Fitting In: Stories about belonging

In this week’s episode both our storytellers struggle to find their place.

Part 1: Heather Galindo studies her lab mates in hopes of understanding what it means to be a scientist.

Heather Galindo has long combined her loves for marine science and storytelling by earning college degrees in both Oceanography and English Literature, plus working at a science communication non-profit organization for five years. While earning her PhD at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station, she also spent a lot of time alone in the field talking to barnacles. As an Associate Teaching Professor in STEM at the University of Washington Bothell, she currently teaches courses in marine biology, evolution, environmental science, and scientific writing. Other than marine science, her passions include social justice, environmental sustainability, and baked goods.

Part 2: When Rob Ulrich leaves their small town to study science, they keep waiting to feel like they belong somewhere.

Rob is a scientist at UCLA who studies how living things make their hard parts: cystoliths, coral, shells, etc. Rob is also the Associate Director of the Reclaiming STEM Institute, Co-Founder of Queer & Trans in STEM (fka Queers in STEM), a writing consultant, and a writer. For their research and advocacy, Rob currently holds fellowships with the National Science Foundation and the Center for Diverse Leadership in Science, and they have been invited to speak on the popular podcasts, including Ologies, Talk Nerdy, ExoLore, and at meetings for the American Geophysical Union, the Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society, the Geologic Society of America, the California Academy of Sciences, and the New York Academy of Sciences. To avoid answering the question “What do you want to do after your Ph.D.?”, they hide in their apartment and cook and bake, or outside by hiking and going to the beach.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

Thank you, people and barnacles who are present.

For me, the study of marine science has really been as much about the community I was a part of as it has been about the study of the ocean itself. So when it came time for me to go to college, I was actually feeling pretty confident about being able to do the academic part of college. I was a lot less confident about fitting in socially.

Most of my family hadn't gone to college and I didn't totally know what to expect. And the few members that had had not gone after a science degree.

So I showed up in college and I went to a huge university but, luckily, our oceanography program was really small. There was about a hundred undergrads and we all got to know each other. Our professors knew us by our first names and I found that community I was looking for. We studied together, we laughed together, we hung out together.

So my first year of college actually went pretty smoothly, but it became clear that that wasn't going to be enough to get me into my science career. I couldn't just take my classes and do well. So when I was a sophomore, I emailed a professor that I had had and asked him if he knew of any lab helpers that were needed by any of the professors. One of the professors, Dr. A and her grad student responded and so I went to meet with them.

This was really my first time in my life outside of a classroom talking to a scientist. I felt so intimidated and I really didn't know what to say.

So I met with them and they were both wonderful. Dr. A was this very down-to-earth woman. She wore t-shirts and jeans. Every once in a while, just hints of her warm Texan accent would come out and it made me feel a lot more at ease.

Heather Galindo performs her story to a limited audience at Greenwood Storefront Studio Space in Seattle, WA in February 2022. Photo by Elizar Mercado.

So we talked and they said, “You know, we know you don't have any experience but why don't you come on a trial basis and then we'll see how this goes.”

My first task was to filter seawater. Dr. A met with me and, being the good student I was, I probably took like five pages of notes about how to filter seawater. Then I went off to class and I came back and it was time to do it on my own. And this was my big break. I was going to science in a real lab.

So I set everything up and I'm so excited and I poured the seawater in the top and nothing happened. It sat there and I thought, “Okay, like I can't be a perfectionist. I need to learn the steps.”

I took everything apart. I did it again, and still nothing happened.

At this point, time is running out. I'm like 45 minutes into this process and I need to leave soon. So I was really embarrassed and frustrated and I thought, “I can't even filter freaking seawater. How am I going to succeed as a scientist?”

But I didn't have time to deal with that. I had to clean everything up and leave Dr. A a note and tell her what happened.

The note that I left her was pretty simple. It said something like, “Dear Dr. A. I'm so sorry I couldn't filter the seawater. I followed your instructions. It just didn't work. I'm so sorry. I'll come back tomorrow. Sincerely, Heather.”

Now, what I realized later was that I hadn't totally cleaned up all the seawater. So when I left my note on the counter, some of the seawater soaked into it and it gave it this sort of tear‑stained appearance.

So that when Dr. A came in the next day, what she read was this: “Dear Dr. A. I'm so sorry, I couldn't filter the seawater.”

So when I come in, I'm embarrassed because I couldn't have completed the simplest tasks they could ask me to do and she is slightly horrified that I had some sort of nervous breakdown over failing at filtering the seawater. This is how my career in science began.

But in her warm, empathetic, encouraging way, we talked it out. We realized what had happened and they asked me to stay. Over the next several months and years, I grew as a scientist and my techniques got better and I became more comfortable.

But as that development was happening, I was learning something else. And that was that being a scientist meant being part of a particular professional culture. This is something that I didn't understand, so I started to observe everyone in this very social science way and noticed the things they had in common. And these were things I couldn't relate to, that I didn't do.

They all listened to NPR, like all of the time. They all watched documentaries. They read science papers at home on the weekends. And I went home and listened to Madonna and watched reruns of Murder She Wrote. I was incredibly proud of who I was and where I came from, but I wasn't sure how I was going to fit into this mold.

So I would do these amazing things in the lab and then, when I had to approach someone, I would say really embarrassing things. So I would go to Dr. A's office and she'd be working. So instead of saying something normal, like, “Excuse me. Hello.” I would say, "I don't mean to alarm you but…”

Yeah, it works. It got her attention, but not sort of the smoothest transition. So these things kept happening where my science development was on a totally different trajectory than my self‑confidence.

When I graduated, Dr. A was really wonderful and she offered me a full-time research position while I figured out if I wanted to go to grad school. I gladly accepted and when this happened I thought, “Okay. I need to start doing things to fit in.”

So I chose two things. One was to listen to NPR. That seemed like a prerequisite. And two, I started biking to work.

Now, I hate biking, but this was a thing and this is what my fellow scientists did. So I would bike to work in the morning and I would take off my shirt and my bike pants that were sweaty and I would put them outside on my bike. All my other clothes I'd sneak into my bag and I'd go about my day. And then get home at night and put everything in the laundry. Pretty straightforward.

Then one night I got home and I'm unpacking my bag and I realized that something in my bag was missing. That something was my underwear.

Now, at that moment, my flowery gold, shimmery underwear were out in the world on their own without me. I felt deeply betrayed by them but I also felt like I had to find them, like now. So I drove to my lab. I searched everywhere. They were gone. And actually, to this day, I have never found them.

So I go home and I go to work the next morning and I just decide to pretend nothing happened. What are the chances my colleagues are going to mention underwear randomly? So I just went through my day.

At the end of the day, Dr. A had now known me for five years and she came up to me and she said, “Are you okay, Heather?”

I just looked at her and in my head I'm thinking, “Can I tell her? Should I tell her? That's weird, right? Can I tell her? I don't know what to do.”

And so I just blurted out, “I lost my underwear at work yesterday.”

And I'm thinking, “Oh, my. What did I do? No one has mentioned underwear.” So I just kind of froze and waited for her response.

Then she looked at me and she smiled and she said, “I thought those were yours.”

In that moment I felt two things. One, horrified that although I couldn't find my underwear, other people apparently had and assumed they were mine. But I also felt an enormous sense of relief because I had spent so much time worrying about fitting in and the worst had happened. I had left my underwear for all of my colleagues to see and it was okay.

So at that moment, as I looked ahead at my career, rather than worrying about whether I would ever fit in, I had this new confidence that no matter what, I could, in fact, make it in science.

Part 2

All right. I'm from Virginia, raised by religious parents and I went to this small tiny Catholic school. When I say small, I mean that there were only about 20 other people in my graduating class of eighth grade. Even then, I was still very jealous of all the kids who grew up in the suburbs with cul‑de‑sacs and neighbors, because they could actually hang out with other kids outside of school.

Me and my siblings, we ended up growing up in the woods, pretty isolated from everybody else outside of school. The summers were pretty brutal. We would just wake up and put on our uniforms before going to school, come home, eat some of Mom's chicken and rice or pho and then go to sleep and do it all over again the next day.

So by the time it was time to apply for college, I really wanted something different. I decided to go as far away as I could without having to pay out-of-state tuition. That landed me at Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech is this massive university with over 30,000 students and a freshman class of like 5,000 or 6,000.

And when I was going to college, I really went with this conscious mantra of trying to figure out what wasn't feeling right growing up. I always was telling myself try everything once. If I don't like it, don't do it again.

Rob Ulrich performs their story for a limited audience at a Black Box Theatre in Los Angeles, CA in November 2021. Photo by Mari Provencher.

And so my first semester I tried everything under the sun. That led me to one… it's like my deep dark secret is that I joined a fraternity. I was that person at the door of house parties being like, “Who do you know here?” and trying to do the mental math of like, “Oh, how many girls do you have with you?” The ratio has got to be right.

But none of this ever felt like me. Nothing I ever tried felt like me. it always felt like I was just putting on different roles or acting each and every day with every new thing that I tried. Eventually, I figured out that I was right.

In my second semester I started coming out as gay. And as I started becoming more acquainted with being gay, I really wanted to just meet more gay people. So I downloaded this app called Grindr, which is this hookup dating app for gay people. As I was scrolling through the different profiles, just seeing who was around, this tagline kept appearing on people's profiles. No fats, no femmes, no Asians.

And that was really hard, this new, very sensitive to me at the time, identity, being gay, and this community that I was trying to breach into didn't want me. It was a learning moment I guess for me. It was very challenging and where I learned that our identities aren't monoliths. We don't get to go into our closets every day and choose what we want to be. That's how we navigate the world that day.

It was the first time that, for me, as someone who's mixed, like Asian and white, that parts of myself had been challenged. Could I be Asian and gay?

I didn't really know what to do with this information at the time and so I did the only thing that I thought I was good at and just threw myself into school, hung out with my friends.

Fortunately, one of the things I threw myself into was undergraduate research. Here, I was working under a PhD student in this geochemistry lab, studying lobsters. And here I felt smart. I felt confident. They even gave me my own office with a desk and a fridge and a microwave. The other grad students were not happy that a little undergrad had an office.

One day, me and this student were catching up in the lab before getting down to work. If you don't know, Virginia Tech is in Blacksburg, which is in southwest Virginia where the demographics are 93% white.

So I was complaining, of course, about the pho I just been served the other day at the only spot in town. I was like, “Why are there crispy onions on it? Why are there red onions in it?” I was like, “None of this makes sense.”

So the PhD student ends up bringing up his boyfriend, who also happened to be Vietnamese, and I had a mental like, I don't know. There was something going on in my head. I was just like, “Oh, my God. He's gay.” Obviously not saying it to him.

And then not only was he gay but he was dating an Asian person. I think the student could tell that there was something going on behind my eyes and he was like, “Oh, actually, there's a number of queer students in this grad department.” That was really surprising for me to hear because I double majored in chemistry and geosciences and, in not one but both majors, I did not know of a single other out student.

So this made me feel like I was going in the right direction. I felt like science was this place where I could actually feel welcome. It was a place where I didn't feel just safe or comfortable, but I felt embraced. And so I had the confidence now to come out to my advisor and get some advice, as advisors do.

She was very supportive about my being gay and very receptive to my concerns about being gay and Asian in our little town. She suggested to me, “Why don't you apply to grad school? You can do anything you want and you can go anywhere.” I think about those words every day.

And so I did. I applied. I applied to cities all over the country hoping that I would be able to go somewhere that was a bit more gay. Where I ended up deciding to choose was UCLA, which is in Los Angeles, California, because I had this romanticized view of a huge, diverse city. And it seemed like, from the media and TV and shows, all the parades and the parties and the people seem to be in Los Angeles, California.

So I moved here. When I got here, I realized that I didn't know anybody else except maybe a cousin that I had. And my anxiety made it really hard for me to talk to people I didn't know. So in the first few months I lost 20 pounds. I felt isolated and I felt homesick. That’s why I just realized the feeling of not belonging, the feeling of not feeling you fit in it doesn't stop with what school you go to or what city you move to.

So I was like, “Okay. I'm an adult. I'm going to be proactive about this. I'm going to put myself out there.”

So I tried things like Bumble Friends and I really wonder if that works for anybody. I also joined the gay sports leagues, which is actually how I met my current roommate so it kind of worked. But it got really exhausting having to commute all over this massive, sprawled out city just to meet some friends, because I literally moved to Los Angeles, this huge, diverse, queer city to simply be around more people like me.

So I was just like, “Why am I having to try so hard?”

This led me to eventually go to the UCLA campus resource center's resource fair, as they do. It was called Cookies & Queers. Very cute name. And I was checking in. I was like, “Okay. This is arguably the gayest school in the gayest city in the country. There has to be something for queer people in science.”

As I walked into the room, I stared down the lines of tables with all the students and their little tabletop décor, and I quickly realized that there wasn't. So I stormed all the way to the end of that room where they were handing out the cookies. I grabbed twice my share and I stormed out. I was upset, right? Like had I made a mistake moving here and coming here?

But also in that moment was when I was finally decided if there's not something here for me, why don't I make it?

So the next day I reached out to the student resource center, expressed my concerns. And they are wonderful people. They were great. And they immediately connected me to three other students who had expressed the same concerns.

I just started meeting up with these other students. We started with once a week just meeting up, chatting, and we hammered out a plan to start something. That's how we made Queer and Trans in STEM. And in less than a year, we went from just us four to having over 300 people around campus, from undergrads, grad students, post-doctoral researchers, staff and faculty.

We just did things together. We had coffee and tea socials. We had game nights. We had guided nature walks on the UC reserves. We worked with the Astronomy Club to have telescope shows and we even had a little research symposium of just us just to share and talk about science. And it felt so good that this space resonated with so many people.

And even when people didn't show up to meetings or come to events, they reached out and were like, “Hey, I know I don't come around but just knowing that that space is there, just knowing that you all exist, it means the world.”

And it's because just having a space to fall back on, a community to uplift you, having that is so invaluable. It was finally space where people didn't have to act or play. We could just be ourselves. It was just a home for people.

Thank you.