Note: Professor Holly Stocking's J554 Science Writing class traveled to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Francisco last month. Students covered and reporting on presentations as well as wrote their reflections on the experience. Below is one of those.

Sandra Arao Ameny
When I walked into my first scientific symposium on voting machines and elections, I scanned the room to see which scientists and journalists were there. I briefly looked at the audience, too. I soon realized, to my dismay, that I was the "only" one.

"What I’m I doing here?" I asked myself. No people of color, minorities, whatever politically correct word you would like to use…I was already discouraged.

I went outside to get some fresh air when I bumped into a security guard. An African-American woman, she looked at me, already knowing what I was about to ask.

"There aren’t any black scientists that I have seen or black journalists," she offered matter-of-factly. "But you better not even think about leaving," and then she gave me a hug. "If you leave now, you won’t find out if there are any."

So I stayed. I walked back into the room and listened to scientists talk about statistical data and voting machines.

Day after day, I attended the symposia, seeing only a handful of scientists and journalists who looked like me. On Sunday, I had missed my flight, so I had to reschedule it for 12:30 that night. I didn’t want to stay at the airport, so I decided I would go back to meeting headquarters to attend another symposium.

That’s when he bumped into me. I was rushing to a symposium about dead languages. The world-renowned Sudanese physicist Mohamed Hassan, someone I had heard my Ugandan mom talk about many times, was standing in front of me. I was walking so quickly I had knocked all his papers to the floor.

After apologizing profusely and picking up his papers, I stood up and shook his hand.

"I am so happy to see you," I said, a statement I assumed he would understand.

He told me he was happy to see me here, too. He must have sensed my need for his words, for he encouraged me not to shrink. Changing the face of science and journalism, he suggested, begins with little steps, from students like me.

At the symposium, Hassan talked about increasing technology and science in the developing world, especially Africa, and he pointed out how nations like Nigeria, Uganda, and Zambia were taking out loans to contribute it to technological development. I found his words exciting for countries in the midst of historical difficulties like poverty and disease.

As a person of color, I felt intimidated and at times awkward not to be in a multi-racial conference. However, I soon realized "multiculturalism" is not achieved overnight. It is achieved because of the presence of people like me at meetings like this one, not our absence.

If other science-writing students of color have a chance to attend a science conference, they should by all means go. It will only widen their views and the field of science writing.

Ameny is a graduate student in journalism.



See the list of other student essays.

Read the main story, "Students attend, cover science conference."