The Bay State Banner: MIT’s AeroAfro provides mentorship, belonging for Black graduate students in aerospace fields

This article originally appeared in The Bay State Banner. Read the full article here.

When three Black high school girls became the target of racist attacks after entering a NASA competition in 2018, a group of Black graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology knew they had to do something.

The founders of AeroAfro, a then-budding MIT club within the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, invited the students to visit campus and meet professors, rewarding their perseverance against discrimination and supporting their interest in STEM. Now, AeroAfro is a broader organization supporting Black graduate students in the department by fostering a sense of belonging and providing mentorship.

Arthur Brown, a post-doctoral associate at MIT and a founding member of AeroAfro, said the organization formed “organically” after several Black graduate students expressed interest. The high school students’ visit served as their inaugural event.

When Brown first arrived at MIT as a master’s student in 2016, he said there were four Black graduate students in the entire department.

“But then, in the class behind me, there were four more,” Brown said. “And so there started to be a critical mass.”

As interest grew, AeroAfro began to take shape: the founders created a mailing list, hosted meetings, coordinated with Wesley Harris — celebrated professor of aeronautics and one of the department’s two Black faculty members.

“Every so often, we’ll be out at an AeroAfro event and I look around and I realize, ‘Wait a minute, there’s 10 people here at the dinner table, and eight of them are people that I knew personally and mentored in some capacity prior to them making the decision to come to MIT,’” Brown added.

According to Ciarra Ortiz, a first-year doctoral student and the advocacy chair of AeroAfro, the organization serves as a “safe haven” for Black graduate students within a program where they are significantly underrepresented, and provides mentorship from upperclassmen members.

“Grad school is very hard, especially being a minority group,” Ortiz said. “Having a big sister, little sister, big brother, little brother situation within the department with people that look like you is also something that’s very comforting.”