May's Learning Days
- Vernon C. Lindsay, PhD
- May 15
- 3 min read
Dear Student Leader,
Is this your year? Will you graduate in May? Whether you choose to pursue a career or additional degrees, learning does not stop when you remove the regalia and join the celebrations.
The application of your education to address societal problems is proof of proper schooling. You and your peers hold remedies to voting challenges, wars, and the anti-diversity movement. Thinking, acting, and consistently exploring ways to improve offers viable solutions.
Keep your mind open and develop what psychologist Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset. Don’t settle for meeting degree requirements; commit to life-long learning.
Learn from psychologist Linda James Myers and achieve optimal psychological well-being. Spiritual beliefs and self-awareness of a Divine connection to the ancestors and nature are critical in optimal psychology.
Your post-graduation plans may not unfold as you envision, but remain optimistic and invest in self-improvement resources. See David J. Schwartz's book, The Magic of Thinking Big, for further insight into this suggestion. I am also sharing advice with you from experience.
When I graduated in May of 2013 with a PhD in Policy Studies in Urban Education from the University of Illinois at Chicago, I didn’t have concrete career plans. I wanted to build a business teaching capoeira and work as a tenure-track professor. On graduation day, I had a struggling business and an inbox full of rejection responses to job applications.
With a pregnant wife and two young children, the pressure to provide sat on my shoulders.
I was nervous when I heard my name and crossed the commencement ceremony stage at the pavilion. Yet, I raised my right fist and held it while the speaker announced the title of my dissertation, “They Schools Ain’t Teachin Us: Black Males and Resistance at Uhuru High School.”
Inside my hand and head, I clenched the strength of Ancestors, the challenges that came throughout my education, and the quandaries of an unknown future. I shared personal stories and academic research about race and gender in my first book, "Critical Race and Education for Black Males: When Pretty Boys Become Men.” Although less iconic and incomparable, my salute also honored Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s protest at the 1968 Olympic Games.
See this video to learn more about the multiple meanings of Smith and Carlos’s bold stance against racial injustices and violations of human rights.
By August of 2013, I found a position as a postdoctoral fellow in teaching and mentoring with the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Honors College. I taught courses about identities and inequalities, advised students, and co-directed the Chicago Signature co-curricular program. The work was rewarding, but it didn’t fulfill my dream of opening the pathway to becoming a tenured professor and entrepreneur.
After three years of applying for more jobs, working on my capoeira business, and receiving more rejections, I moved to Mexico with my wife and three small children. We lived in Mazatlán, Sinaloa for two years where I wrote books, started this blog, and created a YouTube vlog. While I enjoyed living in Mexico and the growth experienced, I failed to create sustainable income.
In 2018, we moved to Antigua and Barbuda where I worked as an assistant professor at the American University of Antigua College of Medicine. I learned more by creating mentoring initiatives, enrolling in an instructional design course, teaching classes on learning strategies and diversity, advising students, and leading community engagement programs. Six years passed by in a blink, and I left the island as an associate professor with more knowledge and skills to serve vulnerable populations in the US.
Since graduation, I have learned about entrepreneurialism, health and wellness, and numerous academic support strategies. I also developed deeper empathy for immigrant communities, strengthened my writing abilities, and cultivated video editing skills. Unorthodox experiences, books, podcasts, diverse people, and the Divine have served as my post-doctoral teachers.
Graduation initiated a new phase of growth that continues to this day. My current work and past experiences shaped my latest publication, Uplifting Black Identity and Studying Abroad, on page 79 of The Discipline and the African World 2026 Report.
If you’re graduating, we need you to commit to gaining more formal and informal education. Your expanded knowledge and skills could be the critical components in correcting the damage caused by redistricting for partisan gain, continual wars, and the omnipresent challenges to diversity.
We have a Divine connection to our Ancestors and the natural world that surrounds our human experience. It’s important to further cultivate this awareness and act accordingly in alignment with our potential.
Make a pledge to learn something new today.
Subscribe to this blog, buy these books or the ones mentioned in this post, and register for these courses/coaching services for assistance during this transition to new beginnings.
In solidarity with your success,
V
This is a power-fillled statement, Dr. Lindsay. I follow in my great grandfather's steps to seek remediation of the injustices to the Cherokee from the thousand mile journey from my state to Oklahoma in the 1840's to be an unsettled issue in my time; he was the doctor I follow.