Yifan Chen, '21
Analyst
Education Resource Strategies

I came into college having little to no clue what “sociology” really was or meant…and came out of it feeling like my decision to concentrate in Sociology was one of the best choices I’ve made at Harvard. Before college, I attended a Title I funded high school where a majority of my classmates were from low-income backgrounds like me. The drive to understand the structural causes of poverty and to study the inequities in our education system - issues that have shaped my experiences as a first-generation college student - fueled my intellectual interests, and thus led me to the Sociology Department.

The highlights of my academic experience were taking classes taught by the amazing faculty in the department. Classes such as Intro to the Sociology of Organizations (Peter Marsden), Elite Education and Inequality (Tiffanie Ting), and Philanthropies and Nonprofits (Shai Dromi) helped me build the necessary foundational knowledge in this field. I developed my qualitative research skills through the methods class Models of Social Science Research (Mary Waters) and learned to analyze quantitative data through the Research Lab: Inequality (Xiang Zhou).

Currently, I work at an organization called Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit that helps transform the way school systems use their resources so that every child, regardless of their race or income, has a chance to succeed. There’s no doubt that the knowledge I’ve gained and the analytical skills I learned as a sociology concentrator has helped me immensely in my current role as an analyst, and more broadly, in my passion for making a social change.