Sheila Thomas, the Graduate School’s newly appointed assistant dean for diversity and minority affairs, plans to grapple head-on with the complex issues that surround efforts to recruit underrepresented minorities to join Harvard's PhD community and support them effectively when they arrive.
Boostin
g diversity sounds relatively straightforward: Encourage the most talented minority students in the country to apply to Harvard, ensure that they’re carefully considered for acceptance, and — once accepted — convince them to come. But Thomas, a cancer cell biologist in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, knows that those simple steps encompass some daunting issues: stereotypes of Harvard and Boston, a wariness about looking beyond the known, occasional — and mutual — cultural disconnect, and even Boston's notorious winter weather.
Thomas has been Faculty Co-Director of Diversity in the Division of Medical Sciences (DMS), a role that won her extensive experience in recruitment and retention — and nurtured a passion for increasing diversity in graduate education and beyond. Now, she will split her time between GSAS and DMS, working with the deans, GSAS minority recruitment officer Stephanie Parsons, and student leaders to improve the way all GSAS PhD programs, across the disciplinary spectrum, approach diversity matters. 
Among her initial points of focus, Thomas says, is “building the pipeline. That’s got to start early.”
At DMS, she worked alongside Jocelyn Spragg, the Faculty Director of Diversity Programs, to manage the Summer Honors Undergraduate Research Program (SHURP), a 10-week immersion in Harvard’s labs for college students, primarily those belonging to groups that are underrepresented in the sciences. Thomas would like to see Harvard create or partner with similar research programs in a range of disciplines that reach out to students as early as junior high school.
Once the pipeline is filled, it’s about getting those students to apply, and too often, that involves “fighting the reputation of Harvard,” Thomas says. Among both students and faculty, in undergraduate settings around the country, Harvard is “not necessarily seen as a friendly place in general, and then maybe more so in terms of underrepresented minorities,” she says. Some of that involves Boston’s own racial history; some comes from cautionary tales or outright horror stories.
Thomas doesn’t want to downplay any of it; she just wants students to know what’s changed.
“I’ve had many prospective students sit in my office and say, ‘We’ve heard it’s a really competitive and uncollaborative environment here,’” Thomas says. “We have to work to change some of these stereotypes. Summer programs help, but there has to be outreach, too. That’s why we go out there, visit schools, participate in undergraduate research conferences at largely minority schools — to make people aware of the opportunities and to give a more user-friendly face, a more personable face to Harvard.”
Thomas grew up in a small town in Iowa, the daughter of Indian immigrants. “We were diversity,” she says. “My family dealt with racial slurs and outright discrimination. I saw it. I grew up knowing it was out there.” But her mother, a registered nurse, and her father, a sociology professor at a nearby college, always stressed the opportunities that education brings, and “I had all these different people along the way showing me how to get where I wanted to go.”
She earned a BA from Northwestern and a PhD in molecular and cellular genetics from the University of Pennsylvania. But although she still loves science, she’s most motivated these days by the desire to provide the same kind of road map for others.
She wants to work on changing the attitudes of the advisors who steer their undergraduates away from Harvard. “Maybe we need to think about ways to do faculty exchanges, partnering with smaller schools and saying, OK, let’s invite this faculty member and undergraduate student from small school X to collaborate with a group here. We have a lot of resources, small school X might have limited resources, so let’s create partnerships that can also help to change attitudes.”
By forming such partnerships, or by asking Harvard faculty or current GSAS students to give talks at a lesser known or primarily minority college, perceptions can change externally and within Harvard’s own walls. Thomas, who sits on the admissions committee for the PhD program in biological and biomedical sciences, says that committees may overlook qualified students in the rush to get through a large number of applications. “It’s very easy to say, here’s this person who has a grade point 3.7 from this school, which I recognize, and here’s a person who has a 4.0 from a school I don’t recognize. This one must be more meaningful than that one, because I don’t recognize that school.”
She is eager to interface with admissions committees across the spectrum, though “the challenge for me is that I know what this world of biological science looks like. Can I tell you what Government wants from its graduate students? Not yet. But this year, I want to learn a lot about all of our graduate programs, and to figure out what I can do to help them achieve the goals they want to achieve.”
Students themselves “are the best source of knowledge about how we can improve,” says Thomas, who hopes to work closely with the W.E.B. Du Bois Graduate Society and other interested student leaders. “As we get more students into our programs,” Thomas says, “whether it’s summer students or PhD students, they’ll be able to say, yeah, I know so-and-so said this about Harvard, but I was there. I was there for a summer, I had a great time, and I didn’t have these problems.”
