composition

That Don't Actually Have to Do with My Research Question I've been working on my dissertation for two full academic years (plus one long summer), and if you've read my earlier posts, you know it hasn't been all rainbows and butterflies. Now that the struggle of the recruitment process has eased up a bit, though, I'm able to finally enjoy my research. So far, I've held four full sets of interviews and five half-sets with undergraduates and recent graduates. I feel incredibly lucky to have had such great participants who were willing to share so much of their lives, identities, and experiences with me. What I'm learning, beyond the stuff that I'm supposed to be learning about my research question, is also pretty awesome and exciting for me. 1.  Undergraduates are incredibly articulate.   This is the one that really stood out to me. I spend a lot of time with undergraduates, and I hear them talk about their ideas, but it's usually when they're strug...

"Think of the solution, not the problem." That is a line from one of my favorite books, The Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind. The book is mostly about Richard Cypher, a woodsman who faces enormous tragedy and learns that he is a wizard--- I think of the Sword of Truth Series as an adult version of the Harry Potter series (and highly recommend it to everyone!). In this moment, as Richard agonizes over all the way things could go wrong while trying to pretty much save the world, Zedd (Richard's mentor) tells Richard  he must "think of the solution, not the problem." This line stuck with me from the first time I read it nearly ten years ago. This year, I've really tried to make this my mantra, and I thought that, in the midst of the chaos of the end of the semester/academic year, it was worth sharing with all of my educator and student friends out there. In many ways, this mantra stands against a lot of what I've learned as a graduate student, whe...