Goodbyes…
On July 1st we started a new chapter in our lives in Evanston, IL. We moved out of our house in New Haven, CT last week, marking an end to this period in the northeastern US. You may already know about the challenges, but there was also a lot of joy here, and I want to acknowledge that joy as we depart.
Our children, now 7 and 11 spent much/all of their young lives here and this place will be special because of that. Their lives have been touched by so much love and kindness from caregivers and educators over our time here. My spouse was a valued and appreciated nurse here as part of the Yale health clinic, and we will always appreciate her job and the community of people and families who made us feel at home here. We shut ourselves in during the first year of COVID here and so this place feels different — larger, more central — than other places we have lived, and probably will live.
Jobwise, I didn’t ever really enjoy it here, truth be told. That was true at the beginning and became even more true at the end. But, I did love our little island, where we carved out a space for us and where we spent most of our time. That space was our collective social inequality lab.
It was a pretty long time ago (~10 years), but before I decided to join Yale I got a message from my now longtime collaborator, Jennifer Richeson. We had briefly corresponded in 2010 about my desire to postdoc in the Richeson lab — it is correspondence that Jenn gets from dozens of people each year. Now on the tenure track, while I was thinking of moving to Yale, Jenn told me that she was also thinking about joining Yale. The possibility of working together was the information I needed to make the decision to move our family of three (at the time) to New Haven.
My second year at Yale we started working on a kernel of an idea about how people have a distorted sense of racial equity in the US. Together, we turned that first idea into a set of studies that became this first paper. We continued pushing the idea until that first paper turned into an entire research program that includes about a dozen projects, collaborators, and trainees that we co-mentor. We will continue this work together for years to come, albeit now from different universities.
People often ask, knowing what I know now about the outcome of my time at Yale, would I, in hindsight, make the same decision to come here? Obviously, having your tenure denied and uprooting your family/moving to another city is not trivial. That said, I wouldn’t change a thing. That’s because I have done the most meaningful work of my career here, in our collective social inequality lab. I have learned so much from working together with all the brilliant people (students, postdocs, interns, faculty collaborators) who have shared our collective lab space. I am a better mentor, a better teacher, and a better scholar because of what I have learned in this space. I will forever be grateful for the time we had at Yale because of this. And of course we have so many amazing reminders of this time, including when we have the chance to gather together at conferences in the future.
So, there is some sadness with the end of this chapter, of course, but there is also tremendous joy about the communities we were part of, what we were able to do, and who we became during our time here. I feel so grateful for what has been, and excited for what is to come.
