Sanaia Pierre is a software engineering senior at Cal Poly. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Mustang Media Group.
Throughout my life, being Black has been a significant part of my identity. I was never ashamed of it, but I also didn’t think too much of it. I was born to Black parents, with Black siblings in a Black neighborhood. I went to a predominantly Black elementary school, middle school and high school and had mainly Black friends.
I never had to do much to “express” my Blackness; it was innate. It wasn’t a topic of conversation because everyone and everything around me was Black. I never felt like a minority. Now, it’s a constant topic of conversation that I’m Black because only a small part of the San Luis Obispo community is.
When I began looking at colleges, Cal Poly SLO became one of my top choices because it offered my major of software engineering (SE), which many schools don’t. I knew attending an HBCU wasn’t in the cards for me financially, so it was important for me to pay attention to the percentage of Black people at the schools I applied to.
Black students make up less than 2% of Cal Poly students. However, when it came down to my final decision, being able to afford the school was the most important. Cal Poly awarded me a merit scholarship that made it easy to decide where I’d spend the next four years of my life.
I hadn’t heard of Cal Poly or San Luis Obispo, and wasn’t able to visit before accepting my admission offer. My first impression of the school came during SLO Days, where I didn’t see many, if any, Black people.
I fully realized that would be the reality for my college career during the Week of Welcome (WOW). During registration, I could choose between participating in the “regular” WOW and the Cross-Cultural Experience (CCE) WOW. My family encouraged me to sign up for CCE, hopeful that I would meet other Black people on campus.
Luckily for me, I made friends with others in my WOW group, some of whom I’m still friends with three years later. Two of those friends I made are Black, which has been great. However, the CCE experience was strange. It felt like we had to receive many of the diversity presentations, rather than participating in many of the extracurriculars that the “regular” WOW groups did.
Instead of seeing Black people everywhere, I now feel like I have to seek them out wherever I go. And when I do, it’s a shock or celebration instead of it just being the norm.
At home, I wasn’t surprised to see Black people, and I didn’t get happy when I saw someone who shared that identity. I had just always been around my people. Under this new reality, I began to see myself as an imposter.
My imposter syndrome began to creep in from two fronts. Software engineering is both a male-dominated and predominantly white field. I’m almost positive I’m the only Black woman software engineering major at Cal Poly. I’ve felt out of place at some point in every one of my major classes. I’ve become more confident and secure in each passing year, but the feelings linger.
To me, the people in my classes had been coding for longer than I have, and I just couldn’t pick up on coding techniques as quickly as others. In groups, it felt like people were talking down to me as if I couldn’t grasp what was going on. Regardless of others’ intentions, this was how I would perceive it. I took it all as further confirmation of what I already saw when I looked at myself: someone not fit to be here.
I’ve been able to fight back against my impostor syndrome and repair my self-image by aligning myself with the Black community in SLO. I’m so grateful to be present in our Black Student Union and at the Black Academic Excellence Center.
Both of those spaces are filled with people who remind me that I do belong in the space I’m in. Not only for me, but for everybody in a similar position. Being around other Black students who feel the same way in their respective majors, who I see doing amazing things, helped me to realize I can be successful too.
In my four years at Cal Poly, I’ve had to think more about what it means to be Black in a not predominantly Black space. Although it was initially difficult to navigate this new environment and way of living, being surrounded by a supportive peer community with similar stories and seeing their successes has brought me the confidence to continue working hard for my goals, even when it feels challenging.