Blog Post 2: February 15th 2022

Do you feel that your identity (gender, race/ethnicity, family, culture, age, rural/urban upbringing, etc.) has influenced your educational journey and your mindset? 

My family is from Bosnia, and they ran from the war in the 90's (about around the time I was born). We got the papers signed to opt-in to the refugee program a number of countries were offering and we ended up in the U.S., AZ specifically. At the time, my family only had quite literally the clothes we were wearing, no English, no connections. My parents worked hard to get us to a middle-class style of living and as such I was raised in not poverty, but not much better standards of living. The reason I'm typing this is that a big part of being raised by a family who worked hard to get you the opportunities for success ties that success to the expectation of hard work(fixed mindset I think). Thus, I grew up influenced in the necessity of needing a good education for success in life over anything else. This has had good and bad consequences.

I am a white male but grew up in a bi-cultural household so it kind of suspended me in a world of "I'm not really American" but "I'm not really Bosnian either" which as a kid I'm sure other people can relate to a kind of non-belonging when that happens. That did however push me into more curious studies and that's how I came to be more STEM focused as I progressed through school.

Do you feel that your identity has influenced your sense of belonging in STEM?

 I am definitely in the majority on a technicality of being white and male so I suppose it makes it easier than women or ethnic minorities have had trying to belong in STEM fields.

Were you encouraged to pursue STEM from a young age, or did you end up in STEM despite your experiences in your younger years?

I was not 'encouraged' to pursue STEM but I was expected to succeed in education in general, whatever it may have been. I was a computer kid due to not really fitting in with any groups of kids in school so I played tons of computer games and video games(strategy games more than other types). I think that tends to get the logic gears turning(how are games made? Coding, Programming, etc.) which is usually a good starting point for going towards STEM. I'm sure someone could do a study on that and find a correlation.

Did you have any role models that influenced your educational path?

Not really? My models when I was in high school were actually philosophers, like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (the good ideas they had, not the bad ones). Getting into philosophy or any proper debate thinking gets you into thinking about logic(if p then q), which definitely pushed me more towards STEM than other fields. 

 

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