6 - Being one of the few among the many: my journey to the PhD starting point

Summary

At the point of writing this, I am just four months into my PhD journey. Fresh- faced and a bit wet behind the ears, I look to older students for advice about what to expect over the next three years. They warn that I have a steep learning curve ahead; that a PhD is a marathon, not a sprint, and that I need to pace myself if I want to successfully overcome the hurdles I will face. Their advice is important and valued, but what I do not say is that, as a Black student, this is not just a marathon: this is my life. I have been running this race since I entered the education system and, while pursuing this PhD may be the biggest challenge yet, it is not my first.

It is difficult to untangle my experiences of the PhD and the application process without first considering how I got here. Not only am I a Black woman of mixed ethnicity, but I have spent most of my life living and learning in predominantly White spaces. For a long time, I did not consciously consider the impact this had on me. In fact, I have spent a lot of my life actively avoiding thinking about my ethnicity, because I was desperate to fit in and be ‘just like everyone else’. But as I have grown older and gained some distance from my childhood, I have been able to recognise that being one of the few among the many in educational settings has been detrimental – most significantly on my mental wellbeing.

Imagine this: you spend the first ten years of your life growing up in London. While you are not ignorant of racism (how can you be, when a friend says ‘My family don't like people who look like you’), you attend a school where half your classmates identify as non- White. Race is present but it does not dominate, and you take this for granted. Your family then move to a small, seaside city in southern England, and you start at a new school.