Ever wondered how an HBCU shapes the future of its students? Join us in this special edition of Entrepreneur Appetite as we celebrate Dr. Langston Clark's 40th birthday and his mission to secure 40 new donors for the From A&T to PhD Endowed Scholarship at North Carolina A&T State University. Our guest, Dr. Ebony O. McGee from Johns Hopkins University, shares her remarkable journey from the South Side of Chicago to earning her PhD. Hear her discuss the critical role of mental health for high-achieving students of color, the community support at A&T, and how these experiences have shaped her success. Testimonials from A&T alumni underscore the transformative impact of HBCUs on personal and academic growth, making this episode an inspiring listen.
We'll also explore Dr. McGee's captivating academic journey, beginning as a math teacher at various city colleges and navigating the complexities of predominantly white institutions. Learn how postdoctoral positions at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University positioned Dr. McGee as a preeminent STEM education scholar. Dr. McGee explains how her time as an undergraduate at A&T provided crucial "racial battle armor," enriching her mental and physical well-being and reinforcing self-confidence. The episode highlights the significance of nurturing environments during developmental periods and the scholarship's mission to support educators in graduate studies, offering invaluable insights for current and aspiring scholars alike.
Ever wondered how an HBCU shapes the future of its students? Join us in this special edition of Entrepreneur Appetite as we celebrate Dr. Langston Clark's 40th birthday and his mission to secure 40 new donors for the From A&T to PhD Endowed Scholarship at North Carolina A&T State University. Our guest, Dr. Ebony O. McGee from Johns Hopkins University, shares her remarkable journey from the South Side of Chicago to earning her PhD. Hear her discuss the critical role of mental health for high-achieving students of color, the community support at A&T, and how these experiences have shaped her success. Testimonials from A&T alumni underscore the transformative impact of HBCUs on personal and academic growth, making this episode an inspiring listen.
We'll also explore Dr. McGee's captivating academic journey, beginning as a math teacher at various city colleges and navigating the complexities of predominantly white institutions. Learn how postdoctoral positions at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University positioned Dr. McGee as a preeminent STEM education scholar. Dr. McGee explains how her time as an undergraduate at A&T provided crucial "racial battle armor," enriching her mental and physical well-being and reinforcing self-confidence. The episode highlights the significance of nurturing environments during developmental periods and the scholarship's mission to support educators in graduate studies, offering invaluable insights for current and aspiring scholars alike.
What's up everybody. Once again, this is Dr Langston Clark, the founder and organizer of Entrepreneur Appetite, a series of events dedicated to building community, promoting intellectualism and supporting Black businesses. I want to welcome you to a special series of our podcast celebrating a milestone that is close to my heart my 40th birthday. As part of this celebration, I am setting an ambitious goal to gain 40 new donors for the From A&T to PhD Endowed Scholarship in North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, an endowment that I co-founded to support teachers and educators who are on their journeys to get graduate degrees. For those of you who have joined our live discussions, you know that typically, 10% of the profits from the podcast go to support this endowment. However, for the months of June and July, I am thrilled to announce that 100% of the profits from the podcast go to support this endowment. However, for the months of June and July, I am thrilled to announce that 100% of the profits will be dedicated to the From A&T to PhD endowed scholarship. If you are inspired to support this cause, a link to contribute to the endowment&T to PhD Endowed Scholarship to help more educators increase their education so that they can better support the students in our community. This special series will feature testimonials from A&T alumni who have gone on to earn their PhDs, sharing their journeys and impact of their education on their lives and career. It will also feature some new episodes from authors who have written books about HBCUs and a few throwback episodes.
Speaker 1:
In this episode, we feature a conversation with Ebony O McGee, a professor of innovation and inclusion in the STEM ecosystem at Johns Hopkins University's School of Education and Department of Mental Health University's School of Education and Department of Mental Health. This special bonus episode is special because, as I mentioned, ebony went to A&T, but I think the first official gathering that we had of folks who went from A&T to PhD was five or six years ago. We organized a symposium for graduate students at A&T who were on their PhD journey, and Ebony was one of the folks who came in and spoke to those students at A&T, and so that's how I met her. She has an interesting story and, as I told Jabbar Bennett in the previous episode, ebony for those of us who have our PhDs in education, ebony is the one who sets the tone for all of us right?
Speaker 1:
She's been at some of the most prominent universities in the country. She's a recognized scholar. She's like the vanguard of the from A&T to PhD, especially, like I said, for those of us who has PhDs in education. And so, ebony, just tell us a little bit about what you do right now and then talk about your from A&T to PhD journey.
Speaker 2:
Okay, first of all, langston, you are way too kind and gracious with that introduction. Like I'm just Ebony from the South side of Chicago who took advantage of a couple of opportunities and made it here right. So I don't feel like I'm any more special than anyone else, especially at A&T, because everybody at A&T is pretty doggone special. Currently, what I do, 70% of my appointment is in the School of Ed, but 30% of my appointment is in the Department of Mental Health, and this is what really attracted me to Johns Hopkins, because one of the things that we are starting to have conversations about but not enough is the mental health crisis of high achievers of color.
Speaker 2:
Not the folks who are dropping out of STEM, not the folks who aren't making it, which we spend a lot of time talking about and negotiating their trajectories, but the ones who quote unquote, make it traumatized that's the word I could use. They're traumatized, and it's not just mental trauma, it's physical trauma. These are the people that we say we want younger scholars to emulate, these folks, and I'm trying to explain that. These folks, although their GPAs are excellent, they have internships at coveted places they are not well, simply not well. So something needs to happen. You want me to start talking about my trajectory to A&T that needs to happen.
Speaker 1:
You want me to start talking about my trajectory to A&T. Yeah, let's talk about Ebony from the South.
Speaker 2:
Side of Chicago, let's go. So I am a proud product of Chicago Public Schools. I used to. I attended Kenwood High School, which is sort of one of the bougie high schools in Chicago, but actually I had a math teacher that was so what I now know to be racist that my mother saw that I was actually being deterred from going into engineering. So she transferred me from Kenwood, this nice little bougie school in Hyde Park, all the way to the Dirty Hundreds and I say that lovingly and she transferred me to Corliss High School, which is a high school that is not typically known in producing and celebrating our traditional successes, but I thrived there. I had teachers that look like me who believed in me. I felt like I had to prove myself academically, but I didn't have to prove myself as a Black woman.
Speaker 2:
While I was in high school one of the things that I was doing is I was volunteering at Operation Push Jesse Jack, the Reverend Dr Jesse Jackson's foundation, and in volunteering I found out that Jesse Jackson went to North Carolina A&T. And then I found out he liked it so much he sent one of his sons to North Carolina A&T. So I said, well, if it's good enough for Jesse Jackson. Lord knows it's going to be good enough to me. So I actually applied, got accepted and went to A&T for the first time with my luggage trying to move in.
Speaker 2:
Interesting story I did not have housing. I stayed with what was soon designated as the Dean of Engineering. His name was Lonnie Sharp, dr Lonnie Sharp. I stayed in his house with his family for weeks and let me tell you something I was able to secure housing two weeks out, but I stayed with them for four weeks. I pretended like I didn't get housing because I just so enjoy being in that house. First of all, that was the first time I've ever lived in a house, first time ever, other than that, just apartment, apartment after apartment. So you know house living, you know you got the backyard and all these things I was very unfamiliar with.
Speaker 2:
His family was so loving and so warm. It was his wife and he had two younger brothers who was living with him who went to Auntie. So that's my initial interest to Auntie. And when I tell this story I'm like only at a black college, only Open up their home to you for a month, just so you can be grounded. So that was fantastic.
Speaker 2:
One of the things I want to say. I mean I love my institution but there were some issues. So, for example, I was considered a bit too radical at the time when I was attending A&T, from 91 to 96. There was no mandatory Black studies. So of course we fought and we marched for mandatory Black studies. I did not know I'd be put on some kind of list as a result of that, which should be like a no brainer for HBCU. I love my HBCU, but I just want to tell my story, my truth. If I could do it all over again I'd still go to A&T. But that was one issue. The other thing is that I never had, besides my mathematics teacher, who was brilliant, whose name I swear I should remember. Maybe I'll find it, you'll put it in something you can put a line there.
Speaker 2:
I had no Black female teachers in my engineering classes, so that was something that was a little disheartening. But I did have Black males and even the other folks who weren't Black knew that they were interested in teaching Black folk in STEM. So I didn't have to worry about sort of proving my intellectual ability or anything like that. Once I graduated I got the GEM fellowship so this is the Graduate in Engineering Minorities Fellowship and I went to New Jersey Institute of Technology and I felt like A&T well prepared me for my education because I felt confident and I felt strong in my studies. I did switch from electrical engineering which I got my bachelor's in A&T to industrial engineering and then I went to work. And that's when the ish hit the fan and I had already worked. So I had internships at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, ford Motor Company, general Electric, right. So my resume was looking good.
Speaker 2:
But every day, in very subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways, I was made to feel as though I didn't belong. So I was experiencing what was first defined as imposter syndrome, but it's really what I now know. It was just structural racism. So if you are being positioned as an imposter, right, that's not in your head and you're not crazy. Right, that's not in your head and you're not crazy. That's the environment positioning you and making sure that you know every day you really don't belong here and you have to prove yourself day in, day out. Now a lot of people say, ok, but you did achieve. So I did make some significant achievements, but having to go in feeling that you are already six steps behind and then, if you make your six steps up, you're just at the starting line, that was just so traumatic for me to experience right.
Speaker 2:
So I got laid off and I love telling this story because if you look at my CV, it looks like this my life is roller coaster after roller coaster, let me tell you. So when I got laid off, I decided to pick myself up off the floor. I was also very ashamed to be laid off because my community, everybody at Operation Push, thought I was the success. I felt like the golden child sometimes, especially when I came back home to Chicago. Everybody was so happy for me. So how dare you know her not maximize this opportunity? But I got laid off and I decided that I wanted to reinvent myself Right. So just because you have a failure or a temporary pause, it doesn't mean that you can't use that opportunity to really discover what you want to do with your life. So when I really took some time to think about it, I moved back home to Chicago, stayed with my mom for three months. I also had a three-month-old. That is very, very important because a lot of times people say the children are sort of hindrance to education. But for me and many of the people that I interviewed, the children are the motivation I wanted to be successful for my son not in spite of him, but for him, that gave me an extra push and I enrolled in University of Illinois, chicago.
Speaker 2:
I had this first advisor who told me I was conditionally let in, that she was sort of doing me a favor and that I was going to have to study LGBTQ populations. I ain't got nothing against them, but that's not my jam. Like, I am here to study how race and racism operationalize themselves in STEM fields and what do students of color, particularly Black students, unapologetically, what do they do about it? Right, or how do they manage that sort of toxicity in that environment? So luckily I was just like oh my God, let me just go with this lady because I need a degree. But luckily my dissertation advisor, dr Danny Martin, came in my third year and I was able to transfer over, had a very successful stint with him he's still a great, fantastic mentor and was able to get my degree.
Speaker 1:
So let's talk about your first job at academia. Did you go straight from University of Illinois, chicago right To academia? Did you go into industry? How did your pathway into the professor at work?
Speaker 2:
right To academia. Did you go into industry? How did your pathway into the professorate work? Oh, that's an excellent question. Okay, so I did two postdocs not one but two. Why did I do two postdocs? So when I was in my doctoral degree, I started teaching math classes at the city colleges. So I was teaching at Malcolm X, Kennedy, King, Harold, Washington College. I was like bouncing around that's why I always fight for adjuncts. So that was getting paid like no money practically and I was running around to these three different colleges. But I love teaching those students so much I love them. Just what they had to do to make it to class was remarkable. I hate to use the word resilience, because resilience will kill you right.
Speaker 2:
You need to be thinking about how to work smarter, not harder, because you can work yourself to death, right, but the perseverance they had in order to be educated was something I greatly admired and I respect it Now. When I went to go teach at the predominantly white institution, I didn't like them at all Crying over everything this is a triggering.
Speaker 2:
I was like I do not want to be a professor, so I got postdocs to be a researcher. So the first one I got was at the University of Chicago under direction of Margaret Bill Spencer one of the best decisions I ever made. She's still a great friend and mentor to me. And then I got another postdoc because, again, I didn't want to teach. I didn't want to teach these rich kids, these rich, elitist kids who you know. If you don't agree with them, somehow the problem is with you. And then I got my second postdoc at Northwestern University.
Speaker 2:
But here I am with a PhD behind my name. I had no 401k plan. Me and my son had to go to Cook County Hospital to get our medical care because the postdocs at that time didn't come with health insurance right, didn't come with dental insurance. I was like, wait a minute, this is like a step up from servitude, you know. So the only reason why I decided to pursue the tenure track is to have some stability for myself and my family, and I never told that story before, but that is the truth. So that's what brought me to Vanderbilt University.
Speaker 1:
Now, ebony, you've been at some like elite institutions and one of the things that I asked Jabbar was can you speak to the environment you were in at A&T that produces someone like you and someone like Jabbar and maybe some of your other classmates who are there who have progressed to be? Maybe they didn't get their PhD but they're doing well in industry, or maybe decided to get their MBA, or maybe they did decide to get their PhD. But what is it about that starting, that common starting place that you all have that allowed you to be able to get a postdoc at the University of Chicago in Northwestern and those are amazing institutions to be able to do a postdoc at and even though I'm giving context for people who don't know academia that well, getting a postdoc at University of Chicago, northwestern is like a huge, is a huge deal, despite the fact that they didn't give you all the resources that you needed to sustain yourself. So talk about that connecting point of A&T, sort of like putting you on the path to be able to do some of these things.
Speaker 2:
Yes, that's an excellent question. So if you've heard of this term called racial battle fatigue, it just means the stress associated sort of racialized stress associated with navigating through STEM well, for me, stem places and spaces and that navigation being very troubled. So I was successful, but it was a troubled success. I was not happy, I was not mentally well. I probably wasn't physically well either, you know, because your body remembers those things.
Speaker 2:
What A&T did for me is it gave me racial battle armor. It's made up that term. Say it again Racial battle armor. It gave me a layer of protection that still exists to this day. That helped protect me from the most serious mental and physical complications.
Speaker 2:
Right, so, being able to be in a space and just having peace and just having to worry about the academics only not how I'll be perceived in the classroom, not if I'll be choosing in a lab or will they ask me to make the coffee run Like I had none of those experience. I was seen as a scholar. I was seen as smart and talented, not a genius. I do actually don't like that term, unless you're applying it to real geniuses, because you don't have to be a genius to be successful. That point needs to be said you don't have to be a genius to be successful. That point needs to be said.
Speaker 2:
So I really believe that A&T and other HBCUs really offer so much protection in such a critical period From 18 to 22,. Folks are developing rapidly during that time and they need that sense of support and that sense of strength right. And even though sometimes, particularly the higher and higher I went in my electrical engineering degree, the less Black my classroom got, that was very troubling. The overall institution was so culturally affirming by that time that I got to my senior year and saw less people that look like me. I already thought I was the baddest chick in the room because that was infilled and instilled in me. So thank you, a&t for that.
Speaker 2:
That's right.
Speaker 1:
One thing I want to emphasize is I want to go back to I think it was 2018, when you I don't think I knew you at the time, I don't even think we really even got a chance to really meet when you came and did the talk at A&T, when we went back to speak. And so Ebony not only is someone who does the work and does this research, she is someone who has made herself available to other scholars who are on the path to getting their doctorates, getting their master's degrees in education, stem, ed or what have you, and so she really, her life, really speaks to this idea from A&T to PAZ, in terms of the community that we're trying to build around, this idea of supporting folks who are in their graduate school journey at North Carolina, a&t and, of course, other places. I just also want to highlight again the fact that you got to stay with the dean of the College of Engineering is not something that is typical most other types of institutions, and I agree that that is something that would only happen at an HPC Only.
Speaker 2:
Hands down.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and the final question I want to ask you before we go is related to the roots and history of this podcast, this show as a book club, which I have to mention that we did an episode with you. It was episode 15 in season two and it is, to this day, the most downloaded episode of this podcast. And so we host book discussions because we have book club. Talk about a book that you're currently reading or have read, that is inspiring your journey, keeping you grounded, keeping you inspired, something like that.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that's an excellent question to end on, and I want to say, although I've been reading some interesting books that recently come out, the book that I really want to highlight is a book by Octavia Butler, and the book is called Kendrick.
Speaker 2:
The reason why this book struck me so much is that it was written in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and this beautiful Black woman, science fiction, afrofuturist writer predicted the following and epigenetics, the trading of human genes, the loss of genetic diversity, the mass pollution of our ecosystem, genetic engineering and the manipulation of organs on subcellular structures to maximize biological enhancements what we now know as DNA testing. In the 1980s, she predicted stuff that is coming true today, and to me, she is not only an Afrofuturist writer, she is a STEM innovator, and that call to embrace folks who are both traditionally within STEM and those who are traditionally not considered STEMers right, because it is that diversity that's really going to help us save the planet. Not just the science or not just the mathematics. We need social scientists, we need anthropologists, we need sociologists, we need psychologists, we need all those folks to make the STEM ecosystem a healthier and better place.
Speaker 1:
All right, ebony O McGee, thank you for joining us here on this very special episode of Entrepreneurial Appetite. Those of you who are listening. If you want to support the From A&T to PhD Endowed Scholarship, you can go to the show notes and you can see where they'll have the link and you can click to make a donation. And since I'm turning 40, why don't you donate $40 to support the From A&T to PhD Endowed Scholarship? Thank you, thank you. Thank you for listening to today's show. As I mentioned in the introduction, this episode is part of a special series featuring voices from historically Black colleges and universities. This is part of a larger effort to support the From A&T to PhD endowed scholarship at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, an effort that I co-founded with two friends of mine who are also on their doctoral journeys. If you would like to support this effort, please review the show notes to make a donation to the endowment. Thank you.
