What it’s like being a first-generation PhD candidate
Dr. Anna Boegehold (@anna_boeg) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Here, she shares some of the unique challenges she’s faced in academia, as a woman and a first-generation PhD student.
This story was published on April 6, 2018, on Dr. Boegehold’s blog (available here), and has been republished here with her permission.
I’m very privileged — I have a supportive family, supportive friends, a loving partner, a nice, safe place to live, health insurance, clean running water, and all of my basic needs are met. However, I do face some unique challenges in academia being a woman and a first-generation college student.
I really started thinking about this status recently. In January 2018 I saw a high-profile, tenured professor who came from a high-profile, elite academic family say that she gets so bored with reading application letters that begin with some variation of “I’ve been interested in science ever since I was young…”
This struck a nerve with a lot of people, especially marginalized and underrepresented students who don’t have the privilege of being born into a life of academia. This prompted me to write a Twitter thread (which I can’t find and didn’t save) but sounded something like this:
For some people, including me, an early love for science is what got me started down this road. Nobody else in my family is in the STEM fields. My parents are musicians and my dad also had a 9–5 job. My brothers are artists and musicians. Neither of my parents finished college by the time I started my PhD*. Aside from my public school science teachers, I didn’t know anyone who pursued a career in science. My passion for science, especially biology and chemistry, was all I had to go on. My passion and interest from a young age was the driving force behind where I am today. I had the encouragement of my parents, who supported my choice to become educated in ecology, but they didn’t know how to mentor me through my education.
Interested to learn more about Dr. Boegehold’s experiences as a first-generation graduate student? Read the full story here.
