Christina Holman | Design Blog

Recently, I've been asked (by a few people) how it feels to go through graduate school as a woman of color. And, to be completely honest, it's incredibly exciting and exhausting all at the same time. Being a woman of color -- specifically a black woman, particularly in STEM -- has a lot of challenges. If you simply search the phrase "black in graduate school," you will get statistics that are very humbling; articles and think-pieces on how different the Black or person-of-color experience is from students who are not minorities; and other outlets detailing how little support many Black and non-Black students of color feel that they have. In fact, the Council on Graduate Schools recently reported that, in 2017, Black students made up just 11.9% of all first-time graduate students in the United States. (That said, 68% of them were women! So, we are making p r o g r e s s.) I'm not sure what the numbers are at Boston University, but it doesn't seem that far o...

So, hey... I'm in grad school! Life is going great. Last year -- the year after graduating from Wellesley College -- was a whirlwind, and settling into the world as a post-graduate is much more difficult than I had thought. My sincere apologies to anyone following this blog, only for it to be really left behind. Long story, short: "Christina made into an amazing program at Boston University College of Engineering as a MechE (Mechanical Engineer) -- and she is living her best life!" Yet, if you still want to know what has happened in my life. Let me give you all a short recap of 2017-2018. Last Semester of College (Winter - Spring 2017) I was accepted into the Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute for January 2017. And, it was absolutely phenomenal. Every day was a new topic of contemporary politics and high-profile policies. On top of that, we were also pushed to conduct a rigorous case study in those four weeks. (Take a peek here . ) The administrators (righ...