The Agenda

How I map my ideas

What I hear a lot of in this program is the phrase "research agenda." So much of our identity as students, scholars, and professors is tied to our research. I can't think of a time I haven't introduced myself first by name, then by what program I belong to, then by research interests, in that order. Describing my research interests can be tricky sometimes, because before I came to MSU, I knew very little about Higher Education. What I brought to the program was my experience as an adult learner, and my professional experience as a nonprofit practitioner. I also brought some hunches about teaching and learning, and a small but meaningful project on curriculum development.

This semester, as mentioned previously, I have the opportunity to work on three different projects. I have been thinking hard about how I can tether my "research agenda" to these three projects, and I think I've figured out how. I can do this by asking questions about "how this applies to this." For example, I am faced with a project that is focused on undergrads, and all of the data I need to use is from first and second year undergraduate students, but I don't really have an interest in undergrads. Right now, I don't think they are part of my research agenda. Ugh. Yet I realized yesterday, that all I have to do is ask "what can be learned from [insert my interest here] to help me understand younger students?" Easy, right? Why I didn't think of this sooner, I'm not sure. But I think it's going to work. I know this is a bit vague, and it is to me as well, but I'm getting better at staying connected to my research agenda while incorporating many other areas of research. I'm getting better at articulating what I'm interested in and absorbing new ideas, while still remaining focused on where I want to go. It's a balancing act for sure, but I'm confident it will make my introductions much easier.

Faux Fur Eyelash

Snow flurries today. And of course, today was the day I planned to walk to campus. I had a meeting with one of my professors to talk through a concept for a paper. In this class, I have a writing partner, and she and I will be writing a paper together, with the aim to have it presented and/or published. I'm not sure that it will be (of course, that would be awesome!) but one of the purposes for this assignment is to write with the intention and on the caliber that it can be. So Meg, my writing partner and I, have been tossing around some ideas and needed to work through them with our prof. And of course, he blew our minds by suggesting a direction for our paper, but I'll save that for another blog post once we get it sorted out.

Knowing that I had this meeting this afternoon, I thought, "Hey, it's gonna be warm, (around 30 degrees) so I should walk." Then, I looked outside when I was about to leave, and it was snowing. At first I rolled my eyes, but I decided to commit to the walk anyway because I have really good boots and leg-warmers. During my walk, much to my delight, I discovered the wonders of the faux-fur trim on my down coat. This trim acts as a kind of giant eyelash. It's pretty amazing. It kept all the snow from blowing into my face, thereby catching it instead in the fake acrylic fur. I do have the option of removing it, because it snaps on and off. But really, after today, why would I ever take it off?

Playing Pretend

Marathon Class Tuesdays: Three down, twelve to go. I came to an agreement with myself Tuesday afternoon, that I would allow for pouting until the end of the week about not feeling motivated, then I would have to change my attitude. However, that afternoon, I decided to just try enjoying my two classes instead of pouting, because like many things I do, I can't even procrastinate on changing my attitude, I need to start on it now even though the deadline isn't until Saturday night. But the other reason for working on my attitude sooner is because attending 6 hours of classes all at once while not enjoying them really puts me in a terrible mood. I feel resentful, and frustrated, and tired, and well, unmotivated. I start to teeter on apathy, and when I begin to feel apathetic, then it's Game Over. So I thought, "how about just pretending that I am enjoying these classes? And pretending that I like my professors? Maybe I will find that I actually do?"

This playing pretend is not some slight of hand trick that I use on myself. Instead, by "pretending," I can put myself into a role that I might not otherwise consider. It involves opening up my mind enough to take in the world from a different perspective, and allow my personal opinions and feelings to take a back-seat for a little while. As I mentioned before, I was getting too wound-up and too focused on my reactions in class, therefore unable to listen to how I was responding.

So, there. I pretended that I liked my classes Tuesday night. And by the end of the evening, I found I didn't have to pretend anymore. I let myself just listen, absorb, and learn. I also found that I didn't have to pretend to like my professors because over the course of three hours apiece, I came to see that they're actually pretty interesting and full of knowledge and dare I say, quite personable.

Confession Time: Motivation

This is the third week of the spring semester, and I feel, well, totally unmotivated. I've been thinking about this a lot and think I know why. I may have become more subjective since the new semester started. When I was a brand new student everything was new, and so it was exciting. Now that my brain has been filled with the "wisdom" (or gossip) of further-along students and I've also had more interactions with professors, I find that I come to class with an already formed idea of what should or what will go on. This isn't helpful. I've been reflecting on this a lot and have come to realize that I'm spending more energy battling my perspective against my professors perspective or teaching style (yes, two of my three classes are frustrating for me right now). Hence, I'm not allowing time for learning, and for investing in the ideas that I want to pursue. My hope is that by the end of this week I'll have put this stuff behind me. It's distracting, and it makes me less able to learn because I'm focused on how I feel about people, or how they feel about me, which can be an endless cycle. Put simply, I'm having trouble "liking" my professors right now, and sooner or later I'm going to have to come to terms with the fact that it doesn't matter if I "like" them because I will learn from them. And they certainly have a wealth of knowledge that I'd love to learn from.

A Night for Play

Spartans almost scoring,
and Rob and I super happy to be at a hockey game

When Kevin is out of town (like now) I find that I work through the evening because, well, sometimes I have nothing else to do. (I mean, before it's Murder She Wrote time). My brain might keep picking up ideas so I keep working on things, tinkering, and puttering around with paper proposals. Yesterday, however, I had to keep a schedule for myself because I went to a hockey game. I grew up watching the Portland Winterhawks, so going to a hockey game here in Michigan was very exciting. I haven't been to one in years. There are two others in my cohort who also like hockey, so we all went out to dinner then to the game. Fortunately, despite MSU having a losing record, we won! And we beat the most hated university in the midwest, Ohio State. Nice job Spartans!

Video Game Music and Rainy Day Cafe

The other day I was chatting with several of my cohort-mates and the topic moved to studying styles. I am not entirely sure I have a studying style, but I do find that I get the most work done while seated at my dining room table. However, something very interesting came up, and it was video game music. I'm not much of a video game player, unless you count that spell in middle school when we had a Nintendo and it was Super Mario Bros ALL DAY LONG. So apparently, there is a trend of listening to video game music while studying, because the entire genre was composed to increase engagement (or something like that). Another suggestion was put forth by a classmate, called Rainy Day Cafe. "It's just a site with the sound of a cafe, and rain, and you can adjust the levels of each." All of this kind of blew my mind. Listening to video game music, and a site that only has cafe sounds? I decided to give it a try. So this morning, while reading, I listened to the cafe (no rain sounds because that actually puts me to sleep). The occasional clink of silverware on a plate, and the low murmur of voices was first weird, then really great. I had my own little cafe this morning and I pounded through 100 pages of reading. Next, I had to start work on a paper. So I decided to go for video game music. There are several different ones, I found one that is not too loud or, for lack of a better way to put it, makes me feel like I'm winning. It's called Fez, and again, totally worked. Maybe I'm just playing tricks on myself, but I have to say, I felt that the little boost of video game music did indeed do something to my psyche. In the words of Super Mario Bros, 1-Up!

I Got It! It's Education!

Since dropping my quantitative statistics class, I am faced with three courses that require me to write long papers on research topics. Don't get me wrong, this is kind of exciting to me. But I wanted to be strategic about this, and not have to start from the beginning. And by start from the beginning, I mean check out a gazillion books from the library and download articles so I can read about something quickly enough to write coherently about it. This is just the nature of the program. However, now that I have one semester under my belt, I have done a lot of reading that, well, I wouldn't just want to go to waste!

Unfortunately, I am the type of person that has too many interests. I know many people suffer from this, and I am trying to wrangle it so that I don't have to start over every time I begin a new class. One of the skills I am learning is developing questions to link the areas of knowledge together. That way, I may only have to backfill the things I don't know, while also using the things I do. It's rather difficult, however, because my brain sometimes goes into extreme web-making mode, and when I write my ideas down and look for the threads that link them, oftentimes after an hour all I'm left with is "What links these ideas together is .... (drumroll) Education."