We hope that this effort will begin to change the graduate applicant pool across the United States, thus changing the graduate student population, thus changing the number of WOC PhD's, and ultimately affecting the number of WOC who pursue academic careers and changing the face of academia
The Women+ of Color Project (WOCP)
Lanell Williams, Harvard University, USA.
The Women+ of Color Project (WOCP) was born out of the need to see more Black, Native/Indigenous, Latina/x women+ in academia especially in STEM fields like Math, Physics, Materials Science, Planetary Science, or any other physical science. To date fewer than 100 Black women have received PhD's in Physics compared to 22,000 white men. The WOCP hopes to address this issue by providing an open platform for WOC to communicate about best practices for applying to graduate, surviving graduate school, maintaining research productivity, and growing your academic careers. We want to take a first step by providing an online classroom focused solely on how to apply to graduate school and what admissions committees are looking for. Our hope is to provide resources to WOC who may not have access to this information due to closed-off networks that provide an adequate amount of information about applications. We hope that this effort will begin to change the graduate applicant pool across the United States, thus changing the graduate student population, thus changing the number of WOC PhD's, and ultimately affecting the number of WOC who pursue academic careers and changing the face of academia. And as we build our network, we hope to provide a wider range of knowledge and experiences that will assist our sisters on their journey.
Lavontria Aaron - Graduate Student at John Hopkins University , Juliana Garcia-Mejia - Graduate student at Harvard University, Jamila Pagues - Graduate Student at Harvard University, LaNell Williams- Graduate Student at Harvard University.