Alcorn student Kimber Thomas receives fellowship from UCLA
Alcorn student Kimber Thomas receives fellowship from UCLA
Alcorn State University senior Kimber Thomas was recently awarded a fellowship from the University of California in Los Angeles to study Afro-American studies in the master’s degree program at UCLA.
Thomas will be completing a stellar undergraduate career at Alcorn in May of this year. As an English major with a concentration in professional writing, she has completed several major academic and creative writing projects.
In the summer of 2009, as a paid researcher for the HBCU-UP Program at Alcorn, she co-authored a 40-source bibliography entitled “Incorporating Writing in the Science Classroom.” As a sophomore in her modern black writers class, Thomas completed an extensive research paper on writers of the Black Arts Movement.
As a Ronald E. McNair scholar at the University of Mississippi during the summer of 2011, Thomas authored a paper entitled “The House That Black Built: The Evolution of the Home in African-American Consciousness.” She subsequently presented the paper at the 2nd Annual Southern California McNair Scholars Research Conference in Claremont, California, in the fall of 2011.
Her creative writing credits include a short story entitled “Blakfrica” which was published in the fall 2011 issue of Cognita, Alcorn’s honors journal. She also interned during the summer of 2012 with the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Mississippi, and published five articles.
Currently, Thomas is a president’s scholar at Alcorn State with a 3.9 GPA. She was recently selected to Who’s Who Among Students In American Universities and Colleges.
“I have been fortunate at Alcorn to have great teachers in the Department of English,” Kimber stated. “Being accepted to UCLA is like a dream come true. It is my wish one day to be a professor of African-American studies at an HBCU, and this is the biggest step I have taken so far to achieve that goal.”
Dr. Cynthia Scurria, chair of the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Alcorn, said, “Kimber exemplifies what we try to do in the department and at the University: provide our students with a first-class education so that they can attend the graduate school of their choosing whether it is here in Mississippi or elsewhere in the country.”
