I graduated from EMU in 2010 with a bachelor's in history and a minor in sociology. That same year, I was recruited to work as an education administrator at an English-language kindergarten in my father's hometown, Busan, South Korea, where I worked for three months. My main purpose of moving to South Korea was to get back in touch with my family heritage and, frankly, to learn more about everything. After about three months, I proceeded to move to the larger city of Seoul, where my mother grew up, to work as a reading comprehension/English teacher at The Princeton Review, Seoul branch. While working at The Princeton Review full time, I interned at a local PR company called Metacommunications. After living in Seoul for a little over a year, I was recruited to work for CFI Group, a global market consulting firm, in Shanghai, China. During fall of 2011, I moved to Shanghai on temporary employment. After my contract had expired, I found a full-time job as assistant executive with Edelman PR, the world's largest PR firm, where my team and I have worked with clients including Johnson & Johnson, Mars Co., Abbott Pharmaceuticals, Starbucks and Hilton Hotel & Resorts. I plan to remain with this company and this country for a couple more years to learn and gain more experience in the field of PR as well as to fulfill my consistent hunger for personal growth.

I graduated EMU spring of 2011 with a major in applied sociology and minor in writing. A foundation in applied sociology has given me a solid start in understanding and participating in complex organizations. I am graduating from Northern Illinois University in May 2013 with a master's in public administration with a focus on local government management. Sociological knowledge should be used to improve living conditions for the society it studies and this application of theory is why I have pursued an education in public administration. While in graduate school, I have also been actively involved in local government as an Administrative Intern at the Village of Kenilworth, a north Chicago suburb. Future plans include becoming a City Manager and facing the challenges of growing populations, including outdated infrastructure, local food networks, environmental sustainability, and government accountability. I am committed to professional management in local government and look forward to working with others who share my passion for building well-functioning and well-ran communities.

Following graduation in Winter 2012, I moved to Seattle to complete a service year with City Year as a Corps Member, tutoring, mentoring and being a role model for children. I serve in a diversity-rich area working with third, fourth, and fifth grade children. After City Year, my goal is to use my applied sociology major and nonprofit administration minor in a community organizing, service management, or program planning capacity with a nonprofit organization in Seattle. I am looking to continue my education and earn my master's of social work within the next 5 years.

Since graduating from EMU, Pia has been working at the Veterans Administration's Center for Clinical Management Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She is part of a team that conducts health services research through studies that support Veterans who suffer from various chronic diseases. The objective of these studies is to identify effective interventions that may ultimately be offered to a broader population. This work is intellectually rewarding because of the opportunity to contribute to studies, from conception, to design, implementation, analysis, and publication. In addition, interacting with patients enables her to see first-hand the positive effects of the interventions, and to be inspired daily by the patients who volunteer their time to participate in these important studies.

I'm working as the Research Area Specialist Associate for the University of Michigan’s health and well-being program, MHealthy. I serve as part of the program evaluation team in providing analytic and administrative support. I conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses on health behavior intervention programs, assist in the creation of surveys, graphs, and charts, as well as, in the drafting of reports, and manuscripts. Being part of a program that provides resources designed to help achieve a safer, healthier and a more satisfying way of life at the individual, organizational and community level is very gratifying. Working with data enables me to see how certain MHealthy interventions have improved the health and well-being of participants and how this data is contributing to the study of health and wellness, and advancing the mission of healthy living.

Kasyera joined the MA program in Sociology hoping to expand on the education she received in social research during her undergraduate studies at Wayne State University. By working as a graduate assistant for Dr. Kristine Ajrouch, she was exposed to survey research in a way that she had not been previously, and began thinking about the many ways survey research can be adaptable in the growing and changing world that we live in. This inspired her to seek out a full-time position at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research in the Survey Research Operations Department. She completed her thesis project, “Fathering and Masculinity in Children’s Films” in 2021. This is a qualitative analysis that identifies characteristics that fathers and father-figures display in popular children’s animated films, differences that exist in the way these characters are constructed and presented in film, and the ways these characters are representative of or different from societal stereotypes of fathers. The proposal for this project was one of the winners of the 2020 Three-Minute Thesis Competition of the Graduate Research Conference

Sara Rakes is a Data Management Consultant at IBM Watson Health, in Ann Arbor, MI. She builds and maintains healthcare databases, which inform policies and planning. Prior to working at IBM, she was a Data Analyst at Turner Broadcasting. She attended EMU for both undergraduate and graduate studies in Sociology. In the future, she would love to work more with user experience research and evaluation.

I am a graduate student at Eastern Michigan University in the Department of Sociology, Criminology and Anthropology. I am currently in my final phase of the program, my thesis project, which is a quantitative study focusing on race, income, and the food retail environment in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. My current research interests are urban sociology, social inequality, community resources, and food justice. In my first two years as a Master's student at EMU, I worked as a graduate assistant and through that role I participated in the Virtual Graduate Research Conference in 2020 presenting research on racial and ethnic residential segregation patterns in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. In addition to my role as a student, I am a former child welfare worker and supervisor, now working at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan as a Survey Specialist on the Health and Retirement Study. I am also excited to be working with SMART at EMU on the Ann Arbor Police Traffic Stop Data project. I am looking forward to partnering with and learning from the SMART collaborative team and to continuing my varied work in social science research.