CSUN Outstanding Grads 2016: Nazanin Keynejad

Nearly 23 years have passed since the first time Nazanin Keynejad stepped onto the CSUN campus. At that time, she was here to get a degree, and nothing else. Her employer at the time had promised her a promotion if she had a college degree. She applied to CSUN to finish a bachelor’s degree in English, which she had started a few years earlier at UCLA.

“I was here during the [1994 Northridge] earthquake,” said Keynejad, of Oak Park. “I went to classes in the trailers. It was a very wet winter that year. They had these wooden planks between the trailers and the mud. People would walk outside on the planks, the trailers would shake and literally, spiders would fall on you. It was a very interesting experience.”

Keynejad, who immigrated from Iran as a teenager with her mother, said she finished her degree and soon was able to take advantage of the job promotion. She eventually got married, had a son and started her own event marketing company. Then the recession hit in 2008, and work became scarce.

One day, while cleaning, she found a journal dating back to 1989 in which she had written her dreams of getting a master’s and doctorate in English.

“I talked to my husband,” Keynejad said. “He said, ‘You’ve been thinking about this for 20 years. You don’t have a steady job right now. Maybe it’s time to do it.’ It was the spring of 2012. I just opened up the [CSUN] catalog. Unbeknownst to me, I signed up for one of the toughest undergrad classes with one of the toughest professors in the department. I took the class and loved every minute.”

Keynejad hadn’t given much thought to her grades when she first attended CSUN, and she had to make up for that. She spent a year taking classes through the Tseng College’s Open University program to spruce up her academic credentials before formally applying to the Department of English’s graduate program.

She said CSUN’s English faculty have fueled her passion for English literature and encouraged her interest in studying the rise and progression of the strong female literary characters in the 18th century. Her efforts earned her the CSU’s prestigious 2015-16 Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral scholarship. The scholarship is designed to give historically underrepresented students more access to doctoral-level study. It places a special emphasis on increasing the number of CSU students who enter a doctoral program at a University of California institution.

In addition to her studies, Keynejad is the graduate student representative on CSUN’s Community Engagement Advisory Board and a graduate assistant in CSUN’s Learning Resource Center.

“What I want to do is get my Ph.D., come back and teach here at CSUN,” she said. “I love CSUN. As a good friend of mine once said, ‘CSUN is the school of second chances.’ [Does she already know where she'll be studying for her Ph.D.?]

“I have had the opportunity during the past couple of years to be a supplemental instructor in freshman composition,” she continued. “I am so humbled by these students. I had students who would take the bus at five in the morning to make it to class. Some are the first people in their families to go to college. If I can help just one of those students get to where they want to be, that would be the only reward I would need in my life.”

Keynejad is scheduled to take part in the commencement ceremony for the College of Humanities at 6 p.m. on Monday, May 23.

Resources:
Read About the Other 2016 Outstanding Grads:
http://csunshinetoday.csun.edu/csun-leaders/hard-work-determination-pay-off-for-csuns-2016-graduates/

CSUN Department of English:
http://www.csun.edu/humanities/english

Crew:
Filmed by: Richard Chambers, Johnny Her, Jonathan Wong
Edited by: Jonathan Wong
Music by: The Music Bed (licensed with permission)

© 2016 California State University, Northridge

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