(Be)coming Professional | Lakeya Omogun | TEDxUTAustin

Video Statistics and Information

Video
Captions Word Cloud
Reddit Comments
Captions
[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] you
Info
Channel: TEDx Talks
Views: 66,958
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Culture, Discrimination, English, Identity, Life, Racism, Social Change, TEDxTalks, Workplace
Id: 3377nOPruPI
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)
Published: Wed May 12 2021
Related Videos
Note
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.