Minority Fellowship Program Testimonials: Emerald Nguyen

The Path from the MFP to Working in the Federal Government 

I have been moving between the West and East Coasts for the past 15 years, as my research training and career have taken me from being an undergraduate at the University of California-Davis to Washington, D.C., where I worked as a paralegal at the Department of Justice, back to the University of California-Davis for graduate school, and back again to D.C., where I served as an American Sociological Association (ASA) Congressional Fellow after receiving my graduate degree. The bi-coastal moves were both deliberate and fortuitous and started when I got my first look at the policy world as an undergraduate intern at the National Women’s Law Center. I was fascinated by how D.C. draws passionate people who are motivated to work on wide-ranging policy issues. That fascination stayed with me while I was in graduate school, and I always hoped there would be an opportunity to return to the nation’s capital once I finished my degree. Receiving a fellowship from the Minority Fellowship Program during graduate school was a foundational and integral part of my professional journey back to D.C., where I now work as a program official at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

The Somewhat Accidental Sociologist 

While it can be difficult to decide what you want to do in life, knowing what you do not want to do can be helpful. This is partly how I decided to go to graduate school. I originally thought I would become a lawyer, but I realized through my work as a paralegal in the Department of Justice Antitrust Division that it was not the right career for me. Through this work that focused on healthcare merger and acquisitions, however, I became interested in health research. The position required me to sit in meetings with legal teams who were talking about dense topics like market efficiencies. All the while, I was concerned about the implications for patients and their families when large companies acquire and restructure local health systems and healthcare services. This influenced my research interests going into graduate school. 

My experiences living on both coasts also shaped my research. Growing up as a daughter of Vietnamese refugees in San Jose, California, it was easy to find common ground when most of my friends were also children of immigrants. Moving to Washington, D.C. with its different sociodemographic composition, I found myself for the first time having to explain and justify things to the new friends and coworkers whose lived experiences were different from mine. These uncomfortable experiences sharpened my interest in studying immigrant acculturation and family demography. My dissertation examined the causes and consequences of multigenerational living arrangements among immigrant and non-immigrant families before and after the Great Recession. Knowing that extended families are more common in immigrant-sending countries, I wanted to study how norms and beliefs about family arrangements and social support evolve in the U.S. context, especially as compared to non-immigrant families.  

Support from the Minority Fellowship Program, as well as ASA staff members, was invaluable because it gave me the protected time to conduct my dissertation research in the final year of graduate school and provided me with a venue for sharing that research at the ASA Annual Meeting. Even more important, receiving the fellowship was confidence-boosting and validating, a signal to me that my work mattered. 

The Minority Fellowship Program laid the foundation for future opportunities, and the next few years of my career involved multiple transitions. Receiving the Minority Fellowship inspired me to apply for the ASA Congressional Fellowship, which brought me to the U.S. House of Representatives and offered me the opportunity to work on multiple policy issues and engage with constituents from the same district where I grew up, making the experience a very personal one. My Congressional Fellowship also included time in the Senate, which gave me insights into the workings of both chambers and offered me the opportunity to apply my sociological expertise to the policy-making process. 

From the MFP to a Career in the Federal Government 

My grandmother worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Vietnam for more than a decade before she and her family resettled in the United States in 1975. Growing up and hearing about her work for the U.S. government and the role that work played in my family’s migration to the United States, sparked my interest in a career in public service. I wanted to use my scientific background to engage with the social science community as part of the broader research enterprise. After finishing the ASA Congressional Fellowship, I transitioned to the NIH, where I have been working for more than five years. 

The NIH is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, with a mission to enhance life and reduce illness and disability. While a biomedical research agency may not seem like a place for sociologists, the NIH is a home for sociologists. One of the many strengths of sociology lies in its multiple methods of inquiry that are appropriate for addressing questions including what challenges and barriers individuals face to accessing quality healthcare services, and how structural forces can lead to health inequities. Sociology provides us with a framework for understanding and explaining social and behavioral determinants of health, and sociologists are well-equipped to conduct research and generate knowledge to inform public health and public policy. For these reasons and others, sociological research is and will continue to be a valuable part of biomedical research. 

The Power of the MFP Community 

The Minority Fellowship Program introduced me to a community of scholars within the discipline that welcomed me with open arms. It offered me a cohort of colleagues, each doing their own important and exciting research. The fellowship orientation at the 2015 ASA Annual Meeting in Chicago gave my cohort time to bond and introduced us to alumni of the program, showing us the power of joining the MFP community. We found solidarity as a group, together taking steps toward finishing our dissertations and preparing for the job market and a future beyond graduate school. The fellowship gave me the opportunity to explore and develop my career, and to think about how I want to make an impact on the discipline, both directly and indirectly. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Minority Fellowship Program, I am reminded of how this ever-growing community is a testament to the way that sociologists can make an impact at all levels and in all sectors of our society, from within academia to within the federal government.