Surprise!

I got quite the surprise on Tuesday evening. I was just checking my email for the millionth time, not expecting to have anything remotely important in my inbox, when I saw a message from the chair of Iowa State's Micro program. That would be the PhD program I just got accepted to. The title of the email didn't set off any bells in my head, so I opened it. That's when I got the surprise!!!! (Exclamation points added to make it look surprising.) Apparently the faculty in the Micro program nominated me for an AGEP fellowship! AGEP stands for the Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate, and they reach underrepresented minorities in science and engineering. I had heard of them before because there were some people on an AGEP internship in 2006 when I did my Carver internship, but I didn't know they had a graduate fellowship or that I would even qualify. See, my family decided to go hide in the mountains during Indian Removal, and somehow they managed to pretend to be white for more than a century (Don't ask me how; I have photos of these people and they are not remotely white.) So I have no tribal registration and no official blood quantum, and the Eastern Band has been less than helpful in my family's quest to get us enrolled. Anyway, I don't look super Native either, so sometimes I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle to prove that I'm a minority, and thus I don't even think about minority scholarships as possibilities.
But I digress! Anyhow, the faculty in the IM (interdepartmental microbiology) program think that I'm awesome enough to have this AGEP fellowship. That means that I get paid $25,ooo a year instead of $20,000, guaranteed for five years. It also means that the professor I choose as my PI will have less to have to pay out because I have some external funds of my own, so I may have a little more leeway in terms of who I can work with. I am really happy because now it's likely that I won't have to take out any loans for graduate school!