budding scholar

One of my goals since last summer continues to be improving how I manage my time. Since I am headed for a career where success depends on using my time well, managing my own time and projects, it’s important to get good at it. The following quote captures my current challenge well:

“Effective time management is a conscious decision where we decide what is important and then plan our time and our lives around these things. The key is to use proactive thinking. Don’t wait and let time make its demands on you; instead, put yourself in the driver’s seat, and decide what you will do with your time.” (from Berkeley student site)

The biggest challenge is sometimes just deciding what is important, and setting aside time to focus on it. Too often I have a list of things in my head, then expect that time to get them done will simply happen. When I have an office where I spend most of my time every day they do end up happening. But as a student the truth is I don’t ever spend whole days in an office, so managing time and getting things done needs to be more intentional. But the key is–we don’t “find” time for things, we “make” time for them.

How do you manage your time? Any tricks for using time well?

The question of which conversation to join makes sense as a way of thinking about how to specialize on this Ph.D. path. Five or ten years from now, what conversations do I want to be a part of? What kinds of things do I want to know about?

Thinking back over the last five years, I’ve learned about a lot of things that are useful, but been a part of many conversations that held only some interest for me. Now, back in school, I have the opportunity to forge a path that is really about my own passions and interests. The basic problem I’m interested in studying is integration in countries receiving immigrants. I’m interested in how government handles this at multiple levels (EU, country, region, city). I’m also interested in the dynamics of social interaction, language change, and how they play out at the school level.

The following conversations interest me greatly:

• Immigration policies aimed at integration, and the role of education in that.
• Policy making, implementation, and evaluation, especially policies related to immigration and language issues in schools (e.g., bilingual schooling, language acquisition, foreign language teaching).
• Research methods, designing studies.
• Theories of assimilation, social change over time, histories of social change.
• Language, immigration, diversity as governance issues.
• What else? Topics or issues from my master’s?

I know for sure I’m not interested in instructional policy, pedagogy (i.e. how to teach…don’t feel I know enough from teaching myself). I don’t want to write curriculum. I can see myself teaching at the university level, or running a study abroad program with research projects on the side. Or simply working for a research organization. Or working for the government. Or perhaps heading the research division for a foundation or education NGO.

While I don’t feel 100% certain of whether the interests I have now will lead me down these paths, I do feel like I’m ready to commit to a research direction. This is exciting. So much of grad school for the last two years has been about waffling uncertainty. I’m ready for a committed focus!

Classes start this week and I’m still debating about what to take. I had planned to take a class on Globalization and International Education, but it conflicts with another class so I’m debating between the two. The professor sent out this article ahead of the first day, and just reading it makes me ashamed of myself and how little I do for global, as well as local, development (I contribute some money but not as much as I could afford, and currently don’t volunteer at all). It also makes me think hard about how I focus my studies. I want to take a more global bend in my studies at Berkeley, of this I am sure. This semester will be dedicated to exploring this. And a class that focuses on the global landscape of education, that thinks in terms of development work, is a great place to begin. These are all strong arguments for taking this class.

What more appropriate day than MLK day to be thinking about this? He was such an incredible, inspiring speaker! How lucky to have heard him speak live. Here are links to a few of his speeches on YouTube:

Excerpt from the “Drum Major Speech”

Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam, the sermon

It’s due in 12 days, so that isn’t much time. It is completely possible though. I’ve brainstormed some ideas, and know who I would ask for the recommendation. But I’m not sure whether I have it in me to pull the application together.

Yet it would be very exciting, and mark a great next step to my career, even if I don’t get it. I want to do international work, and I want to apply for fellowships this year. I also think that I have a good idea, if I can find the right place to study it.

Thoughts?

This year the American Educational Research Association has it’s annual meeting in Chicago in 2 weeks. I went for the first time last year when it was in San Francisco, and found it very valuable to meet and hear people speak who I’d only read in classes or at work.

Next year I hope to go to New York for the conference, and perhaps even present research. It’s earlier than usual, March 24-28. The following year, in 2008, it will be in San Diego, later than usual, from April 13-17th. By then I’ll be in the third year of my program, and can perhaps present part of the early research for my dissertation.

New York

San Diego

Today I drove home with a friend from the program who also lives in San Francisco, and as is wont to happen, we talked about school. But rather than discussing the minutia of day-to-day life in classes and the GSE as we often do, we talked about our program, what we want to get out of it, how we want to shape our studies and coursework to be meaningful in the real world.

Clear blue sky, late-evening sun hanging low over the horizon as we drove across the Bay Bridge back into the city, we talked about what matters to us in this program. Where we’d like to go with it. What we want to have had by the time we finish. She thinks about working for a district. I think about being employable in Spain. We both want our Ph.D.s to be more than theoretical, to be applied to the real world, and relevant to the real-world problems surfacing in education each day. We want our Ph.D.s to be applied, and readily accessible in some ways to people beyond academics.

“I don’t want to be one of those people who comes out of the Ph.D. with a dissertation that doesn’t apply to anything in real life”, she said. “There are skills and expertise that I want to develop, to have mastered, that can be applied”. I soundly agreed. Statistics and research design. Sociological theory. The realities of policy-making and policy implementation. Teachers and real-world schools. These are pieces of the Ph.D. that are important to keep alive.

This is why we are in a school of education policy program–because we care about looking at the real world of education, how things are working or not working, and what action can be taken to improve what we do there. It can be so easy in the academic environment to get mired in interesting ideas and theories that have little practical application in the real world of schools and education policy. Who we choose as our advisers, the classes we decide to take, and the paper topics we choose to write will all steer us in one way or another toward a more theoretical or applied endzone. I’d like to keep aiming for the applied.

I came straight to the computer when I got home to post about the conversation, to keep its energy and bits of inspiration alive a few moments longer. I need to focus on the goal, what I want to get out of this program, what I want to do in the real world with what I’m learning in school.

These are the thrilling moments of grad school (seriously!). You spend so much time thinking about interests, how to bring together what you’re interested with what’s feasible and smart to do. For me, this is some mix between my longstanding interest in language, immigration and schooling, the work I’ve done at SRI, and Spain, among other things. I’ve decided to use the “CILS” (http://cmd.princeton.edu/cils%20iii.shtml) dataset for my statistics project because I want to explore a question about immigrant groups and higher education, and browsing around on the Center for Migration and Development website, I came across a description of a new CILS in Europe, with the initial study happening in Spain! They have a working paper on the preliminary data they’ve found in Huelva, which I’ve started to read, and I immediately emailed Estrella Gualda, the author of the paper, asking for more information and expressing my interest in the work.

The really exciting thing is that this seems to be just getting started. The larger CILS, with 3 different points of data collection in Miami and San Diego, ended a couple years ago, and on the website, they describe this new study as taking the CILS to Europe. Who are the people working with Alejandro Portes and his group at Princeton? Where are they housed in Spanish and other European universities? What possibilities might there be to work with them? Richard Alba, a sociologist that I saw speak at Berkeley last week, also studies immigration in the U.S. and Europe. I think there could be a real place for me to study immigration and schooling in the U.S. and Europe.

How are the schools responding to the influx of immigrants in Spain? Does Gualda’s working paper discuss this? How is the immigrant second generation faring in Spanish schools? Are they transitioning to higher education at rates similar to native Spaniards? If it is too soon to tell, this could be something to study in 10 or 20 years when I’ve built my career in this area.

The possibilities all of a sudden feel much more open. Other people are interested in what I’m interested in studying, and they already have a project going. I’m thrilled to find out more about this effort.