Becoming Professional
[Music]
[Applause]
it was a summer afternoon
in the late 90s when my cousin kiki
pulled up to our house
in her old school beige car
and when she parked her brakes screeched
so loudly
that the whole neighborhood stopped and
in the back seat of her car
were my younger cousins jordan and
julius which meant
that we needed to put away everything in
our house that could potentially be
broken
but that wasn’t what i remembered on
that afternoon what i remember was the
music
the music and the lyrics that spewed
from kiki’s car
as she got out and she struggled to hold
her then two-year-old son
on her right hip she held a brand new
shiny cd
in her left hand kiki always introduced
us to music
it was like her thing whenever she would
come to our house she would bring new
music and
she would rearrange all of the furniture
in our living room
so that could she could teach us the
latest dance moves
and we would try to keep up with her me
and my sisters and whenever we couldn’t
we would just fall onto the floor and we
would laugh
and sometimes kiki would leave her music
behind which was good for me
because that meant that i could play her
music over and over again
and so when she got inside and got
settled and put her children down
she took the cd and she placed it in our
stereo system
and she said this is a new artist he
from new orleans
she looked for the volume button before
she increased it and said
they call him juvenile now this was
before the world had come to know
juvenile
for the party anthem that can change any
party at the drop of a dime before he
became known for his song
back that ass up and in true cousin form
big cousin form she had introduced us to
him
before the world had come to know him
for who he was
she even took us for a ride around
detroit city that day all around the
west side of detroit
windows down music up wind blowing in
our face
summer was in full effect and i love
that cd
so much that i didn’t wait for her to
accidentally leave it behind
actually asked if she could leave allow
me to borrow it
and she said yes and i played that album
over and over again especially over the
next few months while i was applying
to some of the top high schools in
detroit city and by the time i got to
high school
i continued playing music especially
while i did my homework assignments
especially jay-z and it was something
that really confused my mother and my
father because
they could never understand how i was
able to do both to play music
so loudly and to intently focus on my
homework assignments
my mother would tell her friends oh you
would think that she would get
distracted but the opposite was true
it was the familiarity of the music and
the lyrics that allowed me to solve
unfamiliar problems in my homework
assignments
and as i continued to venture throughout
my educational journey
as i would leave detroit and venture
into higher ed and in professional
spaces
it was my music that would anchor me it
was the familiarity in the songs
that would keep me close to home when i
was away from home
by the time i got to undergrad i quickly
became aware
of how my music and my identities didn’t
particularly
fit within the space of higher education
and professional spaces
professional development workshops
sessions and all these mandated events
slowly
turned me and molded me into someone
that i didn’t really recognize anymore
i remember one of my instructors in
particular during my senior year she
told us all me and my classmates
make sure that you clean up your
facebook make sure that there’s nothing
on your website or your pages that will
cause an employer
not to hire you for some people that
simply meant just
removing your pictures at parties or
playing beer pong but for me
that meant something a little deeper it
was a little different
that meant kind of visually
disassociating myself with anything that
connected me to my home in my urban
community
because as we were collecting or
thinking about where we wanted to do our
student teaching internships
detroit was at the bottom of the list
very few of my peers
wanted to do their student teaching in
detroit because though it wasn’t
explicitly stated the idea of detroit
was not particularly connected to
something that was safe
let alone professional and so
i did i deleted the images i deleted the
instances of anything that would
associate me with that community
and i can be honest i was lucky enough
to have tons of advisors and mentors
who constantly reminded me that because
of my identity and because of where i
grew up
that that positioned me in a very unique
way to connect to the students and the
communities where i wanted to teach
i’ll never forget my academic advisor
jennifer watson who constantly reminded
me
that i didn’t just have head knowledge
but because i lived it it was embodied
knowledge and it was in my heart and
that was something that i could carry
with me
throughout my educational journey still
those hidden messages about what it
meant to be professional continued to
war with the affirming words that i got
from lots of people in my corner
how vulnerable our first generation
college students and young professionals
who venture out into new worlds
for many of us becoming professional
means
going into unfamiliar places that do not
understand our languages that
do not understand our styles of dress
and not even the highly seasoned lunches
that we bring to our workspaces and it’s
true
i get it there does need to be training
and things about
preparing people to become professional
how else is a software engineer
is supposed to learn how to become a
software engineer without being trained
but it’s not training that i’m talking
about it’s not merely training
i’m talking about the values the belief
systems and the structures
that uphold professionalism that do not
take into account
multiple ways that people exist in the
world
and that is because i think in the
united states in particular
there are very westernized static
notions
of what it means to be competent of what
it means to be eligible
of what it means to show up as qualified
and so as i ventured into these more
professional spaces
the music the volume of my music lowered
and when we think about professionalism
it just isn’t professionalism in a sense
if we really think about it
it is an identity construct that is
steeped in whiteness
it is racialized it is gendered it is so
many other things
and unfortunately it does not take into
account the diverse ways of being
instead it marginalizes it
as i continued in my educational journey
and i moved to new york city to start my
masters
when people would ask me where i was
from actually replace detroit
with michigan i’d finally come to a
place where i was
at peace rather with feeling like my
identity as a nigerian and an
african-american was something that i
finally wrapped my head around
story for another day but still this
professional
tension was still continuing to war with
me
over and over again colleagues would
constantly ask me
how is it that you grew up in a city
where people get shot and robbed every
day but you’re so smart
you’re so different i even had one
colleague ask me or tell me rather
that she would have never guessed that i
was from detroit she considered it a
compliment
i didn’t when i really unpacked her
statement
what i found and really heard was this
whole idea that like
someone who came from a place like mine
should not have been
or how did you end up in an ivy league
institution
because people who frequent those spaces
only go to safe schools where
there’s a safe neighborhood with lots of
money and my background and my identity
didn’t particularly fit
within the walls of the cherry oaked
institution
and that was true for one of my classes
too i was in a masters writing course
with a world
renowned professor who was known
globally for the work that she done on
reading and writing
across the globe in classrooms all over
and she asked us to bring in an
assignment to bring in a sample of our
students writing and i could not wait
i already had my student picked out ali
i’d worked so closely with him on his
memoir
he had visited his family and i ran and
he really wanted to write about it
and i was equally excited to bring that
piece of writing
into my class that evening and once the
semester got to an end we got all of our
feedback
and i turned to the last page and i read
her feedback
and i would never forget one line that
stuck out to me
it doesn’t look like any quality and
professional teaching has taken place in
your classroom
professional the word jumped off to the
page
into my heart and even caused it to skip
a beat
i was baffled how is it that i was
trained
at one of the nations at the nation’s
top elementary education training
program yet my
question or yet she questioned the
quality and the professionalism of my
teaching
was it because he had written a too
short of a memoir
was it because he had written in two
languages was it because of his
misspelled words i couldn’t figure it
out
what should i have done differently
i decided not to email her or send the
email that i drafted to figure out why
she’d given me that feedback
instead i actually called my father
vented with him on the phone
and kind of moved on kinda sorta instead
i leaned on schools of thought
that took into account multilingual
racial ethnically and linguistically
diverse students identities
that allow students to bring all of that
to their writing
ones that are not necessarily steeped in
very eurocentric ways
of thinking about the teaching of
writing and that comforted me
once i finished my master’s program i
moved 1748 miles
to austin texas from harlem new york
unlike detroit unlike harlem
austin texas would be the least diverse
city that i’d ever
lived in not only was i living
in an unfamiliar city but i was also
in an unfamiliar world of academia with
ways of thoughts and ways of doing
things that were so
foreign and by the time i got to the
second year of my phd program
i crashed it happened so suddenly my
friend had come down to visit me
for winter break and in the middle of us
talking and laughing
one second we were laughing and the next
minute i bursted into tears
all of the years of trying to uphold
this professional identity and
trying to keep it all together and
trying to
be acclimated into this new world had
finally like weighed me down
it was heavy and there was nothing
explicitly that
told me that i needed to be different
while you know becoming a part of the
academic world
but it was the ways that i was learning
to think the ways that i was learning to
write
the ways that i was learning to
conceptualize ideas
that actually put a wedge between me and
the people and the communities that i
loved most
as we were being trained to write
articles and put them in top tier
journals and things of that nature all i
could think about was what about my
cousin kiki
she could never access this work because
she’s not connected to a university or
what about
ali the manuscript that we just sent off
will he ever see it
and so that got me thinking what does it
mean for me
to bring all of myself to the work that
i do
and i’m very lucky to have a lovely
dissertation chair dr allison skirt who
reminds me that i can and that i
should but looking back
i’m really happy that i had that
breakdown and i’m really happy that i
cried those tears
because it was those tears that brought
me back to the very thing that
always made me feel as though i was at
home
and that’s my music i rekindled my love
with music
i was still listening to music and my
taste for music had evolved over the
years
but i went back to the music that i
listened to as an adolescent while i was
in high school
it was the familiarity of those lyrics
that helped me while i was
immersed in this very unfamiliar world
going through these articles and reading
all these different types of ideas that
were new to me that were foreign to me
it was the familiarity that would keep
me grounded
and so as i’ve thought about how do i
bring
all of the parts of me to my new world
i’ve done it in two ways as i mentioned
my music but i’ve also done it through
images in particular
because as we know the professional
world and the idea of what it means to
be professional is very much
communicated through words and images
and so for me i started to ask myself
well as i do in my dissertation research
what does it mean to author and to
narrate ourselves in ways that feel
authentic to us
and i began to think about ways that i
can show up across digital spaces
across different spaces like linkedin or
twitter or
instagram which is one of my favorite
because it does privilege
images in a world that really much
relies on words
and i started asking myself how can i
show up not just as a professional but
as a human
and how can i use my image in different
things that people see to humanize
and to diversify what it means to be
professional
and it kind of saved me not all the way
but i’m getting there
and so it’s true the way that we think
about professionalism
needs to be reconceptualized it needs to
be redefined
and not just in terms of our
professional identities but our
professional
and racial identities our professional
and gender identities
professional and and and
and that’s a question that a lot of
organizations and institutions are going
to have to ask
what does it mean for us to create a
professional space an institution
so that people can feel like they can
bring the multiplicity
of their identities and yes there’s been
work
there’s been policies that have been
changed non-discriminatory policies that
have been changed over time
but we still have so much work ahead
what does it mean for
us to show up as ourselves as young
professionals as interns
across the spaces where we have autonomy
where we have control
so that we don’t feel like as we acquire
our education and as we acquire
these professional experiences that we
don’t have to shed
who we are that we can hold on to our
most authentic selves
and so i’m a few months away from adding
phd
after my name i’m a few months away of
becoming dr lakia omagan
and it’s so funny because as i sit at my
desk or wherever i am coffee shop
the music that i’m listening to is the
same music
that i listen to while i was younger it
keeps me grounded
it makes me feel at home and as i’m
typing and as i’m writing
and as i’m interviewing and as i’m
updating my cv an inch and going on
different talks i’m reminding myself
that me
all of me gets to and should deserve to
show up
in the totality of who i am no more
hiding
no more shedding this is me
[Music]
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