High Price

completed my graduate studies, I’d gained plenty of teaching experience.
    Another academic mentor inspired me as well during graduate school. Jim Rose was the director of the neuroscience graduate program and the most thorough scientist I have ever met. Charlie introduced me to him during my initial visit to campus, taking me to his lab where he studied newts. I had never even seen one of these small brownish green aquatic salamanders before. But the wide range of experiments that Jim was conducting on their behavior and brains impressed me. From the molecular level to neural network level, all the way out to behavior, he was systematically exploring stress and sexual behavior in this animal.
    Jim wasn’t just your stereotypical cerebral scientist, either. A former high school wrestler and track star, he kept himself in such great physical shape that, at twenty-five years my senior, he could outrun me when we worked out together. His tolerance to the altitude may have had something to do with it; nonetheless, he frequently left me behind and huffing. Jim showed me that you could be manly and be a scientist—and he and his wife took care of me emotionally as well as physically. Every week, I’d have lunch with his wife, Jill, at Godfather’s Pizza, where she was so well known to the staff that they kept a bottle of her personal salad dressing in the kitchen.
    Jim helped me negotiate the politics of the university, as well as teaching my neuroanatomy, neuropsychology, and neuroscience of sleep classes. He taught me how to give a scientific talk. His critiques of my work were so rigorous that I knew that if I passed the “Jim test,” I was ready to present my data to the world.
    In Wyoming, of course, I also continued to spend hours upon hours in the lab. Charlie later said to me, “I never had a graduate student before who was as dedicated and put in as much time all on their own. Other students were interested and so on, but they just didn’t put in the hours, and they weren’t as single-minded as you were. You were just so focused on getting done what you needed to get done.”

    Charlie, MH, and me on the day I received my PhD.
    Indeed, I knew I was well on my way to becoming a real scientist when I found myself working Saturday afternoons at the lab during football season. It was located not far from the stadium where the Wyoming Cowboys played, and every time they scored a touchdown, a cannon would go off, loud enough to be heard in the lab. I was still a huge football fan, so making the choice not to go to a big game that was so close was a real sign of dedication for me. I was just hungry for knowledge and scientific experience.
    Of course, I also felt extra pressure to compete well as a black person in such a white milieu. As Charlie put it: “I’ve tried to evaluate, well, was your race a benefit to you or a hindrance? And obviously, in some ways it was a little of each, probably. It may have opened some doors in the sense of having people willing to give you the opportunities. But I [also] got the sense that there was a lot of begrudging of your going farther than they thought you would.” It was as though people were pleased with themselves for giving me a chance, but astonished when I demolished the stereotypes they didn’t believe they still held by becoming a true competitor.
    This was clear from early on during my time in Wyoming. An experience I had at a cocktail party illustrates one way the issue played out. Probably during my second semester, I attended a party at the home of one of the neuroscience faculty members. This faculty member and I had a contentious relationship; he was disliked by many of the students because his teaching was obtuse and we struggled in his class. To make it worse, he belittled students and didn’t show any respect for us. In short, we thought he was an asshole.
    He had been raised on Long Island and my success seemed to make him especially uncomfortable. He’d make remarks like describing someone as “so rich he had the black maid and the black butler—no offense, Carl,” in a way that made clear either that he was oblivious or was blatantly disingenuous about his intentions. I was pretty sure it was the latter, but it was hard to tell.
    The neuroscience faculty and students got together for drinks or dinner regularly, either in the lab or at someone’s house. It was pretty much the only type of socializing many of us did: graduate school takes up