Blog

I’ve been asked a few times about how I chose my dissertation committee, mostly by friends who are currently going through the process themselves. Personally, forming my committee just seemed to happen. The choices I made felt natural and effortless (in contrast to most things in graduate school, ha). But
Reflecting on my dissertation proposal, the one topic I had to write about was feedback. I first wrote about feedback in my first year of graduate school. That post was my way of trying to figure out why the feedback I was getting in grad school, on class assignments and
December 2, 2022, 11:50 am Tapping my feet nervously, I’m sitting at my home “office,” which is just my dining room table with my laptop and a second monitor. My wi-fi has been spotty lately, so I have an ethernet cord stretched halfway across the room, probably a safety hazard.
A simple digital painting of a mountain landscape in rainbow. The Pikes Peak skyline is purple with blue, green and yellow landscape-shaped stripes below. Orange and red stripes at the bottom are in the shape of the Garden of the Gods park. The sky is the color of the trans flag (alternating stripes of light blue, pink, and white).

November 21, 2022

Coping (Club Q)

We have mass shootings in America all the time. But it hits and hurts differently, intensely, when your hometown is the one that has become a hashtag, and one of your identities, a target again. I am coping by having a coffee with milk and sugar and fake whipped cream.
Image of yellow flowers against against a blue/purple evening sky.
In February 2020, I wrote a post titled “PhD, Semester 4: An Inventory of Exhaustion.” It was a very long post about being tired. I guess I needed to think and write through this exhaustion, make sense of why I was so drained. Today, in May 2022, I’ve just wrapped
At one point, I decided not to write an advice post on quals. People seemed to have wildly different experiences. I didn’t think I could present my experience as typical; does a “typical” quals experience even exist? I’d also received advice that just didn’t work for me; maybe my advice