Meet This One-Woman Career Launchpad

Reginald Christian, Courtesy of Albany State U.

Some career advising requires baroque bureaucracies, fancy software, and expensive infrastructure. Other times, all you need is one tireless, enthusiastic person who is totally on the ball. Someone like Florence A. Lyons.

Lyons, who directs the honors program at Albany State University, a 6,600-student historically black college in southwest Georgia, is a one-woman career launchpad. In just a few years, she’s helped connect 29 students with summer research programs at prestigious universities. She thinks her approach is scalable, and can help Albany State and other colleges improve retention and graduation rates while also setting young scholars on course for graduate and professional programs.

Lyons calls her efforts the FAB Initiative — for Find, Assist, Believe. Don’t look for pricey FAB stationery, though. Lyons is the initiative.

The speech and theater professor says Howard University, Spelman College, and other historically black institutions have impressive records in connecting their students with fellowships and internships, and a few years ago she decided, “I want Albany State to get into that mix.”

She started by looking for opportunities for her theater students, but soon found excellent prospects in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields, too. She knew a cross section of students from her public-speaking class and simply from being, by all accounts, a campus extrovert. By the time she was appointed head of the honors program, a year ago, she’d earned a reputation, on campus and off, as an academic Match.com.

“She’s one of those people who is just very resourceful. It takes someone being assertive like that” to expand students’ opportunities, says Marybeth Gasman, a professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania who directs the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions.

Over the last several years, Gasman says, Lyons has connected 15 Albany State students and faculty members, and one president, with the center’s programs, including the Frederick Douglass Global Fellowship, which Penn offers in collaboration with CIEE: Council on International Educational Exchange. The fellowship sends students from minority-serving institutions on summers abroad to increase their intercultural and leadership skills.

Revising an Essay 10 Times

One Douglass fellow is Chiagoziem (Sylvester) Agu, a Nigeria-born Albany State student who plans someday to serve as a physician and executive with Doctors Without Borders. The rising junior will be in South Africa this summer, learning about its medical system and its culture.

“I chose a career in medicine,” he explains in his application video, “because my mother suffered a brain aneurism when I was 7 years old. I was inspired by the American doctors who treated her when the doctors in Nigeria attempted but were unable to do so.”

Agu met Lyons at an introductory luncheon for honors students. She told him about the Douglass fellowship and led him through some 10 revisions of his essay for it. The essay is often the hardest part, says Lyons. “Sometimes it scares students to death.”

Agu credits Lyons’s speaking and theater expertise in helping him convey a range of emotion in the application video, too. She’s part coach, he says, and “almost like a mom away from home.”

Lyons interviews the students before getting into the nitty-gritty of writing. In doing so, she discovers that they have relevant experience they didn’t necessarily plan to include.

Jerome Neal III, a rising junior who hopes to be a forensic toxicologist, had an internship at a probation court analyzing urine samples, and his grandmother’s death, at age 54, prompted him to examine not just her nicotine use but also her excessive consumption of over-the-counter medications, including aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and naproxen. That background enhanced his application essay.

Reginald Christian, Courtesy of Albany State U.

For this summer, Lyons also helped place two students in the University of California at Los Angeles’s Evolutionary Medicine Program; two at Duke University’s Summer Biomedical Sciences Institute; two in the University of California at Irvine’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship; one at Carnegie Mellon University’s Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research; one at the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence at the University of Iowa; one in a study-abroad program in Trinidad and Tobago; and one at Western University of Health Science’s Summer Health Professions Education Program.

Lyons’s work is important because it demystifies the process for students, Gasman says, and helps students believe such opportunities are within reach, even if they have limited financial means. Seventy-four percent of students at minority-serving institutions, and 84 percent of students at historically black colleges, are eligible for Pell Grants, she says.

“Studying abroad is hard to fathom for many students,” says Gasman, who herself attended college with the help of a Pell Grant. “I didn’t do it because I thought I couldn’t afford it.”

Gasman says she hopes Lyons can share her approach at conferences as a model for other colleges.

“Working hand-in-hand with students is a good strategy, as it’s part of the learning process,” Gasman says of Lyons’s intensive coaching.

To scale up the FAB process at other colleges, Lyons says the key ingredients are devoted mentors willing to put in at least four hours of work with each student on his or her essays. If that seems like unnecessary hand holding, Lyons says, it pays off. Those students not only can approach the next application process more confidently and independently, but also can serve as peer-editing mentors themselves.

Elite institutions heavily edit students’ application essays, Lyons says, and “in my own way, I am attempting to level the playing field and allow underrepresented students the opportunity to benefit from the multitude of opportunities.”

Serious Door-Openers

The programs Lyons helps her students apply to are generously, if not fully, subsidized — and they are serious door-openers.

Victoria Stephens, who graduated from Albany State a year ago in forensic science, was in the UCLA medical program in the summer of 2016. Now she’s in a postbaccalaureate biomedical-sciences program at the University of Iowa, taking courses to help her transition to graduate school. A first-generation college student from Stone Mountain, Ga., Stephens applied to 13 doctoral programs, got asked to interview by nine, interviewed with seven, and received admissions offers from six.

In the fall, she will enroll at Vanderbilt University, which is paying her a full stipend for five years. She plans to go into the biomedical industry, academe, or some combination of the two.

Stephens, like many of Lyons’s students, got to know her through her public-speaking course.

“She noticed I was one of these students who really, really wanted to do something with their lives,” says Stephens. Knowing of Stephens’s research interests, Lyons helped her with her application to the UCLA fellowship, going through multiple rounds of edits on her essays. Lyons also helped Stephens hone her CV, personal statement, and letter of intent. She made sure Stephens knew how to send it and to whom.

“She didn’t let me give up. She always had a positive attitude,” Stephens says, adding that Lyons would answer phone calls at all hours of the night. “She’s very motivating.”

The public-speaking class, which is required of all Albany State honors students, increases students’ communication skills and their confidence.

Danielle Prier, a rising sophomore who is studying this summer at Duke’s biomedical institute, says Lyons “was strict, but I understood why she was strict — because she wanted us to be able to go into a room and not be scared” when faced with interviewers who might think, “‘Who is this African-American girl coming from Albany State?’”

‘I’m Proud’

Sharon Coward coordinates the six-week Duke program, in which participants take roughly one-third of a semester of biochemistry, physics, organic chemistry, and physiology. It gives them a running start, so that when they get to those subjects during the academic year, they’ll do better and have a stronger transcript for applications to medical, dental, or graduate school. They also get to shadow medical personnel in clinical wards.

Lyons alerts Coward about students whose applications are on the way, then checks in as applications are considered. “I’d say that she stands above the crowd when it comes to following up,” says Coward. “She’s good people.”

Pamela Yeh is director of UCLA’s program, in which participants study phenomena like the evolution of resistance to antibiotics. She says the summer fellowships are designed to draw more underrepresented students into the Ph.D. pipeline.

Lyons has been so effective in spotting talented students and channeling them into the program that Yeh invited her to be a co-principal investigator on a grant application to continue and expand the fellowship program. The result, Yeh says, was about $250,000 over three years from the University of California. “She’s just this really warm, energetic lady,” Yeh says, “who is just so passionate about her students.”

Neal, the rising junior at Albany State interested in toxicology, is studying forensic science and chemistry. He says Lyons “is the reason why I’m here at UCLA.” He hopes his fellowship this summer will lead to graduate school there. He wants to work for the FBI or the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Lyons is “one of those people that you meet and you have a longtime connection with,” says Emoni Cook, a rising Albany State senior, also at the UCLA program. “She takes you under her wing.” Cook, too, plans to get a Ph.D. and is considering a career in academe. She says she connects well with peers, and for a recent assignment to teach a lesson, she wrote a rap about gene expression. (“Nucleotides — 64 possible combinations. Check out my amino-acid articulation.”)

If the summer fellowships open doors, they also expose students to new possibilities.

“It has been an eye-opener up here in Pittsburgh,” says Sabrina Netters, a rising Albany State sophomore spending the summer in the Carnegie Mellon education-research program. “I wasn’t even thinking about graduate school at all.”

She is now. Working on computer math tutorials for middle schoolers “feels great,” she says, “like all the work I’ve been doing these years is paying off.” She sees “more opportunities to come. It’s great to see what I can do and what I can achieve. I’m proud. My family’s proud.”

Besides Stephens, two other FAB alumni will be pursuing Ph.D.s, Lyons says, one at Purdue University and the other at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Lyons wants to give Albany State students the same encouragement she got from her parents, who were grocers. “They were big on education,” she says. Her mom went to Clark College, in Atlanta, and her dad to Langston University, in Oklahoma. They were always on her case — in the best way.

“Just constantly,” she says. “‘What are you going to major in? What are you going to do? Why do you want to do that? Why is that important to you?’” They’d say, “You have to do what you like. There’s nothing worse than someone working at a job that they don’t enjoy.”

Though she describes herself as a quiet girl in high school, she played Emily in Our Town, and the theater and drama club drew her out, she says.

Divorced with no children, Lyons tells students, “You’re my children.”

Alexander C. Kafka is a senior editor and oversees Idea Lab. Follow him on Twitter @AlexanderKafka, or email him at alexander.kafka@chronicle.com.