A female Ph.D. student’s cautionary tale and the need for peer mentorship

By Bárbara Cruvinel Santiago

In 2018, I moved to NYC to attend my Physics Ph.D. program at Columbia. Life was far from perfect due to personal and family issues, political turmoil in my home country, being away from my loved ones, and a much less than ideal new housing situation. After working for a year, however, I was looking forward to going back to school. Given my track record, getting my B.S. in Physics at Yale under a full-ride need-based scholarship, and working for a year at MIT’s Nobel-prize-winning LIGO lab, I thought I was up for the challenge, but grad school turned out to be different from anything I had ever encountered.

Columbia’s physics Ph.D. program is notoriously male-dominated. During our visiting days, all of the 9 speakers were white and male. At the time I was a first-year student, only 15 out of over 120 students were women, and a third of us were incoming students struggling to navigate that space. My most supportive mentors in undergrad and beyond had been women, so I was scared. From previous experience, I thought I knew the recipe for success: I should find an advisor doing interesting research, but who also had a successful track record supporting female students and a lab where I felt comfortable. I found that when I sneaked into the Astronomy department upstairs and met Professor David Schiminovich, who is now my Ph.D. advisor. Professor Schiminovich is a wonderful mentor, and I have been lucky to have him and the female students in my cohort to rely on. They enabled me to pass my quals, get a NASA fellowship, complete my coursework, present at a conference, teach, and start doing research in astronomical instrumentation within my first two years. Yet, when you’re an incoming student, it’s hard to confide in people you have just met.

Besides, while working for a professor in a more diverse and welcoming department than my own, I was still part of the physics community, and the lack of support there took a toll on my mental health and development. I felt weird at coffee hours, when I would be surrounded by men only. I had an encounter with a male instructor in the Columbia American Language Program who verbally harassed me before classes even started, and I didn’t know who to tell about this. I felt isolated when I was trying to work on problem sets. There were only three white men in my oral qualifying exam committee, and their first question to me was whether I spoke Spanish (because of my last name), clearly profiling me (for the record, I’m from Brazil, speak Portuguese, but have also lived in the US for almost a decade).

This summer (2020), a friend of mine from undergrad asked me if I wanted to join a peer mentorship program for any incoming Astronomy and Physics graduate students. I jumped at the opportunity, because it was something I wished I had in my first year for reasons even beyond the ones stated above. So a group of Ph.D. students got together, and from that SU(5) was born!

SU(5) is a free peer mentoring program to support physics and astronomy incoming grad students. First years are matched in groups of 4 incoming students from different universities across the US based on their background and needs. Each group is assigned a “mentor” who is an older grad student that will attend their first meeting and then follow up with their group biweekly to check in with first-years and make sure that they meet online among themselves. Each biweekly meeting will be about a specific topic that first years usually have to deal with, from personal issues like settling in a new place and making friends to academic concerns such as quals, classes, and research. It is a good opportunity to make connections, find people struggling through the same things, and brainstorm solutions for problems with people in other institutions who have experience with it but don’t have any stakes in your own department. So far, we have dozens of first-years and potential mentors who have already signed up, and the more the merrier! We hope that this will be a successful program for years to come and that it will make transitioning into grad school an easier task for hundreds of physics and astronomy students.

Graduate school is hard throughout, and I still struggle daily trying to find my footing with my research while attempting to balance my work with my personal life and hobbies. However, the first year of a Ph.D. program is certainly one of the most challenging years, if not the hardest, because on top of crazy work hours and a whole set of new responsibilities such as taking classes and qualifying exams, teaching and doing research, you also have to find your own space to thrive in a new environment. So I really believe that programs like SU(5) are essential to make sure incoming students have access to the support and resources they need to succeed in their Ph.D. programs, especially since making new connections is so hard during the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Incoming students can sign up to be matched with a group at SU(5)’s website (https://www.su5.group/) until August 31. Also, if you have any further questions, feel free to reach out to me personally or to the rest of the organizers using the group’s email (su5organizers_at_gmail.com). Please share it with any students who might benefit from the program. We can’t wait to get started and help new students thrive in their academic journey!

Bárbara Cruvinel Santiago is a third-year Physics Ph.D. student from Brazil. She got her B.S. in Physics at Yale, working at CERN and in AMO as an undergrad, after which she worked for a year at MIT’s LIGO lab. At Columbia, she works on astronomical instrumentation in Professor David Schiminovich's group under the support of NASA’s FINESST grant. Barbara has been very active in groups that encourage women and minorities in science since college, and is the president of the Columbia Physics Grad Council. When not in lab, you can find her rock climbing, knitting, doing wood work, playing her guitar, or geeking about politics.