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.