 So hello everyone. It's really great to be here. So I am a professor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and I'll tell you a little bit more about another side of my life today. So let me just start off by saying that I am from the country, and I am actually from Alabama, but the place where I was born was so small that I was born in Georgia. And that just tells you how far out I was. So I did not have access to advanced classes, AP classes, international baccalaureate classes, all the calculus classes, all the physics, all the things that you would expect for someone who ended up being an engineering professor to have. And I think that's really important in my story as well. So after that, I came to Spelma College, which is right down the road. I had an opportunity to get a full scholarship from NASA to be a women in science and engineering scholar, and this is where I realized just how far behind I was in technology. I had people in my cohort who attended or who had been accepted to MIT, people who had had advanced placement classes in STEM, but also in languages and other areas too. So I was the person who cried during our summer bridge program. I was knocking on doors crying because I didn't know anything about derivatives, intervals, or anything like that, although I was a math major. So I ended up graduating with honors, and I went on to get a master's degree in engineering, and NASA paid for that as well. So I had an opportunity to work with the International Space Station, crew a little bit, and it was really exciting to get that opportunity. From there, I was hired at Purdue University in 2005, and I was at an engineering school in an engineering department teaching first year engineering program students, many of whom had never seen a woman or a minority at all in the classroom. And so this began an interesting perspective for me. So this is my first student, Nathan, who's been a professor at the University of Colorado, and a student, Camille, who's from Chicago. And as a professor, and even through my training where I got my PhD at Vanderbilt University in Leadership and Policy Studies, I had an opportunity to learn about grant writing. I learned about a little bit of advising, leadership, and some things that were typical faculty things. So I knew how to do a lot of the skills that would help me to succeed as an academic. In 2010, I had an opportunity to also meet President Obama. I was able to obtain a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering. I'm four scientists and engineers, and this was really amazing to me, especially given my humble STEM background, but I realized that there were great opportunities. And this is a quote that I had that talked about confirming that the American dream was possible for anyone. I realized that as I got this award and had an opportunity to be a guest of President Obama. The picture on the right represents a time when I went back to the White House in 2011 to be on a workforce flexibility panel with Michelle, well, sponsored by the First Lady. And that was an immense opportunity as well. So, of course, you would think I'm at the top of my game. I'm doing great stuff. I'm so excited. I'm on my way, but now I'm a professor, you know, let's just go and rule the world. But I want to bring out something, too, that I think was very interesting. In all of my preparation, people kind of forgot to tell me that there weren't a lot of other people who looked like me in the academy. And this is data from the American Society for Ancient and Education, and it shows a representation of all African-American engineering faculty across the U.S. And if you sum this up, as of 2012, there were approximately 150 African-American women engineering faculty in the U.S. And with so many universities in the U.S., you can imagine many of us are not in the same universities. So I came to Purdue, and I realized that I was the only person there at the time who was in the tenure-track position. And I asked people, where are the people like me? Where are my mentors? Where are the people who could tell me how to navigate this path? That also was not prepared for, was being mistaken for a custodial worker. There's nothing wrong with being a custodial worker. But as a faculty member, I thought that when I entered the halls and when I connected with people, they would know that Dr. Cox is here. Professor Cox is doing her thing, she's taking name, she's a presidential awardee, and respect me, Dr. Cox. But when I was in the classroom with many of my students, they would enjoy, some of them would call me Monica. Some people would love calling me Ms. Cox, and they would call my male professors Dr. Cox. I mean, Dr. whatever the last name was, or Professor something, and there was this disconnection. Also, you would think that it would just be limited to some of the majority students, but many of the minority students also had never seen a female of color, and they would do the same thing. So of course, I felt kind of disrespected, thinking I would work my whole life to get this PhD. I think that I'm doing something instead, but people still are not respecting me. So this represents a conversation that I had with my husband. And my husband was a very supportive person, amazingly supportive, and when I had an opportunity to come to Purdue, he came as well. He's a musician. And I knew that something was wrong. The day that my husband said that he felt that he was married to the people in my department, the people at my university, and the people who I talked about all the time about some of the things that I was going through about the stress. And when I earned tenure, which is supposed to be that prize, that gold standard, that thing that says that you have arrived, I remember being in a faculty meeting and I asked, is this what I'm going to do for the rest of my life? Is this what it's going to be like? The same thing, am I going to have to prove myself? Am I going to have to convince people that I am worthy to be in this position? And this is a disclaimer too. There are a lot of people who are very supportive, but I am bringing you the things that stressed me out, and then I did not expect. So I came up with the same, and I had a piece that I wrote for diverse issues in higher education. And I realized I was prepared to be a professor, but I was not prepared to be a pioneer. So for all the training that I had, for all the right ways of being a professor and saying the right things and teaching the right ways, I also did not know how to get into a situation and kind of stay solid when someone said something to me. When someone confused me with the only other black woman in a faculty meeting, I was confused, and I did not have a good way of handling that. So one thing that I realized is that although being a pioneer seems to be kind of like the thing that a lot of people want to do, or the thing that's very admirable, everyone is not going to be a pioneer. And I think that that's okay, but I think that there are several people who are thrust into a pioneer role, whether they would like to be or not. You don't realize that when you're entering a tech field or you're doing something that you're the first person who people have ever seen to do a particular thing. And I thought that there was something to this that I wanted to pursue. So I was just a definition, and I wanted to present that to you as well. So when you think about a pioneer, the dictionary says that there's a person or group that originates or opens up a new line of thought or activity or a new method or technical development. And pioneers are usually one of the first ones to settle into a territory. And I believe that we are missing conversations with people who do this all the time. And we don't explicitly say that they're pioneers, but they enter professions often without the tools and without the preparation to be successful in those professions because they are not just being professionally proficient, but they have to represent every group that they somehow embody at the same time that they're trying to do their jobs really well. So I wanted to talk about three tips that I have, and these connect to just a few things that I'll mention. So the first thing is mentoring. So I thought that mentoring was very important when I began my career, but I realized that as a pioneer, there's a different way that you have to engage in mentoring. I came up with a model, and I call it, and the metaphor that I use is that of a wedding. We think about there's something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, but I realized that I just had kind of like the old mentoring style. Look at the people in your organization who are proficient, and those are the people who teach you the trick to the trick. But I realized that the old in my model represents that type of mentoring, but you also need the new people. So those are the people who maybe do things in a different way. They're the ones who will convince you to do things that you would not have thought about doing, and an example for me is someone who's in marketing who helped me to completely rebrand my research enterprise. So I now have blogs. I have so many different ways that I'm engaging with people instead, and so it's because of my marketing friend that that's happening. When I look at the, excuse me, the borrowed, that's someone who is in a different profession. Maybe that person is a pioneer in a different space. So I'm working with a person who's a social entrepreneur in business, and although he does not have a PhD and although he does not have a tech background, he has a network that's completely different from my network, and I'll talk about that just a little bit. But I realized that it was helpful to have someone who was a pioneer and could help me to understand how to connect with other pioneers, even if I didn't see them in my particular field. The next one is the, so what did I say, old, new, borrowed, and then blue. And blue are my bad day buddies. So I have some people who absolutely know Monica Cox. Like if my boss, or if someone says something absolutely crazy to me and I know I can't say something in a faculty meeting, those are the people I call up at a moment's notice or text and say, I need to talk to you. I have to close the door and do something completely different. And I need to just calm down so that I don't go off on people and lose my job right now. So, you know, that's important. And I think so often when we think about being a pioneer, we want to be so strong. We want to be the people who take all the arrows and all the attacks, but we need people who also can help us to be vulnerable and can be shoulders for us at the same time. And so once again, that's something that I wish I had known. The second thing that I want to point out is the opportunity to really think about what your purpose is and align your purpose with your profession. I wasn't doing that. I was so focused on being a really great professor that I forgot about who I was. You know, I like fashion. I like cutesy things. But as an engineer, you're not supposed to be that person. You're light. You're fluffy if you do that. You can't show weakness. But I decided that my purpose in life is to help people to fulfill their destinies. And I need to do that in any way possible. So I decided that I would align some of my research with some of my passions. So a new thing that I'm doing is this thing called professional compatibility. And I came up with this idea because I realized that it's very hard for me to find people to work with. And I found that for many minorities who are also in academia, they don't have people who are just knocking on their door saying, hey, let's work on this $3 million grant together. Let's work on this same project together. So I'm interested in using psychometrics and developing an algorithm that I can find ways for people who are in very different areas to come together and somehow move forward. And that leads to the connection that I had with the borrowed mentor. This is the one who I engaged with on a sabbatical. And I ended up finding this person at a women of color conference. And this guy is in a completely different space. He's a matchmaker. He's a social entrepreneur. We have no connection on the surface. But matchmaking and compatibility has some type of common commonality. And we kept working and figured out that we wanted to work together in a tech project to combine our interests. And so that's something that I'm working on now. And I feel very enthused and engaged about this new research stream. The last part of the pioneer piece that I want to recommend is trying to tap into maybe your entrepreneurial spirit. And many people will say entrepreneurship is completely abandoning your job and just quitting everything you know. And I think that there are different levels of entrepreneurship where sometimes you just have this entrepreneurial way. Like you want to create a product. You want to do something that represents who you are, but it also helps other people. And so although I'm still a professor, I have started my own company and it includes an educational product which is connected to my educational research but I have two other things that I'm working on too. The first one is this really odd thing because I'm a little odd. Now I embrace that now. But this is the thing I call the quirky time game. And it's an animation and those are actually my graduate students. So one day we had a research group meeting and we just started laughing. And we said this is so fun. And people would think that a lot of STEM professionals and minorities would not have fun. So we used to go anime to create characters. And we do have some of these videos on YouTube. These are intros, but I'd like to do something else with that. And so if anyone, Shang was plugged, has any type of interest in like animation and you can help me out, that would be great. The other thing that I did was trademark and create my new brand call prepared to be a pioneer. And that is something that I think is really important because I think that pioneers need to have ways to connect and people need the preparation to actually become a pioneer. So I now have a blog. I'm doing some of my professional compatibility and some other coaching. But this makes me feel great. It makes me feel that I am in control and not the victim anymore. And I hope that I can empower other people who want to also do that. And so just looking at it again, you know, this is the way for, I think, pioneers to gain control. In a world where you sometimes feel that you don't have control or you don't have the stability. It's important to tap into those things that are really important to you. And so in summary, I want to say that a lot of people, of course, in this room are probably pioneers or you're going to be a pioneer or you're going to know a pioneer. And there are risks, but I think that we as a community need to work together to try and find new ways to engage people and let people know, and we've heard this throughout the day, that it's okay to be different and you do have the support to be successful and do really amazing work. And so I hope that through my story, you will be motivated and encouraged to be unique, you know, be that different person, regardless of whether it's comfortable, because there are other people out there who are doing that. And I think that if we could connect, then we could really change the tech world. So you can get in touch with me. And I'm with the PhD because it's a habit. And so hopefully you understand that. I'm not trying to be, you know, all egotistic about that. But, you know, it's just something that I do. This is my Gmail address. And then you can check out my personal brand prepared to be a pioneer.com. If you're really interested in research and, like, graduate education, assessment, all that other stuff, you can go to I2A, which is an international institute for an engineering education assessment. And then I am always on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and you can find me at Monica at COST. So thank you very much for the opportunity.