A graduation post: Where I am now and why I changed my name.

Rene Canady, Bachelor of Science in Bioengineering and French Minor, Cum Laude.

Nearly six months after graduation, I struggle to find space to name what the past four years looked like. A summer research internship in Israel gone wrong, being named the first student ambassador to South Africa for a diversity program and having your work exploited, and a semesters as the only Black girl in classes with professors who expect self-sacrifice from each student. A whole lot went wrong. I got rejected from every public health summer program I applied to last year, and several scholarships.

On the contrary, I sit here typing this from my new apartment, where I look outside to a car I paid for myself, knowing that my 9 to 5 is not dictated by anyone but myself. I have received the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship award and the Olin Fellowship for Women. I know my stipend is coming monthly, my bills are paid, I finally have steady healthcare and my fridge is full (when I remember to buy groceries, but the point is I have the privilege to.) I didn’t have an honors GPA until after my last semester of college.

I struggle to feel proud of myself. Honestly, many of the challenges I faced weren’t just a vague, structural force, but decisions unmade by people in power. I’m still waiting on them to make them. I wonder what it feels like to not wake up every day and face the odds, and still not beat them. If it weren’t for poverty, mass incarceration, substance abuse, healthcare access, racial trauma, and sexism, I wouldn’t be who I was. They informed how I felt in every space, led me to understanding how exactly a bioengineering program with a pre-collegiate diversity program can fail and put out exactly one Black female and male a year, and how everything bioengineers learn and make are only for a small percentage of people.

I spent 2 years working on a low-cost navigational device for the blind, and it will not work without a smart phone or internet. My senior design project of creating a new tool for surgeons involved no patient input. I took at least four classes about engineering for humanity, and none of them mentioned health disparities, poverty, or even lack access to health care. All of these things my family faces daily, vigorously. There was/is no space in bioengineering for those thinking of equity. Accessibility was a simple feature, and not the part of the main design. I spent my last two years in school thinking about how I was designing medical products for everyone but the people I loved.

I think how I feel both pushed out of the field and more passionate about it with time. I loved prototyping and building. I love solving problems even more. As opposed to attempt to change the culture as a small drop within, I looked for spaces that could enhance my understanding of how a society so unequal could lead to sicker people. I have ended up in the Sociology department at Washington University of St Louis.

I learned shortly after graduation that I had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I didn’t learn anything about mental health from my family. I spent ten years without my mother and grief bled into everything I did, whether for the better or for the worse. It amazed me how I was able to withstand four years of turbulence, when the place I spent the most time in reminded me of my fate in the world. As the tenth year brought me to knees over and over again, I decided to lean into this grief. There is no reason for me to be ashamed in who I am, and I am still learning to lean into that deeply (with the support of my partner and chosen family.)

I want everything I do to honor my mother. Without her way of loving, I wouldn’t have been able to find so much love and beauty in the world. I started going by my middle name, the same as hers in 2020. It reminds me of the meaning of love, Black health, and passion.