High school students experience conflicting stressors on a daily basis, balancing school, work and social life along with sports or other after-school activities while still trying to figure out the next steps in their lives. Some students, however, face additional pressures. Cecile Gadson studies the experiences of black adolescent girls in high school and the microaggressions they face every day, specifically at the intersection of gender and race.

On Christmas Eve 2018, graduate student Jason Stubblefield drove to an acquaintance’s farm and was handed a brown paper bag with a sheep hide inside. The hide—which remains vacuum packed in a freezer—is going to be critical to a research project he’s doing with fellow grad student Karen Norwood.

Joe Strong realized medical school wasn’t right for him in the summer before his senior year of college, leaving him little time to think of an alternate path. Through his volunteer work in the hospital and job shadowing in neurology clinics and other healthcare facilities, he knew he enjoyed working with older adults and wanted more opportunities to do so, but he was disenchanted with the roadblocks the insurance industry seemed to introduce into the care of these patients.

During an introductory nuclear physics course her sophomore year, Elizabeth Mae Scott developed a need to understand things from their most basic, original structure. The course showed her how math becomes a language that physicists use to describe the world around them.

“Fundamental physics is a way to pry at the cosmos. It’s really fun to try to understand the tenets of how things work, to push the boundaries of how we describe our universe,” she said.

Scott earned bachelor’s degrees in physics and mathematics from Tulane University. Now a graduate student in nuclear physics at UT, she continues to push those boundaries as part of a collaborative experiment called Nab at the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The 2016 elections left many wondering how their lives might change with a new administration in the White House. For Zach Stumbo, a graduate student in theory and practice in teacher education, it meant accelerating his plans to get married. Stumbo and his partner feared a potential reversal or challenge to the Supreme Court ruling that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples.

After 10 years of working in rural schools, Stumbo entered UT’s cultural studies in educational foundations program. As part of the Theory and Practice in Teacher Education program, Stumbo was able to combine his experience in the classroom with his social justice and equity interests. He discovered a lack of research on the experiences of married LGBT teachers in the US, and the foundation for his own research began to take shape.