So, by now lots of people have seen this tweet about my award. Thanks to everyone for the congrats. I have a story to situate this award and what it means to me in context. Yes it involves someone telling me I couldn’t do it.

Story time: https://twitter.com/ibjiyongi/status/1313813608728604672

The penultimate time I went on the faculty market, I asked one of my collabs/advisors, someone I had invited to my wedding, for a letter yet again.

He said, “Ok, but you will never get a faculty position. And you should settle into doing something in science outreach.”

I responded, “But I want a career doing my own original research, not just helping people understand other people’s research, which is another skill set.”

This man had the GALL to say, “It’s really not that different. When you teach you’re mostly explaining other work anyway.”

I really admired this man and assumed he meant well, so I let him write me a letter anyway. And I felt I had to because I knew search committees would be expecting the letter of someone who had a significant advising role in my life.

But he had told me I wasn’t faculty material

That year I didn’t get a faculty position.

The next time I applied, I applied without his letter. This was a huge risk. Whose letters did I have? Among them were Alan Guth and Ann Nelson, two ppl who nominated me for the Bouchet and are much more accomplished than unnamed guy.

Anyway reader, I was offered multiple faculty positions that year and this week won the Bouchet award for managing to make contributions to advancing physics and the position of underrepresented people of color in physics.

So,
1. Fuck that guy, who still hasn’t apologized

2. Many times I was told that my interest in changing how physics is done, socially, was at odds with my interest in changing what we know about the physical universe.

I was encouraged to change directions, to reduce my focus on my research.

I showed an unreasonable tenacity. I say unreasonable because I shouldn’t have needed to be this stubborn.

But also, I didn’t let my anger or my interest in changing the face of physics distract me from still getting science done.

As #BlackandSTEM is easy to come to the conclusion that our only two options are to keep our head down or give up on our scientific dreams to pursue our social ones.

There are definitely compromises I made along the way, on both sides.

I’d like to do more science.

But someone who is telling you that you just can’t do it is not trying to help you and frankly, they don’t mean well.

Someone telling you that your strategy is wrong: they may be right. And they may be wrong. But they are trying to strategize with you.

Know the difference.

Importantly that guy wasn’t the first one to tell me I couldn’t do what I wanted to do. But the story sticks out because more than anyone else, he did it in a way and at a moment that could have derailed my future completely if I had listened.

It was stunning because at an earlier stage in my life, he had helped me out of a difficult situation where I was facing bias.

But at the end of the day, he couldn’t imagine a world where someone like me was a valued physicist and chose to live in his small imagination.

I am thankful for the times when he was a supportive person.

And the fact that he was still painfully and egregiously limited tells us a lot about how incapable people are of interpreting what it means to be #BlackandSTEM, what it means to strategize for our success.

That doesn’t mean advising means telling someone what they want to hear all the time.

But it means being someone who is willing to strategize and fight over strategy with a person you care about.

Advising and mentoring don’t involve telling someone to quit.

Had he instead written me an email saying, “I think you’ve been too distracted by social issues,” I might have been upset/annoyed but at least he would have been trying to help me get there.

Know that difference.

I hope junior folks don’t walk away from this thinking I’m saying that your advisor’s advice should always feel good and be exactly what you wanted to hear.

That’s not an advisor’s job.

It is their job to help you strategize. It’s okay if y’all disagree on tactics.

Ps I am very nice to people who apologize and mean it

All of the scientific work that is named in my award citation involves collaborations with other people, including that guy. The social activism has all been collaborative too.

No one does any of this alone. That’s important to say too.

The personal accomplishment I am proud of is moving between several different topics which has required independently picking up new techniques/skills and ideas along the way. That’s an ability I’m proud of, both as a physical scientist and social scientist.