The following student was named as 2016-2017 APSA Minority Fellowship Program recipient during the fall 2015 application cycle. These fellows plan on entering a PhD program in political science in the fall of 2016.
Estefania Castañeda Pérez received a BA in political science with a minor in honors interdisciplinary studies at San Diego State University (SDSU). Growing up in Tijuana, Mexico, and adopting the trans-border lifestyle to attend school in San Diego, CA prompted to write an senior honors thesis investigating the different experiences and perceptions of border policing from cross-border commuters in the pedestrian lanes at the Tijuana-San Ysidro border. Her thesis won Best Student Paper Award at the Association for Borderlands Studies Conference. After graduating from SDSU, she was a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Madrid, Spain and worked to prepare high school students to compete in Model United Nations competitions. Estefania will focus her graduate studies on cross-border migration, border theory, human rights, and national security.
Learn more about the Minority Fellowship Program here.