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In this episode Shekerah and Fatu continue their discussion with Ijeoma Kola, a public health historian of race and medicine. When she was younger, Ijeoma didn’t exactly have a science spark moment, but she was positively influenced by her mother’s career as a nurse. She remembers in middle school attending a summer program, Center for Talented Youth, at Johns Hopkins University, where she was first introduced to genetics and genomics. From this experience, Ijeoma was convinced that she would continue to study science and become a doctor. Things started off as she expected during her undergrad at Harvard University; however, one late night studying organic chemistry Ijeoma suddenly realized that maybe this career path wasn’t really for her. She wanted to help people, but didn’t see how memorizing amino acids was the best way to reach this goal. “Do I want to make people better by prescribing medicine, or do I want to make people better by changing the environment that we live in?—So their social health is better, so their neighborhoods are better, so that their socio-economic status is better. All of those things also shape our health and health outcomes,” explains Ijeoma. It took a little bit of quick thinking, but she was able to transition from her molecular biology major to a history and science major without losing any credits. After receiving her doctorate from Columbia University in history of public health, Ijeoma took an “eat, pray, love” style gap year to reset her thoughts on what to do next. After some brainstorming and reflecting on her own graduate school journey, she founded Cohort Sistas to support black women and non-binary individuals pursuing graduate degrees. Looking back on her journey, Ijeoma wishes she had given herself more grace and forgiveness along the way, to take care of herself not only intellectually but also mentally and physically. The journey is hard enough as it is after all, and as long as it's getting done, we are all doing a good job—it doesn't need to be perfect.
Tune into this episode to hear Ijeoma discuss:
Mentoring and the impacts on her career journey
How to shift in your career journey as you find new ways to reach your goals
What skills and experiences inspired her to found Cohort Sistas
Reach out to Ijeoma:
info@cohortsistas.org
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ijeomakola/
And be on the lookout for her book!
More about Cohort Sistas: https://www.cohortsistas.org
To join Cohort Sistas: https://community.cohortsistas.org
Other Great Episodes:
Ep 7: STEMLand Future of Science - The Journey
Ep 17: Mentors of Incalculable Worth - Anthology
Reach out to Fatu:
www.linkedin.com/in/fatubm
Twitter: @thee_fatu_b
and LoveSciencePodcast@gmail.com
Reach out to Shekerah:
www.linkedin.com/in/shekerah-primus
and LoveSciencePodcast@gmail.com
Music from Pixabay: Future Artificial Intelligence Technology 130 by TimMoor
Music from https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Scott_Holmes: Hotshot by ScottHolmesMusic
Shekerah Primus 0:15
Welcome back to We Love Science podcast. This is the journey episode. Here our guest star shares more about the discovery of science and how mentors and experiences shaped who they are today. To hear more about the work associated with this journey, please check out the previous episode.
Hi everybody. Welcome back to the show. Today we'll be talking to Dr. Ijeoma Kola, who is a public health historian and founder of Cohort Sistas. Thanks so much for telling us about your work and just what it means to be a public health historian, which isn't something that I do I was telling you about. It's not something that I knew before. But it's really interesting and very, very important work. So thank you so much for sharing. So now we're going to jump into the journey segment of the conversation and we like to start this segment by discussing sort of your earliest memories involving science. So did you have a science spark or any science wow moments while you were growing up?
Ijeoma Kola 1:26
Yeah, so I wouldn't necessarily call it a science moment. But I have had medicine moments; so my mom, yeah, my mom was a nurse. That's actually how we immigrated to the US. So I was born in Nigeria. My family's from Nigeria, and my mom came to the US in the early 90s to help America solve their nursing shortage. And so you know, I had a healthcare worker in my family, who would often talk about not as to the specifics of what she was seeing in the hospital, but we were aware; I was really aware of, you know, my mom was a nurse. She's working in the hospital, she's making people better. She's helping taking care of people with various illnesses, and diseases and conditions and stuff like that. So for a really long time, like a very long time. I wanted to work in a hospital and I wanted to be a doctor, and I wanted to be a pediatrician specifically and so it was following the good old immigrant narrative of if you do good enough in school, you got to be a doctor right? Because like we came all the way here so you can be a doctor and I was actually like liked it. I wouldn't say that that was forced on me. I don't remember like anyone telling me I had to be a doctor. But I do remember from a very young age being like, I want to be a doctor. And so that kind of drove a lot of my decision making as I was, you know, taking classes in high school and figuring out what I wanted to do for college. But one of the earliest, I think maybe non medical, scientific experiences that I had was I went to, I was one of those nerds, such a nerd; So everyone else was going to summer camp and like going swimming, and I was at Nerd camp like in the seventh grade. I did this program, at Johns Hopkins called CTY the Center for Talented Youth and my husband makes fun of me about it all the time; he's like what is wrong with you? like summers are for fun, but no, I'm going to go to do additional learning. Through that program I took, it was like a six week thing but I went for 12 weeks because my parents were like, you'll get all this knowledge. That summer I took like a genetics class. The first six weeks was about genetics, and the next six weeks was about genomics. And it was really interesting. And so to be exposed to the concept of genetics and genomics, as a middle schooler, I think was really, really unique. For a brief moment, I was like, oh, maybe I'll be a genetic counselor. But then I was like, I actually, don't like talking to people like that. So nevermind; because I feel like as a genetic counselor like you're helping people make like life changing decisions, and that was much. I felt like I wasn't ready for all that burden. So I was like, let me just stick to telling you like what medicine to take. And that was really I feel like that's a really critical moment, that's that stood out to me of like I was immersed in science and scientific learning. And was very excited for a very long time, about science until until; I will just continue telling the stories. I got to college. And I as I said, I've been on this like, I'm going to be a doctor track really, since I was like six or seven like really, really young. And so I was majoring in molecular biology at Harvard, and you know, went through the first year of science classes. Cool. And then in my second year, so that was the orgo year and it wasn't even that I didn't do well in orgo because I do feel like you know, organic chemistry is a weeder class for getting into medical school.
Shekerah Primus 5:15
Oh, yeah.
Fatu Badiane Markey 5:17
Yeah, I didn't do badly but I was like, why am I suffering to learn about atoms and cells? And like, I don't care; like I care about people. Remember this moment I was with my roommate who was also pre med and so and she's also Nigerian and so like, we did a lot of things together and I was like, girl, why are we up at 2am? Like trying to figure out like these like these different chemicals? Why are we memorizing? Like for what purpose for what reason? And she was like, What do you mean, like we need to know this. I was like, do we tho, like is this really what impacts people's health? And so that kind of, that was the moment that I was like, okay, maybe hard science isn't for me, but social sciences and really public health is. That's really when I decided like, okay, do I need to, do I want to make people better by prescribing medicine or do I want to make people better by changing how we think about the environment that we live in so that they're like social health is better so that their neighborhoods are better so that their socio economic status is better; because all of those things also shape our health and our health outcomes. And that took me on the journey that I'm now currently on which is where I got interested in public health and I only, this is so odd. I only became a historian of science because literally, that was the only major in college that would take all of these science classes that I had racked up and I was not about to like start over with a major. It was the only like, non science degree that accounted, all of these classes I'd taken. And then as I was taking history of science classed, I was like, ohh, actually, like this is actually kind of interesting. It's cool to think about why, you know, like the evolution of the field of psychology; like why do we think that you know, psychosis is a disease like why do we medicate some illnesses? And why don't we medicate other illnesses? And then I just got really, really interested in specifically the social determinants of health. How does your or society's perception of your race like shape your health, how does your gender, your sex, shape your health? How does your religion? How does your immigrant status kind of shape your health? And so I went from, you know, studying the molecule to kind of thinking about the social science impact on our health and our well being. So that is my that's my science journey.
Shekerah Primus 7:47
Very cool. But you went from nitty gritty to big picture.
Ijeoma Kola 7:52
Absolutely. Yeah.
Shekerah Primus 7:54
I love that. Excellent. And when and why did you decide to found Cohort Sistas and how did your experience getting your PhD influence that?
Fatu Badiane Markey 8:06
Absolutely. So I started Cohort Sistas, probably about, I started thinking about it, probably, maybe, like eight months after I defended my dissertation. So I defended in July of 2019. I moved to Kenya in August. I had a baby, my first child in December, and then COVID happened in March. It was a lot going on at that time. It was a really like high low period for me because it's super high like oh my gosh, I got my PhD. Oh my gosh, I'm about to move to a whole nother country so cool, so fun. I was doing like an Eat Pray Love slash like gap year kind of thing. It was a time, then welcomed a child into the world. Super exciting. And then I was like, oh my gosh, the world is coming to an end. And so I think my immediate thoughts like once, things locked down, and gratefully I was in Kenya for that during that time. So Kenya was very strict, like America was playing games. Kenya was like, there were two cases and like the next day there was curfew. There are mandatory masks, but they didn't even care like where y'all gonna get masks from, but like masks were mandatory. Like you were outside, you have to have a mask. You know, and then there was a curfew and like, everything's locked down, like you couldn't go to church, you like things, they shut down. And actually really appreciate that approach. I got sidetracked. But during that time, we were just home right? We were just home. We have a four, at that point, a four month old kid and I started to think about I think once I kind of got out of the postpartum fog, I was like, wait, so like, what am I doing now? Because although I really love being a mom, and I'm now a mom of two, that is not the only thing that I love. And I did not want to just be a mom. So I was like, okay, great. We got this degree. What are you going to do with a girl; like what was the right thing? What was the point of the degree? And I started to think about the other skills that I had acquired throughout my doctoral journey. While I was doing my PhD, I also had built a blogging business, a pretty successful blogging and influencing business, and was really well versed in digital marketing and social media management and storytelling and content creation and all those things. And so one day I was like, wait, what if I took the digital side and combined it with the academic expertise and the populations I know very well. I know the issues, the problems, the struggles of black women going through doctoral degrees very, very well. They know how to communicate and bring people together through social media because I have done that for 10 years. And so, you know, also within the back of my mind, this idea that people were about to start a PhD journey online, because the pandemic had stopped traditional education. It is already lonely. And now you have to like do your classes on Zoom and meet your cohort on Zoom. So that was really those are the people who I was initially really thinking about, like first year doctoral students who had just gotten their acceptances. But were going to have to do their doctoral degree online or in a kind of virtual capacity. And so yeah, though, that was those are the kinds of things that were going on in my mind that that made me start Cohort Sistas at that time, and I really pulled from my own personal experiences and the things that I went through in terms of you know, struggling with financial instability. I was really fortunate to have been in a, it's weird to say fully funded program because it's only funded to a certain point, right? Like it's five years of funding, yet I had an external fellowship. But after those five years, it took me longer than five years, because for a variety of reasons, but in that six year I was like, well, now what we gone do because and so I had to make it work. And I went to grad school in New York, which is not a cheap place to exist in and so I feel like I had to really finesse my way through grad school and wanted to be able to share some of those strategies and advice that I had with other people.
Shekerah Primus 12:18
Very cool. So you told us about how you sort of went from pre med to public health. And now you're running this amazing organization that really focuses on mentorships and trying to make sure that people are supported during their journey. How about yourself? Did you have any influential mentorships during your journey?
Fatu Badiane Markey 12:45
That's a really good question. Because I feel like in retrospect, there were people who were mentors that I did not realize at the time were mentors. And it's taken me, therapy was great, because it was really just the ghetto. But there were, there were people who were looking out for me who were encouraging me and supporting me at the time. I think that, I also I didn't say this, but I went to grad school straight from undergrad. So I was 21 years old, running around New York City and trying to figure out how to do this Ph. D program. And so I think that where I was in life, because I was so young, I needed I needed a lot more hand holding that isn't traditionally available in a doctoral program. And so I think that people, I actually think that I had like pretty decent advising it just I needed more. I really needed someone to like, tell me step by step what to do and how to live because I was a child when I was like a baby. Now that I'm a lot older, I'm like, oh, you know, like if I had done it, if I had done a PhD in my 30s I would have been a lot better equiped. But I will say that the best mentors that I had, were in my fourth year. I, a new faculty member joined my department and he was, is, an Asian man. And he was you know relatively young, he had just finished his PhD and I just felt like he one had the time to talk to me because again, I needed someone actually like, be able to just pop into their office and my other advisor was like a big shot in the field and just really wasn't accessible. So he wasn't available. He was two interested in really, I think, maybe because he was a junior faculty and I was his first student that he advised you know, he had the capacity and the interest to really like pour into my development as a scholar. So that was really, really amazing that he really helped me get through my dissertation. And then when I finished my degree, after you know, I spent the first year post degree not really doing anything related to academia and then I kind of had this nudge that the work wasn't done yet. I kept feeling like okay, like, I have my PhD but I'm actually I didn't feel like I was done. And what I realized is that because I hadn't published my work, no one knew about it. So it wasn't helping anyone and kind of going back to the initial desire, my desire has always been to improve people's health in some way. And so without publishing my research, I wasn't helping a lot. Yeah, yeah. So I decided to apply for postdocs to kind of test the academic waters and see if I wanted to pursue a career in academia. And through that process, as I, you know, started a postdoc, I already was doing Cohort Sistas and so it's really important to me to not give that up like that is of equal importance, if not more important than my research and my academic work. And so I was able to find a mentor through this program called the Interdisciplinary Association of Population Health Sciences, IAPHS. And they have a mentorship program. And one of the best things about their mentorship program is that they allow you to check a box if you would like a gender concorded mentor or race concorded mentor. And so I was like, yes please, I would like a race concorded mentor. I had never had that really close. And so the mentor that I got paired with was this bomb Professor at the University of Washington and she was just so nurturing of my vision and my desire to do both academia as well as run this organization and anytime I was like, oh my gosh, like what are they gonna think? She was like, it don't matter what they think because you are doing the work that you need to do, that you are called to do, that you are an expert at, and so as long as like your research is crisp, like no one can say anything about what you're doing outside of the institution. Right. And so she was just so encouraging, and I don't think that I would have had the courage or the knowledge on how to kind of juggle the two if not for her guidance. I'm eternally grateful to her. Dr. LaShaunda Pittman. She is such a boss and such an amazing, amazing mentor and really taught me a lot about mentorship that I hope that whenever I mentor people I can I can just be like, as like half as good of a mentor as she was to me to somebody else. Other people, other people are really going to benefit.
I love that. Oh my gosh, so fantastic.
Shekerah Primus 17:37
I really just wanted to say it's so important to have that support and I can see in you now how, how powerful that was for you. To have someone giving you that feedback and giving you that support and really just giving you what you needed to feel, to feel your power to feel that power and to feel like you could do this. Just I can see how important those mentorships were for you. To have someone to just you know, have your back and hold you down like that, but I get it. So what advice would you give your younger self?
Fatu Badiane Markey 18:10
So many things. Do a lot of things differently. Yeah. I think the biggest piece of advice that I would give my younger self is to have grace, to have grace with yourself. Give yourself the same grace that you give other people. I have been and still continue to be, I'm working on it, but I have like very, very hard on myself. And I think that the, I don't know if you're into Enneagram, but I'm Enneagram three which is like the overachiever. Okay. But in, which is I think has some positive elements to it. Right? Like obviously, I'm a hard worker, I persevere with doing all the things. But there definitely were, separate, different points in my journey, both through the degree and since then that I wasn't taking as good of care of myself. Not just the intellectual part, and again thinking about the impact of the work that I'm doing in others, but really like, you have to you have to put on your own oxygen mask before you help other people. So yeah, I think that the biggest piece of advice I would have for my younger self is to be easy on yourself. Because you're doing a great job and it doesn't have to be perfect, doesn't have to be. Yeah, yeah.
Shekerah Primus 19:39
I love that, though. So Important to take care of yourself first. Put your oxygen mask on first.
Fatu Badiane Markey 19:46
I love that. I love that too. And love that too. Yeah. And I also just loved hearing so much about how Cohort Sistas develop because I never throughout my academic career at any point had any mentors that look like me. I had like great mentors you know, who were all excellent, but I really think that just brings like a whole different level of connectivity. And I think it's just like, so refreshing that you kind of like took the time to really reflect on that. And were like, this was what I needed. I didn't have it, but how can I build it for other people? So I think that's really incredible.
Unknown Speaker 20:24
Thank you.
Fatu Badiane Markey 20:27
So for our last section, we are going to do something called Life Lights. And this is something that basically is going to cover what brings you joy outside of work. So if you want to think about like hobbies, passion projects, family, friends, how do you like to relax, and you know what else brings you light and enjoyment to your life?
So there are two things that stick out. One is cooking for other people. I do really love entertaining and having people over and making like six dishes and have like, oh my gosh, you had time to make that, like yes I did, like no I didn't. But I love entertaining. I love hosting people. I love putting together a little dinner party. And the second thing that is a recent probably in the past like five years hobby of mine is interior design. I am now like I'm obsessed with interior decor. And design. I think because I've realized that I really enjoy being at home. Like happy to be at home. But I like I like being at home like when the space is i really tend to do it like room by room, that serves a function, but it's also beautiful but also practical. I'm not one of those people who has like all white house, like all white living rooms. I got kids it can't be doing that. I really liked just designing and I started to do it for friends and family. But I love decorating and redecorating and moving furniture around. So yeah, I really love interior design as well.
Like gosh, I didn't know that could be like a hobby though.
I'm trying to keep it a hobby right and so I feel like another struggle is there was a time when I was like wait, like should I start charging people for this but then I was like, stop doing the most like, not everything has to be a business. Just sit down and enjoy. Do it like when you want to. So it's definitely a hobby of mine.
Oh, perfect.
Well, thank you so much Ijeoma. You know we look forward to following up with you in the future as well to hear about the next phase of your journey. And you better let us know when that book comes out also, so we can make sure you know to tell our audience about it. It was such a pleasure speaking with you today.
Thank you so much and I will definitely keep y'all posted.
And on that note, we'd like to thank our listeners for supporting the podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like and share. And you can reach out to us by email, Love science podcast@gmail.com. Until next time, Bye guys!
Transcribed by https://otter.ai