Rezwanul Karim
Contact Information
Job Title
2023 Cohort
- karim.83@osu.edu
- Office
- Townshend Hall 223
Areas of Expertise
- Status
- Education
- Labor Markets
- Gender, Race & Class
- Quantitative Methods
Education
- M.A. in Sociology, Ohio State University, 2024
- B.A. in Sociology, Brooklyn College, 2022
Current research examines college major selection as a mechanism of social stratification, with dissertation research tracing how the structural earnings risk embedded in different fields of study shapes (1) graduates subjective economic insecurity and labor market perceptions, (2) the health outcomes of students enrolled in high-risk fields, and (3) the rise of double majoring as a credentialing strategy to hedge against field-level risk and its consequences. Broader research interests include occupational status, gender and race in educational credentialing processes, and comparative/international perspectives on educational stratification. More recent work engages large language models through novel computational approaches to examine how status and meaning are constructed and contested around educational credentials.
I spent two years studying computer science before I admitted to myself that the questions I kept coming back to were sociological. I think I was drawn to understanding why the choices people make when they are young, about what to study, what kind of work to do, what kind of life to aim for, seem to carry so much weight for everything that follows. There is a lot of cultural pressure to pick something practical and financially safe, and I became quite curious about whether that framing holds weight over the life course and what it obscures about inequality in the process.