Scientist and HBCU Grad Says Support Networks Helped Her Succeed

When Racquel Jemison struggled in a chemistry class as an undergrad at Morgan State University in Baltimore, her professor approached her about doing research for him. Jemison was incredulous. ” ‘Wait a minute,’ I thought. I’m already struggling in this class and you want me to do research?” But doing the extra work strengthened Jemison’s understanding of certain chemistry concepts.

[Related: 5 STEM Competitions for Young Scientists]

“For example, Stoichiometry is used to convert quantities or to relate reactants to products in a reaction, in one metric to another, like grams to milligrams; or if you want to know how many molecules are in a gram of something, or if I want to make 10 liters of something, how am I going to do it? So one way of honing understanding is to actually be in the lab and having to do it,” says Jemison.

“Of course, each course has an associated lab, but everything is so scripted–there’s only one right answer, so typically everyone’s doing the exact same experiment at the same time. But when you’re the only one in the lab doing the experiment, it’s much clearer why it’s important, how you’re using the information; it’s more tangible, more graspable.”

Jemison also says she works best when she has more things to balance on her plate. “If there’s not enough going on I find any opportunity to procrastinate, but when there’s a lot going on, it demands focus. Those two aspects: making things make sense in the classroom and bringing in a higher degree of focus–they made the difference for me.”

Now Jemison, a senior chemist at Dow Chemical Co., is working to make a difference for many of us. She works in Dow’s Core Research and Development, Formulation Science, a division responsible for building an innovation pipeline, “essentially the products we’re going to see in the next five to ten years,” she says. “Formulation Science is a subgroup of Core R&D, so we have specialized capabilities including expansive robotic equipment and things like that which can accelerate how many experiments we can do at a time,” Jemison says. “Currently I’m working on a project with Dow Pharma and Food Solutions to make gelling polymers for nasal drug delivery. We’re aiming at improving the efficacy of the drugs and improving the patient experience.”

From childhood Jemison enjoyed learning how things worked. Her interest in shows like MythBusters may have been an early indicator that she would grow up to be a scientist. On the other hand, Jemison may have just been wired that way, because she tends to see things differently from the way others do: A high school chemistry teacher that many of Jemison’s peers saw as demanding, hard, and intimidating, Jemison saw as a challenge.

Continue reading on the next page…

She had been well prepared. The California native had attended an IB-prep middle school that became a pipeline for her high school’s International Baccalaureate program. “I went to school clear across town solely for the IB program,” she says. “The school wasn’t especially high performing, but the IB program had a significantly higher college attendance rate than the school as a whole.”

For college, young Jemison wanted to trade California sunshine for the East Coast, so, influenced by an African American teacher who had urged the black IB students to consider HBCUs, she applied to Morgan State. “Morgan gave me the most financial aid of any of the schools I had applied to, which was the deciding factor for my attending.” Jemison was accepted into Morgan’s honors program, which provided a generous scholarship.

At Morgan, Jemison enjoyed a high degree of exposure and was able to participate in research–”not just for the summer and during off-periods but throughout the school year, so research was continual over two years. You can do research at traditional universities and at R1 schools that are known for their research, but the focus may be primarily on graduate students, and the number of long-term opportunities for undergrads may be limited.”

After graduating from Morgan, where the faculty urged students to pursue advanced degrees, Jemison headed off to an internship. “I had already applied to Carnegie Mellon and been accepted, but I wasn’t fully committed to the idea of going there.” In the meantime, she loved the internship because she saw her work being “applied in real life, making floor polish and seeing how it performed; painting stripes on the highway.”

She also noticed that, although there was a hiring freeze and people weren’t being hired at the B.A. level, people with

doctorates were still being brought in. And the longer she was at the internship, the more she realized she wasn’t satisfied just running experiments–she wanted to understand why things worked (perhaps harking back to her days of watching MythBusters) on a very fundamental level. Jemison says, “That’s not something that a technologist would dig into as much. By the end of my internship I had developed a greater appreciation for what an advanced degree could do for me. For me it was being able to have the capability of figuring out what the fundamentals are regardless of any topic, because really a Ph.D. equips you with the tools to figure those things out.”

She warns, however, that pursuing a Ph.D. is difficult: “Going for a Ph.D. can be a bit romanticized, but it is not easy. If you don’t have the persistence, the heart, and the discipline (phd–get it?) you’re not going to get through it.”  

Jemison “got through it,” not only at Carnegie Mellon but also Morgan by tapping into her support network of friends, professors, and informal mentors in addition to just plain working hard. At Morgan and also on the doctoral level, she encountered some academic challenges. “In grad school, you have a research group, you have grad students who have already been through the same courses that you’re going though; there are post-docs that know a wider range of things than you do, so really just having one-on-one time with them, and just sitting down and really taking personal time to hammer in some of the concepts worked for me.”

You hear a lot about having a mentor, but Jemison, who recently spoke on a panel at the U.S. News & World Report STEM Solutions Conference, believes that mentoring others, even informally, is also important. “The more I work in industry, the further along I get in my career, the better I understand how these things work and what looks good and what doesn’t. As I get better I can help the people behind me get better than I was at that point.”

Jemison says what’s been key for her in the workplace is that she has learned how to learn. “What surprises me the most about being a scientist is that we are not locked into what we learned in grad school unless we want to be. The one thing I learned after coming to work at Dow, in some cases you are hired exactly for your specialty, but in many cases you’re being hired because you know how to learn, and you know how to adapt quickly.”

What is her advice to African Americans and women who’d like to follow in her footsteps? “The biggest thing is maintain your confidence. Have the confidence to know that you’ve earned your place, and once you get there, perform at your best.”