Shemana Dixon is a first year graduate student in African-New World Studies M.A program. She began her academic journey in the one-room school building of Belmar Basic School in Kingston, Jamaica more than two decades ago.  Since then, she has taken countless steps towards fulfilling her academic dreams. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics, and a Certificate in African Studies from FIU in 2007. She was also FIU’s 2007 Miss Omega Psi Phi. Shemana was admitted into the Masters Degree of African-New World Studies (ANWS) in Fall 2007. She is on the Transnational Policy Analysis track of the program. According to Shemana, "becoming a graduate student in ANWS is a significant milestone in my life. The first semester in the program has proven very challenging, forcing me to confront many of my own views and assumptions, but I find it very rewarding in laying the foundations for my future academic and intellectual growth."

Shemana plans to write her thesis on the social and political economic aspects of South-South Migration, especially from the Caribbean to East Africa. This is not a well understood theme in migration studies, and she hopes that her study of the experience and life histories of Caribbean immigrants in Africa will be a major contribution to the scholarship on international migration in general. She finds the interdisciplinary, transnational and diasporic approaches of African-New World Studies curriculum most relevant to satisfying her intellectual curiosity.