thing that I could do in order to get a new kind of perspective to apply to future studies in public policy or public administration, which is what I eventually would like to do.

Q. Do you see this as a natural progression in moving on with your studies and career?
A. I think that by doing this — by pursuing this particular path—there is really no better way to learn more about an issue than to really just jump right in. I've spent so much time here at school learning about things which has been incredibly valuable—but to get that inner perspective, there's really no better way but to be in one of these schools and meet these kids and meet these communities and really see first hand, the kinds of problems that they're facing relating to poverty.

Q. What are your long term goals?
A. At this point, I would like to go on to study public policy or public administration so that ultimately, I can be in a position one day, to enact the kinds of policy that we need to really help people—to help children and working families.

Q. How will you be able to do that?
A. I'm not sure politics is in my future but that's definitely a possibility. Working in government can be a valuable experience — even working for a non profit. I think my work in policy can lead me to lobbying work or something like that.

Q. What's the best class you have taken?
A. It would have to be Professor Jefferson Cowie's Collective Bargaining 306 Class- Recent History of American Workers From The 1960s To The 1990s. I took it in the fall of my junior year. He's an excellent professor. The lectures are incredibly interesting and he touched on a lot of issues that really made you challenge your own personal assumptions in looking at the hard issues of social class, issues of race and issues of gender.  We really explored them within the context of the labor movement. He is a hard grader and when I did get an "A", it meant more to me probably than any other "A" that I received because I knew I had to work so hard for it. I appreciated just how challenging it was and the high expectations that he placed on us as students. It was a very valuable experience.

Q. Your best teacher at ILR?
A. It's a tie between Jeff Cowie and George Boyer. I hold a lot of affection for both of them. I think they are both incredibly intelligent and incredibly good people. They really held me to high standards as a student and they treated me as a fellow academic . I worked for Professor Boyer in the summer following my junior year because I received a research fellowship. I gathered data for him for an academic paper he was writing on elderly pauperism in Great Britain. That was a great experience. They're very interesting and very intelligent professors and I am really happy that I got to know them. One of the reasons that I like this school is that it is small enough so that you can get to know professors on that level.

Q. What is the difference in perspective between the two of them?
A. It wasn't in the way they approach teaching. I was more of a partner in the learning process than just a subject and just a receptor of material. Both of them focused on class discussion and raising a general awareness among the students and talking with the students in class about issues that were raised. So, it wasn't so much just being "talked at" during class, it was being able to be engage and be able to grow on that level.

Q. Have you changed in your four years here?
A. I think I've become far more independent and confident in my ability to think critically and to write and to defend my reasoning and my ideas. I wasn't politically active when I first started college but now, I hold very strong opinions on politics and the way, I think, things are being run in this country. And that, I owe largely to becoming involved, becoming politically engaged with the encouragement of faculty around here.

Q. You are also very involved in the local community. Why?
A. Getting involved in the community is so important. It was through my research, my field work—I did research over in the Human Development Department on a Longitudinal Study on Rural Childhood Poverty that required me to go into people's homes and interview the Moms and interview the kids. Sit in their small apartments, sit in their small trailers and see what it was like even if it was only for a couple of hours. That experience of kind of breaking out of the Cornell bubble and seeing some of the poverty that is really right here in Tompkins County really made a big impact on me as a person and what I perceive my role to be as a public servant and my obligation to give back to the community—to serve the community and to learn from the community and to address problems not from a very distant, theoretical approach but from actually applying what I learned in school to what I see in the community and helping people that way.

Q. Tell me about your fellow students here at ILR?
A. The friends that I made here in the ILR School definitely had a huge impact on me. I don't think every student here is the same. I think this school encompasses a very diverse group of people with very diverse interests — which is part of what makes it interesting. I have definitely found that you can find people who are driven, who are ambitious and that in turn, encourages you to try to meet higher expectations. Some of the close friendships I've developed here— I've been friends with some of the same people since I transferred here the first semester of my sophomore year. They're still some of my closest friends to this day. We've watched each other kind of grow intellectually and personally. It's been wonderful.

Q. What will you miss about ILR?
A. I will miss the close relationships I have made with people here. I work in the Catherwood Library. I'm also a teaching assistant. The school is really my home within a very large university. I have this feeling of belonging and knowing of all of this giant space — there is this one building that I know extraordinarily well and I know most of the people in it. It's that feeling of closeness to other people and a familiarity. I will probably miss that.

In this school, there's a small minority group people who are very active...who are very involved. A lot of the other students aren't necessarily as involved or as engaged as opposed to the small minority group that I belong to who are out — getting arrested in President Lehman's office for the Redbud Fiasco. Those are the people that I am friends with.  So, I guess, when I get out of this school, I'll probably be able to pursue that niche a little bit better because I found it within the school and so I know that's where I belong. I know that once I get out of school, I'll be surrounded by just a larger group of people who share that same sense of activism that I believe so strongly in.

Q. You received the Daniel Alpern Award — an award based on the criteria of scholarship, leadership, and service to the school. Tell us about that.
A. I was very honored to receive this award. I was surprised. I wasn't sure that anyone had taken notice of me but I guess someone had. It was definitely an honor because I am very impressed with my peers in this school.  They are very impressive people.

Q. It is a prestigious award?
A. Yes and I found out that my thesis supervisor, Professor Francine Blau, from the Labor Economics Department, won the same award when she was a student at ILR. She told me that and that was really neat to think that she won this award and now I am receiving the same award. I was very honored to be able to work with closely with her while writing my honor's thesis. She has done a lot of work on male - female wage disparity and the role of women in the workplace and the economy.

Q. You wrote a paper — The Transformation of Public Assistance: Evaluating The Impact of Welfare Reform on Female Headed Households" Tell us about it.
A. That paper really grew out of a class that I took with Professor George Boyer that examined Social Welfare Policies in the United States and Great Britain. I took it in the spring of my junior year. I wrote a paper in that class about the socio-economic position of single mothers in American society and how they have held this very peculiar situation — on one level — they're expected to work and support their families. And, on another level, they are expected to stay to stay home and read to their children. I looked at how the role of the poor single mother has evolved over time in this country — especially with regard to welfare reform. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 placed entirely new expectations on this particular demographic of people and had a giant impact on millions of working families and millions of children. We examined how this policy really influenced the lives of these working families.

I wrote a separate paper for Prof Boyer's class on this topic and that's what sparked my interest in the topic. I am really grateful to him because I never would have thought that I could write a thesis on single-mother families in the economy until he told me — if you can write it for my class, you can make it into an honor's thesis. He definitely encouraged me and allowed me to see that I can think outside the box a little bit.

I like that about ILR — you can make the education what you want it to be. If you have a passion and if you have a strong interest, you can do it. A lot of people were surprised when I told them the topic of my thesis because — it wasn't about human resources — I didn't have to perform statistical regressions — but I took this thing that I was really interested in and that I thought was important and I made it work — I made it fit. That was a really good experience for me.

- Interview by Robert Julian