When Jessica Flake started her Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut, she hadn’t yet figured out that published papers were the currency of academia. Flake, who describes herself as growing up in poverty and was the first in her family to attend college, let alone pursue a Ph.D., found herself navigating an increasingly foreign landscape as she pursued her academic career. “You just don’t know how it works,” says Flake, who is now an assistant professor of psychology at McGill University, and “it gets worse the higher up you go.”