Aya Waller-Bey

Aya Waller-Bey is a Ph.D. candidate studying trauma narrative in college essays. Her dissertation examines how Black students make sense of racialized expectations to narrate trauma in college personal statements and how admissions officers make sense of the trauma narratives they encounter in personal statements. She completed her B.A. in Sociology with a Social Justice concentration and minor in African American studies at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. She then received the Gates Cambridge Scholarship in 2015 and earned her MPhil in Education at the University of Cambridge in England. Before beginning her doctoral work at Michigan, Aya worked in the Office of University Initiatives at Arizona State University as a University Innovation Fellow. She also worked as an admissions officer and coordinator of multicultural recruitment in undergraduate admissions at Georgetown University. She has presented her research at local and national talks and symposiums, conducted storytelling workshops, and written op-eds in publications like Huffington Post U.K, Forbes, and the Atlantic.