By Kate Rix

 When a visitor mentions she is reading the nouvelles of Henry James and finds them a bit dark, English Professor Mitchell Breitwieser recommends the work of James’ brother, William, who wrote about religion. “I think you’ll enjoy William James,” he says. “Give him a try.”

Breitwieser just can’t help but give advice about literature. As a member of Berkeley’s faculty in English he volunteers for a number of programs aimed at encouraging disadvantaged students to pursue graduate or undergraduate work at the university.

One of Breitwieser’s mentoring commitments is the Summer Research Opportunity Program (SROP), for which he’s volunteered four times. SROP is in its twentieth year at Berkeley, providing in-depth research opportunities for highly motivated, under-represented students. Successful applicants are undergraduates, usually juniors, who are the first in their family to attend college. The goal is to pique their interest in graduate school, and prepare them for it.

Breitwieser describes himself as a scholar who “stumbled into academic life.”

“I came from a family without academic background,” he continues, seated in his book-lined office in Wheeler Hall, near a balcony with Bay views. “When I got into college despite a low GPA, I got seminar experience. I was good at English and got a lot of reinforcement for that.”

He is one of several Berkeley faculty who take on undergraduates who’ve had limited access to graduate research opportunities. When the competitive program, which received 200 applications this past summer and only accepted 20, has students interested in English, Breitwieser often gets a phone call.

This summer he mentored three students, who agreed to spend eight weeks of their summer on a graduate-level research project. Rather than work with them each individually, Breitwieser created a mini-seminar. Spending some of the time talking with the group about the research resources available to them on campus as well as the requirements for writing a paper, he also encouraged the threesome to work together, sharpening their ideas and honing in on precisely what they would write about.

As students in the humanities, he says, part of their challenge is to learning how to refine their ideas in writing. Graduate students are routinely required to produce an advance synopsis of their longer papers. Breitwieser schooled his three SROP students in the art of crafting these three-page abstracts and emphasized the importance of writing in a way that leaves their ideas room to change and develop as the long paper takes form.

“This is one of the particular difficulties of English composition,” he says. “I make sure they encounter some of the difficulties of typical English graduate students and that they experience the feeling of figuring out what they think at the end of a first draft.”

Students come from colleges and universities all over the country, including U.C. San Diego, University of Southern California, Hampton University, Brown University, and Hampshire College. Most are from the humanities and social sciences, with a minority from education. Separate summer programs, such as U.C. LEADS, focus on science and engineering students.

SROP provides an opportunity to conduct “a focused research project that contributes to a student’s research repertoire and may in fact be the foundation of a senior thesis,” says Josephine Moreno, Graduate Diversity Coordinator for the Arts and Humanities Division within Berkeley’s College of Letters and Science. “The objective is to increase diversity among students entering Ph.D. programs by preparing them for research level work.”

The program is sponsored by the Graduate Division’s Graduate Diversity Program and is funded by the U.C. Office of the President. Moreno works closely with Cynthia Ladd-Viti, SROP’s program coordinator in the Graduate Division, to review the  humanities applicants, make admission decisions, and secure faculty and graduate student mentors. Once the summer is underway she meets with participating humanities students—eight this year — providing writing guidance and information about applying to graduate school.

SROP students go on to pursue graduate studies at a number of universities. A few apply and are accepted to Berkeley. This fall Rosa Martinez will begin graduate work in English, after having participated in SROP with Genaro Padilla, an Associate Professor in English, as her mentor. A student at Chico State studying 19th century American and contemporary Chicano and Latino literature, Martinez says she emerged from SROP with a specific sense of what she wanted to do.

“At the end of the summer I finally was able to pinpoint my particular focus within my field of interest, which I was having difficulty with,” Martinez says. “As a humanities student, what excited me about this experience was the fact that I was finally able to delve into one project. Usually I am reading several texts and writing papers for each.”

Another SROP alum, Marcelo Sousa, will begin graduate work in Art History this year. A Mellon Mays Fellowship recipient, Sousa is interested in contemporary art, Ancient and Modern art, feminist and queer theory, and museum studies.

At the end of the summer students are required to make an oral presentation of their work and submit a substantive research paper. This summer students in Breitwieser’s cohort of three presented work focused on African-American literature. Brown University English major Ah-Young Song presented her research on novels by Zora Neale Hurston. Briana Boykin, who will graduate next year from Hampton University with a degree in English, presented her paper about Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby. Ashley Richardson presented research into  the evolution of  “colorism” in African American Literature.

“This summer was great,” Breitwieser says. “There was a high level of rigor, and more conviction. Their hearts were really in their work.”