As a sociologist of education, Rachel explores how children’s aspirations toward higher education vary across families and communities. She is completing her doctoral dissertation on the spatial stratification of student outcomes in rural, urban, and suburban contexts, and will earn her Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. Her training includes both quantitative and qualitative methods. She received her bachelor’s degree in economics at Rutgers University, and a master’s degree in higher & post-secondary education at Teachers College, Columbia University. During graduate school at UConn, Rachel taught her own writing-intensive introductory sociology courses as well as an upper-level sociology of education class. Professor Leventhal-Weiner views her teaching to be a form of activism and builds critical thinking and writing exercises into her courses to expose students to new ideas in their social world, to their role in the social hierarchy, and to ways of improving social life for themselves and others. She is enthusiastic about joining the Trinity faculty and incorporating community-learning experiences with Hartford in her courses.