Putting events on the table this week - I am figuring out how to navigate (as someone I talked to recently put it) "the transition from being an undergraduate to being a graduate student & researcher."
This quote rings true. I am having difficulty making the transition from my experiences as an undergraduate to being a graduate student at UW. For one, I valued class very highly as a student at Northwestern. I knew that in my fluid dynamics class I was learning the skills I needed in problem solving, problem scoping, and solution brainstorming. This was true for all my classes - I was in school and being in school meant going to class. My classes filled up most of my schedule with lecture time, discussion time, student study group time, office hours, and completing homework assignments. I also recognize that much of my learning at Northwestern happened outside the classroom in extracurricular activities and experiential learning but I still felt classes were my "main" way of learning. Reflecting now, connecting graduate school to my past, this idea that classes are my priority has been flipped on its head. Classes are still very much a priority but my research and developing my interests have been brought to the forefront. It is difficult to make this transition because it lacks structure and order. There is no syllabus with a breakdown of what I should be doing and at what weeks things should be happening. I had read/heard about this lack of structure before starting graduate school but going through it has been challenging.
I started reaching out to professors I am interested in learning from. As I try to "expand my brain with knowledge" I have been thinking about who I want to learn from, who I want to ask questions to, and who I want to hear about their life experiences from.
This week in 543 we focused on epistemology. Before this week, I do not think I encountered that word. Or maybe if I did, I did not understand what it meant. I still do not feel confident in my understanding of that word but I can have a conversation about ways of knowing and I have begun to challenge my own understanding of what my ways of knowing are. The questions I am thinking about now around epistemology are more personal. What epistemological commitments influence my work? What epistemological space do I exist in and what are the implications of these influences on my research? Also, I now have begun to understand positivist, interpretivist and critical epistemology but there are others I have not yet explored like feminist epistemology or sociocultural epistemology.
... So what did I learn?
I learned how to read a paper and make a judgement of the epistemological space it comes from. I learned how to be a critical of the epistemological space an author comes from and how the research is presented in a paper. If a paper is heavy on quantitative data and results but the authors claim that they developed a framework to define a new phenomena they identified I can analyze what type of claim they are making and if their methods align with their conclusion.
I have also learned a new way (maybe?) to think about myself. I know this is just the beginning as I think about the ways of knowing that I believe in and that influence my research, my research practices, and my research papers. I am excited as I will continue to learn more epistemologies and gather different ones that best align with who I am become as a scholar.
I also learned that maybe not every graduate student is exploring the epistemological space they exist in because of the many factors that come into play in this process. My department, Human Centered Design and Engineering, and the field of human-computing interactions, is so broad and open to epistemologies that in class when we attempted to map the best CHI/CSCW papers on a critical, interpretivist, and positivist angle our papers spanned the poles. This can be both exciting and also nerve-racking to an extent. In class, we started to talk about the freedom our field affords of being able to present a paper that has both positivist and interpretivist epistemologies. We also discussed the challenge of writing a paper that has all three of those epistemologies and how this can be confusing to readers and reviewers as they figure out how to critique your work.
... So what is the challenge?
The challenge is still wrapping my head around the word epistemology. The success is feeling comfortable writing it so many times in this reflection even though I am just beginning to understand.
The challenge is understanding the many types of epistemologies that exist in my research journey and identifying which ones I like and investigating why I like them. The success is having another tool in my kit to have conversations with professors in the learning sciences, in engineering education, in technology design, and in communications to question epistemology.
... So what now?
Moving forward, I am thinking intentionally about what my ways of knowing are. Exploring dual-language proficiency as a way of knowing is intriguing. Learning about ways of knowing for immigrant students. Thinking about my own ways of knowing as an undergraduate to my new ways of knowing that I am developing as a graduate student feels very relevant to my life right now. The surprise in all of this are the many questions that have emerged for me. What is HCDE? What epistemological influences underlie research in HCI? At Northwestern Engineering? In Engineering Education? In my Era?
... All good questions ... that I do not need answers to right now. But I have begun to explore.