Category: Health and Disability
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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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🎨”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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💖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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📣Let’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 