Director shares vision for UIC as a Hispanic-Serving Institution

As UIC's first director of Hispanic-Serving Institution initiatives, Veronica Arreola helps coordinate campus efforts to serve as a model institution for supporting Latino students.

Since 2010, UIC has been designated by the U.S. Department of Education as a Minority-Serving institution as well as an Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution.

In 2016, UIC was designated as a Hispanic-Serving Institution after receiving a five-year, $5.3 million grantfor an initiative called L@s GANASto increase the number of Latino and low-income students attaining degrees in STEM fields.

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Arreola, a UIC alum who has worked for the university since 1997, was director of L@s GANAS through its grant cycle until 2021. Before that role, she was director of the UIC Women in Science Engineering program.

In celebration of National Hispanic-Serving Institutions Week Sept. 9-15, Arreola recently spoke with UIC today about her vision for UIC as an HSI.

How do you describe your role as UIC's first director of Hispanic-Serving Institution Initiatives?

We got our first HSI grant in 2016. Since then, a lot of folks on campus have advocated for this position to be created because after we got that one grant, we got a few more. UIC is a big campus, and a lot of people are working on a lot of great things, and not everyone knows about all those different projects. So that's the core of this role - to work on collaboration, communication and cooperation.

What is your vision for UIC as a Hispanic-Serving Institution?

I have three big things. One is to truly serve our students in a way that is more than just enrolling and graduating them. To really incorporate that servingness in how students arrive, what students see around campus and have them leave UIC not just with a degree, but a good sense of what it means to be Latino/Latina/Latinx in their field, and how that their experiences as a Latinx person in that field benefit their career and is a bit of a superpower.

Second is to perfect our relationship with other HSIs in the state. UIC is the only Hispanic-Serving Institution and Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution in the state that's also a research-intensive university, and it's the only one in the Midwest. We have a big responsibility in that space. We also receive so many students from our two-year campus partners and other non-research-intensive colleges in the area. If we can perfect our partnerships with those schools, then those students are better served from a Latinx or even Minority-Serving Institution perspective - the whole sense of being welcomed to UIC and welcomed into their field.

And the third is just really working to build on both of those things. We're a destination campus for Latinx students or all minoritized students in the Midwest. I'd really love to see us use the service focus to really notch things up, so we really have students leaving this campus with a firm grasp of how their identities fit within their careers.

What does it mean for UIC to be designated as an HSI?

It is an accumulation of years - decades, actually - of advocacy and work on and off campus. About 50 years ago, students, along with staff, faculty and community members, advocated for an increase of Latinx students being enrolled at UIC. And what came of that was the creation of the Latino Cultural Center, our Latin American and Latino studiesdepartment and LARES. So, when we received our HSI designation, we were about 40 years after those demonstrations and requests. It was 40 years of different organizations on campus, like LARES and the Hispanic Center of Excellence, working in the community to create trust with family members as well as schools to send their students to us. Getting that HSI designation is a signal that we did that hard work and the HSI was really important for us to really reflect on who our students are.

How does this designation support students?

It supports students in terms of the designation, as it unlocks a lot of federal funding opportunities. Neither of those designations - AANAPISIand the HSI - comes with funding, which is one of the biggest misconceptions about the designation. What it does is allow us, as a campus and as faculty, to apply for different funding opportunities.

In 2016, I was on the grant writing team that brought L@s GANAS. A lot of our programming was very centered and focused on Latinx folks, the Latino community and culture and heritage within the STEM fields. There are other grants, such as an (National Science Foundation)grant that focuses on HSI work but is more focused on departmental and classroom culture so that our Latinx students have higher success, but also all of our students have higher success. So, it's not just focused on our Latinx students, but we are able to apply for those funds, and we won those grants based on our HSI designation.

What current UIC initiatives support UIC's HSI designation?

L@s GANAS is still working on supporting our Latinx STEM students. We also have Monarchs and Milkweedsthat is wrapping up, that is a partnership with biology and Latino Cultural Center that brings in high school students, as well as employs our undergraduates within the Heritage Garden and makes those connections between monarch migration, milkweed cultivation and all the things that go into that science of monarch migration.

We also have the institutional transformation project that's in some of our STEM departments that's really focused on faculty culture and curriculum in the classroom. We also have a multidisciplinary Research Center of Excellence, which is actually not an HSI or an AANAPISI grant, just under a general Minority-Serving Institution grant. It goes back to the idea that UIC having these dual designations unlocks different kinds of funding opportunities that we wouldn't have been able to apply for otherwise.

What are some aspirational goals that UIC can strive to achieve as an HSI?

My aspirations for this role and for our campus are for us to be able to talk about our diversity in a more nuanced way, to talk about what that means in terms of students being able to know how their lived experience before they get to UIC helps them be better scientists, business people, writers, artists. Students come not with just their dreams and aspirations for their major, but a lot of reasons why. That "why" is often rooted in their neighborhoods, their families and their culture.

At L@s GANAS, we had a lot of students who talked about wanting to become physicians because they wanted to treat diabetes or heart disease, and we would talk to them about the variety of different positions that they can take in solving those problems, but then also having critical conversations with them about some of the reasons why they thought diabetes or heart disease was prevalent or disproportionately impacting the Latino community. They would bring things like, "We don't eat well. We don't exercise well." And then we would talk to them about things like food deserts: How far away is the grocery store? What does the fresh food look like in your neighborhood? Do you feel like your neighborhood is safe enough for you to take a walk, for your abuelita to take a walk and stay physically active? So, to pull those kinds of things into their larger conversation and encourage students to have a more complex view of what it means to be a Latino doctor in Chicago because almost all of them want to become something and then go back to their neighborhood for improvement.

What I have been working on recently is trying to create more partnerships between HSI and AANAPISI, and also staff who are working on projects related to our Black students, so that we can really center on working on the Minority-Serving Institution part of our designation.

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