By Ya’el Courtney

I am one of the happiest, most content people I know. Life is really unbelievably good for me right now, but it took a lot to get here. I left a difficult family home at fifteen years old, so ten years ago now. My grand entrance into the independent adult world was made without money, without health insurance, without a car, without parents to go home to on the holidays or call in tough times. Those were an indescribably difficult couple of years. A lot of the people I met at that time – other troubled teens in foster care – are still struggling today. I wasn’t expected to make it this far. I had a temporary guardian tell me once that, the way she saw it, I had two paths left for me in life: “become a heroin-addicted prostitute on the streets or enlist in the military and maybe they’ll straighten you up”.

Despite being immensely driven and curious about many academic subjects, I didn’t end up getting a high school diploma because of everything else I was juggling in my life at the time. In the year that followed, in an intentional journey of self-discovery and career exploration through reading, I set my sights on a PhD in neuroscience. I was bound and determined to make that happen, starting with earning my GED. GED in hand, I still had almost no money to my name and certainly no one to cosign any sort of college loan. Notwithstanding what I feel is the truly extortionary nature of American higher education, I eventually managed to figure out a way to go to college.

I set about learning what I would need to do to eventually get into a neuro PhD program. I gleaned that I should major in relevant fields, get a good GPA, get research experience in labs, present research posters, and try to publish a paper if at all possible. All of this while barely able to support myself on a day-to-day basis. Yikes. My freshman year of college, a double major in biochemistry and psychology, I averaged 3 hours and 43 minutes of sleep a night because I was trying to manage it all without compromising anything. I took classes from 7:45am-12:30pm. I volunteered, unpaid, in a research lab for a couple hours every afternoon, and then I worked as a manager at Wendy’s from 4pm to midnight (and yes, I still eat Wendy’s!). I snuck in homework and studying in the 15-minute breaks between classes, while sitting in other classes, by listening to recorded lectures on my drive to work, or when I’d wake up at 5am every day before my classes started. After a year of this, my body couldn’t keep up, and I ended up getting quite sick.

Early sophomore year, over the course of a couple weeks, I got sicker and sicker until eventually I couldn’t even get up off of my living room floor. I didn’t go to the doctor for weeks because I didn’t have any health insurance. Surprise, Surprise! I couldn’t afford it. When my roommate’s mom kindly offered to take me to and pay for a visit to Urgent Care, I learned it was just concurrent cases of mononucleosis and strep throat that had spiraled out of control. I had to start getting more sleep at night to stay healthy, but that meant making less income. For the next year or so, I ate almost exclusively eggs, rice, and beans to try to keep my spending low enough to be sustainable. My roommate would lovingly tease me if she saw salsa in the fridge, “ooooh big spender this week huh?” In later college years, I started serving and bartending. I was thankful for a way to earn more money than my $10.50/hour Wendy’s manager wage. As my lab work ramped up, I often found myself coming into lab before and after bartending shifts. I optimized my assays such that I figured out which incubations could be stretched over a shift, and I’d regularly walk into lab at 1am to finish up an in situ hybridization assay or to get in some confocal time. I was a breath away from giving up so many times. How nice it would have been to just sleep.

One time I ruined my laptop when, in my constantly sleep-deprived state, I knocked over a coffee onto it, frying the Macbook’s logic board. I responded to a Craigslist ad and ended up taking a side gig as a house-cleaner, scrubbing the floors of the wealthy to earn enough cash to get a used laptop so I could keep doing my homework and research projects anywhere but the public computers at the library. When some of the families realized that I could cook, I got paid to meal-prep for the wealthy, too!

Being here at Harvard is a dream, it often doesn’t feel real. I have health insurance now!!! Even as recently as the summer of 2019 before I began my PhD, things were not easy. I had achieved so many of my wildest dreams upon accepting my offer of admission to the PiN program, but WOW was it going to be expensive to move to Boston! I was shocked to learn that by the April/May before I moved, I had to pay a lump sum including first month’s rent, last month’s rent, security deposit, and a broker fee to secure an apartment. I am thankful from the bottom of my heart for my roommate, who was willing to front me thousands of dollars to cover this and trusted me to pay him back. I ended up continuing my work as a bartender and picking up a summer job in a research lab until 3 days before I made the move to Boston so that I could pull together that money. Now, basking in the relative riches of a PhD student stipend, I can finally afford to sleep at night.

Photo courtesy of Michael Goderre

I like to share these things because I want people in academia right now to think about how the choices they make can make our institutions more accessible to the populations that they’ve excluded. Start with the very basics: please pay the undergraduates in your lab. Pay your undergraduates, pay your techs, pay people who design your logos, pay the people who give your diversity seminars and panels, and pay them well. Advocate for the kinds of healthcare reforms that make medical care an accessible reality for all. Advocate for welfare programs that are straightforward to receive and not buried under literal years of paperwork and red tape. Host summer students in your lab as part of funded research experiences and give them that leg up into this world. Give young students a chance who may not have been able to get research experience somewhere else yet. Mentor people at every level and help to demystify the secrets to success in academia. I owe everything to mentors, teachers, and friends who gave of themselves, their time, and their wisdom to help me – and you can change lives like they changed mine.

Ya’el Courtney is a graduate student in the PhD Program in Neuroscience at Harvard University, working in the laboratory of Maria Lehtinen at Boston Children’s Hospital. She studies the choroid plexus, an organ in the brain which produces and regulates cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and serves as a barrier between the body’s blood and CSF.

Check out this Humans of HBI Q&A with Ya’el here >>