Shireen Lewis was working on her dissertation for her doctorate and feeling very isolated and alone. She recalls thinking, “There must be other women of color going through the same thing I am.”
Lewis put out a call and four women showed up at the first gathering of a support group for women working on their Ph.ds. That was in 1997 in Washington, D.C. and since that time Lewis’s group, called SisterMentors, has helped 41 women receive their doctorate degrees.
Then in 2000, the women wanted a way to “reach back” and they began mentoring young girls by introducing them to the idea of attending college, counseling them on how to prepare for it and being a support to them through their years of higher education. To date they have helped 19 girls of color go to college and have mentored about 100 girls total. There are 30 girls in the program now. Most are from low-income families and most will be first-generation college graduates.
At that very first meeting of SisterMentors, Lewis greeted a group of frustrated women who said they had tried to form groups before and they had failed because people talked about everything except their dissertations.
“They wanted rules about how often we met, what we would talk about. They wanted to be accountable and wanted goals,” Lewis said.
Today, nearly 15 years later, SisterMentors meets once every four weeks. Members still write down their individual goals every six months. Of course, as they journey through the doctoral process, earn their degrees and move on, those goals change.
Over the years Lewis learned that one of the main reasons people drop out of the long process to earn a PhD (generally seven to 10 years) is lack of mentoring by the people on the candidate’s advisory committee or from the advisor. Also, Lewis said, families are often not supportive because they don’t understand the process and can’t understand why it takes so long to get a degree.
Treda Grayson, a doctoral student in Environmental Science and Public Policy at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., joined SisterMentors in the fall of 2009. She delivered her oral proposal defense before her committee that following January. She thought everything was going well, she said, until June, “when my committee kind of turned on me.”
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article courtesy of BlackAmericaWeb.com
