Working together to achieve equity and inclusion
2/7/2019
Engineering Penn State sat down with Dr. Tonya Peeples, who joined the College of Engineering on August 15, 2018, as its inaugural associate dean for equity and inclusion and professor of chemical engineering. We are pleased to share that conversation with you.
Engineering Penn State (EPS): What drew you to Penn State?
Tonya Peeples (TP): I was really drawn to Penn State for the opportunity to become the College of Engineering’s inaugural associate dean for equity and inclusion. I remember applying for the position and thinking, “Wow, I might be the perfect person for this job; I’ve done all these things in my career that are aligned with what this role is.”
I was coming from another big institution but with a smaller engineering college, and the opportunity to have an impact on a large number of students and to work in a different culture was something that was appealing to me. The scale of the engineering community here is one that can really have impact across campus and beyond.
Justin Schwartz, who is the Harold and Inge Marcus Dean of Engineering, is a major champion for equity in the College. We had some conversations in the recruitment stage and all along the way, he has been a great support and ally helping me establish the initiatives that we have in the College. I was really encouraged that I was going to be doing this in the right place with the right kind of support in the work environment to make some progress.
EPS: What do you find most exciting about this position?
TP: The ability to build something and to design a structure to advance equity goals is really exciting. It was very important to me that the position is equity and inclusion, so that we provide opportunity and access to people who want to pursue engineering, but also to develop the capacity to really create a welcoming environment for education and scholarship.
What I’ve been really excited and encouraged about lately is that we can’t achieve equity and inclusion if the whole community isn’t involved. A lot of times when you hear equity and inclusion, you have people who check out and say, “That doesn’t represent me,” but it absolutely does represent everybody. We all are working to create this welcoming environment where anybody who comes in feels an ease of wellbeing while they’re reaching their educational goals. I’m really excited to work on an allies program across groups and disciplines to talk about how we create the kind of environment we want to have in college and in engineering specifically. I think there’s a lot of energy in terms of how we all make the environment better for women, for first-generation students, for minorities, whatever piece of the pie you represent, how do we make it better, how do we have our white male students go out and feel like they can be really effective at advancing equity from their position. I want everybody to see themselves as a partner.
Along those lines, I’ve been encouraging people to think about who made a difference in their life. An ally could be a U.S. citizen making a difference for an international student, or it could be a low-income student that made a difference for somebody who is a person of color. There are so many different aspects of who we are that we bring here to Penn State. Who made a difference for you? I’ve had a lot of mentors who didn’t look like me — a lot of white men, including my Ph.D. adviser who made a difference for me. And that’s really what I feel like I’m here for, to make a difference for people.
EPS: How has your professional experience prepared you to be the associate dean for equity and inclusion?
TP: I started my career as a chemical engineering faculty member, and my entry into the area of equity and inclusion work happened when I was an assistant professor at the University of Iowa and I was writing a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER grant. In the CAREER program, the NSF supports junior faculty who are “teacher-scholars.” I got feedback from the NSF that I should really think about pursuing an education program and where I can make an impact. And for me, being an underrepresented student, being a woman in engineering, I thought I could really do some things to help women and underrepresented students. That part of my work really grew.
All throughout my career as a faculty member, I was working with students, whether it was outreach to K-12 students or working with students in professional organizations. I was engaged in that way which led me into doing more in that area. Once I got tenure and I could devote a bit more time to the service part of it, I developed more leadership in equity and inclusion work.
EPS: Can you explain your experience as a woman and minority in engineering, and how the experience has aided you in your role in equity and inclusion?
TP: There were times when I would be the only African American in the STEM space. The numbers were low when I was in undergraduate school, but there were people like me around. It wasn’t until graduate school that I was one of very few African American students, particularly Ph.D. students in my program. I was at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and it’s sort of ironic because Baltimore is a very diverse city, but in graduate school you didn’t see that diversity in the lab. In fact, in 1997, I was the only woman faculty member in the University of Iowa College of Engineering.
My experience has helped me think about others and what their struggles might be being the only female or minority in a classroom, lab group, or in a meeting, thinking about how to build community, how to work with people who maybe don’t look like you or have the same background as you in terms of mentoring. Whether it was teachers or lab mates, I grew in my ability to work with different people, whether they were international students or U.S. students from different parts of the country, and I really just got a lot of empathy from it in terms of being able to understand what somebody else might be going through, and to help figure out how do we do things to improve the sense of community for people.
EPS: Can you talk about the Dean’s Engineering Equity Initiative?
TP: Penn State is a large institution that is graduating so many engineers. If we really look at advancing equity at the University, it could actually have a national impact because we graduate so many people. And as we think about equity, what we want to do is think about how we can graduate men and women who are advancing equity in the workplace, because if we have more participation from different groups at the undergraduate level, they go into the professional world. And the professional world includes the next generation of professors as well as those who are working at companies, so a lot of companies around the country have been talking about getting more women and underrepresented minorities into high tech fields. It also impacts those who come from economically disadvantage backgrounds or first-generation students whose parents never went to college. We’re thinking about what the experience is like for these people, and we are asking, “How do we develop more opportunity and more access to the things that help them be successful in engineering?”
We are successful in inspiring students if they have role models. For instance, it’s so important for women to see other women in engineering to prove that women can do this work.
It is crucial to share the stories of successful women, to have successful women as faculty, as graduate students, as college students, also sharing stories with women that are in the K-12 space so that there’s this idea that this is something that women can do. They can go into engineering in a variety of fields and be successful and make a difference in the world. I think another aspect is the inspiration of helping people. The idea that engineering is a discipline that solves problems and designs solutions to make the world better is a part of the draw to become an engineer.
In the faculty equity space in the College of Engineering, I’m launching an equity advising program to help improve the faculty search process to think about things like how do we improve the applicant pool, and how do we look at every piece of the hiring process to identity areas where we can think about equity and inclusion, and do a better job of attracting diverse faculty into the College.
EPS: When talking about equity, there is a perception that underrepresented students who aren’t as academically successful as their counterparts will be accepted just to “meet the quota.” Can you explain this misconception?
TP: It really is misinformation. There are very talented people on paper who are just as strong, if not stronger, than the current students that are being admitted. We’re not talking about changing admission standards, but actually changing the “why” or the reason people would want to come to Penn State or enter into engineering. We are really making the case for how engineering helps people. There are people who don’t necessarily see themselves in engineering because engineering has never been communicated to them as an option and because they have so few role models. These individuals have the talent and the passion and the ability to really be engineers. An important piece of equity is engaging our whole community, thinking about how we can get more people who want to be engineers to be able to do so. That’s really what it’s about.
EPS: Along those lines, what is the Dean’s Equity Partners Program, and how can alumni and corporate partners get involved?
TP: One of the things that we’ve been able to identify is that the yield or the number of women students who meet or exceed our admissions criteria that can actually come to Penn State is lower as a percentage because of finances. It is either too expensive or they don’t have enough scholarship money. We realize that is an important lever to get these really talented people into engineering. Our corporate partners are very much interested in having great employees, so we’re engaging with them to think about how we can create this opportunity for students and lower the cost of their education through scholarships.
EPS: How do you plan to create an inclusive academic community at Penn State?
TP: We need to communicate that Penn State has everything that a person needs to be successful and to be supported. Whether it’s a special living option, scholarship opportunities, or undergraduate research, or whether they’re coming from a Commonwealth Campus into Penn State University Park, we want to make sure that they’re connected with a network that enables them to be successful. And a lot of times we think about it in terms of mentoring — we have this idea that there’s one person who’s going to know everything that we need, when actually it’s more of a matrix or a community. There are other people around that are “human landmarks” that help you along the way.
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Tonya Peeples
