I'm curious, Dr. Tonya, what has been the hardest thing you have ever had to learn, and how did you learn it?

I feel like as a scientist, people would expect the answer to be something like, you know, advanced calculus or computer programming or something like that.

But honestly, I think it's more on the social side of things.

It's the idea that the work that you do and how good, quote-unquote, you are at doing that, whether that's in school or your job or wherever it might be, that's not enough.

Like, you have to be good at marketing yourself and explaining why you're good at what you do, why you love what you do, why you're the right candidate for a particular opportunity on a college application, a job application, things like that.

I think especially as women, we're really conditioned to be humble, to not talk ourselves up, and I know this is not just something that women face.

There are a lot of people that feel uncomfortable kind of, um, bragging about themselves or feeling like you're bragging about yourself.

You've also just shared work around, like, "I love this thing so much, and like this isn't my skillset, but I'm gonna find another way." When I kind of hold those together or braid them together, if you could redesign what school emphasizes or how school does its thing, not really the subjects necessarily, but like the underneath, the architecture of school, what would you put at the center given all that you have come to learn and come to learn about yourself?