My Master Studies & MeToo Research
Donation protected
(Hi everyone, my name is Yan Yang, an international student at Georgetown University. The following is my story, and if you can help me, I would be super grateful!)
The second year of my M.Sc. study in Computer Science is about to start, but I still can't make ends meet.
The salary and other inequalities from the 30 years in my home country are still showing their influence. For instance, there were apparent differential treatments during my career, as quite a number of my leaders and interviewers argued for me privately while they can't change the companies' decision. This definitely contributed to my lower salary compared to males of a similar situation. In addition, my family is unable and unwilling to help with the rest of my educational expenses while they were able to support my cousin brother to buy his house.
I collected various contest medals and scholarships until the second year of my undergraduate studies (2003) when I was subjected to sexual harassment from male students at my school, as well as a prolonged period of verbal abuse from my roommates in the dorm. Previously, my school and family almost never mentioned anything about sex and gender, nor did they have any concept of bullying in their daily lives. As a result, there was no way for me to understand that I was being unfairly treated. Thus, I suffered from decreased levels of concentration and experienced difficulties absorbing information, ultimately affecting my academic performance. In fact, the records left from my undergraduate studies almost made acceptance to a top-ranking school with a scholarship impossible.
However, things were not too bad when I tried my best. Even with the terrible harassment experience during undergraduate school, my studies ended with a near 3.0-grade average and a scholarship in one of my math courses. Furthermore, after I found a proper psychology therapist in 2013, although I already can't find as good a chance due to Chinese companies' policies being biased towards new graduates, I still quickly quadrupled my income (from $750/month to $3000/month if translated into dollars) within my limited opportunities and gained recognition in IT industry, with head-hunting frequently contacting me and several leaders willing to recommend me when I apply for a graduate school.
Having now worked for three years in web developing, I intend to enhance and deepen my computer science core abilities and extend my knowledge and skills from web developing to also include NLP, ML, and scientific research. These skills I will learn in grad school will allow me to play more important roles in the industry, as well as conduct my intended research in the future. The latter is what I have long yearned for because applying NLP in social-linguistics may be a good way of using data to advocate for improvements for minorities.
I am a minority of gender, age, and socio-economy status, as well as a sexual assault survivor still suffering from mental health issues. Consequently, I have many difficulties with my current study, one of which, for example, is that while my classmates form study groups, I often must cope with everything alone and even face hostilities. Besides, I still need to pay a lot of money to psychological therapists. I blame it partly on what happened right before I came here which actually made me retraumatized -- I was removed from my undergraduate classmate chat group when I tried to argue about sexual assault and PTSD. Now I wanted to raise awareness among my peers of the fact that minorities have so much more difficulties to cope with, and otherwise, they could be as excellent as mainstream people in this area, but I felt the need to be excellent to make my voice convincing.
Bearing this in mind, I proactively strived to be excellent and earned a 3.945-grade average in my first year of grad school. To my surprise, however, my school dean informed me they simply don't offer scholarships to graduate students once they're enrolled, regardless of the grades achieved. I also worked as a part-time research assistant for the maximum working hours allowed for international students. In a gender-related study on tweet data, I received some starting points for potential papers and plan to apply for a Ph.D. in fall of 2019.

One of my teachers asked me to study for the Ph.D. with her because of my excellent performance as her RA during the summer. She usually offers her students ready ideas about papers, and we just need to realize them. This professor’s offer has been very promising, and her students all have published many papers and received plenty of employment offers after graduation. However, I feel more drawn to realize my own ideas with the Victims of Violence Project in our data-centric lab: applying NLP in social-linguistics for the purpose of advocating improvement of situations for victims of sexual assault, etc. When I learned how to develop virtual reality products in the previous teacher's lab, the first idea that came to mind was that I could use it to illustrate how PTSD feels using the research results from tweets with the "MeToo" hashtag, so people may accept facts that are not easily accepted by plain preaching. Nonetheless, due to the different style of this professor, I need to find paper topics and take risks on my own with the rest of my Ph.D. life if I choose to be on this track.
In the last year of my master study before I could start earning my Ph.D. stipend, I will feel less promised and more struggling about the financial issue, but I still hope to choose the "MeToo" research topic, so I hope I can get support for my choice. Your donations will reduce my burden and allow me to better contribute to the advocation of helping PTSD people as well as the diversity of STEM.
I will thank you from the bottom of my heart and continue to spread your kindness to other people in need once I'm out of the temporary difficulty myself.
———————————
THE MATHS:
The estimated cost of the rest of my school year is more than $66,000, while after working the maximum hours during the summer, my US bank account balance was $10,000. If I continue working the maximum hours during the following semesters, I will earn another $10,000 or so. Besides that, there is a little less than $20,000 in my Chinese bank account, and my boyfriend in China may be able to support me around $10,000 in the future, but not promised.
The second year of my M.Sc. study in Computer Science is about to start, but I still can't make ends meet.
The salary and other inequalities from the 30 years in my home country are still showing their influence. For instance, there were apparent differential treatments during my career, as quite a number of my leaders and interviewers argued for me privately while they can't change the companies' decision. This definitely contributed to my lower salary compared to males of a similar situation. In addition, my family is unable and unwilling to help with the rest of my educational expenses while they were able to support my cousin brother to buy his house.
I collected various contest medals and scholarships until the second year of my undergraduate studies (2003) when I was subjected to sexual harassment from male students at my school, as well as a prolonged period of verbal abuse from my roommates in the dorm. Previously, my school and family almost never mentioned anything about sex and gender, nor did they have any concept of bullying in their daily lives. As a result, there was no way for me to understand that I was being unfairly treated. Thus, I suffered from decreased levels of concentration and experienced difficulties absorbing information, ultimately affecting my academic performance. In fact, the records left from my undergraduate studies almost made acceptance to a top-ranking school with a scholarship impossible.
However, things were not too bad when I tried my best. Even with the terrible harassment experience during undergraduate school, my studies ended with a near 3.0-grade average and a scholarship in one of my math courses. Furthermore, after I found a proper psychology therapist in 2013, although I already can't find as good a chance due to Chinese companies' policies being biased towards new graduates, I still quickly quadrupled my income (from $750/month to $3000/month if translated into dollars) within my limited opportunities and gained recognition in IT industry, with head-hunting frequently contacting me and several leaders willing to recommend me when I apply for a graduate school.
Having now worked for three years in web developing, I intend to enhance and deepen my computer science core abilities and extend my knowledge and skills from web developing to also include NLP, ML, and scientific research. These skills I will learn in grad school will allow me to play more important roles in the industry, as well as conduct my intended research in the future. The latter is what I have long yearned for because applying NLP in social-linguistics may be a good way of using data to advocate for improvements for minorities.
I am a minority of gender, age, and socio-economy status, as well as a sexual assault survivor still suffering from mental health issues. Consequently, I have many difficulties with my current study, one of which, for example, is that while my classmates form study groups, I often must cope with everything alone and even face hostilities. Besides, I still need to pay a lot of money to psychological therapists. I blame it partly on what happened right before I came here which actually made me retraumatized -- I was removed from my undergraduate classmate chat group when I tried to argue about sexual assault and PTSD. Now I wanted to raise awareness among my peers of the fact that minorities have so much more difficulties to cope with, and otherwise, they could be as excellent as mainstream people in this area, but I felt the need to be excellent to make my voice convincing.
Bearing this in mind, I proactively strived to be excellent and earned a 3.945-grade average in my first year of grad school. To my surprise, however, my school dean informed me they simply don't offer scholarships to graduate students once they're enrolled, regardless of the grades achieved. I also worked as a part-time research assistant for the maximum working hours allowed for international students. In a gender-related study on tweet data, I received some starting points for potential papers and plan to apply for a Ph.D. in fall of 2019.
One of my teachers asked me to study for the Ph.D. with her because of my excellent performance as her RA during the summer. She usually offers her students ready ideas about papers, and we just need to realize them. This professor’s offer has been very promising, and her students all have published many papers and received plenty of employment offers after graduation. However, I feel more drawn to realize my own ideas with the Victims of Violence Project in our data-centric lab: applying NLP in social-linguistics for the purpose of advocating improvement of situations for victims of sexual assault, etc. When I learned how to develop virtual reality products in the previous teacher's lab, the first idea that came to mind was that I could use it to illustrate how PTSD feels using the research results from tweets with the "MeToo" hashtag, so people may accept facts that are not easily accepted by plain preaching. Nonetheless, due to the different style of this professor, I need to find paper topics and take risks on my own with the rest of my Ph.D. life if I choose to be on this track.
In the last year of my master study before I could start earning my Ph.D. stipend, I will feel less promised and more struggling about the financial issue, but I still hope to choose the "MeToo" research topic, so I hope I can get support for my choice. Your donations will reduce my burden and allow me to better contribute to the advocation of helping PTSD people as well as the diversity of STEM.
I will thank you from the bottom of my heart and continue to spread your kindness to other people in need once I'm out of the temporary difficulty myself.
———————————
THE MATHS:
The estimated cost of the rest of my school year is more than $66,000, while after working the maximum hours during the summer, my US bank account balance was $10,000. If I continue working the maximum hours during the following semesters, I will earn another $10,000 or so. Besides that, there is a little less than $20,000 in my Chinese bank account, and my boyfriend in China may be able to support me around $10,000 in the future, but not promised.
Organizer
Yeon Yang
Organizer
Washington D.C., DC
