GRAD EDGE Fellow Spotlight: Brandin Ali

I grew up in California. After high school, I knew I really wanted to go to college, and specifically, I knew someday in the future I really wanted to be in research. I just never really knew what that looked like for me. I was fascinated with astronomy. I liked psychology a lot, so I had a couple of different avenues that I was really passionate about.

Originally, I had chosen astronomy as the desired route that I wanted to pursue, so I became a physics major at  UC Riverside. I found out that it was more of an interest of mine rather than a huge passion. I transitioned over to psychology and fell in love with it. I feel like I connected more with people. Understanding people as a data point just makes more sense to me. Being able to hone into my long-term desires in that field...I was very grateful to the staff and all the faculty that helped me discover that.

After graduating from UC Riverside, I knew I still wanted to do research. I was still developing my academic interest at the time, so I knew that part of me wanted to be a social psychologist, but there was also still a part of me that also wanted to be a developmental psychologist. I had a cross-cultural plus developmental kind of hybrid lens. It wasn't until I was also applying to master's and PhD programs, that I realized I hadn't really developed my research sense of self. I was kind of just following what had been given to me.

I went into a master's program at Cal State Fullerton and really fell in love with social psychology -- most specifically,  social cognition and how we imagine prejudices develop and such. Through this field, I found methodology, since social psychology requires a large amount of quantitative understanding of how we handle data and how we can answer our questions through data. I fell in love with the quantitative side of how we actually ask our questions, and how we derive our solutions from them. So from there, I really just dove into the statistics. I've really tried to understand all I could from it. I graduated knowing this was what I wanted to do moving forward in life.

I got a job at an evaluation firm called TheMarkUSA, which was a really interesting experience, dealing with many different fields and many different ways that we think about data and what we consider even a data point that I hadn't been experienced before. This really opened my eyes and really helped cement my love for just methodology and how we actually answer our questions...which is a lot of what evaluations are about.

After that, I realized I did want to go back to school. I wanted to learn more. I wanted to be an expert on the stuff that I felt passionate about...which drove me to come to UCSB. I'm super grateful to be here.
 

I think as a kid, I had always been a curious person. In my younger years, I was fascinated with the insect world. I don't even like entomology that much, but I found myself reading books about bugs and being fascinated about like "why do ants move the way that they do?" I think I just have a deep fascination with the world around me and how it functions. Since then, it's really honed in on what I think I haven't been able to explain in my life...you know, there are a lot of answers in a straight line, like going back to animals. I could find that answer as a kid in a book.

But when it comes to people,....and this is where it really drove me...is that people are so varied. They're so different, and there are so many different contexts in which the expression of even personality takes shape. So people were really what I had always been interested in understanding. Why is it that we do things the way that we do? Why do we interact in different ways? And maybe in one culture we interact in a certain way, but in another culture it's completely different how we think about it. So really, it's just the deep fascination and curiosity about humans in general that really brought me to psychology.

So I first heard about it from my advisor, Dr. Karen Nylund-Gibson, when we had been talking quite a bit about the application process, and through the interviews and post-interviews as well. She let me know that there was this new opportunity on campus, this program, which is a great way to segue people coming from a Cal State to a UC.

At the time, it sounded super interesting to me. I thought it would be a great opportunity to transition from work life back into a school setting, which was very important to me. I came from UC Riverside and then went on to Cal State Fullerton -- two different systems. It became really easy to forget what it was like at a UC. The Cal States have very different mission objectives on how we treat students, how we treat research. So I found it a really amazing opportunity to reinvent myself in the research lens and the research focus, and also to to get to know people who are going to be going through the same experience as I had moving forward....something that we could talk about, like looking back on our days in the Cal States and thinking about how we approach our learning and education through that lens.

So that's what brought me to the program at UCSB.The mission statement of UCSB and my advisor were the huge draws to come here. My research is kind of right up the same alley as my advisor's as well. 

I've been blown away by it. I've been feeling really well onboarded and well supported throughout the whole process. I've felt since walking in that I've had a sense of community with the cohort, and with my faculty advisor as well. She's done a phenomenal job of making me feel included and making me feel like I have agency...not just in my research, but my role here at the school, which I don't know if I've ever really felt before. Even at Cal State and through my master's program, I've had to support my own learning and to figure out what it is it that I want. But being in a PhD program, it seems like it's a very unique experience of driving your own interest and figuring out what works best for you and what research you want to pursue. So there's a lot more agency that Ihas been brought out through this GRAD EDGE program that I don't know if I've really understood fully until I went through it. It was such an amazing opportunity with the mentors, the fellows, and the GRAD EDGE Coordinator Sebastian to figure out what works here, what resources we have, and what we can look forward to in our time here.

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Coming into the program, l had some loose idea of what I want my research to be about, mostly about investigations,, underlying traits to our data, and how we deal with it. I really enjoy as a methodology the analytics and the bounds at which we can push our analytics before they basically break. That's kind of like what I came into this program imagining that I'm going to be doing now. The program with the eight week turnaround that we had, I didn't really feel like it was necessarily enough time to kind of open up a question to figure out, like "how do we go about testing this?" because I still want to develop my tools to actually dive into it fully.

I took the research approach from the program as a point of learning. I really wanted to learn about specific statistical procedures that my advisor is an expert in and to figure out ways that I can disseminate and relay these tools to others that may benefit from them as well. My goals here in the program have been about learning and figuring out what tools I have available for me and what I'm going to be learning about.

It has been a preface for what's to come in the next couple of years. Getting my feet wet with the work that we'll be doing in the lab, and then a point at which I could practice presenting complex statistical procedures to people who maybe don't deal with them on an everyday basis, and the benefits of using procedures that are of similar kinds. I feel the GRAD EDGE program has really helped support that type of work I sought to do through all of the variety of different workshops that we did. For example, I felt that it was very supportive, from a holistic perspective, of how we approach research from the idea to the publication. We had writing workshops that I feel have been super helpful to find funding supports like grant writing...across the board those just been so helpful. Now going into my first year, I can begin to imagine where I need to go to actually get things done.

I don't have to worry about learning the hurdles before actually getting to them. I can look ahead and plan to jump before I have to, which has been just really transformative, and also thinking about what my first year looks like and further on beyond that,

I really enjoy like the classroom setting. I'm a lecturer myself. so I've been on the other end for a while now, not as a student, but as the the teacher. I have really missed being a student again. I am super eager to take classes and to learn more about my field. And further than that, on the research side of things. I've been involved in research very lightly since graduating, but I've really craved diving in again and really just spending a lot of time tweaking what it is that I'm passionate about and working with statistics that I hadn't been exposed to before.So taking classes is one huge thing for me. Also, really understanding and getting to know my cohort...other students who are not just in the GRAD EDGE program, but also my cohort for my academic program. I'm really interested seeing how other people think about similar problems that I've considered and seeing other people's experiences through their lens. Also, how that could shape my understanding of my own research, which I find is very valuable in higher academia,  I hope that a lot of other faculty advisors and many other people in academia also consider it because I feel like shared experience and a shared uplifting is one of the most important things about research that we're always confronted with.

First and foremost, I have to thank my fiance and my family. They have been such an unwavering support for my goals and my journey, even when it gets hard, like they've been there for me. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for them. They have all my things in my heart and the whole world.

I'd also like to thank the advisors that I've had at Cal State Fullerton and UC Riverside. They've really helped me to develop my sense of self and academics that I feel at many points in my life had been lost. I've really been searching. has been really transformative and kind of my understanding of what it is that we do in research and what are our goals.

Dr. Ella Ben Hagai, Dr. Kathleen Preston, and Dr. William Marelich have been really foundational in my understanding of how we ask questions in psychology and how we best answer them. I also really want to thank my advisor here, Dr. Karen Nylund-Gibson, for being super supportive of me through this program, for taking the time to help me with my understanding the research that she does, and helping me to start thinking about what it is that I'll be doing in the next few years and how we're going to collaborate...for really treating me like an equal in this process. It has been super eye-opening, I think, just what we do in academics. So I appreciate that a lot.

My final thanks goes to the team and Sebastian as well. I feel like it's just been really indescribable, this experience. It's hard for me to imagine future students who don't have this experience because it has just been so useful to me. All my thanks go out to the whole GRAD EDGE team for setting this up and really putting a lot of work and thought into what best supports us.