4 - The long and winding road: tackling barriers and prejudice on the journey to PhD study

Summary

I did not always want to do a PhD; it was certainly not on my radar as a secondary school student. Apart from two White male teachers, I did not know anyone else with a PhD, let alone anyone who looked like me who had done one. (It took ten years after leaving school to meet a Black woman with a PhD.) My initial plan was to be a medic. It was during my interview for medical school that I first experienced blatant prejudice in what was deemed a professional environment. After waiting for my interview and watching a consultant paediatrician introduce himself to other applicants as just that, when my name was called, I got up and this same paediatrician shook my hand and introduced himself as ‘a child doctor’. I was mortified that he thought that I did not know what a paediatrician was. My mum was internally raging at the back of the waiting room and, afterwards, this resulted in a huge discussion between her and me about how to approach situations where this would inevitably happen again. Other decisions would lead me down another path and into research rather than medicine, but that experience, 13 years ago, is still clear as day in my memory.

My journey towards a PhD started six years before I managed to actually start on my programme. In 2012, I took a year out of my undergraduate degree to work for a pharmaceutical company. Being one of two Black people in the department was not too hard as, by this point, I was used to navigating spaces where the majority of people did not look like me. I had been in the minority ever since I started school.

During my industrial placement year at the pharmaceutical company, I was encouraged to apply for PhD programmes, and I actually started to picture myself pursuing graduate school. On returning to university for my final year, after conversations with my lecturers and supervisors, I set about applying for PhDs. They were confident in my ability to gain a PhD position because of my level of experience and enthusiasm for research.