#seriousacademic

[seriousacademic]

quick personal/school update:

Y'all. I've officially formed my Dissertation Committee (with some absolute rock stars) AND I just sent my chair the draft of my first 3 chapters (the dissertation proposal)!!!

With any luck, I'll be a doctoral candidate in just over a month!

I still have tons to continue working on in the meantime, but I had to share the good news with someone. :)

[elizabolt]

I won our building-wide costume contest as Best Person Eleanor Shellstropp. The prize was a bottle of wine, because duh.

And yes, I had plastic shrimp.

[altgradschool]

Bringing it back around...

So I started using "alt grad school" when I got into performing arts Photography in undergrad and continued it on the side when I started working for my Alma mater's registrar's office.

But then I got really into higher education as a career and recently completed my actual masters in higher ed administration. So keeping "alt grad school" didn't feel like who I was anymore but it was still part of my internal brand/discovery process.

Now: thrilled that I kept AGS as a Tumblr url because I've found my next career goal/dream job but am still academically hung over so I won't even entertain the idea of a doctoral program for a few more years. But I want to work towards this dream job anyways and have always (since I was a child asking my mom to create homework and tests for me during vacations - crazy, I know) enjoyed creating my own curriculum and that's what I'm going to do!

Welcome back, alt grad school, my off-beat and practitioner-based studyblr!

[crazycephalopoda]

Get to Know Me

Thanks to @reallybigtrousers!

Rules: Answer 16 questions and tag 21 blogs.

Nickname: I don’t have a nickname I often go by. Affectionately: Chey. My family calls me Pooh-bear.

Starsign: Saggitarius

Height: 5′10 or there abouts

Last Film I Watched: La La Land

Favorite Musician: Jonathan Davis

Song Stuck in my Head: Lyre Le Temps. Looking Like This https://youtu.be/fdMB1CeDbZE

Do I get asks: I enjoy the odd one or two.

What am I wearing: a Thor tanktop and tentacle workout tights. Dont ask why. It's called fashion, sweaty.

Dream Job: I'm currently working it! I enjoy being a college instructor. I'd like to move up to tenured professor once I finish my PhD. I love being able to motivate and inspire the next generation of scientists. It is a fulfilling career.

Dream Trip: Visit the ocean on the west coast, drive down to the gulf, then visit the ocean on the east coast. I'd like to see the Mediterranean sea one day and dive in the waters of Belize.

Play any instruments?: I started with piano. Eventually learned flute and piccolo. Played the Native flute and made s terrible CD. Learned some violin, cello, and upright bass. Wish I had stayed with them all. I got depressed and stopped playing most when I got diagnosed with an inner ear issue that resulted in me being hard of hearing. I can still play piano reasonably well.

Languages: English.  enough pigeon sign and ASL to communicate effectively. I dont feel that I've mastered it yet. I learned bits as my hearing was worsening. See about above.

Favorite food: Shrimp. Really any seafood will do. Long story but I was at an environmental summer camp learning about conservation. The guy in charge of food fed us tofu and vegetarian meals for over a week. The very last day we watched a long documentary about shrimp and I salivated the whole time. First thing I ate when I got home? Shrimp.

Favorite song: My favorite changes periodically. Currently I'm really into Korn: Throw Me Away and A Perfect Circle: 3 Libras

Random fact: My belly button is "fake". Have been in the hospital a lot and when I was younger they had to put tubes through my belly button for something. The skin healed over. Doctor used his thumb to make an indention and stapled it. It looks normal today but theres still a staple(?) In the back that you can see.

tagging if you would like to play, but I know everyone’s super busy….  @lovethythrall @mental-health-in-academia @sea-sapphire @weird-ecologies @seriousacademic @end0skeletal @life-love-and-happiness-persued @natureblog24 @queenofthebench @rabbitinthemeadow @vultureculturecoyote @xxautumnivyxx @zoologicallyobsessed @jadewolf-writes

[healthacademic-blog]

@seriousacademic and @andbecoming I just ordered one of those academia planners from the Wright Planner Co. I'm so excited for it to arrive!

[phd-in-crying]

05.12.17 // feeling like a #seriousacademic

Here are some things I'm constantly re/learning: -being a black person in a body that isn't always read as black can be really hard (perhaps particularly in the academy) -having that blackness recognized then becomes so much more meaningful to me (again, particularly in the academy) -talking to other black academics can be scary (I hope that someday I'll feel like I've read enough 😳) but is SO IMPORTANT. -I want to repeat that one: talking to other black academics - especially those of us in English departments - is SO IMPORTANT. I had my first session of my summer course, and while the lesson itself was great, the most incredible part was the bus ride home with my professor. We live a few blocks from each other, so we travelled together, and our conversation was so affirming in the face of all my fears about going into academia. We were talking about Moonlight and I made what I thought was a throwaway comment, but he told me it was a really interesting entry point to the text, and said it showed I was thinking like a professor. On the one hand, I don't want to feel like I need someone to validate my decision to try to make it in academia. On the other, I'm constantly being bombarded with articles about how this path is futile, and told that if I do a PhD I should give up all hope of getting teaching job, and then if I do get a teaching job, give up any hope of it being tenure track, and, and, and… with all of that, it's so important to me to have people say "yes, you're doing good work and you should actually try to pursue this." It left me feeling so positive in a way last semester could never quite manage.

[seriousacademic]

Y'allllllllllllll. I've submitted my doctoral portfolio for dissertation chair matching! In 6 weeks, I'll know who my dissertation chair is and in 8 weeks, my research kicks into high gear!

I kinda can't believe this milestone is already here. For a multitude of reasons. Alas, I have a new course starting up today, so I don't have time to dwell

[seriousacademic]

Starting back to work (and school) for the new Year with a sunrise that's showing off feels right.

[seriousacademic]

Ok, I have a whole spate of tasks to accomplish for my dissertation concept proposal between tomorrow and my chair meeting on Tuesday morning. Thankfully, it's a combination of new, original writing and document housekeeping tasks, so I should be able to chip away at this list regardless of my cognitive capacity at any given time this weekend.

Here we go:

- methodological approaches

- write brief comparative overview

- write selection justification

- research methods

- write brief comparative overview

- write selection justification

- write/pull together research design summary

- write/pull together resilience summary

- review alignment of problem, purpose, & RQs

- definitions

- compile definitions list (alphabetized)

- clarify/format in-text definitions

- copy over high points of lit review

- resolve asterisks (my revision flags/placeholders)

- update in-text citations with Zotero plug-in (final step!)

It's a little daunting to look at this list all written out. But I ultimately need to get each of them done - not perfect - this week.

Once I can get past this week, I'll have plenty of time to tweak it before my prospectus defense in May!

[seriousacademic]

Posting this to get it out of my head and into an accountability sphere:

I'm sick.

I have a meeting with my chair/supervisor tomorrow morning and an upcoming deadline. I always feel the (self-imposed) pressure to produce on Mondays so I'm ready for the Tuesday a.m. check-in.

I recently had a setback/detour of maybe about a week when I discovered halfway through my literature review that there was an entire paradigm for my research that I had just discovered/hadn't read about. (Read: the paradigm is essentially the entire focus of my research. Woo. Everything prior had been adjacent) so I powered through dozens of articles while also juggling course assignments and a full-time job. And was understandably burnt out.

But then I shook it off, got back to writing, and wrote up a couple new sections for the lit review. I planned to repeat that level of productivity today, reasoning that I'd wrap up the final sections and revisions in time to submit my draft in a week.

Except I'm sick.

I've been wrestling with this all day. I can barely focus. I can barely hear myself think.

I've tried to come up with little productivity bits I can do to feel like I'm still making progress.

But what I need more is to rest.

Tomorrow, I'll talk about my progress and aim to have a draft ready for the following week, and see what she says.

The scary thing pounding through my head is, "what if you really actually need TWO weeks?"

And to that I say: then one Monday of not writing wasn't going to make much of a difference, then.

So now I'm curled up on the couch and am giving myself grace to rest and stop wrestling with the hustle.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[seriousacademic]

👏 PAPER 👏 IS 👏 DONE 👏

I wrote a few paragraphs this morning while drinking coffee on the patio with my dogs. Then I had my Sunday crochet session with my mom and grandma (we're teaching my mom to crochet!), where I got to talk through my panic attack and the assignment and how I was tackling it. It helped me realize a few holes I'd missed (no pun intended - crochet & holes 😜). So I came home, tackled those gaps, wrapped up the final paragraphs and a quick conclusion, ran it through Grammarly, and submitted that b*tch!

I've made peace with earning my first B in this program (after a year and a half of maintaining a 4.0), so now we wait. And sew. And rest. 🙌

[seriousacademic]

Accountability/Validation Update for my current reality:

In addition to being a doctoral student, I work a full-time job at my university. For this course, I have a massive paper that hits earlier in the term than my previous courses and I've been sweating it for a couple of weeks now. (Not helping: I discovered an entire component of the paper I'd previously missed and had an absolute panic attack yesterday at the exact time my coworkers were in the group-chat sending me gifs to celebrate my 2-year work anniversary ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ go figure.)

I've spent the past week reading and compiling the relevant chapters and articles along with expanded outlining (i.e. lots of sentence fragments/half-developed ideas peppered with asterisk crumbs to elaborate on later).

I took today and Monday (the due date) off to work on this paper, with the hope that I'd have actual spare time for errands and adult-life tedium. For morale, I ordered fancy cookie delivery for fuel.

I'm about 4 hours into my day and have solid pages written for about half the paper and a decent plan (*with asterisk crumbs!*) for the remainder. Typically I wouldn't work more than 4 hours on an assignment in a day, but I haven't decided if I'm done for the day yet.

No matter what, I'm at least taking a break!

[seriousacademic]

Lordy, I talked around my research in all those posts, but never told y'all what I'm studying! 😅

It's organizational cyber resilience within higher education institutions!

[seriousacademic]

Ok, maybe I'm now just fully sick-brain rambling, so feel free to ignore me waxing manic about my topic

So I mentioned earlier that I'd stumbled onto a new paradigm that was essentially the entire focus of my research. Bc it is.

I've been waste-deep in lit for over a year. I've jokingly called my focus "an Olympic-sized swimming pool gap in the literature" and have been researching it to the best of my ability through adjacent disciplines and with lengthy key word maps.

I keep not finding research directly pointing to my phenomenon, despite it being a legitimate problem of practice (yay, applied research/practitioner-scholar programs)

Then I stumble onto one, then multiple articles that give my paradigm a NAME. In the middle of writing my lit review, no less. AND, tracing the recent evolution of the paradigm, people have only really started approaching it from my similar perspective so recently that it's only been getting published in the last year or so.

(if could have been worse - it could have been a year from now or even later)

No kidding - I'm situating this paradigm within the higher ed context and literally only TWO articles have been published about it. And they were both published (internationally) THIS YEAR. heck, one of them was literally published a week before my most recent literature search!!!!!!!

Also, wildly, I've been tiptoeing around the paradigm for months. I'd been toying with a theoretical framework that made sense to me in this application - yet that is literally the foundation of this paradigm I'm reading about.

I guess the best way I can describe it is that I've been trying to put together this puzzle from pieces I've found laying around in various rooms (and outside in the yard or even down the street) AND YET now I've found the box with the picture and I honestly wasn't far off???

But now that I have the box, my brain is kinda glitchy bc I have to think about it a little differently than I had been and I'm now on a deadline instead of my little ~exploratory journey~ and ...

I'm overwhelmed.

[seriousacademic]

Well, since I can't stop thinking about my diss despite professing that I need the rest, I'll just ruminate here for a few minutes...

I'm excited and passionate about my research. But I'm also consumed and exhausted by it. And I haven't even mapped my research design yet.

I realized over the weekend, as I was struggling to write sections of my literature review, that the new paradigm I'd been wrestling with was giving me grief precisely because it was technically new to me. I hadn't already written multiple assignments over it (writing to understand before writing to be understood), so I didn't know what I was trying to say with that information.

[Tbh, I still am not sure what I'm trying to say in these remaining sections.]

So I started journaling longhand, trying to free-write my thoughts on the subject. To make sense for myself what was significant or whatever. And it's really helped. It also reinforced how iterative research really is.

Also, also: the desperate need for our brains to process in the background. To percolate.

Also, x3: writing about my topic longhand in a multipurpose journal has (almost) shifted the writing process from "blank word doc agony" into "stream-of-consciousness confessional" - which can then be typed up and filled-in with the lit review mechanics.

-

Basically: my early lit review sections were a struggle bc I've written so much of the synthesis already, that I had to get mechanics (they said ___) and planned to backfill synthesis later.

Whereas my current sections are on entirely new-to-me literature, so I couldn't even crank out the mechanics bc I hadn't gotten to organize my understanding of the literature until I could write about it beyond the lit review mechanics.

[seriousacademic]

It's been a rough weekend, but I'm so grateful for the people around me.

This week, I had my dissertation chair match! So far, she seems fantastic, and we're getting our first meeting scheduled for this upcoming week. I'm really looking forward to all the work I will be doing this fall.

Last weekend, I was so nervous about my upcoming (read: like, 2~ months) concept proposal deadline, but now on the other side of getting my chair (just mere days later), I might actually be relieved to have to nail down the direction of my research.

I'm also nearing the end of my current course, so I took Friday off, went to a local coffee shop, and figured out the final paper. Sure, it could be improved further, but I've submitted it already and will take the grade I earned.

I've had a lot of ups and downs over the last few months (ok, all of 2023 has been a ride), but it's somehow August and the world keeps spinning on.

I also lost someone dear to me, despite the distance that had grown between us over the last decade+. It puts everything into sharp focus. Including my mental health. I'm still raw and processing everything.

And so it goes.