First-Gen Feels: Dr. Charles Scaife

Episode 2 of Season 2 is LIVE! On this week’s episode, I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Dr. Charles Scaife! Charles is currently an ORISE/ORAU Science, Technology, and Policy Fellow at the US Dept. of Energy and was formerly a NOAA Sea Grant Knauss Fellow! He received his PhD from the University of Virginia and completed his undergrad at UNC Chapel Hill! Enjoy!

Transcription

Transcribed by Caden Sweet (he/him)

Charles: My name is Charles Scaife. I am a PhD candidate at the University of Virginia and I’m also a John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellow at the US Department of Energy. My background is primarily in hydrology and ecology, basically studying the impacts of climate change on water resources and ecosystems throughout southern Appalachia. I think, you know, one of the things, though, that that really drives a lot of my interests and the work that I do is how some of that work intersects with applied - well, or applications, I guess. One of those applications being the intersections with energy. So, for example in my current role at the US Department of Energy I’ve been working a lot on sort of the intersection between water and the future of our water resources and sort of the future of our renewable energy.

JP: Very cool Charles, thank you for taking the time to be on today. So this conversation is being had on a rather important day in American history, to say the least. I know you said you’re zooming in the capital, I think you mentioned you’re in Washington DC. How are your emotions, how do you feel about the incoming administration and what do you think this means for black and brown folk like you and me.

Charles: Yeah, thank you I that’s a really great question. It’s it’s a really important date, the weather here is sunny, it snowed a little bit earlier today and the air feels electric. I think people are generally excited and feel maybe empowered, I don’t know if that’s too strong of a word, but I don’t know I feel excited. It’s been rough working in the sciences doing climate change work, right, working in the federal government and having this background in in climate work and not being able to talk about it in the way that you want, but also it not having sort of the respect that it deserves, and it means a lot as an environmental scientist that we have an incoming administration that his values are the climate crisis that we’re in. Taking off my environmental science hat and putting on my black scientist hat, maybe. I think we have a lot of work to do, as a country, and I think we’re on sort of a right direction. You know, I was just reflecting on this earlier today, as I was listening to the news but Kamala Harris will be not only our first woman Vice President, but our first black woman Vice President, and our first Asian American Vice President and I don’t know that that really resonates resonated with me until today and I’m not really sure why it took so long, but part of that really spoke to the core of who I am so you know I’m black but I’m also South Korean and I’ve grown up with the sort of two identities and outwardly right people see me as black and I think it’s important to sort of recognize kind of the full person that you’re bringing to the table, and I think having someone like her, in such a high office really shows a lot of people like me and, especially, people who are younger, gives them someone to look up to, and I think you know it’s it’s really powerful and yeah it’s a positive and great day in the U.S. it feels like.

JP: Yeah I mean it goes to show that representation really does matter. Like one of the things we’re doing at Occidental’s Biology Department is a lot more power was given to students to ask speakers to come in and and really show them like I - we titled the speaker series The Representation Matters Speaker Series. Just to, again, empower the future generation of scientists. So thank you for sharing that. Would you mind painting a picture of who you are, how were you raised, and what your upbringings were like.

Charles: My upbringing was complex, to say the least. So I was born in rural Florida in - on the panhandle. I like to call it swamp country it’s I think a lot of Florida is swamp country, but my particular nook of Florida just you know feels feels very - it’s got a close place in my heart and it’s right below Alabama, and my grandparents - both sets of my grandparents are from there, our families have been in that part of the country for for generations and that’s - so that’s sort of where, okay, let me pause. I’m I’m from Florida, I was, I was born there but you know I didn’t spend much time in in Florida my my dad joined the military at a really young age, my parents were both you know teenagers whenever whenever I was born so they joined the military as sort of the their only means of escaping kind of the poverty in which our family has been born into for for so long and, you know, growing up in the military gave me the ability to see this country and to see parts of the world. So I spent a lot of time growing up in many different places across the country, sort of settled on North Carolina in high school and that really sort of developed as my home, partly because you know I feel like high school’s a really formative time you kind of grow into the personality that you become for the rest of your life, in high school, and I found a really good group of friends that I sort of stuck with through college and who still live in in North Carolina today.

JP: Awesome yeah so a huge theme when I’m facilitating these conversations is a lot of people talk about finding their quote unquote tribes and communities, etc. It sounded like you had a pretty good support system in your friends, can you speak more to that and how has this shaped you, how how did you end up being lucky enough to find these people?

Charles: That’s a really tough question JP.

JP: Sorry, you just met me and I’m already asking these deep like -.

Charles: No yeah yeah you’re doing your job I guess. Yeah no friends are so important, and my friends in a lot of ways are my second family. I don’t know really how we met I guess it was all sort of this swirl of high school and college and just kind of evolving together over time and and also going through a lot together, you know. I think it’s also - it also makes for really powerful connections with people, whether you know it’s going through the tough times of college together or going through tough times in your personal life together. I think a really big part of finding people you connect with is being able to connect with yourself, first. I think it took me a long time to truly connect with who I was on many different levels and it wasn’t until I started being honest about, you know, my background and being honest about my sexuality, even, that I could really find a group of friends that I really connected with.

JP: So I know that you are a first generation college student, like myself, what kind of role has your family been in in terms of supporting you? You also don’t have to answer if it’s if it’s a really deep question, like for me if I asked that question, I could go on for days, man I wish they gave me more, I wish they helped me with the FAFSA, I wish that it wasn’t – you know what I mean?

Charles: Yeah no, I was just trying to think I, you know, I haven’t reflected on, I haven’t I haven’t like truly needed - I haven’t leaned on my parents a lot, and so it’s it’s kind of hard but yeah I guess you know if I had to state which - what are the things that I wish I had more help on, I mean, everything. Like you know it’s so it’s it’s so crazy, I never - okay, let me just pause. This is, this is a, this is a great - not a great story, but this is, I think, important to sort of contextualize a little bit of that question but, I was having a conversation with my partner, maybe a year or two ago, and I think we were talking about first generation college students and I didn’t know until that conversation that I was even a first generation college student and I think that speaks to just how little I knew about how academia and even going to college worked and it was just like this huge revelation for me of, you know, I didn’t have my my parents couldn’t provide the support that I needed to get to the places that I wanted to go, which I’m sure it was challenging for them, but you know, having this realization so so late in life is is really eye opening, I think, looking back on it, I wish that I did know those things and could make use of resources that were available to me, because of my status as being a first generation college student. That being said, you know I think it’s important to talk about that experience because it’s important that you know if there are young students, high schoolers, that are like me and they don’t have that support, that they know it’s available at least.

JP: Yeah, and I mean that’s a big reason why I’m trying to collect as many perspectives as possible because it’s not just first generation college students, it could be just being a person of color in STEM, it can be a whole plethora of things so yeah, our life isn’t just science, that’s all I gotta say, it’s a lot more complex than that. So what have you had to sacrifice, in order to get to where you are now, and do you have any regrets?

Charles: Yeah that is a very good question. I think some of what I’ve sacrificed to get to where I am involved kind of compartmentalizing pieces of myself. I think as professionals as students and young professionals who may be on different career trajectories than their parents, you kind of have to put on blinders sometimes to other things around you, or maybe you have other problems going on in your life that people who are your peers may not understand. And so I think growing up, a really big part of my success was being able to compartmentalize those pieces of myself to achieve success, you know, and I think looking back on it, I wish I had made myself sort of more emotionally available and more physically available to my family, to even friends, and to even past relationships right, like I think that sort of juggling the many things that we have to juggle as people makes it really difficult. I don’t know if that makes sense, but.

JP: Oh no, it made a lot of sense and I don’t know, the thing the thing with the pandemic like as bad as it’s been, I feel like it’s been a period for a lot of personal growth for a lot of people, right, a lot of time to reflect and I’m not sure if if a lot of this reflecting was done during the pandemic for you, but at least for me it’s been a lot of, okay like I’m a senior in college, this is the last - this is my last year, like what has led me up to this point, like, how can I move on stronger than I was before?

Charles: For sure. Yeah lots of reflecting. I mean, I sit in I sit in this room for more hours than I would care to share, you know.

JP: I would too if my room looked like that.

Charles: Yeah, thank you.

JP: Of course, of course. So how do you think we can diversify STEM and implement full inclusion inclusion initiatives that better support and empower, you know, people like us, first generation students, members of the LGBTQI plus community, and other marginalized identities? Because, yes, people have support from their parents, people can get support from their institutions, but if you were a consultant and you were like we need to scrap this, change that, is there anything in particular you’d do?

Charles: One thing that I would definitely pursue is better mentoring networks. I didn’t realize how important mentoring was to the success of, even myself right, I - it took me arriving at the University of Virginia and entering into a program that was a longitudinal program for graduate students who are underrepresented in their field, and what it does is it sets them up with a faculty mentor either in their department or outside of their department, and this faculty mentor just basically serves as a person to like bounce ideas off of, help get through milestones, and help navigate what comes after a PhD. And I have - I wouldn’t be sitting here from Washington DC, working for the US Department of Energy, if it weren’t for the encouragement of my mentor to pursue the things that I loved, and if it weren’t for my mentor helping guide me along the way to achieving those things, and I really think as universities we - they can do a better job of setting up these types of mentoring programs or mentoring opportunities because, ultimately, I think we’re unsuccessful because we don’t know, right, and if you just put knowledge in front of people or present options to people, then they can start to make more holistic choices about next steps. So yeah mentoring is one I think I had another, I forgot it.

JP: I’ll let I’ll let you think about that one, but I love, how you said mentorship because I am fortunate to be at an institution, where the biology department is very receptive to their students. So, with everything that has been going on in the past year, a bunch of students and I just went to the faculty and we were like we need to be better. And we’re setting up a mentorship program, which I think is awesome. We’re pairing our upperclassmen with our historically underrepresented students, that are first years. Because it’s hard to even, you know, they’re first years, they’re entering a virtual environment, they - it’s hard for them to find community, so we were like okay - let’s what can we do? So I’m really glad you said mentorship because I think this program will go a long way.

Charles: Yeah you know, part of what I, what I’ll say - part of what I wanted to add to the mentorship pieces, you know, I - there’s a lot of talk about setting up these pipelines for underrepresented students to get into higher education, and you know, one of my big critiques about these pipelines is that you can’t just plop students who weren’t exposed to this type of culture and expect them to thrive, just because they’re smart or because they entered into a program set up to diversify that institution right? We need ecosystems of community, of mentorship, of you name it right, like these pipelines will always fail if we don’t have the resources to support students. And so, you know, I would want to see not just the creation of programs designed to better feed students from underrepresented groups into higher education, but to see the development across a community within an institution.

JP: Yeah, and our whole thing was ground up, right, we started at students, we looped in the faculty, and now we are emailing the President of our college. And this is kind of like a top secret, not top secret, it’s insider info, but he reached out to me and sent out like an agenda for his diversity and equity plan, he’s a brand new President, and it is the most comprehensive impressive list I’ve seen, and it shouts us out and I asked him if he can bring it up to his, he calls it an alliance of a bunch of liberal arts colleges around the nation, so I’m hoping that we can get that going, but no, I agree, it has to be an ecosystem. It can’t just be a singular river, right, like you got to have an entire an entire niche in this right.

Charles: Yeah, exactly yep.

JP: What advice would you give to students, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, pursuing your path, or just trying to navigate life in general, so kind of tying everything in. With the state that everything’s in right now right, what advice would you give?

Charles: That’s a big caveat to put the state that we’re in now.

JP: Yeah sorry, that’s why I was like, state that we’re in now.

Charles: Well yeah cause I think my first advice would be, don’t be afraid to fail, is my first advice. I have made so many decisions out of fear of failure, and I think that’s partly why I’m successful, right, but failure is so important to helping you find what you really love, and helping you find what you’re really good at, but I think sometimes as an underrepresented student myself, I have been so afraid to fail because to me failure meant ending up like my parents right, being poor, being you know, not college educated or feeling like you can’t advance in a career, or that you can’t ever be your own boss, and so I think we need to - I hope with sort of mentorship and with community building, we can allow people like us to take more risks. I don’t think I answered your question but.

JP: You did, I mean it made my heart kind of like go boom boom, so it’s true. You’re, you’re 100% correct.

Charles: Yeah, okay good.

JP: Yeah a big a big thing is just normalizing failure and.

Charles: Yeah yeah.

JP: Knowing what to do with it, right.

Charles: Right yeah or just like - I mean, so you know, DOE, this fellowship at DOE is a risk for me right? I am taking time from my PhD program to pursue almost a separate career track, in a sense, and it’s a huge risk. I’ve been struggling to pull together my dissertation, but at the same time I’m learning so much about what it is that I love, that I can’t imagine never having done this before like never doing this, you know what I mean? And I think this is the type of thing that we need to encourage and support other people in doing is just finding what you love and then you know not also rushing into things, and there’s no reason to know what you want to be when you grow up overnight, and I wish someone told me that whenever I was your age thinking about going to Grad school that you know Grad school will always be there, you know, exploring different careers in your early 20s though, that won’t always be there and so, yeah.

JP: Don’t tell me that while I’m about to go, come on. No, I’m just messing. Yeah, but how do you stay motivated? You said you’re taking a risk, do you have tips for students that might feel like they just keep failing and failing and failing, what do you say to them, especially when we are say historically underrepresented students and it’s even harder right that’s that’s the added kind of layer to that.

Charles: Man, that’s a really great question.

JP: Sorry.

Charles: Yeah. Honestly, I don’t know how I stay motivated. I think it’s just surrounding myself with great people and having mentors, having this ecosystem to rely on you know, I’m - I I feel like part of me doing this is adding to that ecosystem, but you know I also have my network of mentors that I have to pull on whenever I need help. Two hours before this meeting I had to call an emergency meeting with like my department chair at UVA because I was having super bad anxiety about how I’m going to finish this dissertation and work at the same time, and I had to pull on him to just talk me off of a meltdown basically so I think the short answer is, I don’t know but I, you know, I think what I do is just kind of lean on others to help me out and not be afraid to ask for that type of help. I think I carried a lot of pride whenever I was younger that I could do it on my own, and while I, I did make a lot of success, I think, on my own it didn’t - it came at a price of what I discussed earlier, right, of kind of compartmentalizing relationships and people and parts of myself, but now I’ve gotten older and I’ve learned that asking for help is incredibly valuable and incredibly useful and can really help get you to the next step.

JP: Definitely yeah, I mean I met you what 40 minutes ago, but you can add me to that ecosystem right if you ever need a naive undergrad soon to be, hopefully, soon to be grad student, I got your back for sure.

Charles: Yeah same, same.

JP: So here’s a couple more questions. Let’s say that you had a phenomenal day at work and let’s say you just got published in Nature herself, what songs are you playing on the way home?

Charles: Okay, give me one second. Okay, the song I would play coming home from work after like a day of major success, I’m feeling it, I’m in the groove, is a song that I loved a few years ago and had completely forgotten about, and then I heard it on the radio, I think, and was like oh right, that is my jam. But it’s a song by this band called Caribou, and it’s on an album of theirs from 2015, and the song is Can’t Do Without You, and it just hits the right beat for me and yeah I, I’m already envisioning myself on the metro coming back from Department of Energy, going back home in just like my business casual clothes, but feeling cool as hell.

JP: Just bobbing your head.

Charles: Yeah yeah.

JP: Awesome. Um once you get home, what are you eating for dinner? Celebratory.

Charles: Okay, celebratory? Well, I’ve popped into the local beer store, picked up myself a four pack of hazy IPAs, walking in the door opening one immediately and.

JP: Or just the IPA you know.

Charles: Yeah maybe it’s just the IPA and then we’ll see we’ll see what’s - what strikes me on on GrubHub, or something.

JP: Okay last one.

Charles: Okay

JP: What is your happiest memory or proudest moment, and why? Yeah, let’s take you back to a good place right now.

Charles: I, I’m gonna start talking, but I might change that happiest moment in a second once I start talking about it, once I start talking about it because I have a few. I think one of my happiest moments was getting the Sea Grant Knauss Fellowship, and it was one of the happiest moments because it was the one time that I felt that I was doing something sort of truly for myself. And I dedicated so much time and effort to putting together this application, doing practice interviews, and thinking about what it is I want to be when I grow up, and recognizing that to answer that question I needed to go out and just experience things. And in my application, I was just as honest as I was with you just now about sort of my background, and you know who I am as a person, not to mention who I am as an academic and as a scientist. And it felt so good in the interview process - so the Knauss Marine Policy interview process is notoriously insane. It’s two and a half days of interviews, and people do up to 20 interviews so you’re running around DC from federal agency to federal building interviewing with people, running up and down the floors of the NOAA headquarters, that type of thing, and there were several interviews where I walked in and they had read my cover letter and clearly parts of my story and parts of why I wanted to be there resonated so clearly with them, and I think it was a lot - there was a lot of vindication in in in getting this fellowship and in those interviews, vindication that showed me that you know being true to myself and my desires and who I am pays off, and so I think that’s probably one of my happiest memories.

JP: Just kind of the reaffirmation that you do matter, more than just what they want out of your job, more as like a person.

Charles: Yeah, I mean like I think in Grad school we just get so hung up on the metrics for measuring success that we forget that there are so many types of success, right, that - and that we might all measure it a little bit differently, and turns out I don’t measure my success in how many papers that I publish or how many grants that I successfully write, I measure my success in in how I feel when I come home from work and in how heard I feel by the people that I work with or the people that I’m around, and those are things you can find in academia sure, but I also sort of found them in a place where - that was kind of related to science policy, which is a place that I had been really interested in.

JP: I love that. Well, you can also measure your success in like your impact, right? This might be a little too much information, but I have, I have my STEM community, we all have twitter’s and we’re always, we’re always sending each other your tweets or someone else’s tweets and were like yo this is so relatable I know we’re not in Grad school this is great. So just know you’re also making an impact, and I think that is a great way to measure your success as well, I can’t tell you how to measure your own success but.

Charles: I mean JP at the end of the day, you’re right. I think I do measure my success in impact and until you said that I didn’t remember that impact was really important to me, but you know, as part of Grad school you dive into your field, and sometimes it’s really narrow and sometimes you get lost, and you forget why things matter, right, and it’s so important to contextualize why things matter, and for some people it’s it’s so important that it’s a measure of their success, and for me, knowing why things matter, knowing knowing what I do matters, is really important for me, so you know at the end of the day I want my science to speak for the science, but also, I want it to empower communities that might need information related to hydrology or climate change, you know I want it to empower young scientists who might be interested in getting involved in doing work like me or yeah.

JP: Yeah, and as intense as science can be I just think that it’s important to always go back to you - to your humanity, just realizing - like I came into into my graduate school apps with the intention of talking about community, like that that is the most - single most important thing to me, and I know that when I’m in Grad school might be a little different because I’ll be so entrenched in whatever I’m working on, but that’s kind of how I think of science, like science is for the community, I don’t think it’s for anything else, it’s for giving back to the community, that’s why we’re doing it. So no yeah thank you so much for your insights and everything but that’s all I had for you, unless you have anything else you want to talk about.

Charles: This is really good I, I think yeah I guess I’m curious how your, what do you see your impact?

JP: Currently?

Charles: Yeah sure, currently, in the future.

JP: Yeah, um I love the youth, the youth. I’m a baseball coach, yeah I freaking love kids. Well it’s because I think that that’s where most of the change is, is going to happen. In all of these different conversations I’ve had with people it’s it’s how can we bring compassion and empathy to people, and it always goes back to the youth. Like, for me, my parents were very conservative. It wasn’t until I got to college that I was just delving myself into inequity and becoming really passionate about it, so I think that the youth is a very important thing that - I feel like that is where I want my impact to be. Yeah I’m applying to graduate school because, again, I think representation matters. Not only do I love science, but it’s more than just the science. If I can get 10 Filipino students to grow up and want to be who I am, that’s successful in my eyes, put that on my tombstone. So that’s kind of who I think I am, I just - I’m for the community. Like I said, I’m trying to change the way Occidental recruits student athletes, we’re currently changing the curriculum in the Biology Department, and I’m fortunate that I have people behind me on this, but, yeah I don’t know what it’s going to be like outside of this institution, I just don’t, so I’m hoping UNC Chapel Hill’s kind of, a little bit, at least the same way, or Oregon or anywhere else.

Charles: Yeah I um - you brought up a really good point, empathy yeah, the empathy thing is is real. Empathy is something that I think there’s a gap in, sometimes, in academia, and it shows. I think it’s narrowing, though, but I think people are starting to realize that oh, the students that we’re getting aren’t just your run of the mill, middle class, parents are paying their rent, and so it’s okay that we pay them no money, or we expect them to work 80 hours a week because they have no other life and they don’t have kids or they don’t have disabilities or they don’t have medical bills and those types of things, and so I - you know, yeah the empathy thing really resonates with me, and I just I wish - and I think it’s happening, and you and you’re right that young people are going to bring a lot more of that, and so I, you know, I’m kind of in this process - I’m at this point in my life where I’m trying to decide if I’m going to sort of stay in the federal pathway or move into academia, move back into academia, I guess. And I know, one of the things that I want to bring back to academia, is that empathy, right, and I don’t know how to do that, I don’t have the answers, but I just, you know, I have this like vision for sort of a diverse equitable and just academia and science and STEM, and I know that part of that is mentorship, part of that is building community, but I’ll be interested to learn how you really operationalize that and scale it.

JP: That’s the million dollar question in my in my eyes, like a lot of people are agreeing on the same things it’s just okay, how do we bring this to the table, like how do we put this on a paper? Like, in my eyes, it needs to be more holistic, like you can’t just treat every system the same. Like Amanda Gorman’s speech today, she’s my age, like what. I have never been that - like I listen to a lot of speeches, like dating back to civil rights movement, because I’m a I am also a history nerd, but that speech might be the most impactful speech of my 21 year old life, straight up. I was like how in the world, did you do that? Words are just so powerful, I was so moved by it.

Charles: I yeah I’m I’m I’m getting a knot in my throat just thinking about her speech, it was fantastic yeah.

JP: I just blasted it throughout my house, multiple times today already, because - and I got the chills every time because.

Charles: Yeah, it was pretty great.

JP: It’s nice hearing people like that talk again.

Charles: I can’t agree more. It’s really nice and, God, yeah.

JP: The work starts now, in my eyes.

Charles: Yep.

JP: Now we’re in, now we don’t leave.

Charles: Yeah. Yeah, I feel like, yeah, there’s so much work to be done and you know we’ll see, it’s just been it’s been a roller coaster of like a few years with the Trump administration and.

JP: For you I bet, like environmental sciences like you said.

Charles: Mm hmm, I know. Yeah, I didn’t I didn’t mention this earlier, but I’m sure - I guess you follow – you probably follow me on Twitter, well you do.

JP: Yeah.

Charles: But I’ve talked a couple times just about like you know what it was like being in Charlottesville during the Unite the Right Rally, and then like also the resemblance to the events on January 6th, just two weeks ago, the insurrection at the capital, I mean it was the same anxieties of, am I safe going to sleep at night, you know, is everything that I know that I’m familiar with that I love, about to change dramatically, right, and not having to live with that fear. It’s hard to imagine because it’s just been three years of fear, at least in Charlottesville, yeah, so.

JP: Well, you’ll be a part of that change, a lot of us will be part of that change.

Charles: Yeah, you will. It sounds like you’re going to be part of that change too.

JP: I’ve got a lot of ground to cover.