Prospective Students

Do you want to come to do research with me at UCLA?

Enrolling at UCLA as a Ph.D. student and working on a research project provides invaluable mentoring and development opportunities. It also allows you to get funding for your PhD through graduate student research assistantships (GSRs) and to gain significant academic experience. 

My advisees usually see themselves in the future as academics (professors), research or policy analysts in think tanks or similar organizations, analysts or evaluators for school districts, or doing development work in international organizations (World Bank, IDB, etc.).

If you want to come to UCLA, please get in touch with me. Before you do that, please carefully consider the following:

1. Make sure our interests are aligned. Below are things I’m either currently working on or have a significant interest in

• Policies to improve teaching/learning for English-Learner classified students

• Dual-language immersion policy

• Student mobility

• Anything having to do with education policy or educational program evaluation in Latin American countries (mainly Mexico)

• Teacher labor markets and teachers more generally from a policy perspective (especially bilingual teachers).

• Please note that I usually cannot advise students who are studying language or teaching from an educational psychology, cultural, pedagogical, or anthropological perspective--since that is not my training. If that is your jam, check out other faculty in the Language, Literacy, and Learning collaborative at UCLA. There are amazing faculty members that whose interests may better align to yours. 

2. My expertise is in quantitative education policy analysis. Therefore, most of my projects use quantitative methods. Our collaboration will be most successful if you already do the following:

• • • • • • Understand the basics of quantitative analysis. By this, I mean you have taken several basic statistics and probability courses, regression analysis, etc. People with economics, sociology, public policy, or political science degrees usually have this training.  

          • You can program using statistical software such as R or Stata (and beyond—the more tools, the better!).

In addition, you should be interested in learning how to prepare and analyze large-scale data sets, including administrative data from school districts, state-level data, international data (PISA, etc.), and/or survey data (NCES data). 

If all of this applies to you, please email me at lsantibanez@ucla.edu. I would love to hear from you!

PS. UCLA's admissions cycle usually closes on (or around) early December.