Sophie Lewis

Sophie is the Graduate Assistant for GPS and has been with the team since May of 2023. She is a current doctoral candidate in Music Education in the College of Fine Arts at Boston University. Sophie is primarily responsible for the management of the PhD Progression Pathways and the expansion of curated pathways for all graduate students at BU.

Sophie’s doctoral research is centered on music student experiences in higher education spaces and how students develop values through interactions with institutional policy. She is especially interested in how students are prepared for contemporary music industry labor markets and how the values that students develop in post-secondary education shape the kinds of careers they will go on to have. Sophie is also actively interested in education policy and spent a summer working with the Massachusetts Executive Office of Education as a Rappaport Public Policy Fellow. She helped to design programming to help high school students connect with different education resources across the state, thinking about futures that do not involve a four-year college degree. She uses her policy and academic experience to inform her work at GPS.

As a professional doctoral candidate at BU, Sophie is committed to expanding GPS services to support the graduate students whose experiences in graduate school do not follow the traditional PhD experience. Sophie is involved in expanding the PhD Progression system to support all graduate students through curated pathways. As a proud first-generation, international student, Sophie hopes the curated pathways can help students who are new to BU feel confident about navigating life at BU.