From the Office of Undergraduate Academics to Her Own Dissertation Defense

For more than a decade, Sara-Lee Ramsawak has been a familiar and trusted presence at NYU Tandon, first as a coordinator, then in progressively senior roles that have culminated in her current title of Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Academics and Global Engagement. She has helped launch programs, shepherd students through research internships and study-abroad experiences, and guide the school's global partnerships. What she has also been doing for the last several years, quietly and in parallel, is earning her own doctoral degree.

Ramsawak is a Ph.D. Candidate in NYU Steinhardt's International Education Program, and her research grows directly out of her work at Tandon. Years of watching students navigate the school's rigorous STEM programs gave her a set of questions she wanted to pursue — and she decided the best way to do that was to become a researcher herself.

That decision is now paying off in notable ways. At this year's Steinhardt Research and Scholarship Showcase, Ramsawak took first place in the poster competition. Her research poster, "Who Speaks? Examining Response Patterns in Course Evaluations Through an Intersectional Lens," drew on a dataset of nearly 95,000 student-course evaluations at an urban engineering school — in other words, the kind of institution she knows well — to examine which students participate in course evaluations and why the patterns matter for understanding how feedback systems actually function. She is also a recipient of this year's Mitchell Leaska Dissertation Research Award, a Steinhardt honor given to doctoral students whose work shows exceptional promise.

The dual recognition reflects what colleagues at Tandon have long recognized: Ramsawak brings the same care and precision to her scholarship as she does to her administrative work. She is, in the most literal sense, studying the very field she serves — and doing so at the highest level.

Ramsawak's dissertation committee includes faculty from Steinhardt's Department of Applied Statistics, Social Sciences, and Humanities, as well as Jelena Kovačević, former dean of NYU Tandon, a fitting connection for research rooted in the engineering school community. Slated to defend her dissertation this fall, Ramsawak has spent much of her career helping Tandon students find their footing in research, mentoring them through demanding programs, and cheering them across finish lines. It turns out she has had a finish line of her own in sight all along.