By Rachael Alfant
“To My Younger Self”: Bridging the Mentorship Gap for Underrepresented Students During the 2021 INFORMS Annual Meeting, I attended a remarkable panel in which five professors – all women of color – shared their experiences in academia. I was elated to see such diverse representation in the INFORMS community. It was especially affirming when the panelists all agreed that the inclusion of gender and ethnic minorities in STEM is still treated by the scientific community as a sacrifice in research quality for the sake of added diversity. This perception poses an undue burden on women, nonbinary individuals, and people of color, who are tasked with overcoming this perceived lack of ability by “proving” that they belong. As a woman of color in a PhD program, I felt like my voice was heard, my struggles recognized, and my frustration justified.
The problem of underrepresentation in academia is generational. While less than 8% of Americans have a graduate degree, over 50% of faculty in American universities have at least one parent with a master’s degree or PhD
[1]. The same study also found that faculty are more likely to have grown up in wealthier neighborhoods than the general population. Thus, the current underrepresentation of university faculty who are women, nonbinary, first-generation college students, people of color, or from lower-income backgrounds, is rooted in academia’s historical exclusion of them.
More often than not, this exclusion does not come in the form of overt actions; it plays out in more insidious ways, such as unconscious biases (the aforementioned imagined tradeoff between research quality and diverse representation) that inhibit the advancement of people belonging to these underrepresented groups. Therefore, we must forge paths where students from underrepresented backgrounds are not only encouraged to pursue careers in academia, but, just as critically, are supported along the way. Mentorship programs can be a key tool in establishing support structures for underrepresented students to pursue academic careers.
When a postdoc in my research group told me about the To My Younger Self (TMYS) program, I was eager to participate. The goals of the TMYS program are to foster community and provide the mentoring and professional development opportunities that the mentors themselves wish they had early on in their careers. Mentorship programs like TMYS support students in their pursuit of academic careers by:
- Showcasing the research of underrepresented students, whose accomplishments are often discounted due to the implicit perception that their presence in the field comes at the cost of lower research quality.
- Creating a supportive network of people who understand each other’s struggles and help each other navigate them. This fosters an environment that elevates students’ self-confidence, and makes students from a wide range of backgrounds feel supported and welcome in the field. Furthermore, this network ensures that students need not overcome institutional barriers alone.
- Helping students find mentors who champion them. So much of a student’s success in graduate school depends on how enthusiastically and persistently those in power advocate for them. Underrepresented students have a harder time finding mentors because there are so few people like us in the field. Without representation, these students are not seen and recognized at the same rates as their male or white counterparts.
- Directing students to trustworthy resources. Marginalized students are more likely to face harassment, violence, unfounded judgment, and feelings of self-doubt (including imposter syndrome). Having a mentor who knows how to navigate these issues can mean the difference between leaving a graduate program early and graduating with a PhD.
- Connecting underrepresented students with mentors from outside institutions when their local institutions fail to provide them with adequate guidance. PhD students may have career goals that differ from their advisors’, or may desire a form of support that their advisors cannot provide due to time constraints or lack of experience. So although PhD advisors are considered the primary mentors for their PhD students, they cannot (and should not) be expected to be the sole providers of mentorship and support for their students. INFORMS, through programs like TMYS, is able to cast a wide-reaching net that bridges the mentoring gap for these students to have access to mentors beyond their PhD advisors.
I admire that the TMYS program organizers recognized their ability to mentor women and nonbinary graduate students even beyond their own institutions, thereby helping universities across the country retain underrepresented graduate students. Mentoring, community-building, and retention efforts are particularly important for underrepresented students, who are often tasked with being the sole navigators of the isolation and discouragement that come with being the “first” in their communities, or the “only one” in the room. When the experiences of underrepresented students are discounted, deemed trivial, or treated with skepticism, it sends the message that those students are not valued. So it should not come as a surprise when these students leave the institutions that fail to provide them with adequate support structures.
Although graduate students are often the ones tasked with spearheading mentoring and community-building activities on campus, faculty members and university administrators have the greatest power to organize these initiatives. Graduate students are temporary and transient in academic institutions, whereas tenured faculty are permanent fixtures at universities who have the ability to create lasting change. Furthermore, graduate students are often reprimanded for organizing such activities on their own because they are deemed “irrelevant” to research progression.
Whenever I get discouraged, I think about the students who regularly attend my office hours, who are all women of color, despite the class itself being mostly white and male. I think about the inspiration drawn by the audiences of the panels and conferences I have organized. I think about all the mentors who helped me get to where I am today because they believed in me when I didn’t even believe in myself. I think about the women of color I look up to, who were once where I am right now, and wonder if I can be that person for someone else one day.
[1] Morgan, A., Clauset, A., Larremore, D., LaBerge, N., & Galesic, M. (2021).
Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty.