Finding your Community
By Roberto Hernandez (he/him)
Roberto Hernandez
Embarking on the journey through graduate school is a tough one. It can be very daunting to attempt on your own, without a support system. A support system can take on many forms. I am fortunate enough that I haven’t been alone in the process – my partner Jasmine and I both went to college together and are both current graduate students in the same program so we have gone through the whole process together. Even though we have each other, we’ve also leaned on some of our mentors, in and outside of our current institution. My aim for this post is to (hopefully) convince some of you all that having a community of support outside of your home institution is a cheat code to succeeding, whatever that may mean to you, in grad school. I want to be clear that for the remainder of this post, when I say “support system”, I mean outside of family because of course our family and friends are great, but if we’re being honest they don’t really know the struggles of a mathematician navigating these spaces, unless they are mathematicians or academics themselves. In my case, I am a first-generation student so it can be difficult to explain to my family what I do.
During my time in graduate school, I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve felt defeated. In those times of defeat, it was often difficult to figure out what my next steps should be, when I felt like I shouldn’t continue at all. This is when I turned to my mentors, some of which I encountered during my time in undergrad. Reaching out always resulted in productive and inspiring conversations that always left me feeling encouraged. I’ve been very fortunate to have people who I can reach out to and remind me of why I belong in a PhD program. It’s very important to have mentors who have seen you struggle and overcome those struggles so that in those tough moments, they can help lift you up. For example, one of the moments where I felt like I needed help was when I failed my analysis qualifying exam after my first year. This was something that, in all honesty, I was not expecting to happen and when it did, I felt like maybe this PhD stuff wasn’t for me. After the qual, I reached out to my undergraduate mentor and we had a really long conversation about how my performance on the qual was not indicative of how the rest of my time at the program needed to be. He shared stories about how he also didn’t pass exams when he was in grad school and I think it was just very reassuring to know that someone who I looked up to so much academically, had been in my shoes as well. I guess the takeaway here is that having people who you feel comfortable to share those experiences with is important, especially because many of us probably share the same experiences, but never talk about it.
Experiences vary from person to person, and so sometimes it may feel like the people around you aren’t going through the same struggles that you are, even though this is almost never the case. It may even happen that you don’t feel like there’s anyone in your department, graduate students or faculty, who you relate to or feel comfortable enough to share your experiences with. Being a first-generation student of color, I am often surrounded by people with different backgrounds and the experience in navigating this space is rarely ever the same. Just because we may be going through the same classes and qualifying exams, that doesn’t necessarily mean that our realities and navigation through the graduate program are equivalent. This is why it is essential to try and build a community outside of your department who you can reach out to, when things are good and when things are bad. More recently I’ve had the opportunity to go to conferences and get to know people who are in my area of interest and it’s been very enriching to add them to my community of support. I find it to be very limiting to only look for people for your support system at your home institution and it’s been a breath of fresh air to have people who I can look forward to seeing at conferences. I hope to continue to add more people to my support system at every stage of my academic career.
I want to end by thanking all of those who have been a part of my small community and who have helped me navigate the program up until now. I am happy to say that I am four years in, still leaning on my community heavily, but in a much better place than the start of all this and failing my analysis qual.
Roberto Hernandez is a 4th-year Ph.D. student at Emory University studying arithmetic geometry under the supervision of David Zureick-Brown. He is passionate about teaching and mentoring undergraduate students from underrepresented communities.