professional – Page 4

Scholarship AS creative activity: Meeting your inner artist

Five glass tiles of different colors and designs on a black background.

I am currently reading The Artist’s Way, and it’s leading me to think about the ways I can guide graduate students as they explore their research, writing, and teaching AS creative activities and learn how to protect and nurture their creative spark.

Making Meaning (Part 2): Why focus on grad students?

It is possible for graduate students to check the boxes and to zombie-walk through the initiations and benchmarks of graduate school. Graduate students need and deserve mentoring that is intentional and cognizant of their meaning making process.

Making meaning (Part I)

To me, meaning-making is the way we make deliberate mindful observations, recounting and interpreting stories we find significant and important. It’s the “being” part of human beings.

Dissertation Blues

I often see PhD students, successfully on the other side of these passages, in a state that looks like mourning (as if they hadn’t passed). Even students who have successfully defended their qualifying examples or dissertations experience a lost sense of purpose, listlessness, languidness, low motivation, and lack of direction. I want graduate students to be able to talk together about these experiences and their attendant complex, competing, and ambivalent emotions.

Back to “Normal”

I’ve been thinking about what it means to me to both move forward and return to normal in a psychologically and socially healthy way. And I’ve been thinking about how this transition relates to the work I do in helping graduate students make sense of their significant transitions during graduate school

Grad student stress and distress

I am sharing this story because I want readers to know what graduate student distress sounds like. I want readers to be moved and affected by these graduate students and their peers.

There’s something about graduate students

This is the time of year when many grads and postdocs, curious about non-faculty careers for people with advanced degrees, ask me about my journey to my present position as an “assistant dean” in a graduate school. Inevitably, I find myself explaining the field I’m in now and what “graduate student development” means.

Crossroads of heart and mind

I’ve witnessed a lot of distressing, prolonged, overwhelming, and inconvenient-to-productivity experiences among faculty, graduate students, and staff. Here I want to share some trauma-informed practices that promote individual and community healing and support interdependence.

Finding my voice/Finding your voice

I want to catch you up – for those who know me and those who are meeting me for the first time – with what I’ve been up to between 2017 and 2022 and what interests me now.

Graduate School as a Hero’s Journey

[Image of Moana from the 2016 Disney movie, Moana] “What all myths have to deal with is transformations of consciousness. You have been thinking one way, you now have to think a different way. Consciousness is transformed either by the trials themselves or by illuminating revelations. Trials and revelations are what it’s all about.” -JosephContinue reading “Graduate School as a Hero’s Journey”