by Caleb Fort
Daily Lobo
Michelle Touson sometimes has a hard time explaining to her family why it takes so long to get a doctorate.
Because many minority students are the first people in their families to go to graduate school, it can be difficult for their parents to understand, said Touson, an African-American graduate student in sports administration.
"You can explain undergraduate. It's four years. You take your classes, and you graduate," she said. "But graduate (school) is different. It's like a secret society - skull and crossbones, ball and shaft, whatever. Unless they've gone through it, you can't really explain it to them."
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Touson spoke Tuesday at a roundtable discussion about first-generation minority graduate students sponsored by Peer Mentoring for Graduates of Color.
About 15 people attended the discussion, which was the first of four scheduled for the semester.
Mabel González, a project
assistant for peer mentoring and the first member of her family to attend graduate school, said the bureaucracy of a university can be intimidating for someone whose family hasn't been through it.
"If you're the first generation of your family going to graduate school, you don't really have any experience with academia," she said. "You don't know where to go for funding, and your parents don't have any advice. Academia is like an unknown beast sometimes, and a lot of minorities get lost."
In 2005, 52 percent of graduate students at UNM were white, 17.5 percent were Hispanic, 4 percent were American Indian and 1.6 percent were African-American, according to the UNM Web site.
"Undergrad is like, 'Bring us your poor, your sick.' It's like Ellis Island," Touson said. "Everybody's in there. But once you get to doctoral, there aren't many people
of color."
Having a lack of minority peers and professors isn't good, but it's not the end of the world, said Gabriel Sanchez, an assistant professor in the political science
department who participated in the discussion.
"One thing that a lot of first-generation graduate students don't do is develop a social network of people within your discipline," he said. "If you're in a situation where there are no minority graduate students or professors, that doesn't mean you should just parachute out of there. It means you should expand your social network."
Students should be willing to accept that they aren't surrounded by members of the same race, he said.
"You have to be willing to step outside of your comfort zone," he said. "That means you might have to hang out with people you wouldn't normally hang out with, but sometimes, that's what you're going to have to do to be happy and successful."
Ted Jojola, an American-Indian professor in the School of Architecture and Planning, said it's important for graduate students to find a mentor.
"Go to presentations and conferences," he said. "Talk to people you respect, and start developing relationships. Mentorship, first and foremost, is about finding someone who cares about what you're doing, either because of who you are or what you're studying."
Although it is easy to blame UNM for some of the difficulties that come with being a minority graduate student, it is
important to take advantage of what the University offers, Sanchez said.
"We can sit here and say, 'UNM doesn't do this. UNM doesn't do that,'" he said. "But there are a lot of resources here that are underutilized. I would love to see more people at an event like this. That's something that is available now."
