Category: graduate school

Post-Semester Check-In

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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

Halfway to Hooding: Reflections on Year One as an #SAGrad

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Briscoe-staff
The phenomenal staff that I worked with during the past year. I definitely couldn’t have made it through the year without their support, understanding, and grace.

Looking back on my first year in graduate school, I can honestly say that my first year didn’t go exactly how I thought it would. I had developed a rather glorified view of student affairs and higher education, nurtured by the perceptions of the field I had fostered as a super-involved undergraduate student leader. On one hand, I’m actually glad that I encountered various difficulties this year in my program, as it was these roadblocks that challenged and pushed me to grow as a young professional. How timely it was that our professional development seminar took place during my second semester, allowing me to first-hand apply the various theories and frameworks that we studied. While I could probably write a tome on lessons learned this past year, there were definitely five themes that were the most poignant as I reflected on the past academic year.

Supervising Student Staff: Student staff can be incredibly unforgiving. Innocent first-year supervisory mistakes easily become distorted and blown out of proportion, and at times it can be incredibly difficult to be viewed in a supervisory manner, particularly when some of the students I work with were my own age. First-year grads are often warned about navigating relationships with students that are in the same age bracket, but nothing really prepared me for cultivating that professional relationship aside from just going for it, accepting feedback, and listening to more seasoned colleagues. At the end of the day, I worked with some pretty amazing students during my first year in graduate school. They’ve challenged and taught me so much, and I hope that they feel the same way about me.

Navigating Relationships: Relationships can be tricky in graduate school, where it’s easy to become caught up in classwork, assistantships, and practicum experiences. There’s no mandate to develop close meaningful relationships, and I’ve probably had to work harder than ever to develop my close group of friends in my cohort. While it took me a semester to find my close-knit group of friends. Surprisingly, each of them worked in different offices outside of residential life. By and large, that has been a tremendous asset to how I process through various life and work things that have arisen.

Institutional Politics: Navigating institutional politics is something that I’m still learning to be comfortable with. Really, it wasn’t until my second semester that I was even concerned with institutional politics as I began to see more of the inner workings of the institution, including the good and bad that comes along with that. These experiences have been formative in helping me to view my summer internship through a political and structural lens as I continue to grow in my role and learn how I fit into my current department.

Everyone won’t be a friend…and that’s totally fine: One of my greatest weaknesses is that I try to see the good in everyone and to genuinely be at least friendly with my peers and colleagues. Of course, that isn’t always reciprocated. And that’s totally alright. Whether a conflict is with a colleague or other staff member, I genuinely strive to see the good in every interaction and to center that as my main takeaway.

Authenticity: In summation, the biggest lesson I learned from this year is to honestly be myself at all times. It sounds cliche, but I think it really took the experiences that I’ve had this year to cement this lesson in my mind. I’m a really dorky, nerdy, sometimes clumsy and awkward person. I care so much about the work I do and the students that I serve. While I am a very internal processor, I view the relationships that I form are the foundation of my success as a young student affairs professional. Who I am when people engage with me is honestly who I am. At times, I’ve had some really hurtful interactions, some due to my own mistakes, but no one that knows me can say that I’m not a caring and dedicated professional.

It bears saying again that I was only able to grow the way that I have over the past year as a direct result of my shortcomings. I genuinely view each interaction as a learning opportunity, and I certainly have grown a lot this year. I couldn’t have done it without support from my close friend group and a variety of professionals in my department and beyond who have offered their time, expertise, and good will to help me continue my development as a professional. I’m truly appreciative for the village that has invested in my success, and I’m excited to see what year two has in store.

Thanks for reading,

-Joe