Category: Being In Academia
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🔬A Brief Retrospective on Three Years of PhD life While Chronically Ill
Presently, I’m navigating the ambiguous space between preliminary exams and proposing a dissertation. I’ve crossed the ethereal frontier of accepted full-paper first-authorship, and the mystical milestone of travelling to present it in person. In all honesty, I expected to feel more grown up after that. Does anyone ever feel like…
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🔬A Brief Retrospective on Two Years of PhD Life While Chronically Ill
(Cover Image: Hiking in the foothills using all my mobility aids for the first time) I’m currently occupying the ambiguous space between being an early PhD student (task: do your best and survive) and being a mid-season PhD student (task: prepare for and pass preliminary examinations), after which I’ll ideally…
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🔍Trauma-Informed Computing, Two Years Later (analysis from an enthusiast)
The different facets of ourselves and our experiences are inexorably intertwined in our work and our research. As academics, we make choices about how explicit or visible we want this intertwining to be. When I first read “Trauma-Informed Computing“, in the first semester of my doctoral degree, I saw an…
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🎨”If I Can Feel Creative, So Can You:” Experimenting with Critical Design Methods
This semester (Spring 2024), I took a class called “Critical Technical Practice” with Dr. Laura Devendorf, who heads up the Unstable Design Lab in the ATLAS building at CU. It was eye-opening, inspiring, and enjoyable from start to finish, particularly as someone who has little to no experience using design…
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đź’–Professional Self-Care and Boundaries (What I Try For)
The picture above is a page from a mental wellness for grad students packet that I put together with a fellow doctoral student in my cohort. One specific kind of boundary that can include components from all categories is the oft-overlooked professional boundary. The most commonly discussed one is hours…
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đź“ŁLet’s Talk About Passion, Guilt, Disability, and Being in Academia
“I knew what I was signing up for.” My first year as a doctoral student has been punctuated by moments where I stop myself, worried that it sounds like I’m whining, and add that sentence. I’ve had several conversations with friends where we’re talking confidentially about our struggles (I’m having…
Faye Kollig 