Grades are in the books, and I’ve made it through my third semester in grad school. It was quite a slog, as may be evident by my relative inactivity on the site. Nevertheless, I wanted to check-in with a few thoughts and updates. 

Becoming a Scholar: This semester I took a course on college environments and assessment. The penultimate milestone for my program, it required my colleagues and I to work in teams to plan an original assessment project. Drawing upon our academic foundations in student development theory, diverse college students, and more, our study was titled “An Exploratory Analysis of the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering Living and Learning Community.” Working closely with program staff, my group developed this project to explore the gendered dynamics that exist within this STEM LLC. If you’d like to learn a bit more about the project, there are some documents available for download on my current projects/artifacts page.

Aside from the immense relief of accomplishing another semester in my graduate program, this semester was also a significant milestone in my development as a scholar-practitioner. I’ve always been enamored with the idea of being a scholar and producing original research. My time in grad school has propelled me forward in this regard, from learning the scholarly foundations of higher education and student affairs administration to the hours spent wrangling text in Microsoft Word to make sure my work met the necessary APA citation style. In many ways, it felt like this semester fit the final pieces into place. This manifested itself in small wins along the way, such as navigating IRB protocol and feeling comfortable doing a literature review. Within my own group, I worked closely with a colleague and provided most direction regarding research methodologies and data analysis.

I highlight these various items because these aren’t just things I wallowed through for the last semester trying to figure out. These are all components that my graduate program had been preparing me to do the entire time, whether I was cognizant of it or not. I could go on for days, but I’ll keep it short. My program has prepared me to engage in research. I’ve always had these various ideas bouncing around in my head, and I finally feel that I’ve achieved a scholarly foundation where I can go forth and put these ideas out there into the universe of scholarly ideas.

Finishing the IR Certificate: Let me preface this by saying that my decision to pursue the graduate certificate in institutional research is the greatest example I can think of where I made a decision on a whim only for it to become one of the most profound choices I’ve made, in both the personal and academic spheres of my life. Seriously, my internal thought process in pursuing this certificate was a thought process that went something as follows: “I have absolutely no idea what this program is, but it sounds sort of  cool, why not?” I wish I had a more grandiose, epic reason for choosing the IR certificate, but alas, here we are. I had no idea at the time that the program would open up a whole new world of higher education to me. In many ways, the IR certificate confirmed my inner hunch that a career path in assessment and institutional research/effectiveness was the best fit for my professional trajectory. It also helps to be in a graduate preparation program with brilliant faculty. Seriously, how many people can say that their professor is the project director for the Carnegie Classification?

Statistics: I never thought I’d be a huge fan of math, much less statistics for that matter. Naturally, an introductory statistics course is a requirement fore the IR certificate that I talk about above. You can imagine my surprise in discovering that I enjoyed so much that I decided to take multivariate stats as an elective in the spring 2019 semester. Starting to learn stats this past semester was one of the happiest accidents to have happened, as I’m fairly certain I would never have done so were it not required of me. Prior to taking statistics, I would glaze over the methods section of various papers in my field, not really understanding different types of statistical tests or what it means for a result to be statistically significant. I’ve even found myself recently speaking diatribes on why we need more statistical competency in our graduate preparation programs and the field as a whole (but I’ll save that for another day).

Overall, the common theme of this semester was another continuation in my story of becoming — becoming a better scholar and practitioner than I was last semester or even last year. The last semester has taught me a lot about where I fit inside of the large higher education ecosystem, and I’m excited to see where this journey will take me. I’ve got some exciting projects planned for 2019, so I hope you’ll stay tuned!

Thanks for reading,

-Joe