Growing up in Metro Detroit, Nahlia Moncrief noticed that her grandmother had to drive much farther than she did to buy groceries, and she had to pay more once she got there. The disparities between neighborhoods struck her as unfair, but she didn’t yet have the tools to study them.
“I always thought those things were weird and felt like it was an issue,” she explained, “but I didn’t know how to verbalize it.”
Moncrief arrived at Michigan State wanting to do work that was people focused. In James Madison College’s Social Relations & Policy major, she found a way to connect history, public policy and broader social issues. Later, in a senior seminar on race, place and food justice, she studied the foodways of the Great Migration, tracing how food traditions, practices and access move with people and settle into new places.
Her project focused on Metro Detroit and connected public health, environmental justice, history and family memory.
For Moncrief, research helped give language to issues she was passionate about exploring.
That connection — from interest to question to method to direction — runs through the undergraduate research experiences of three Class of 2026 graduates. Their projects differ in subject and scale, but each student describes research as a pathway to tackle broad concerns and explore more focused questions.
Will Castanier, who majored in International Relations and Arabic, came to MSU with an interest in studying the Middle East. He began taking courses with Prof. Russell Lucas during his sophomore year, choosing classes on Islamic world politics and regional politics of the Middle East. By the end of the year, Lucas encouraged him to apply for a research assistant position.
The work began with articles. For one of Lucas’s projects, Will and a second research assistant contributed to a content analysis of scholarship on Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations,” the argument that post-Cold War conflict would run along cultural and civilizational lines. Working from a standardized form, they read each article and logged its methods and arguments, data that Lucas used as graphs to make his argument. The first set ran to 100 articles, with roughly 20 more from a second batch.
While tedious at times, the work allowed Castanier to see the larger shape of academic research and how an idea moves from scattered reading into a finished scholarly argument.
That process carried into his own senior honors thesis. At first, Castanier thought he might write about political Islam. Through an independent study with Lucas, he read more deeply, built a literature review and landed on a more focused topic. His thesis compared Saudi foreign policy in Syria and Yemen, and the work helped him specialize further within the Middle East, drawing him toward the Gulf States.
“Pretty much all of my research skills and experience come from working closely alongside Prof. Lucas,” Castanier reflected.
That focus has followed him beyond JMC. After graduation, Castanier began working at the Gulf International Forum, a Washington, D.C., think tank focused on the Gulf region. This fall, he will begin a master’s program at Georgetown, where he plans to continue studying Arabic and may develop his undergraduate thesis into a more focused project on Saudi foreign policy.
Looking back, he described his path as a process of refinement. He came in with an “amorphous” interest in international relations and the Middle East. Through classes, research, independent study and his thesis, that interest became something more defined.
For Rachael Lee, the first turn came before she arrived at JMC.
Until the summer before her senior year of high school, she had planned to study forensic science or forensic psychology. A conversation with her father about the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan pointed her in a direction that would help her better understand global politics.
She chose International Relations, then found JMC, which offered the major within a small residential college setting. She later added a second major in Spanish.
Lee’s first research position came through the Honors College, where students are provided the opportunity to work with a faculty member whose research interests them. She looked through the JMC website, read about Prof. Norm Graham’s work on Central Asia, energy, water and the environment, and sent him an email.
She began with annotated bibliographies, reading articles, taking notes and discussing how they related to Graham’s work. She also reviewed tables on energy exports and reported numbers connected to the countries Graham was studying.
Over time, the work became more aligned with Graham’s interest in dams and their environmental and political effects, with emphasis on the impact on the challenge of transboundary water sharing in Central Asia. She published a brief summary article with Graham and two other Madison students, Maren Nicolaysen and Eleanor Pugh.
At the same time, Lee became involved in the JMC Human Rights Data Science Lab, where she learned open-source research: finding, sorting and verifying information from public sources. As part of the lab’s mission to investigation human rights violations, she worked with news articles, databases, social media posts, images, videos, maps and satellite imagery. Later as a lab leader, Lee also learned how to guide other students through the same process and how to present findings clearly to partners that included representatives from the International Criminal Court.
Early in her time at JMC, Lee had imagined pursuing a career path in national security or intelligence. Through the Human Rights Lab, internships and research, her interests shifted toward humanitarian aid, refugees and internally displaced people.
This summer, she is in Ethiopia for an operations and logistics internship with Samaritan’s Purse. The work explores how supplies are obtained, moved and managed for programs in country.
For Lee, one of the lasting benefits of her research was not a skill but a relationship. Close, one-on-one work with a professor is something she came to see as an advantage of a small residential college. Graham, an established scholar who has taught at James Madison College for four decades, became a mentor to her through the research itself.
“I have realized through JMC how special that is, especially because we have such a small college,” she said.
Nahlia Moncrief’s path into research began differently. She did not know, at first, that opportunities existed for social science undergraduates, assuming research was mainly for STEM or graduate students. Upper-level JMC students working as research assistants encouraged her to pursue opportunities by reaching out to professors whose work interested her.
Through the referral of JMC Prof. Daniel Ahlquist, Moncrief’s first research experience came through MSU’s Center for Community and Economic Development, where she worked primarily on an internal cataloging project.
Later, she assisted Prof. Florencia Rojo on a foodways study in the Hillside neighborhood of Colorado Springs. In a Madison Academic Research Tutorial with Profs. Sejuti Das Gupta and Louise Jezierski, she and fellow students helped extend their research on gender and the care economy. Moncrief focused on child care, interviewing a Head Start teacher, handling some writing and research for Wayne County, reviewing policy briefs, working with federal databases and learning to code interviews.
The work gave Moncrief examples she could point to in job interviews and changed how she understood research itself by providing first-hand opportunities with interviews, databases, policy briefs, posters, presentations, conversations and shared work.
Her senior seminar brought many of those pieces together. Moncrief studied foodways connected to the Great Migration, with a historical focus and some attention to how traditions have continued. She connected that work to public health and to questions of food apartheid and food deserts. The work allowed her to explore ideas she had encountered in earlier classes more deeply.
After graduation, Moncrief is taking a gap year and working with the Michigan House of Representatives while she decides between a master’s program and law school. She is still weighing the path ahead, but research has already shaped the way she talks about her work and the issues she wants to pursue.
Learn more about undergraduate research opportunities at James Madison College.