Student group offers support and resources, both academic and personal
When he was a high school student working hard to find paths to success beyond his disadvantaged Chicago neighborhood, Flavian D. Brown discovered how critical it was to connect with role models and mentors. “But once you begin to move up the ranks, you don’t see very many people who look like you,” says Brown, now a third-year PhD candidate in immunology at Harvard. “That’s one of the things we’re trying to change.”
That’s also why Brown got involved with Minority Biomedical Scientists of Harvard, a student-run organization dedicated to building community among PhD students and postdocs on the medical campus in Boston’s Longwood area.
MBSH runs a successful mentoring program that matches advanced and new students for friendship and guidance. The group also hosts a series of professional-development events — on fellowship proposals, grant writing, presentation skills, choosing a lab, and career planning, for example.
Karina Gonzalez Herrera, another MBSH leader and a third-year PhD candidate in biological and biomedical sciences, learned firsthand how important that support can be as she struggled to transition — culturally and geographically — from a close-knit undergraduate experience at California State University San Marcos. “There were a lot of minority students [at Cal State], so there wasn’t much of a need for me to reach out. It felt a lot like being at home. Coming to Harvard — it was completely different.” But Herrera built a strong network of support when she connected with a key faculty mentor and met Brown and other MBSH members. “We all talked frequently and convinced each other that we’d be OK,” she says. “It really made a difference.”