What a start to the new semester and academic year! It’s been very busy with new project and responsibilities, but already learned so much and am excited to see how the rest of the semester unfolds. This academic year is my first year being one of the Lead Graduate Teaching Associates (GTA) for our first-year program after many years of being a GTA here. I love getting to work with students, help them get hands-on with engineering skills and content, and helping them find what they enjoy. While I still get to do that with my students this semester, one thing I didn’t realize before taking on this new position was how much goes on behind the scenes to get everything in order before a new academic year begins! With my new position, I was a part of the team that helped to do this and saw first-hand how we get things ready for our students before they come to OSU. It was interesting to get this perspective since this marks 10 (!!) years since my first year at OSU as an undergraduate engineering student. 10 years ago, I never would have guessed I’d be working on my PhD and teaching engineering students at OSU and while I’m very happy with this decision, I find it fascinating to think about where we first think we’re going to go with our lives and where we actually end up based on who we become along the way.

Over the course of the next academic year, I’m excited to build new skills that help me to support my GTAs and all undergraduate teaching assistants (UTAs) in supporting their students’ growth. I still think back to the GTAs, UTAs, and instructors I had as a student in the first-year program and how my experience was shaped by the amazing role models I had during this time. I hope I’ve been able to do the same for my own students and will help prepare our teams now to do the same for their students!

With all the new things starting up this year, one thing will certainly hold steady – making progress on my dissertation. I began working on it over the summer and am looking forward to finalizing my interview protocol and getting some interview practice in this semester. One thing that I really like about pursuing a PhD that also differs from other degrees is that you have the opportunity to implement so much of what you learn from mentors and in classes. A lot of times in engineering technical coursework, you learn different concepts, theories, and equations, but depending on your job or career track, you may not put all of it into practice. With my PhD, I catered the classes I took and the knowledge I pursued so that it was something that would be implemented either in my dissertation or my future career working with engineering students. I think this is something that enhanced my motivation to not only pursue this degree, but also to complete it and I’m excited to see what new things and skills I learn from my dissertation along the way!

The past few months of my PhD journey have been an absolute whirlwind! Aside from my typical class and GTA responsiblities, I was juggling my dissertation proposal, an ASEE conference paper, and preparing for the KEEN (Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network) National Conference! It was a lot of work at times and a little daunting, but whenever I took a step back from it all, I realized how cool all the work is that I’m doing and how amazing it is to be doing it as a PhD student. Along the way, I learned several important lessons that will inform how move through Engineering Education moving forward.

A long term goal of mine was to finish my dissertation proposal, send it to my committee, and formally start my candidacy exam on February 1st which happened! I blocked of time weekly to work on my proposal and flesh out my research design since the Summer of 2023, and seeing the kind of progress and growth I was making was incredible. For some time, I had learned about all the different elements of research design, what kinds of things I need to consider, and what decisions need to be justified, and finally putting all this knowledge into practice helped to make all this conceptual knowledge more tangible. This process also showed me the power of setting aside dedicated work time for specific projects. With each passing week, I could see the progress I was making and always ended each week a few steps ahead than where I started.

While finishing up my proposal and sending that to my committee, I was able to work on an ASEE paper with fellow RIME members, Amanda Singer and Carter Huber, along with Drs. Kajfez and Kecskemety! This paper focused on the application of some indirect assessments our KEEN Research & Assessment Team developed in the honors track of our first-year program. We had some interesting findings in our data analysis and it’s exciting to put this out into the world for other practitioners to reference as they help their students develop an entrepreneurial mindset. It was also very cool to begin collaborating with my peers on research! I think we all brought something valuable to our work and that helped to make our findings shine.

The submission of both my proposal and this ASEE paper culminated with a trip to the KEEN National Conference (KNC) which was held in Austin, Texas this year! It was refreshing to be with a group of educators who are also invested in how we teach students and making sure it’s done in a way that benefits their growth. The conferenced largely focused on different kinds of workshops and helping educators see how they could bring new ideas and practices into their classrooms to enhance student learning. But, the best parts of the conference were attending with Dr. Kajfez and meeting up with fellow RIME member, Meg West, and RIME alumn, Abby Clark (see photo below).

Looking forward, I will soon begin working on the written portion of my candidacy exam. While it can be a little intimidating, it will encourage me to think deeply about different pieces and parts of my study design and make sure I’m ready to think through any curveballs that come my way post-candidacy. I’m excited to begin this part of my PhD journey and see what my study design will look like by the end of the spring semester!

One year ago next month will be a full year since I first began my journey to earn my PhD in engineering education here at Ohio State. I’ve gained a wealth of knowledge and a number of new skills I didn’t previously have, and it’s changed me so much already. I’ve become more reflective, aware, and think deeply about what I would like to accomplish and how to go about doing that. Throughout this past year, I was able to take numerous classes both directly related to engineering education and to the skills needed to conduct my own engineering education research. These classes helped me to begin framing the research I plan to do for my dissertation and to think critically about how I will go about executing it. It’s been very exciting to see my ideas on paper and slowly come to life, especially from all the groundwork my classes laid down for me.

As I became more introspective and thought about how to use my PhD journey to prepare me for a faculty position, I realized I would like to use it in a way that makes me a strong candidate to become clinical faculty. This has led me to begin working on a graduate certificate in College & University Teaching which not only is helping me understand how students learn, but also how to lead my classes in a way that’s student-centered, engaging, and memorable for them. With a culminating mentored-teaching experience I will complete this next academic year, I am excited to put all the knowledge and skills I’ve gained from these classes to use and to receive feedback to improve my teaching practice.

With my research design, dissertation, and future career plans slowly coming to life, I’m excited to see how the next year of my journey unfolds and where I am a year from now!

This semester, I began working on my PhD in Engineering Education here with RIME. I finished my M.S. in Mechanical Engineering this past spring, and couldn’t wait to get away from the calculus and technical work of my last two years of school. It was interesting and made me think critically, but I was eager to take on more of a human-centered approach to engineering.

When this new semester began, I was determined to dive deeply into this new world, learn more about the research being conducted, and begin searching for a research topic that I am passionate about. Even though this is something I am excited to do, it can be a little daunting when you think about how much literature in this field exists and how many facets engineering education touches on. Luckily, the courses I’m taking this semester are encouraging me to reflect on my engineering experiences in and out of the classroom, teaching me about myself and my values, and helping me develop some fundamental skills needed to be successful in this field.

All three of my courses (Foundations of Engineering Education, Learning Pedagogy & Assessment, and Qualitative Research), are full of reading, reflecting, writing, and discussions which juxtapose the typical education setting of technical engineering fields. It’s been a nice change of pace from all the technical work that went into my Masters. Because there is so much reading and writing in this field, I’ve found myself having lots of thoughts and ideas. To keep track of all these thoughts, it’s been handy to have a notebook with me at all times to jot them down so I can free up that headspace again for more thoughts. From things related to possible dissertation topics, to journal articles that have encouraged me to think differently, this notebook has quickly become a valuable tool for me in this first month of my PhD. My goal is to have a large whiteboard and write all these ideas on there too so I can take a step back, see my thoughts, make connections and use them to weave a larger narrative of what’s going on in my mind.

Like I said earlier, there’s been plenty of reading to do in this past month. Another PhD student of my cohort tallied up the total number of readings we’ve done in our Foundations and Learning Pedagogy class over this past month and we’re already at 30 articles! I didn’t realize how much ground we’ve already covered, but it’s been a good reminder for me to keep writing thoughtful summaries of each article and to keep my Literature Trace up to date so I can recall and refer back to all of these readings with ease when it’s time to study for my Qualifying Exam next summer.

With all the reading, writing, reflecting, and discussions I’ve had in this first month of my PhD, I’ve been able to refine the lens I want to conduct my work through and even added aspects to it that I hadn’t thought of before. It’s certainly a work in progress right now, but I’m confident I’ll be able to tailor it to suit my needs and desires and I’m excited to see what I discover in this field over the course of this year!