What It’s Like…being Black in STEM in 2023/2024: Chapter 2, Now she talks

Hi, long time no see. I meant to update this blog a long time ago, but I decided to wait. I will have a proper update to the first part of this story, but I wanted to drop with this update instead.

April 29th. This date has a lot of feeling to it right now that will make sense in the coming months so stay tuned. But, this is a date I won’t forget. Because April 30th and on. My life is about to change, and I think for the good.

But let’s back track a bit.

Almost two weeks ago was ImmunoDiverse’s annual Colloquia. ImmunoDiverse means a lot to me. Coming to UCSF and being in a lab where I’ve since become the only Black person in the lab, for a long time was the youngest in my lab, and one of two or three people maybe who grew up in a low-income household, the access to community that I had at UChicago, I didn’t have access to  anymore.

And that was much harder that I thought. So If I haven’t expressed this before, I’ll say it again. To my FGLI/Questbridge/Odyssey Scholar Family: I miss you and love you deeply. I don’t think I would’ve gotten through undergrad and even this stage of my life without you all. So thank you.

So yeah, I don’t have a giant cohort of people who came from demographics like me at UCSF like I did in undergrad, but with ImmunoDiverse, it’s given me a home and a place where I found myself brought back to that safe space. Every year, we host an annual Colloquia to celebrate and highlight the work that we do, and highlight the work of Black and non-Black scientists of color.

I’m still recovering from planning it, cause it’s a pretty big task, and this year, it was completely ran by 1st year graduate students and technicians/post-bacc students like myself. Putting on an event to this scale at this stage is really hard and exhausting and to any of our speakers who come across this, I want to thank you all again for being so kind and patient with us.

But Colloquia this year had a much different feeling to me. I’ve been in a weird headspace for sometime as I reflected on my relationship with DEI work and my experiences in academia, from my time in undergrad at UChicago to my post-bacc lab at UCSF.

I’ve changed as a person, some of it has been good, but not all of it.

I lost myself. I lost my mind, my happiness, friends, family, everything.

My confidence and hope has been at an all time low. I’ve been having conversations about this loss and I’ve been taking the steps I needed to try and heal everything that got burnt. Some things have come back to life, others, baby steps,

and I’m learning to be okay with that.

I can’t change the past, I can’t change or try to fix everything that has happened to me.

But with this blog and what I’ve always committed myself to do, what I can do   is share my experiences and my story, and hopefully try to make change.

I don’t want people to experience the things I’ve dealt with. No one should have to feel the way I’ve felt over the past two years; and I will continue to do what I can to make sure of that.

With that, I want to share with you a bit of the introduction I gave to our Colloquia. I’ve cut some parts out for reasons that’ll make sense in the coming months (good reasons for once :) ), so it might start off weird and end a bit an abruptly, but everything that is important will be there.

So thank you for listening to my story.

TW/CW: Discussions of anti-Blackness and mentions/discussions of suicidal ideation