Minorities in Academics

The semester has been busy, and I did not update this blog as I had planned to in preparation for study abroad. Today was full of errands, but eventful in providing food for thought.

Study abroad pre-departure orientation is mandatory, I expected a general focus on health and safety. Instead the focus was on stereotypes of Americans on study abroad programs, perceptions of Americans in other countries, and culture shock while abroad. Having grown up in the United States in a decidedly Mexican household, I am no stranger to culture shock. My house, my family, my various neighbourhoods, and my schools were all principally Mexican or Latino, or had a significant proportion of Mexicans or Latinos. College and certain classes in high school are when I've been "cast out" into surroundings where Mexicans and Mexican culture weren't all around me to take for granted. The culture I grew up in and hang out in is always mainly Mexican. Americanization mainly shows in food choices and which language, or mix of language, is used to communicate. But the culture is very preserved, so the orientation session alienated me.

First of all, when I entered I was the only non-white student. As the session filled up with late tricklers, there were about 35 students, with only 5 non-white students including me, and only one male. The video they showed us on American stereotypes and differences in cultures marked to me why I was a minority in this country, and why I will always be a minority in this country, even though I was born in and grew up here. Among points addressed were:

• Americans are too loud (I've only heard this stereotype in regards to people of my culture) -do not drink to pass out, because in most other cultures drinking is for social mingling (this part of American culture is one of the more alien to me, and I always grew up seeing drinking as a social activity as well. Tipsiness in my culture okay, yes. Passed out drunkenness? Not so much.) 
• Americans are too invasive of personal space (compared to what I grew up in, Americans have a too large bubble of personal space) 
• Americans hug more than in non-European countries (but less than what I expect among other Latinos)

Those are just the ones covered in the video, but they were enough to make me feel alienated from the larger gathering, and the fellow Latina I'd wound up sitting next to kept shifting uncomfortably as well like I was doing, at least until we were given time to mingle. My own fidgeting stopped after that as well.

All this after having watched two videos that also made me see my place as a minority. One on women in STEM, as I am, and how they are still held to standards of beauty and asked about their fashion and life choices despite it having nothing to do with their work, and the other a Pantene advertisement of women in the workplace. The latter was a Filipino advertisement with remarkably light-skinned models, some who looked white and not at all Asian, which a discussion into the homogenization of beauty. It's a lot to think about, and I'll write on it when I've had more time to reflect on it.

To those interested, the videos:

A Post of Introduction

     Since this is intended to be an academically-focused blog, I thought I’d make my first post a summary of my summer and my short-term goals. This has been my first time working in a lab, and I’ve loved it thus far!  Not only is the work extremely interesting and engaging- whether running a protocol, reading scientific literature, or even working with software (my dislike of which led me to changing my major from Computer Science)- but the people (our head professor, our postdoc and the graduate researcher who have been working directly with us, and my three fellow undergraduates) are simply fantastic. I couldn’t have been luckier. Did I mention we’ve got plenty of caffeine options to choose from thanks to the tea and coffees on the lab office’s back counter? And that there’s not only a French press for the coffee, but also an espresso machine AND milk frother? Pretty much each person has brought either coffee or tea to share- it makes even the dullest parts of research seem like a coffee break!

This photo was taken at the beginning of the summer- the espresso machine is cut off, and we now have two (dwindling) bags of Starbucks coffee and another box of tea.  The writing on the cabinets has to due with pyrosequencing of 16srRNA, or at the very least pyrosequencing. 

     However, I digress. The lab is a microbial ecology lab, analyzing permafrost soils across a thaw gradient in Sweden. The goal of our lab’s portion in the project, which spans numerous labs, is to examine methane emission and microbial community gene expression. Thus far I’ve worked with a command-line line program to create tables, the bioinformatics program R, mass spectroscopy (MS) search engines for protein identifications in the microbial community, and now the analysis of the data from MS search engines such as MyriMatch and X!Tandem using tools in the Trans-Proteomic Pipeline (TPP) to judge the accuracy, reliability, and error rates of the matches made by the search engines.

Yay proteomics!

      As for my own goals, I have decided to stay on in this lab for the 2013 fall semester. The deciding factor was the passion I found I had for the work, and the suberb friendliness and approachability of my labmates. All of it is new, exciting, interesting- contributing to, in my understanding at least, the wider window of understanding of microbial contributions to global processes such as global warming via the analysis of microbial community gene expression methane cycling. Plus, since I discovered the milk frother I’ve been making a cappuccino every morning, so I do get to keep that as well!

I even sprinkled French vanilla flavoured cappuccino powder on the first one!

      I’m also planning to apply to study abroad in France for Spring 2014. I’m unsure how I’ll manage that and do research as well, since now that I’ve "gotten my hands wet" in this lab I simply don’t want to take a break from research and the excitement it holds for me. Paying for study abroad will be tough, I know- aside from the direct program expense there’ll be travel expenses, school and personal supplies to purchase, airport and baggage fees, and all sorts of other expenses. So whether or not I go depends on what the scholarship office tells me and how much aid I receive from the additional aid I'll be applying for.  I am confident I can do it, given I'm already making the basic planning toward getting the application steps done and have already done all research regarding a student visa and what I can and can't take overseas, or what I can but need to pay for.

Au revoir!

-Krystalle

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 A version of this post was submitted as an entry essay to the “Hit the Books Scholarship” funded by CoffeeForLess.com. I tweaked it a bit to be more fitting to this blog, as I felt it was excellent material for an introductory post.