By Bryné Hadnott
When LaNell Williams arrived at Harvard University in 2017 to begin a graduate program in physics, several of her peers told her she had been admitted only because she was a Black woman—her 3.9 GPA, NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and two coauthored scientific papers notwithstanding. During an open house for the incoming class, she asked her fellow students why they thought no other underrepresented racial minority woman had been admitted to the physics department that year. “We [women of color] hear many different things in those conversations, one of them being that we’re not interested in physics, which isn’t true,” Williams says. “Or that some of us don’t have the pedigree, which is also not true. And then the last thing is that we don’t apply—and in some cases that is true.”
In Williams’s experience, however, many women of color had both the grades and the aptitude for physics, but they were discouraged from applying to graduate programs by their professors, advisers, and classmates. “I wanted to prove them wrong,” she says of her peers at Harvard. She was determined to show just how many talented candidates there really are. “I wanted to say to those women that you are as good as, if not better than, some of the people who might be applying to graduate school,” Williams explains.
In 2019 Williams founded the Women+ of Color (WOC+) Project, an annual three-day workshop that encourages women and gender-nonconforming people of color to pursue advanced STEM degrees and provides resources on how to apply for and succeed in graduate school. The WOC+ Project has gone on to win the Materials Today Agent of Change Award. Now, Williams, graduate students L. Miché Aaron and Ayanna Jones, and several other graduate student volunteers are working to expand the workshop’s scope to support women of color throughout their academic careers.
Read the rest of the article at: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.5.20210510a/full/
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