Joanne, Part 2 - Chinese American: STEM, Identity & Choosing to Belong

In Part 2 of our conversation, Joanne shares how her STEM journey unfolded in ways she never expected—through academic pressure, nonlinear pivots, surprising mentors, and the slow, intentional work of choosing where she belongs.

We talk about what it means to grow up under high expectations, nearly failing out of college, rediscovering purpose through neuroscience and teaching, and the moment she finally said: “I get to choose to belong.”

This episode is about identity, resilience, and rewriting your story when the old one no longer fits.

Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/Sdxi9CwAUJw

In this episode:
 • Nonlinear STEM career paths
 • Academic pressure + nearly failing out
 • A professor who offered a second chance
 • Chinese American identity and belonging
 • Purpose, risk, and choosing your own path

Connect with Joanne: https://strelogroup.com/about/joanne/

Keywords: Asian American stories, Chinese American identity, STEM careers, belonging, immigrant family expectations, nonlinear careers, resilience, Cultureful Podcast

Transcript

Transcript generated by AI and may contain errors

Joanne: [00:00:00] For many years I was angry at them. I was angry at the pressure, I was just like, how could you do that to a little kid?

And then I, in a moment of reflection, and this didn't happen overnight, but I recognized how utterly existentially frightening it must have been to spend your childhood running from existential threat.

To, to come from that sort of chaos and existential fear and not want what they considered to be the best possible outcome, the safest outcome for their children. 

Jess: You are listening to Cultureful. I'm your host, Jess Lin. This is the second half of my conversation with Joanne In part one, she shared what it was like growing up as a professor's daughter in upstate New York, moving between one version of herself at home and another outside of [00:01:00] it.

she also took us back to the year she lived in Taiwan at age seven, navigating public school during martial law. A vivid chapter of her story. 

Today we pick up with the part of her life that's just as rich, her winding, surprising career path. She brings us into the moments that shaped her, the academic stumbles, the pivots, And the awakenings that slowly pushed her toward the work she does today.

zooming out. Her story makes me think about how our careers really unfold and how often to figure out what truly fits we need to take risks and make big changes. The path isn't straight and sometimes that's not only okay, but necessary. As always, there's a video version with photos on YouTube. I hope you enjoy the second half of Joanne's story. 

Welcome back from the break.[00:02:00] 

Joanne: Thank you.

Jess: So let's, let's get into college and grad school. So. Did you end up studying biology in college? And where'd you go?

Joanne: I tried. Uh, so I ended up going to a, a college up in upstate New York called the University of Rochester. And the University of Rochester purported itself to be a liberal arts college. that may have been true, uh, if you weren't in stem, but it turns out it was, a weed out college. So a STEM majors were essentially weed out majors.

And I, having grown up in my little town in upstate New York, had never gotten anything but a's in my entire life. So I get to college and I'm very excited 'cause I'm going to grow up and be Marlon Perkins and chase snakes in the desert. And I did okay in my biology class, but I took chemistry [00:03:00] and I got a D

Jess: Okay. I just got sweaty palms.

Joanne: and my parents lost their minds.

Jess: I bet.

Joanne: They were beside themselves. in retrospect, I now know that they had never dealt with a child's failure before. I had never dealt with my own failure before, and it was exacerbated by not only did I, was I crashing and burning through chemistry, calculus, physics,

Jess: Whoa.

Joanne: um, I discovered boys and beer at the same time.

Jess: Were they, did they contribute to the crashing and burning? Were they part of it? Oh my gosh.

Joanne: Boys and beer were so much more interesting than passing my calculus test

Jess: and you finally had some space from your parents to, were you in a dorm?

Joanne: [00:04:00] Yes. And I had, one of the things I, I didn't tell, and I, I've never told anybody this before, but in my senior year, I started sneaking outta the house. I had friends from town that had cars. I wasn't allowed to have a car.

They would drive up to my driveway, kill the engine. I would crawl out the window in the back of the house. And that town was really known for its bars and its underage drinking. And I would go drinking with my friends.

Jess: Uhhuh

Joanne: I, every night I did this, I was like, if I get caught, I'm going to be dead, so I'm gonna party like it's the last night of my life. And that,

Jess: That was the strategy. It's like I might not ever, ever get to do anything ever again, so I just need to really enjoy it like it's the last time.

Joanne: So I'd already sort of discovered boys and beer before I left, left for college, but it was definitely accelerated, which contributed to my declining, [00:05:00] GPA. And it was actually really unpleasant because my parents, my mom cried a lot. My dad yelled a lot. I mean, they were, they didn't know what to do.

They, they were like, who is this, this obedient perfect daughter that has turned into this hellion? So I discovered Rebellion pretty late,

and I essentially crashed and burned through college. I barely got, got across that stage. My grades were so bad. My dad refused to come to my college graduation.

Jess: Oh gosh. 

Joanne: Um. 

Jess: And for someone who was just dreaming about that for you, for himself, really? The

Joanne: Oh yeah. His,

Jess: your whole life. Oh my gosh.

Joanne: My life was over at the age of 22.

Jess: like, okay, so it sounds like your parents were devastated. Like how did you feel about your grades? 

Joanne: Oh, it was terrible. I was, no, and I didn't know how to get back on the horse. I didn't have enough resilience. I didn't know what to do, and I didn't have the support of my parents. And they rejected me. I rejected myself. It was, it [00:06:00] was a very, very bad situation.

Jess: so there's some like mental health things that you

Joanne: Oh yeah. I remember seeing as, uh, some sort of mental health counselor, but that's, this was also, you know, not at a time in which there, there was a lot of fluency around mental challenges.

Um, you know, now as a professional and as someone who has some. Understanding of, you know, challenges and growth and resilience. I didn't know any of that stuff back then. the other piece of this, so while I was crashing and burning and drinking too much beer and having a very good time with boys, my mom developed breast cancer.

Jess: Oh no.

Joanne: So in my freshman year, the fall semester, my freshman year, as I was doing all this, my mom, got diagnosed with breast cancer and she had a mastectomy and she was very sick. And so I'll, I think with both my, my brother and I both left for college at the same time. And so with the kids outta the house, they really turned [00:07:00] inward and really focused on each other.

My mother was ill for most of my college years and then she, the breast cancer returned my senior year.

So the entire time I was in college, she was sick. Uh, and one of the, critical things that happened right after college was, she had a stroke and she died.

Jess: Oh, I'm so sorry.

Joanne: So I was less than a year out of college in rough shape because I had barely graduated from college.

It went to an extremely expensive private college, and to the shock of my family, my mom, who had been the pillar of the entire family was gone.

Jess: Wow. That's just like too many, too many whammies, like 

triple, quadruple, like all the whammies and, and so I mean. You survived that because you're here now. Like [00:08:00] how did you, how did you move into your next step? What was your next step after college and how did you like, like just what happened externally?

Like what did you do, but also what was happening internally?

Joanne: Yeah. so my mom was the one who really tried to nurture my dream in becoming a scientist. My dad just wanted it because that was the thing that you did. But it was my mom. She was the one who bought me all the books about snakes and evolution, and she's the one who was my guardian when I was chasing frogs and catching toads in the garden.

Jess: Would you say she like understood and appreciated and encouraged your vision?

Joanne: She 

Jess: Mm mm-hmm. 

Joanne: And with her gone. I didn't have anyone in my court because my dad was so wrapped up in his own grief. he didn't have the. Capacity to support me, [00:09:00] through anything that I needed. so at the time, I had gotten, uh, a job at the medical center after college, because one of the saving graces of college was, although I ended up dropping out of a biology major, I became a psych major like everybody else who drops out of biology, ends up getting a psych degree.

at the time the University of Rochester was one of the first undergraduate institutions to teach this brand new science called neuroscience.

Jess: I didn't know neuroscience was that recent.

Joanne: it's a Wow. Real field. A really

Jess: recent field. 

Joanne: Real, new major. Right? There were no undergraduate majors in neuroscience when I was in college. That didn't exist.

You only studied it in graduate school. You often were a biology major or physics major, but for whatever reason I was sort of licking my wounds and, and realizing that my dreams of becoming a field biologist and becoming Marlon Perkins [00:10:00] were dashed. Namely because I couldn't pass chemistry, physics, calculus.

But I discovered this thing called neuroscience. And neuroscience was cool because not only did you get to study animal behavior, you got to cut the heads off of animals and look inside their brains.

Jess: Uhhuh Uhhuh. This is the thing that kid Joanne loved,

right? This is like your jam Uhhuh.

Joanne: it was totally my jam. So one of the jobs that I had as a work study student in college, was I got to work in a rat lab in which I studied, acoustical asymmetries in sound processing in a rat model. And so my job was to schlep rats. Back and forth in and out of operant chambers.

And I got paid really well for an undergraduate. At the time it was like 10 bucks an hour or whatever it was to schlep rats in and out of boxes. It was also the same time that I remembered something that, so my mom was still alive, but she was, she was pretty sick at the time. I remembered something. [00:11:00] She told me when, when, when I was a kid, which was, ' cause I, I, ever since I was a kid, I asked her if If I could have a pet snake. And she was like, as long as you are living under my roof, you cannot have a pet snake. Someday when you have your own roof, you can get a pet snake. So it was the summer of my junior year and I was living in an apartment with my boyfriend at the time in Rochester. And I was like, Hey, I, I'm living in my own, under my own roof. This means I can go get a pet snake. So I went to the pet store and I got this baby Burmese Python and the baby Burmese Python was probably less than a year, but it was already like three and a half feet long. And I brought this baby Burmese Python home and I named him Boo Boo, my baby Burmese Python. And I thought, this is fantastic. I work in a research lab, I have free food for life for this snake.

Gonna be awesome. So I [00:12:00] had this pet snake in my senior year, so, and I was working in this research lab. So I graduate from college and I can't get a job.

I cannot get into grad school 'cause my grades are so bad. No graduate school would touch me. And so I realized, oh well, all right, well least I can do is get a job and then maybe I could try again in a couple years. So I got this job working in the medical center, working in. Retinal transplantation research.

So it was like blindness research for people, doing research on, on macular degeneration, which is the degeneration of the retina.

And so I got to schlep more animals. So I got to play with mice and rats and monkeys and it was great. And so I had, at the time, my boss and his wife, so it was a Argentinian couple, the wife was the lab manager and the husband was the, major primary investigator of the research lab. the wife, her name was Coka Coka Del Ero. Coka took me under her wing, this pathetic, sad [00:13:00] Chinese girl who didn't know anything about anything. she brushed me off and told me how to dress and told me how to act and. They were very generous and they put me, as an author on some of their scientific presentations. And one of the things that I, uh, was able to do was because I had my, my name on a poster presentation on a, on a scientific presentation, I got to travel to the, big neuroscience conference, which is still the biggest neuroscience conference of the world called the Society for Neuroscience. And at the time I wanted to re try one more time to revisit my dream to become a, a snake ecologist. So I had studied all the famous researchers and snake behavior, and it turns out one of these guys was gonna be at the, this conference. 'cause I saw his name on a couple of science presentations. and so I went to go see.

This guy at his, poster presentation. And [00:14:00] of course I was too naive to realize that famous scientists don't stand in front of their own posters. They they send their graduate students to do

Jess: Yeah. You thought you were gonna meet him at his

poster, 

Joanne: him. He wasn't there. He wasn't even there. So I met the woman who was standing in front of the poster and I was like, hi, I wanna study snakes.

And I went to study with your major professor, and she looks me up and down and she goes, no, you don't. I'm like, no, no. I read all of his papers. I do. She goes, no, you really don't. I'm like, why not? 'cause, because that guy's a jerk.

Jess: Oh.

Joanne: I'm like, oh, okay. So I'm standing there like a little confused and she goes, you need to go two aisles down and you need to go talk to this other guy.

His name is Walt. I'm like, what does Walt do? He goes, Walt works on frogs. And I'm like. I like frogs and everything, but I don't wanna work on frogs. I wanna work on 

snakes. And she goes, go talk to this guy.

So I go over and, and sure enough he's actually standing with his students by his [00:15:00] poster. And so I said, Hey, I, I just got sent over here by this girl and she told me to talk to you and I wanted to grow up and play with snakes, but she told me to talk to you about frogs.

Jess: Uh

Joanne: And unbeknownst to me, he was looking for people to recruit to his lab.

long story short, he attempted to recruit me. So he actually took my name down and I applied, this was at the University of Texas in Austin. And I didn't hear from him for a long time. And I finally called him and I said, hi.

Remember me? We met at the meeting. I'm curious, do you still have my application? He goes, oh, yeah. He's like, about that. Your grades are really terrible. I'm like, I know.

Jess: You cannot get away from those undergrad

Joanne: no, 

Jess: Oh my gosh.

Joanne: He said, they're really bad. And I said, I know. And he said, but you know what? You are actually much more impressive in person than you are on paper. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll pay for you to come to Austin and I want you to interview with my colleagues.

We're gonna put you through the ringer. We're gonna have you meet with every [00:16:00] professor in the department. In the end, I, I think it's gonna be okay, but you have to basically come here and state your case.

Jess: And sell yourself. Woo.

Joanne: And I remember this one particular interview I had with the department chair. He was an old guy, grizzly guy with a big beard and big glasses.

And he was sitting behind a big desk. And I remember walking into his office with my little notebook. He's like, sit down. So I sat down. He's like, he kind of leaned forward with his glasses, you know, at the end of his nose and he is like, so you are the one with the grades.

Jess: oh my gosh.

Joanne: got in and so that was the second chance that I was given to make up for the massive catastrophic failure of my college career.

Jess: And then, you know, fast forward, I don't know how many years you end up becoming a professor at Spelman College. 

Joanne: At Spelman College, what are the milestones that get you to Spelman and what was it like teaching there?

so Texas [00:17:00] was a really important part. This is when I learned my love for teaching. I actually won a teaching award while I was there as a graduate student. I loved doing field work, so I, I studied, local species of frogs and I studied, the intersection of different neurochemical systems, in their brains to impact their social behavior.

essentially, what I ended up doing is finding myself in the field of animal biology, but at the nexus of ecology, evolutionary biology, pharmacology, anatomy, physiology. So I, I got 

to play 

all 

ologies, 

right? And it was all under this big umbrella of behavioral neuroscience. So this, this whole, that whole neuroscience thing was, was really the saving grace.

So I became the expert of frog brains. So I can tell you everything there is to know about frog brains. so I, I got my bug of teaching and I got my bug of. Really, helping, wanting to have more students have more field [00:18:00] experiences. So I got, I really got to, own that for myself. I, I wasn't chasing snakes in the desert, but I was chasing frogs in the swamp.

Jess: I love when life and things just kind of come full circle like that where you, you thought you, you know, were going in the direction, away from, your biology, love when you went into psych, 

Joanne: Mm-hmm. I came back. Yeah.

Yeah. And then in psychology, I learned about things like motivation and resilience and, I got to merge all of that into my PhD program. And then, uh, before I came to Atlanta, I did a, I did four years at Oregon State University where I studied salamanders and I studied the, Their olfactory system. 'cause they communicate all chemically. And I decided salamanders are just really dumb. They don't really do very many interesting things. Not like frogs, like frogs sing and they establish territories and they have courtship behaviors. And so I brought that passion to Spelman. So at the time, Spelman was part of all really large national sound science foundation [00:19:00] funded consortium.

the National Science Foundation was interested in, creating a juggernaut of social behavioral neuroscience for the city of Atlanta. And that included all the HBCUs, Morehouse s Spellman, Morehouse School of Medicine, Clark Atlanta, the research universities Georgia University, Georgia State University, Georgia Tech, Emory University. every single one of these institutions recruited young neuroscientists to be on their faculty. And because I was always committed to. Teaching over research. I was drawn to the opportunity to come to Spelman College and teach undergraduate biology, I had recognized the importance of having women in this field.

And so the fact that I got to marry my love of science, love of stem, love of neuroscience, love of teaching and empowering women to enter in STEM fields, I, it was like the perfect job. [00:20:00] And a lot of what I did was I got to deploy things that I loved and learned throughout my lifetime, my love of nature.

So I, I was able to create learning experiences for my students, which involved more field trips, less lab work, more integration and observation of natural phenomenon. Just not just things that you could look at under the microscope, but things that you could actually touch and feel and. And, and actually embody.

I continued my research, um, looking at the neurochemical systems that underlied social behavior, in mating systems in frogs, which was a very strange thing to be bringing to a historically black college set in downtown, practically downtown Atlanta. and that's actually what also made me realize that Atlanta, Georgia was the first, place that I had ever lived in which the natural systems were fairly degraded.

So our water was dirty, our air was dirty, our land was dirty, and I had not ever lived in a place that didn't [00:21:00] have abundant nature all around me. And I felt as though it was a very important moment for me to recognize that everything that I had learned about the natural world I was bringing to. to an institution that did not take these things for granted or, or didn't have much familiarity with being, feeling at home, comfortable, and belonging in nature.

Because as much as I felt like an outsider, I always felt like I was comfortable in natural environments, and, and so I got to bring some of that to Spelman.

Jess: okay. I'm very curious because, you told me that you had two awakenings. Spelman, but I was like, don't tell me what, until we're recording and now it's like finally upon us. We're recording. we're at the s Melvin chapter. was one of the awakenings, did one of them have to do with what you're talking about, about the natural world, about Atlanta, about ecology?

Like, 

Joanne: Mm-hmm. 

Jess: Yeah, 

Joanne: Yeah. 

So the two awakenings that I had when I was in Atlanta [00:22:00] were the first one. These women that were graduating with a biology degree from Spelman College, I knew each and every one of these women were going to graduate and become leaders in their communities, in their professions, in their lives, in their families. And yet none of them, until I kind of showed up and, helped reorchestrate the curriculum, even though they were biology majors, had much comfort with the, with the Unbuilt environment. I mean, Spelman's an urban campus. they have a giant lawn, in which students are not allowed to walk on.

Jess: Oh wow.

Joanne: So here I am, you know, having grown up catching frogs and snakes. And so I, I felt as though it was imperative that these leaders, these future leaders, understood and not only were not afraid of, but could love and protect and steward the natural world. the source of clean air, [00:23:00] clean food, I mean, so I, I got in a whole, area of interest around environmental justice and around the intersections of, of race and, privilege and how some people were allowed to have more access to clean air and clean water and other people weren't right.

And I felt as though these women who are gonna be living at this nexus of health disparities of environmental justice, that they had to understand what was to be gained through the natural world. And that food didn't come in a styrofoam plate wrapped in cellophane from Whole Foods, right? They came from real animals and real plants.

And so I felt as though as biology majors, they had to have some competency around that. it became a mission of mine to, to incorporate as much of sort of the natural world, ironically, the natural world into the biological sciences as I could.

Jess: so what did that look like? Did you take them camping? Did you take them gardening? Like, did you start, you know, an urban garden? Did you, like, what did you do?

Joanne: So the, the main thing that I did was I was privileged enough to [00:24:00] be able to help support a restructuring, a re-envisioning of the biology curriculum. And, uh, most biology curriculum starts with chapter one, which is like cell division. And somewhere around chapter 57 is when you get to ecology and the real world.

And so, I helped Re-envision the curriculum so that it actually started with observation and hypothesis testing using the natural environment, using trees and animals and plants and natural ecosystems. And so, and I believe to this day, Spelman students still go on these field trips out to this granite outcrop, park that we have not near nearby, just to actually begin the fundamental skills of practicing hypothesis testing, observation, looking at interactions between plant and animals.

I mean, really looking at things as biological systems, not just things that you look at in a lab or underneath a microscope. 

Jess: That just sounds so incredibly different of an [00:25:00] experience, for the students, but also just like, to kind of marry what you're studying academically with, you know, hands-on, real life

in 

Joanne: Real animals. 

Jess: I think it's really cool that you were able to be a part of that and to kind of drive that effort.

Joanne: Yeah. that was really big deal. And, and so recently I, uh, I got to meet up with one of my former students, and I hadn't seen her in 20 some odd years. And she said, you remember I worked in your research lab? And I said, oh yeah, I'd forgotten that. And I said, what do you remember? She goes, I remember that one time you made us go catch frogs in a swamp somewhere.

And. She said, I've never done that before, so the whole idea of like going out in the swamp and catching snakes and frogs at night was not part of the, part of the typical Spelman biology student curriculum. But, I think what I did was hopefully I normalized

that and that girls could do it and that black girls could do it and Asian girls could do it.

And, um, because I also, when I was a kid, there were no other Asian girls that I knew that liked catching frogs and snakes. [00:26:00] Right. And so I wanted to representation matters. And so I wanted to help sort of break the, I don't know, assumption that girls didn't do field work. 'cause girls do do field work.

Jess: Yeah.

Joanne: So that was a, that was a big thing.

Jess: After the break, Joanne opens up about her second awakening at Spellman and reflects on belonging. Stay with us. 

Joanne: the second major awakening was so, Spellman is a historically black college for women. I am a woman of color, but I had never examined my own identity as a woman of color, as a Chinese first generation American born Chinese kid. And I was very lucky in that the first year that I was a professor at Spelman, Spelman College, got a new president.

And that president was Dr. Beverly [00:27:00] Daniel Tatum, who is an internationally renowned expert in racial identity 

and assimilation. And she had written several books about this. And so, yeah, I'm a young professor and I'm interested in this new president we've got. So I pick up her book and her seminal book, which is entitled, why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria and Other Conversations about Race? I read this book I was shocked. To read about my, my own journey described in this book, my trying to break away from the, ethnic, identity, the cultural expectations of my parents, right? The utter rejection of my Chinese identity, and the, the return to reintegration and opening up the, channels to kind of explore and own my identity.

It turns out lots of immigrant kids go through this, almost all of them, and, and it was all described in her book. [00:28:00] And so I, I began to understand what was absent in my own understanding of how I was wired, my own journey. Towards racial and ethnic acceptance. And then by proxy, the journey of my students and what it was like to be growing up, especially if you're smart and you're black and you're a woman and you might be going to majority white high schools and being overlooked, being disrespected.

and so it, brought me a great deal more empathy and understanding about the challenges that my students faced as young women that I never had to face that my challenges were different, but that because I had grown up in majority white communities, I had just never, these were things that had been invisible to me.

And so I became really important to me to understand. The challenges that these [00:29:00] young black women were being faced, that, that were being projected on them by the world, and certainly as, young STEM students. that the difficulty it was to establish yourself, your credibility, your competence, your, authority in stem in a field that was still fairly biased unconsciously in some cases, but consciously biased.

Jess: Where are you now in your journey with your racial ethnic identity? this second awakening at Spelman, this happened when, and I assume there's been like it's been a few years, right?

Joanne: Yeah, I re, I remember the first time I cracked open her book on one of the first pages. she gives her definition of racism and she defined racism as a system that, confers advantage to certain group of people over another group of people. And I remember at the time reading it and not actually understanding those words.

I'd never seen a definition of racism before and it took me many. Years of going back [00:30:00] and reading and rereading her book before I really began to understand what she was talking about, because a lot of these systems of privilege and bias were, had been invisible to me. Like, and I had occasionally had bumped up against them, 'cause I'd grown up in largely white spaces. and plus I'd grown up in the north, so a lot of that stuff was kind of invisible to me. so where I am now a couple years after I left Spelman, I left academia, my father passed away, and I felt as though I was finally liberated to be able to make my own choices.

One of the choices that I made was to become a consultant

How, how, how old were you at the time that you were like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna do what I want?

yeah, 40.

Jess: Wow.

Joanne: So my mom died when I was 20 something. My dad died when I was 40 some 40, barely 40, 39 maybe.

And I got a chance to say, what do I wanna do?

Jess: Wow.

Joanne: And what I realized is I didn't wanna stay in the research [00:31:00] lab, that I wanted to work with people. I mean, my time at Spelman really had taught me that in order to really make a difference, for me to make a difference in the world, I couldn't just study frogs.

I had to put people back in the center of not just the problem space, but the solution space.

Jess: What do you 

mean 

by that? 

Joanne: When I was younger, I used to say, I don't like people, I just wanna study animals. And so humans were devoid, were were the, they were. I rejected even thinking about people 'cause I was so interested in snakes and frogs and other, you know, I was interested in animals.

What I learned when I was at Spelman was I learned about this concept, about environmental sustainability. Spelman College at the time was leading the effort among HBCUs to talk about climate neutrality, to talk about climate change. so I got a chance to really see and understand this. And because it's a small college, I got a chance to actually participate in those strategic conversations.

And I recognized that [00:32:00] my previous worldview, that was a pretty classical sort of environmental conservationist worldview, which only thought about. Non-human animals humans were a problem, but they were out there, right? That if I really wanted to help the world be a better place, not only did I have to reintroduce people back into the problem space, so in the, part of lens that I wanted to actually look at the world about, so that I had to put people and people's problems, their economy, their, desire, their need for the built and unbuilt environment, like I had to put, put people back into my question frame

and I had to put people into the solution.

our current situation around climate change Around greenhouse gas emissions is a essentially a people problem. It's about our existence on this planet.

If people weren't on this planet when we talk about saving the planet, we're not talking about saving the planet for itself.

We're talking about saving the [00:33:00] planet for people

Jess: To exist here. Yeah.

Yes. 

Joanne: right. And I had spent the first three decades of my life thinking about that at all. And so as a consultant, not only did I start working with the people who are working on environmental sustainability issues and later on things like climate policy and food justice and environmental, energy efficiency and all those things that I was working with leaders.

Who were leading people. And so my current company, Strelo group, which I founded with my business partner, in 20. So January 20, 22 months before COVID hit, we opened up our doors as Strelo group that we believed in a particular kind of organizational strategy and change, which puts people at the center of the solution. And also its execution. So it's not about KPIs of like profit or it, it's in which people are the [00:34:00] problem and they have to be managed somehow that we actually honor people and we wanna work with leaders that actually honor people and believe that people are the solution, not the problem. And so we have created a particular kind of approach, it's about honoring the people that work for you, honoring yourself as a human being with your thoughts, feelings, and actions, to solve really complicated problems together. And I feel like everything that has led me up to this point, my study of nature, my curiosity about how things, how complex systems work, my wonder about how a caterpillar turns into a butterfly.

All of these things have sort of informed my journey to this moment where now I am a strategist, a coach, a group facilitator to help people solve really complicated things, of which there is no easy solution. And I feel like my training as a neuroscientist allows me to sort of operate in the nexus of all these different things, right?

So in neuroscience it was [00:35:00] anatomy and chemistry, and now it's like HR and human development leadership growth you know, I'm very comfortable navigating how all these different traditional disciplines come together to help us strategize, create organizational change, and create lasting results that honors the people that are having to do the work and are the recipient of the work.

Jess: you're drawing from all these different skills and aptitudes and experiences to do this work. I think it's, it's really inspiring to me that you found a way to kind of draw on all these things and to kind of realize, okay, life is short. And let me reexamine, like am I doing what I really wanna do and make a big change?

Like I'm, I mean, going from academia, I'm sure was like a very, very big choice because you had worked so hard to get to where you were.

Joanne: Plus, you know, I was five when I said I was gonna get, get my PhD right. And become a professor. So yeah. [00:36:00] So I didn't know any other world, 

but I intentionally stepped out of the ivory tower, right? And I shut the door behind me and I just looked out into the world and I said, what can, with everything that I know, everything that I believe in, everything that I know how to do, up until now, how can I serve the world and meet the world where it is?

Help real people solve real problems outside. Of the higher education ivory

tower. And so I, I entered the real world from the, from the tower, and that was a really vulnerable moment because I had no idea what I was doing. I had no guarantee of success. I didn't know where my clients were gonna come from.

I didn't know anybody who was gonna hire me. But all I knew is I believed in people. I believed in the sort of tenements of sustainability, this sort of complex intersection of people, profit and planet. I knew that I could teach people about [00:37:00] experiential learning, right? I, I knew I had a couple of foundational skills, and the rest was just like, well, let's see what we can, we can do together.

That has never been done,

Jess: Did you believe in Joanne that she would 

make it happen? 

Joanne: I guess, I must have. 

I, I think at that time, I, I didn't, it was like. Succeed or bust. Right? I, I just, I just figured I'm just gonna do it. I mean, the worst thing that could possibly happen is I go back and I go back to the tower. that felt like the safety

Jess: That was 

there if you wanted to 

go 

Joanne: it was there, right? And so in a sense, I, you know, I said I shut the door, but I always knew I could open the door and go back in 

the cage. So I said, okay, well if that's my safety net, that's not bad.

Jess: It's not a bad safety 

net. No. 

Joanne: so why not just fail forward mightily and just see what happens?

Jess: I want to wrap up with a few reflection questions. so now looking back at your whole story, right? Looking back at your whole life, you know, your, your parents were pushing you so hard [00:38:00] into academia and you did end up kind of going that route and then. Even now, even though you've left it being able to use a lot of things that you've learned and experienced there, so, so I guess my question is how do you feel about that pressure that they put on you now, hindsight that you're, now you're 58 hindsight, as the way they raised you.

What do you think of that now?

Joanne: For many years I was angry at them. I was angry at the pressure, at the compulsion, the Westinghouse High School Science Award. Like, I was just like, how could you do that to a little kid?

Like what were you thinking? Like what, what fallback were you, you, were you actually ever seeing me for what I wanted to do? So I was, I was very, very angry for, for many years. And then I, in a moment of reflection, and this didn't happen overnight, but it, it, it happened gradually. I recognized [00:39:00] in thinking back to where we started, at the top of this hour in talking about my parents' origin story and about their childhood and how utterly existentially frightening it must have been to spend your childhood running from existential threat.

Whether it was the Japanese that wanted to complete genocide of your ethnicity, right, the full scale slaughter of all the Chinese people, the communists who wanted to destroy any sense of anyone who was educated or had land or had position. To, to come from that sort of chaos and existential fear and not want what they considered to be the best possible outcome, the safest outcome for their children.

It all makes sense now that all they wanted for their kids was safety, security, respect, the [00:40:00] things that they fought so hard to gain for themselves in this country. That's all they wanted for their kids, and they have any other ideas. They thought that was the best solution, and they were gonna do everything in their power to ensure that their children had a safe, secure, predictable life

because they had done it. 

Jess: Yeah. And like now you can empathize with 

why they did it.

I think it's really interesting that you, you said they didn't really have any other ideas. And I think that is so true of just like parenting of life in general. Like a lot of times we live because of this formula that we see, because of the culture that we grow up in or the circumstances that we grow up in.

And, and that, is one of the, hopefully one of the externalities, hopefully one of the impacts of this show is just I want people to share all the different ways you can do life. From these [00:41:00] different cultures, from these different backgrounds and like, and there's just so many different ways to parent.

There's so many different ways to career. There's so many different ways to, you know, cook food at home, whatever it is. Right. And it's just like, sometimes we get stuck because we can only imagine what we have come into contact with. And that's just sometimes if it's only limited to like what we read in our life experiences, you know, there's a lot of underrepresentation.

the other reflection question I wanted to ask you is growing up feeling like you didn't belong in, you know, the neighborhood you grew up in, in New York, also in Taiwan. you know, how do you think that impacted you, shaped you as a person?

Joanne: One of the, We do a lot of culture work in my consulting company in which we help organizational leaders create environments of inclusion and belonging in which diverse voices are heard and honored, and creative solutions are sought for. [00:42:00] I have to believe that it is my own search of feeling included, feeling like I belonged because I know how it feels when you aren't seen, when you don't feel like you belong and think about like the lost human potential when young little Joanne didn't feel like she belonged, right?

So the fact that we can now work with organizational leaders to help. Create cultures of belonging and inclusion that allow every, human soul to, to lean in and, and participate fully. I, I think that's, that's probably in part where some of this comes from, but it also makes just good business sense.

I mean, you got a bunch of people that you hired, you might as well make the best out of them. and one of the ways you make the best out of the human talent that you've got in your organization is you help them feel included and that they belong, so that they can co contribute to [00:43:00] whatever complicated challenges your organizations are facing.

Right? If you don't feel like you belong, why would you try Right? Somebody else's problem? Not my problem.

Jess: And a follow up to that is, present day in your life, what settings communities, in what parts of your life do you feel like you belong?

Joanne: That's a really great question. I think I still struggle with it. I think I've got a lot of old habits in which my presumption is I don't belong.

Jess: Mm.

Joanne: Uh, a couple months ago, my company now, which started with two women founders five years ago, we had our first all staff retreat. It was the first time our entire company, I think we were eight of us, we flew to San Antonio and we got to be together in this awesome house together for a couple days before Christmas. And I remember thinking to myself, this is my company. I get to choose to belong. Like this is a big deal. And as an academic, you're often like working by yourself and yeah, you have people working in your lab, but [00:44:00] there's, it's not really the same as building a company from scratch. creating a team of like-minded people who all wanna be the kinds of change agents that, that you wanna be.

So that was, so I've been thinking about my own culpability in maintaining distance of not belonging, right? So I think the work that I'm doing right now is to choose to belong. So when I ran into you at that badass Asian women thing, I was like, I wanna belong to a group of women that call themselves badass Asian women.

I'm a badass Asian woman.

Jess: Yeah,

Joanne: I wanna belong. I wanna belong to that, right? And so then that's how you and I met, right? Because we had this connection, in which we chose to belong with each other, just at least for that. brief period of time. And that's led to this. So it's a really, um, I've been thinking not only about the conditions necessary for it to be easier for someone to belong, but also the choices that each and every one of us [00:45:00] makes on a small and large level to either belong or not belong.

And I think for someone like me, it's a lot more work because, my default wiring is, oh, I don't belong. Right? So what is the choice that I'm gonna make that says, yes, I'm gonna belong, And especially now, belonging and inclusion are so important because we are so fractured.

We are isolated sometimes, you know, I'm still on Zoom a lot. We're talking virtually right now. so this idea of belonging, inclusion community, I think are really, really important for what we are facing as a society. our problem solving is only enhanced when we actually feel like we belong.

Jess: I'm grateful that I bumped into you and we just like, I don't know, we're drinking our. non-alcoholic champagne next to each other. That was good 

Joanne: That's right. I forgot about that. 

Jess: Yeah, 

Joanne: food. That's right. That was funny.

Jess: thank you so much for doing the interview. Thanks for being here.

Joanne: You're [00:46:00] welcome.

Jess: Thank you so much for listening to this conversation with Joanne. 

Her story is such a rich reminder that our professional journeys don't have to be straight to become something we're proud of. If this episode resonated with you, I'd love for you to share it with someone who might need to hear it. You can connect with Joanne through the links in the show notes.

our next episode will be the season two finale, a conversation about the traditions we hold onto, and the ones we create for ourselves.

be sure to follow or subscribe so you don't miss it. 

If you'd like to support this homegrown indie podcast, you can leave a rating or comment or make a small donation through the link in the description. Your support truly helps keep these stories going. This episode was produced and edited by me with advising and executive production support from Ruben [00:47:00] Gnanaruban.

I'm Jess Lin. See you soon.