As I started writing my post I was trying to come up with a clever or at least descriptive title for my reflection this week. I ended up googling "emotion list" and I found this image I really enjoy looking at. A fun fact about me is that my favorite kind of graphing is polar graphing. I often share this fact with others but I sometimes leave out the part that the reason why I love polar graphing so much is that most times it produces an aesthetically pleasing graph. When I was learning polar graphing in high school I would always share my homework with my mom and even though she did not know what the graph meant, she always complimented how professional and pretty my graphs looked.
Prompt: What's on your mind?
I will try to keep this blog post to research and my academic career but just like my identities are all present in my everyday life, my emotions also overlap between academics and personal.
There are many things on my mind but for this post I want to talk about the feeling of isolation in relation to my work as a scholar and what my future in academia can look like. This week felt like the busiest yet with readings, research, homeworks, writings, IRB, and the NSF GRFP grant coming up very soon. I've really been enjoying my classes and I am proud of the work I am producing. I think my professors and my classmates value my input in the classroom and in our lab meetings but I've been bringing up a lot of questions I have.
Prompt: Think about what was unsettling. What was it?
I think what is unsettling is 1) how I feel behind my peers in my cohort & in dub and 2) how with all of my work and my research and my readings, despite being in a human-centered program, I felt like I did not interact with many humans this week.
I'll flesh out the second thing I noted was unsettling and why. I consider myself an extroverted person. When it comes to school and my research, I value feedback, I value conversation, I value talking to people about it. I've left behind my community at Northwestern, my family in Chicago, my sisters and friends back home, and that has been hard because as much as I try to Facetime and text them to update them on my work it is not the same as paraphrasing my work for my parents at the dinner table. I am reading so many amazing papers from CSCW and CHI, literature on gender in engineering and identity in engineering, research on students doing reflection and I feel like my brain is just growing. I love having the time to just read and learn. It reinforces the feeling that I am in the right place and that I did not make a mistake in doing a PhD right after undergrad but what I miss is the sharing. I monitor my airtime in class because our classes are small and seeing my cohort very often I do not want to take up too much space. I talk to my roommate who has been great about listening to me but this week this was unsettling to me and made me miss human interaction greatly.
This is unsettling to me because I worry about how isolating PhD can be in general. Someone told me at the dub seminar that this is my journey, my PhD and I should make decisions for myself. I thought this was good advice. If I want to take a class in the Learning Sciences department I should and if I want to join a DRG next quarter because I think it would be good for me then I should. The concern with this is that this can also be a very solo journey in action. This week I read on the bus a lot for one of my classes on writing better and I was so intrigued by the advice, the tips, and the skills that I look forward to improve. This reading was alone. I typed up my reflection notes alone. I gained so much from these activities but I think my midweek I realized I'd kept to myself much.
I'll end on a high note after this section of the reflection to note that I have made more friends in outside departments and in the masters program in HCDE. Through an event sponsored by the Graduate Opportunities and Minority Achievement Program I met other students, I set up lunches so that I do not eat alone too often, and I'm excited to build the community. I am not concerned that I will always be alone working but I also value community and people and I know I need to be patient.
Prompt: Is there anything you don't understand in this?
I think one thing I do not understand in this is that although I felt like I lacked human interaction at the beginning of this week and that was not fun - I loved the many activities I engaged in this week too. I feel conflicted [see emoji]. I played around for a long time on Tableau, a data visualization software and I feel proud of the graphs I produced and my analysis of them.
I learned about how I could improve my writing style and what I need to do to become a better writer over time. I've been thinking about the individual components that go into actually makinga good paper. The intentionality that needs to go into citations and arguments, stance and analysis in every sentence. I have found a personal interest in visual notes and have practiced this for my handouts for class assignments. I've been thinking deeply about the direction I want to take my research in. Who I want to take classes with and where I can learn more about topics around gender, cultural capital knowledge from ethnic minority communities, feminist theory and gain learning science knowledge. Being a little more to myself this week has given me much time and space to think about all these things plus more.
Prompt: What assumptions are you building off...
I'm not sure what this prompt is referring to based on the previous questions but here I'll just note that based on my undergraduate experience and my transition to college I understand that I am probably not the only one feeling isolated. The assumption I could be building off of is that the rest of my cohort is a-okay with this transition and I am sure they also have their own struggles.
Prompt: How can you connect your thoughts so far to the practice of reading
One way I can connect my thoughts so far to the practice of reading is recognizing that each of my sentences should add value. In my words above what role is each sentence, each paragraph and each section playing? Are my sentences educating the reader? Are my words clear and concise to convey my ideas?
Prompt: What is something you might want to do this year...
Something I told myself I wanted to continue while I was pursuing this PhD to feel true to myself was running. This activity, though, is also isolating since I tend to run by myself. I have been doing a good job about keeping this hobby up and the act of running does help me practice mindfulness. Something I might want to do this year is find a way that I could data visualize to share my thoughts about readings or just cool papers with my family back home. Also I am in the process of finding other people I can share my thoughts about papers and research with. I'll let you know how it goes!
Prompt: Try writing a tweet to capture your reflection. What would be the hashtags?
Research can be very introspective & is valuable but it also presents the danger of being alone with your thoughts in the process #tweetyrphd