Fanni Farago received the 2025 College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS) Dean’s Challenge Scholarship, which recognizes exceptional students who have demonstrated academic excellence, a commitment to education as a powerful tool for change, and commitment to leadership and community engagement. It is among the most competitive and prestigious scholarships that the college offers, with more than 30 applications received and reviewed by a committee consisting of faculty, staff, and students. The annual scholarship is open to all CHSS students.
University career services professionals everywhere are tasked with meeting the unique needs of their students and setting them up for success while also facing the challenges of a changing workforce, the continuous growth of artificial intelligence, internal and external policy pressures, and limited resources.
Those are the dilemmas Fanni Farago, a PhD candidate in sociology at George Mason University, is exploring in her dissertation research that includes 44 in-depth interviews with career service directors and practitioners at public universities throughout the country.
“It is a time of rapid change for career services,” Farago said. “Why is that? At public institutions particularly, because there is this much broader context where a lot of people are questioning the value of higher education. We see a lot in the news and elsewhere, questioning the return on investment. There is a lot more sort of pressure for accountability to demonstrate student outcomes.”
With increased focus on workforce readiness, career services practitioners play a huge role. However, Farago says her interviews have revealed the challenges these professionals face when meeting the needs of their students. Farago plans to use this research to make an impact on how public institutions and professional associations deliver and design career services to consider the needs of all students, including immigrant-origin students.
“It is shifting the mindset of a single career services office being responsible for doing this work for 30,000 students to shifting the mindset to the entire campus, whether it is administrators, student services, or faculty, that we all have a shared responsibility to support students in their career development,” she said. “But how do you reconcile all of this with very real resource limitations? That’s really where sociology is creating a context for it.”
Farago’s research also looks at how immigrants are affected by the complexities facing career service professionals. Farago can relate to how many first-generation immigrants feel as she emigrated from Hungary to Texas when she was 9 years old.
Her research shows immigrant-origin students have unique needs that must be addressed in order improve their access to career service offerings. For example, she says, while undocumented students or international students may face legal and language needs, other first- and second-generation immigrants also face obstacles that may not be as obvious.
Farago describes her experience at George Mason as “immersive and holistic.” She arrived at George Mason in 2019 and quickly had to adapt as the pandemic forced her home to Houston (and left her car at BWI airport for six months). She has occasionally returned to campus but has still managed to stay in the fray. Under James Witte’s leadership, she served as a graduate research assistant for three years at George Mason’s Institute for Immigration Research (IIR).
“She was a fantastic graduate assistant,” said Witte, sociology professor emeritus and former director of the IIR. “Fanni sort of integrated (at IIR) really quickly and was very much a part of that culture. She really put in the work.”
Through the institute, she also co-authored several articles, including one on problem-solving courts, formerly known as drug courts. The study, whose co-authors included Witte, criminology, law, and society PhD student Lindsay Smith, and Schar School of Policy and Government professor Faye Taxman, examined how court coordinator’s perceptions and attitudes about medications for opioid use disorders impacted their treatment plans.
“I came to Mason, first and foremost, because the program here in sociology, it focuses on applied and public sociology,” she said. “Which, in a nutshell, really means taking the knowledge and training, and not just thinking about it, but actually really working to translate it to the outside world. That’s very unique in the scope of sociology PhD programs across the nation … especially at a R1 (research) institution like ours.”
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September 11, 2025