{"id":1085,"date":"2020-04-30T02:28:35","date_gmt":"2020-04-30T02:28:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/?p=1085"},"modified":"2020-04-30T03:23:51","modified_gmt":"2020-04-30T03:23:51","slug":"melisa-diaz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/2020\/04\/30\/melisa-diaz\/","title":{"rendered":"Melisa Diaz"},"content":{"rendered":"

[et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”3.22″][et_pb_row _builder_version=”4.0.11″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat” hover_enabled=”0″][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.25″ custom_padding=”|||” custom_padding__hover=”|||”][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.27.4″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat”]\u201cI was born in Queens, New York. Near Jamaica Avenue is where I grew up. That\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy dad was out of the picture. He\u2019s in the Dominican Republic, so it\u2019s just my mom. I have a single, disabled parent. She tried going to college, but it just didn\u2019t work out for her. We were always living in low-income housing, which is generally a pretty diverse group.\u201c<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think in first grade, I moved to a smaller town called Maynard. I grew up speaking English and Spanish, and my English wasn\u2019t good enough for school. I couldn\u2019t grasp the language as quickly because I grew up bilingual. And they didn\u2019t know what to do, so they put me in special education classes for two years.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis small school, saying that they don\u2019t know how to deal with this, and that they didn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI did move eventually to a much bigger town, technically a city. It\u2019s called Marlborough. That high school was fairly diverse, and I felt more comfortable.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI 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\u2019t 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\u2019t feel very comfortable.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI chose a very expensive school, and they gave me a lot of scholarships and grants. But, it wasn\u2019t enough. My family grew up with Section 8 [housing] and food stamps and we\u2019ve lived like that our entire lives. I had to work to pay off the $2,000-plus a semester that I still owed.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI was working too much, and my professors didn\u2019t really get it. They said, \u2018Well, don\u2019t work so much.\u2019 I\u2019m like, \u2018Do 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.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think that there\u2019s a lot of mental energy that\u2019s spent on things that aren\u2019t higher education. I spent, and still spend, a lot of mental energy checking in on my mom and sending money back home. There\u2019s that thing in my head too, that if my car breaks down, I\u2019m screwed.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t 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\u2019s something that people really don\u2019t understand, that there\u2019s no fallback.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI 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\u2019s like, \u2018Why don\u2019t you try doing some of the lab work?\u2019 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI met this dean, dean Feldman. I got to really know him, and he came up to me and he was like, \u2018You can do this. I know you can. But I\u2019m going to help you find a way to manage your schedule and make it better.\u2019 That was just so impactful.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHe was willing to accept that he didn\u2019t have the same struggles that I did, but that he could be there, too.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf he wasn\u2019t my mentor, I would\u2019ve quit because everything was just too hard. This is why I advocate for mentors because we can\u2019t be expected to figure everything out on our own, and there are people out there that are willing and eager to help.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSo 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat 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\u2019m here at Ohio State as a polar geochemist. It\u2019s kind of that exponential thing, all those things built on top of each other.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI got a really great education at the school that I went to, and it\u2019s really helped me out. But the mental toll that it\u2019s taken on me, my hair is very gray. There\u2019s this study I was reading that when you\u2019re really stressed out and you\u2019re working really hard because you feel like everything in your being depends on succeeding or not failing, it triggers physical and emotional responses.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy hair wasn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/span>
\n[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][et_pb_row _builder_version=”4.0.11″][et_pb_column _builder_version=”4.0.11″ type=”4_4″][et_pb_button button_text=”Go back to full list” button_alignment=”center” _builder_version=”4.0.11″ custom_button=”on” button_text_color=”#000000″ button_font=”Georgia||||||||” hover_enabled=”0″ button_url=”https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/project\/road-to-ohio-state\/#melisa-diaz”][\/et_pb_button][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Melisa Diaz, a Ph.D. candidate in earth sciences and outreach coordinator of Ohio State\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4076,"featured_media":1047,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"

\u201cI was born in Queens, New York. Near Jamaica Avenue is where I grew up. That\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u201cI did move eventually to a much bigger town, technically a city. It\u2019s called Marlborough. That high school was fairly diverse, and I felt more comfortable.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u201cHe was willing to accept that he didn\u2019t have the same struggles that I did, but that he could be there, too.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u201cMy hair wasn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"coauthors":[13],"class_list":["post-1085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hilton-sp2020"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/files\/2020\/04\/Melisa-Diaz-1-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4076"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1085"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1113,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085\/revisions\/1113"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1085"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}