Each year, doctoral students in the School of Education at the University of California, Riverside organize a research conference of their own — writing and reviewing the proposals, chairing the sessions, filling the room — alongside an annual wellness retreat a graduate student first imagined and led. That community has a name, the Pre-Professoriate Thriving Program. It began as a pilot in the fall of 2022, but its roots reach back two years earlier: to a loss in the doctoral community, and to the students who carried its advocacy forward.
A legacy carried on
In the fall of 2020 — Dr. Alice Lee's arrival to the School of Education faculty — the doctoral community lost one of its own. Margarita Vizcarra was a doctoral student, a Chicana feminist first in her family to attend college, had advocated for the people around her: for living wages, for stronger support for teaching assistants, for the basic dignity of graduate workers. In the grief that followed, Dr. Lee heard from one student after another about her brilliance and her fierce advocacy. Her death was a profound loss — but the work she had poured herself into, born of deep love for her friends and community, did not end with her.
It was carried on by close students who had stood beside her — among them Ariana Romero and Patriccia Ordonez-Kim. Beginning in the winter of 2021, Dr. Lee listened to graduate students over Zoom and by phone. They spoke warmly of the mentorship they had received from longstanding faculty and the grounding of their coursework; still, they named needs no single course or mentor could meet, and Dr. Lee encouraged them to bring those needs to the School's leadership. What they named was specific: many felt underprepared to carry out the qualitative research their dissertations required; others worried about conferences, publications, and the job market. And beneath the practical gaps was something heavier — loneliness, anxiety, and, for some, a quiet sense of being second-class next to peers at other, more high-profile UC campuses. "Our doctoral students already have the leadership and brilliance; they just need to be seen and supported," Dr. Lee would say — needs that, she came to feel, ran deeper than any one faculty member or office could answer, and so she added her efforts to a collective one.
Building it together
From those conversations, Dr. Lee shaped a vision she would later put to a room of students: "a scholarly community in which students grow as independent researchers and find belonging alongside one another."
The program began as a pilot in the fall of 2022, made possible by $35,000 Dr. Lee committed from her own graduate student research funds to pay her two doctoral students, Sofia Rivas and Esmeralda Muñoz, to help her lead it. Out of that pilot came two components. The first was a redesigned qualitative research course series, with structured methods training and mentorship. The second was a graduate research conference. Its spirit, like the coalition that produced it, was one of gentle disruption — a real platform for professional development, but, in Dr. Lee's words, "not merely a line for your CV." It was meant to push against the traditional, sometimes colonial conventions of how research gets done and on whom, and to build a space rooted in warmth, belonging, and care. Dr. Lee brought the two components back to the students, and it was in that coalition that the program found its fuller shape: it was Ariana who proposed a third, a wellness retreat, turning two parts into three — the people most affected by the work helping to shape it.
Taking root in the School
As that first year's funds began to dwindle, support came at the level of the School. Dr. Joi Spencer, newly the dean of the School of Education, saw the value of the work and put institutional weight behind it, committing staff and funding for graduate student support. In the winter of 2025, the School's Writing and Research Center took on the staffing of the program, giving it a lasting home; and from January 2025 through January 2026, Dr. Lee mentored the Center's director and staff, so the work could carry on without her.
How the work took shape
The program has since grown into a visible part of the School's life. Its research series is supported by a qualitative research team: Dr. Alice Lee, the School's faculty lead for qualitative research from 2022 to 2026, with faculty partners Dr. Michael Moses and Dr. Amos Lee, who helped lead the redesign of the course series. Together, the three offer quarterly workshops that began with qualitative methods and have since expanded school-wide, bringing in faculty who cover quantitative methods as well. The graduate research conference has drawn nationally recognized keynote speakers, among them Dr. Danny C. Martinez (UC Davis), Dr. Carmen Kynard (Texas Christian University), Dr. Venus E. Evans-Winters (University of San Diego), and Dr. Jessica T. DeCuir-Gunby (University of Southern California). And in 2025, Dr. Lee received UC Riverside's campus-wide Commitment to Graduate Diversity Award.
In the students' hands
The public life of the program has always belonged to students: Sofia and Esmeralda co-chaired the conference, and Ariana led the first wellness retreat in the spring of 2023. Dr. Lee served as faculty advisor over the Pre-Professoriate Thriving Program from 2022 to 2026 but kept that visible leadership with students by design.
For Sofia, the experience offered new forms of growth: "Co-leading this program allowed me to have experiences that didn’t exist within the SOE; experiences that centered the well-being and academic excellence of my peers and allowed us to grow together while supporting each other."
Esmeralda describes the impact of this leadership opportunity on her doctoral journey: "To witness intentional programming for underrepresented students of color was such a rewarding undertaking and labor of love. This opportunity opened avenues for graduate students to collaborate with SOE leadership and find a deep sense of belonging.”
Carrying the spirit forward
The clearest sign of its impact, Dr. Lee says, is in the community itself: morale has shifted, and the culture feels different. "The student response to advancing these changes gave me life during one of the darkest periods of my career and amid multiple global pandemics,” Ariana says. “What sustained me was the compassion, vulnerability, and unwavering commitment of my peers and Dr. Alice Lee—people who became family through this work. Through tears, honest conversations, and collective action, I witnessed hope emerge and a meaningful shift in our culture begin to take root."
Students coming through the redesigned research series describe feeling prepared and confident for independent research, many more moving through their programs on time. "It's so rare to see something come full circle," Dr. Lee says, "to see the fruit of that labor. It has been absolutely life-giving."
This story is set down, in part, as a record. Cohorts turn over, and those who build something are not always the ones who inherit it; the hope is that its origins are not forgotten — that the spirit of the work, born of loss and built in coalition with students, is carried forward by those who come next and with School leadership. The annual conference continues on in the memory of our sister-scholar whose advocacy first inspired it. And if the program offers anything to others, it is a modest example of what can grow when faculty and students build something together: a community organized less around climbing than around care, where one person's success is understood to belong to everyone.
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