What is community in the ivory tower, really? and the restorative power of female friendship on this PhD journey
This article was partly prompted by a question a junior phd student in my lab asked: how do you make friends in a new town, in a PhD program?
To start – I cherish my female friendships. They are so emotionally intimate, SO MUCH FUN, and are often a safe space for us to kick back and relax or to mutually blow off steam together with a venting session.
While I had these sort of connections in my personal life through a 15 person co-op I joined my first year, I had a hard time imagining finding a substantive community in academia as a PhD.
Yes I have colleagues – but my colleagues often played the role of colleague more than (close or even just good) friends, and while people may say that a PhD is different than say undergrad or a masters and that there is no “competition” you’ve all made it … I find that you are in competition in small or big way such as – through gleaning some of the precious time of shared advisors, whose paper gets accepted to conference in a lab, being perceived as serious enough or more serious than others about your research, applying to the same internship positions… it just feels different sometimes.
People can not always play more than one role in your life and that’s okay! You can’t just expect them to do both and for them to play both well. I think it’s also honest to know that you yourself can’t play both roles for other people.
But for me, I know that I needed and I value the reliable emotional support and intimacy that comes with friendship with people who understood the journey. It’s life affirming and is part of what keeps my passion for life – and thus my work – burning.
In my 3rd year I’ve been particularly happy with the community that I’ve cultivated with other PhDs. So I’m going to talk about them a bit:
I first noticed Kowe in a first year class but was I far too shy to speak to her other than the few times we collaborated in class group activities. We later reconnected when we were on the student board for ISGSA and began organizing weekly do-working sessions for other black students in our program. We were frustrated by the isolation and lack of consistent community for black students in IS and have since worked to welcome more students as they enter so they have a place to be held accountable and to feel supported.
I first noticed Drea when I took a Drag makeup workshop. I later reconnected with her when I reached out to the Ithaca Black student GroupMe for participants for my study and she kindly replied.
Meeting Aishat was the funniest one … I first noticed her on a dating app (we matched lol but that’s all). We later reconnected at a mutual friend’s party and she kindly drove me home.
All of them are incredible leaders. Drea is a former BGPSA (Black Graduate Student Association) president. I was VP to Kowe’s co-presidency for ISGSA. Aishat is on the BGPSA board for philanthropy.
Drea Darby, Aishat Sadiq, and Kowe Kadoma are just some of the PHENOMENAL black women who have helped keep me grounded in this unpredictable and often confusingly cruel world. They remind me to re-commit myself to my values for love of community, advocacy for self and community, and resiliency when things are tough. We provide each other a safe space to be ourselves and to dream our wildest dreams and to share in our own time. We check in with each other during difficult times and reaffirm our desire to see each other happy and healthy. We’ve held each other through tears (I’m the friend who will join in a teary group and pause… before cracking a joke to make everyone laugh). We’ve validated and listened to the grief and frustrations of not just the PhD experience but also being in spaces that can be and are antagonistic to ambitious, authentic black women. We often meet each other and set goals for what we want to achieve for a given time. (Sometimes we don’t meet them because we are too busy making eachother laugh). As fellow neurospicies, Double-bodying has saved us many times from getting stuck in overthinking spirals and procrastination spells. We’ve welcomed each others into our homes, fed each other, and have uplifted each other through our hearts again and again.
It’s inspiring being in community and friends with such passionate, compassionate, and hard-working people.
I met them all in very different ways quite unexpectedly. I think my biggest recommendation is put yourself in a position to meet people. It doesn’t mean that you will make friends but you are more likely to meet others who share similar interests and values. Join leadership positions, introduce yourself to other people’s friends, join org GroupMe’s so you can stay abreast of the social scene, talk to people in other departments – PhDs are susceptible to cliques too, organize fun events and have your friends invite other people, be weird, funny, soft you and own that. Get very familiar with feeling rejected and accepting it: You will “fail” at making and keeping friends. People will flake. People will get caught up in their lives and forget about you. People will suddenly stop talking to you and not address it. Maybe you guys will reconnect. or maybe not. That’s all okay – just get up again with a smile. Remaining kind and open after many disappointments is one of the bravest things one can do. It shows that you’ll make for an amazing and emotionally mature friend that anyone would be honored to have in their life 🙂
I’ve been getting to know and welcome more black grad women students and maybe I will highlight them on this blog later as I build my connection with them 🙂
I’ve also joined online communities as well.
Here’s a Discord group for Black Doctoral Students: https://discord.gg/a96QyGJS
Here’s Black Woman in HCI writing group on slack: https://join.slack.com/t/bwwritinggroup/shared_invite/zt-2a2p9hlkl-lmy7VOOwo06FpQPMy6fZ7g
If a link is broken let me know and I can send you an up to date invite.
A Growing Intellectual Community
This academic year I’ve done a better up of doing work in the office. This means I’ve spent more time with colleagues.
I may go there in between classes to get work done or rest sipping on coffee from Gates Hall’s own Gimme Coffee.
Colleagues can bring joy in their own way. One of my colleagues got me a plushie decoration for my desk that’s super cute. It’s nice to say hi to folks and sometimes you guys can exchange pieces of helpful information about research, classes, leadership opportunities, internships, and so on.
I’ve also have gotten better about attending the student organized weekly colloquiums where we welcome scholars from other scholars to talk and share their work. I’ve valued seeing the work other people are doing and thinking how I can make my own work relevant. It also allows me to keep updated on the interests of my colleagues and see where their head is at.
One thing I regret from this semester is not properly documenting my experience at AOIR. I think love-blogging may be the way to go for future conferences. What stood out to me is how different it was having attended CHI and CSCW. AOIR was smaller and thus felt more intimate. The format of presentations were different – they didn’t seem to follow the norm that I noticed about CHI/CSCW about here are “X,Y and Methods and now discussion”. AOIR felt closer to the people that they conducted research with and presented findings more of a story rather than as tabulated numbers and graphs. That may have been presented but I didn’t notice those ones so much. Which made me wonder: which venues are more receptive to interpretive and qualitative work?
Maybe I’ll answer that question for a future post.
Geeked,
J
J.C. Otiono 