College
of liberal arts
Outstanding
graduate - Lisa Pinley
By
Amy Cucinella
On-line Forty-Niner
 College
of Liberal Arts outstanding graduate Lisa
Pinley had a great Valentine’s Day.
On Feb. 14 she received an acceptance e-mail
from Yale University into its doctoral program
to study Latin American history.
“I’ll always be able to remember the day
I found out now,” Pinley said. “It
was a nice day. Yale was always my No. 1
choice.”
Not only did Pinley get her choice for post-graduate
studies, she also received a full fellowship
scholarship that will pay for all of her
expenses, including housing.
“I tell Lisa that when she graduates, she’s
going to take a pay cut,” jokes Cal State
Long Beach President Robert Maxson, who
knows Pinley well through her part-time
work in the University Outreach and School
Relations Office and through the President’s
Scholar program. “I love Lisa Pinley.
She’s been one of my student heroes.”
Pinely, a history major and political science
minor, also earned a full academic scholarship
to CSULB through the President’s Scholar
program, a program that Pinley cites as
one of her greatest experiences at CSULB.
“I just had an overall really good experience
here,” Pinley said, “which is a result of
a combination of factors — the people that
I met, the other students. And then there’s
the faculty in the history department who
were all so amazing. They helped me so much
to figure out what I want to do and how
to get there. And the [President’s] scholar
program was great, it made everything so
easy.”
Academic success is nothing new to Pinley.
She was the class of 1999’s valedictorian
at Paraclete High School in Lancaster.
Pinley is originally from Quartz Hill, a
town about an hour and a half north of Long
Beach.
This past year, Pinley has been dedicated
to writing a thesis paper, which is almost
complete and should be about 30 pages in
length. Her thesis seeks to explain
the development of the tourism industry
in the Mexican town of San Miguel de Allende
between 1926 and 1960.
To gather research, Pinley took two trips,
totaling five weeks, to San Miguel de Allende,
where she lived with a host family and took
language immersion classes to improve her
Spanish.
Pinley was able to offset most of her research
expenses because she is a McNair Scholar
through the McNair Program, a federally-funded
program for students interested in obtaining
a doctoral degree and who come from a low-income
family, a minority background or are the
first in their family to attend a higher
education institute.
Pinley is the first in her family to attend
college, though she has a younger sister
completing her first year at UCLA and another
younger sister who will be attending Fresno
State next year. Pinley is also a Sally
Casanova Pre-Doctoral Scholar, which is
a program similar to the McNair program
but funded at the state level.
CSULB history professor Patricia Cleary
has served as Pinley’s McNair Scholar program
mentor, as her thesis advise and has taught
several of Pinley’s upper-division courses.
“I’ve known Lisa for almost three years,”
Cleary said. “She’s an excellent student.
In class, she offers surprising and original
ideas. She’s dedicated to challenging herself
and deepening her own education, and she
inspires others with her commitment and
enthusiasm. She’s a joy in the classroom.”
Pinley, who has decided she’d like to be
a professor of Latin American history, first
became interested in studying Latin America
after she read “Presidential War Power,”
by Louis Fisher, for a political science
course.
“As I read the book, I was really shocked
that I didn’t know that much at all about
Latin America, specifically U.S. involvement,
so I became interested in the U.S. foreign
policy side of it and jumped over to it
in my history courses,” Pinley said. “I
really want to teach and do research and
travel some more, and get paid to do it.”
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