Alexandra Odom ’16
Ph.D. student in history, University of North Carolina
There was a point that I was like ‘I love teaching, but I also really love research,’ and I didn’t realize that there was a career where I could kind of meld the two.
At Grinnell, Alex received mentorship and guidance through her Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, a program designed for underrepresented students to increase the diversity of faculty in higher education.
After winning a Fulbright award, Alex deferred her admission to a doctoral program in history at the University of North Carolina in order to study for a year at Queen Mary University of London. London is one of her favorite places and the place where she studied abroad for a semester during her third year at Grinnell. In London she dove deep into research at museums and archives and emerged with the confidence to pursue her ideas.