Melisa Diaz

Jasmine Hilton
Thu, 30 Apr 2020 02:28:35 +0000
Hilton-SP2020

Melisa Diaz, a Ph.D. candidate in earth sciences and outreach coordinator of Ohio State’s division of the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science, earned a spot as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, one of the most competitive graduate fellowships in the country. Working nonstop hours to support herself through school almost stopped her from getting there.

“I was born in Queens, New York. Near Jamaica Avenue is where I grew up. That’s a very diverse area. But my mom, after I was born, moved to Massachusetts with me, my brother and my sister. We lived in Worcester.”

“My dad was out of the picture. He’s in the Dominican Republic, so it’s just my mom. I have a single, disabled parent. She tried going to college, but it just didn’t work out for her. We were always living in low-income housing, which is generally a pretty diverse group.“

“I think in first grade, I moved to a smaller town called Maynard. I grew up speaking English and Spanish, and my English wasn’t good enough for school. I couldn’t grasp the language as quickly because I grew up bilingual. And they didn’t know what to do, so they put me in special education classes for two years.”

“This small school, saying that they don’t know how to deal with this, and that they didn’t really embrace the fact that they might have a student that speaks another language, everyone was telling me that I needed to speak English, and I was being punished for being brown. So I stopped. I just stopped speaking Spanish.”

“I did move eventually to a much bigger town, technically a city. It’s called Marlborough. That high school was fairly diverse, and I felt more comfortable.”

“I actually went to the University of Rochester for my undergrad. I picked a school that, on paper, had everything that I wanted, and I didn’t pay enough attention to the culture. I wish I had chosen a place that had a little bit more of a diverse campus because I didn’t feel very comfortable.”

“I chose a very expensive school, and they gave me a lot of scholarships and grants. But, it wasn’t enough. My family grew up with Section 8 [housing] and food stamps and we’ve lived like that our entire lives. I had to work to pay off the $2,000-plus a semester that I still owed.”

“I was working too much, and my professors didn’t really get it. They said, ‘Well, don’t work so much.’ I’m like, ‘Do you not understand that I have to somehow come up with a couple thousand dollars every semester? No, I have to. I have to work as much.’”

“I think that there’s a lot of mental energy that’s spent on things that aren’t higher education. I spent, and still spend, a lot of mental energy checking in on my mom and sending money back home. There’s that thing in my head too, that if my car breaks down, I’m screwed.”

“I can’t just move back home. My mom lives in a teeny, tiny apartment with my brother, and her Section 8 [housing] says she can only have this number of people there. It’s something that people really don’t understand, that there’s no fallback.”

“I needed an income and to pay off my school, so I accepted a job to care for birds at the Center for Translational Neuromedicine. I got to breed them, and my boss at the time, he’s like, ‘Why don’t you try doing some of the lab work?’ I started doing some of that work, but it meant that I was working a lot and it was getting in the way of my academics.”

“I met this dean, dean Feldman. I got to really know him, and he came up to me and he was like, ‘You can do this. I know you can. But I’m going to help you find a way to manage your schedule and make it better.’ That was just so impactful.”

“He was willing to accept that he didn’t have the same struggles that I did, but that he could be there, too.”

“If he wasn’t my mentor, I would’ve quit because everything was just too hard. This is why I advocate for mentors because we can’t be expected to figure everything out on our own, and there are people out there that are willing and eager to help.”

“So I worked in this lab for a few years and ended up evolving. I still took care of the birds, but now I was doing something called immunohistochemistry. I was using viruses to label certain genes and cells in the brains of birds, and I got paid to do it on my work study.”

“That opportunity that I was able to have then meant that I could work in an ice cores lab my senior year. And then I went to Greenland, and now I’m here at Ohio State as a polar geochemist. It’s kind of that exponential thing, all those things built on top of each other.”

“I got a really great education at the school that I went to, and it’s really helped me out. But the mental toll that it’s taken on me, my hair is very gray. There’s this study I was reading that when you’re really stressed out and you’re working really hard because you feel like everything in your being depends on succeeding or not failing, it triggers physical and emotional responses.”

“My hair wasn’t always super gray, but with the stress of dealing with school and life, my body is literally recording the fact that I feel like I have to work so hard to survive.”