 In this session, we're going to hear from some of the younger members of the community, folks who can help us understand better from their perspectives. Many of us are pretty far removed from being in the beginning of our careers and things we have seen things change, but we need to hear the things that could change more. And so we're going to hear from three speakers today. We're going to start with Cody Hernandez, who recently graduated from the University of Chicago, congratulations Cody, and has accepted a job as a protein engineer at evil is on a company that is based in Chicago. Cody, I hand it over to you. Hi Lydia thank you can y'all can you hear me. Cool I don't want to be like five minutes in and nobody be able to hear me. Yeah, so I did just graduate. Very exciting. It was definitely a long, long road. I grew up in El Paso, Texas, which is much warmer than Chicago. Basically, both my parents so I'm part of a large family. And nobody had really gone to college, or grad school for that matter. And so growing up it was a lot of sports and a lot of hard work. I'm just diving in here given the time constraint but I basically got out of El Paso on a athletic scholarship and went down to San Antonio for college, placed into all remedial classes so for a year and a half didn't really make any advancements in college but racked up quite a bit of debt. The college was very hard for me it took about five years. It was a lot of learning things that I probably should have learned in high school but I was not doing things that I should have been doing in high school so I decided in college that I was going to do science. I thought initially that I wanted to be a doctor because growing up my sister had a muscle disease that they thought you know she was going to live past the age of 14 and then it was 16 and then they were able to help her out and as of today she's a nurse and doing well so that's good. She was really a huge motivation for me early on. And so I decided I wanted to do research I thought, you know doctors were the ones in labs that medical doctors are the ones in labs coming up with, you know cures for diseases and things like that and certainly in some cases that's true but I found my passion in research, specifically RNA biochemistry, started working on splicing, and then decided to go to graduate school to continue working on that. As an undergrad I definitely took advantage of every opportunity I could so like the NSF RU program. I was part of Berkeley's 2014 RU program and my mentor was Tyrone Hayes and Matthew Welch. And so many people know Tyrone Hayes. For those who know him. He's an amazing mentor and somebody that when you're learning to become an advocate for marginalized groups, it's a very different style. And you don't realize that until a few years in but I'm definitely very thankful for all of his mentorship. And so yeah so fast forward, get to graduate school. I went on a couple interviews. I was very determined to go to one of two places either you Chicago UCLA. I interviewed at both places and decided to go with you Chicago and hindsight that was not really sort of applied to a lot more schools. But I was fortunate, I was able to come to Chicago. When I interviewed here at you Chicago, or you Chicago, a lot of the people that I was interviewing with was just a very diverse cohort. I was really under the impression that that was kind of how it was going to be when I came to Chicago. That was not the case. My cohort was probably one of the most diverse cohorts that they've had. And it was just kind of like, it's a bit shocking to go from an institution where it was primarily Hispanic students to an institution where that was not the case. It was like everything that I said was different, the way that I operated was different. And it was always kind of pointed out and I was just like whatever you know it was just kind of shake it off. But then there would, you know, I decided that it kind of wasn't okay that there wasn't more people at the institution that were from more diverse backgrounds and so I was actually able to myself and somebody that, well, my best friend, we were able to get our hands on some data for recruitment. And we were able to analyze it and see that you are ms were rejected more than non you are ms. And we brought that to the leadership that you Chicago and they agreed that this was a huge problem. And I guess that had never been analyzed in that way before maybe it had. I don't know just was not considered taken too serious time. So from that we began attending a lot of faculty meetings. We started a sacnas chapter and held the first Midwest sacnas regional conference. We just really began having a lot of conversations about the issues and this idea of, you know, not really being who you are but you know who the institutions, kind of what you go into an institution. And we begin to realize that what we were going to do was build an initiative in which students led students from all backgrounds. And it was going to be supported by faculty entirely, or it wasn't. And we were going to have the is the money to be able to do the things that we needed to do in order to make the change that we wanted to make. And so one of our first initiatives was removing the GRE is a requirement for admission to Chicago or to even be considered. We kind of went on a campaign of, you know, just chatting with faculty, initially showing them the data just one slide that was showing that you are am to reject more than nonurms. It may be something that I learned from that was intense conversations or, you know, very sensitive matters. It honestly is better to provide data and not immediately go into a conversation about, you know, what somebody needs to do differently but allow them to react. And so I'd say nine times out of 10, showing somebody this slide of, you know, what we had found was pretty powerful and that everybody was very upset about it. And so that really energized I think a lot of faculty to get behind this initiative we were starting. The initiative was called grit the graduate recruitment initiative team. And essentially our goal was to promote recruitment retention sustainability of marginalized groups in stem. And so we started this with the goal of doing this not necessarily for you Chicago but just in general. We wanted to push this model across the country because we had had some preliminary data that showed that we had boosted the recruitment of your Ms, just to apply one but then also in terms of how many your Ms came to you Chicago, as a result of this program we presented to them one. We had panels and honest discussions where faculty weren't allowed in the room just to kind of talk about, you know, kind of what the climate is that you Chicago. And we attended conferences for recruitment. We had these, you know, very open and honest conversations with the support of people who supported grit, which was a lot of faculty deans provost. And so to kind of have these, you know, big dog mentors as we call them that were kind of in the room that you were able to speak your to talk about the issues. It really paid dividends because it's not to talk about a lot of issues and why they are the way they are I think a lot of people get very uncomfortable. And so to have somebody there. You know, to make sure that you're able to walk away and so be a grad student after that's what you came here for is a really nice feeling. And so, with that part of what we want to do is expand this across the country and so I heard about the HH my gillian fellowship. And so I decided to apply for that. And I had actually already been speaking with David aside about actually wanting to see if HH my would fund this initiative, which was a crazy idea but a lot of the things that we had done at that point were really easy. So, I mean, unless we were told no that was kind of our like our MO like we were going to ask and see what happened and if it didn't work out didn't work out. And David was really helpful I think I spoke to them three or four times for like an hour each time about a bunch of data that we had about what was working what wasn't. And he told me to apply for this gillian fellowship. I was super pumped. I eventually applied and got it. I met a lot of friends that I'm still very close with we started initiative within the gillian fellowship, very similar to grit, but with a slightly different purpose. In any case, I guess what I'm getting at here is that it is all is, you know all these different communities and reaching out being vulnerable that really allowed us to continue moving up. Really, your network is kind of it's very powerful because to send out a tweet or to ask people for help, and then receive it. It is, I mean, that is kind of at the heart of advocacy right with obviously unifying message and so, for example, when the pandemic hit and mass run easily available and there were a lot of protests. We had put together this initiative called protester packs. We raised $15,000 in two days, and we're able to basically get 3000 mass packs and deployed out to the south side of Chicago. That was done within a day after receiving the funds. And this was a massive community initiative, and we wouldn't have been able to do that without grit, or without this network we have built. So really it all came down to forming these communities and not just forming them to say you're part of them but also forming them to enjoy them. And you know it's not all, it's not always about you know CV checking and making sure that that you know you're you're building your you optically sound and you know when somebody looks at your CV you look good. I think it's very different, like, even when I went to look for a job like the number of people that reached out and we're just so excited to help me because I'd help them in the past or we had worked on something together. It was, it was really wild and so I think for me personally, it was really huge to be able to be part of this community. We all have this initiative that we all worked on together. We put term limits on these initiatives as leaders so you can only be a leader for a year so that you basically had to walk away and just solely be a grad student again. That was really useful. So throughout all of this I think the big the barriers were really just. I think a lot of a lot of faculty are okay with change being very slow. A lot of faculty are okay kind of putting the blame on somebody else. And I think one thing that I've noticed that is really discouraging to most students and I think is really one of the biggest reasons that you're just seeing an outpour of minority student like minority students not staying in academia is how many faculty are upset or not willing to confront one of their colleagues about something that happened. But you know is maybe kind of borderline like maybe I should say something maybe I shouldn't. For example, you know I, I wanted to apply for the Gilliam my first year, and I was told that I didn't deserve it from one of the one of the faculty on the on the floor. And this is right after we had raised a lot of money and put together this conference bunch of other things. And then giving you know me the the nomination they decided to not give anybody the nomination. And so those are the kind of things where it's like oh you know that faculty is going to retire don't worry about it. It's like, what is that you know these these events keep repeating themselves and I think it's an issue of if we're trying so to stand up for for what we believe in the people can even stand up for basic things like that is so blatantly wrong. What does that really mean for the future and is this worth, you know, risking the next eight years so forth and so on when you know you could move on and be happy and not have this risk so I think a lot of a lot of the issues with the so called pipeline is really, you know, what all of all of our role models are not always the best. And it would just be nice to, you know, have somebody that is always willing to stand up to you not just when it's training grant renewal time or you know something like that so I think I'm a minute over my lot of time so I'll stop there but we could, we could definitely chat about this quite a bit more.