We recently interviewed CRRES Affiliate Dr. Bo Hyun Lee, Assistant Professor in Counseling and Counseling Psychology program at the School of Education, about her intersectional approach to understanding the influence of oppression and marginalization on academic achievement and career development among members from oppressed groups.
Jeff: Could you tell me a little about yourself? What brought you to IU?
Dr. Bo Hyun Lee: I am a Korean immigrant. I came to the United States for my doctoral degree about ten years ago. In Korea, which is a relatively homogeneous society, there was nothing that I needed to worry about except being a woman. But after coming to the United States for a doctoral program at University of Missouri, I noticed that I am both invisible and sometimes very vividly visible in the U.S. There's no middle way. I also found myself becoming increasingly anxious.
I'm generally an optimistic person, but I began worrying about how people would judge me based on my accent, my appearance, and my skin color. In many of my training sites, I was the only person who looked like me. I became aware that evaluations were not just about my individual performance. They felt like they might shape how future graduate students who look like me would be perceived. That sense of representational burden added another layer of pressure. I also experienced moments that intensified my self-doubt. For instance, I was passed over for practicum opportunities despite having prior clinical experience. At the time, I internalized it as a personal deficiency. Later, I came to understand experiences like this as subtle racialized microaggressions embedded within evaluative systems.
Those experiences shaped how I understood myself as a graduate student, but they also shaped my scholarship. My research now focuses on career development among minoritized populations, particularly how subtle institutional processes influence how people see themselves, their competence, and what they believe is possible for their work lives.
Jeff: Okay, that's a lot! I think a lot about how labor decisions intersect with your own racialized experiences and how that influences what kind of work you want to do, and what you can do.
Dr. Bo Hyun Lee: Yeah, so far, a lot of career-related research is focused on individual factors, such as, “what are you interested in? What do you value? Do you believe you can do the job?” And there is often an assumption that if you have interest and confidence, then you can simply pursue it. But actually, that's not how it works. We are constantly receiving messages from institutions, from media, and from people around us about what is possible for someone like us. Those messages shape what we even allow ourselves to imagine. For example, I never imagined I would earn a PhD in the United States. Even now, speaking and thinking in English like this sometimes feels surreal. It wasn’t that I lacked the ability to do so; it was that the option didn’t feel available in my world of possibilities.
Jeff: This is what really ignited you.
Dr. Bo Hyun Lee: Yeah, it ignited me.
Jeff: Part of what I'm hearing is that your personal experiences, especially being here in the United States, has influenced your current work and what you're doing. In thinking about vocational psychology, could you describe the moment in which you decided to start exploring this topic more?
Dr. Bo Hyun Lee: I was fortunate to be a part of an NSF-funded longitudinal study of Latiné and white engineering students. We recruited around 1,700 engineering students in the first year and followed them over time, examining factors such as self-efficacy, institutional context, and persistence in engineering. Initially, we expected gender or race alone to be strong predictors of outcomes like persistence and degree completion. But what stood out was the interaction between race and institutional context. We found that positive expectations about the benefits of an engineering degree predicted greater academic satisfaction over time for Latinē students at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs), but that relationship was not significant for Latinē students at Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) or for white students at PWIs. This suggests that positive outcome expectations may play a particularly important role for Latinē students navigating predominantly white environments. That finding was pivotal for me. It highlighted that career development and persistence are not simply products of individual motivation or identity. They are shaped by how institutional contexts interact with those identities. That realization solidified my interest in examining how systemic factors intersect with identity to shape vocational pathways.
Jeff: Interesting.
Dr. Bo Hyun Lee: Yeah, so that intersectional piece was really appealing. And then, with my own experience, feeling like somebody will judge me and then thinking it will impact other people who look like me led me to examine stigma consciousness in engineering, work that began with my dissertation and continues to inform my research today.
Jeff: Could you tell me a little bit more about stigma consciousness?
Dr. Bo Hyun Lee: Stigma consciousness is related to stereotype threat, but it’s conceptually distinct. Stereotype threat occurs when someone underperforms because they are worried about confirming a negative stereotype about their group in a particular situation. Stigma consciousness, in contrast, reflects a more ongoing expectation that others may judge or interpret you through stereotypes tied to your social identity. No one may explicitly say anything, but you carry an awareness, or apprehension, that your race or ethnicity might shape how others interpret your behavior or competence. For my dissertation, I examined stigma consciousness among engineering students across racial groups and institutional contexts within a Social Cognitive Career Theory framework. I was interested in understanding how chronic expectations of bias shaped self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and persistence intentions. We found that higher stigma consciousness was associated with lower self-efficacy and more negative outcome expectations, which ultimately related to weaker persistence intentions in engineering.
Jeff: What were the differences among the minority groups?
Dr. Bo Hyun Lee: In that study, Black-identified individuals reported the highest level of stigma consciousness across institution types. Latiné students reported moderate levels, and white students reported the lowest levels overall. What stood out to me was that for Black students, those heightened expectations of bias were present regardless of whether they attended a PWI or a minority-serving institution (MSI).
Jeff: How do you navigate stigma surrounding studying race within your work? Especially in this time where there's a lot of pushback on doing research on race and ethnicity in general?
Dr. Bo Hyun Lee: It’s certainly challenging in the current climate, particularly as funding priorities shift and research on race and equity can become politically scrutinized. At the same time, my work increasingly demonstrates that diversity and institutional inclusion benefit all students, not just minoritized populations. In one of my studies, we examined the percentage of racially and ethnically minoritized faculty in engineering programs as a structural indicator of diversity. We found that higher faculty representation was associated with stronger perceived support and greater engineering self-efficacy among both Latiné and white students. This suggests that structural diversity at the faculty level can shape students’ academic experiences broadly, not only for students from minoritized backgrounds.
Jeff: Right. Is your research focused primarily on engineering students?
Dr. Bo Hyun Lee: STEM students in general, yeah.
Jeff: Can you tell me a little bit more about your current research?
Dr. Bo Hyun Lee: My current research extends into both workforce and faculty contexts. In one project, we’re examining why Latina engineers disproportionately exit engineering roles after earning their degrees. We’re focusing on structural and organizational factors, such as workplace climate and access to support, to understand what shapes retention beyond individual ability or preparation. I’m also studying minoritized faculty whose racial or ethnic identity does not align with the majority population of the institution they serve — for example, Black faculty at Hispanic-serving institutions or Asian American faculty at HBCUs. Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), we’re examining how they navigate belonging, institutional expectations, and identity within those contexts.
Jeff: Two very exciting projects going on for you! Can you talk about some of the theoretical considerations that you have?
Dr. Bo Hyun Lee: Definitely. My framework is Social Cognitive Career Theory. What I appreciate about SCCT is that it integrates individual cognitive factors, such as self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and interests, with contextual supports and barriers. It allows us to examine how people make career decisions and persist over time, not simply based on motivation, but in interaction with structural and institutional environments.
Jeff: For both the research projects, what's something from each one that you want people to learn from them?
Dr. Bo Hyun Lee: The central takeaway from both projects is that context truly matters. When individuals struggle in academic or professional spaces, they often internalize that difficulty as a personal failure. My research highlights that structural and institutional factors play a powerful role in shaping confidence, belonging, and persistence. Naming those contextual influences does not create helplessness. Rather, it creates clarity. When people understand structural barriers, it allows for more targeted, systemic interventions and can actually empower individuals to navigate their environments more strategically. Ultimately, my goal is to shift the narrative from “What’s wrong with the individual?” to “What is happening within the system?”
