Rochelle Williams, Pepperdine University
Rochelle Williams is a rising senior at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. She is majoring in political science and minoring in journalism. She is the president of her university’s Black Student Association, serves as a resident advisor, and spent a year studying abroad in Italy and interning in Washington, D.C. in the capitol for a congresswoman. She has spent the last year working on research under her advising political science professor researching political opinion and voting patterns of various partisan and religious groups. She has presented research at multiple symposiums at her university and the 2025 Midwest Political Science Association conference in Chicago. She is most interested in researching effective campaign strategies and the voting patterns of gender and ethnic minorities. After graduating from Pepperdine, she hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in political science at a university in Washington, D.C. Her goal is to use her research to do campaign work and help members of Congress get elected. Later on in her career, she hopes to be a professor of political science and pay it forward and invest in students the way her professors have for her.