Dayle Smith: “Under-Represented Groups in Science”

Q: How did you decide to run a Symposium workshop?

A: A lot of people are interested in increasing the diversity of people who take science classes. It’s something that the National Science Foundation and our local and national government are interested in, and that’s something that I care about as a minority who does science. There’s never anyone who looks like me when I go to a conference and, in order to change the face of what science looks like, people will have to get pretty active. So that’s what my workshop was about, diversity and identity formation as a scientist in particular, what some people are trying to do to make science classes more welcoming to all sorts of different kinds of people, and also just sort of what some of the statistics look like.

Q: What kind of work went into planning that?

A: I chose topics related to that concept that I would have been interested in. So, practical tips for how to organize a class, for instance, so that it accommodates people with a lot of different learning styles. We know, for instance, that certain people from certain ethnic groups prefer warmer temperatures or a brighter classroom. We know people from certain ethnic groups need more time to reflect before they can answer a question. Do you design your classroom to reach a lot of different people? That’s something that I was interested in, so that’s what I put into the talk.

Q: How did you feel about the result?

A: We got a whole lot of really good stuff out of the discussions, some really good ideas for how to change things here and in general. It was small, though. I had two faculty members, two staff members and two students in there. So it was a nice little sampling but it was pretty small. The nice thing about it was that we could really talk, so the discussion part was really good.

Jeremy Balch: “The Politics of Attraction”

Q: What made you want to lead a Symposium workshop?

A: Well, I’m the GLBTQ Intern, to start with, and I figured, since it is a talk about minorities and diversity on campus, the term “sexual minority” has been floated around a lot, so I kind of wanted to address that. And also it was kind of a personal thing too, because I wanted to actually get some answers about why people actually care to begin with when it comes to sexuality issues.  And also because I wasn’t really sure what “sexual minority” meant.  So, it was personal as well as trying to get the whole idea of the sexual minority out there.

Q: What did it take to put it all together?

A: A lot of reading.  Basically, my friends all took off about a week and a half before the end of winter break, so that left me a lot of time in the UCSD library, so I just pored through a bunch of history textbooks.  It was like hundreds of pages of reading.  I really enjoyed it, though.

Q: What for you was the biggest challenge?

A: I’m not really good at speaking for long periods of time.  So I guess the practice, just practicing and the presentation itself and being able to say everything I want to say, and not having to read from a sheet and still give a presentation that length.

Q: How do you feel about the way it turned out?

A: I think it turned out pretty well; at least it was improved since that Sunday.  And I kind of wanted it to be more of a discussion, but I realized that I didn’t really put together the slides that way, and the room wasn’t really structured like that, so unfortunately I couldn’t ask a lot of questions.  It probably would have been better with more discussion, but other than that it went well.