Today, I am sharing with you all the hardest part of my grad school journey. At first, I was very ashamed to talk about all this, but today I finally pulled out my courage (which was hidden away) to share with you all. I wanted to share because I think far too often in academia we are convinced to believe that if things do not pan out a certain way or go according to the “norm” then we are a failure. And the reality is that is FAR FROM THE TRUTH. Let’s dive in. Flashback to February 2020… I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed! I was getting ready to propose my dissertation and I had found out that I was moving forward to the next round with my SRCD Federal and State Postdoctoral Fellowship applications. Everything was going according to my “grand plan.” Little did I know that my “grand plan” would soon quickly come crashing down! I went into my dissertation proposal meeting expecting it to go as any other student would when you propose—you get feedback and you move along! Well, that’s not what happened to me. I was thrown the biggest curve I have ever experienced in grad school. I did not really pass and I didn’t really fail, BUT … I would be proposing the dissertation a second time. My committee for whatever crazy reason took a strong interest in my non-academic career endeavors and said that my proposal would benefit from having a piece that would reflect my interest in policy. I could not even process all the positive feedback they had and that they meant well because I was fixated on the fact that I had to re-propose my dissertation. And in case you were wondering, YES, I did cry in front of my committee. I shed many, many tears because how do you respond to your committee changing the whole vision of your dissertation. My emotions took over because it was a lot to process. Although that may have seemed unprofessional, I think my humanity needed to be seen. I am only human and that moment felt really sucky! While now a year later, I can see the beauty of this change for the larger vision of life… at that moment I felt like crap. I questioned everything about my grad school journey… and yes, even questioned whether it was worth it to finish. I FELT DEFEATED. Thankfully… in spite of my tears, I was able to get a hold of my lab mate and roommate who helped me get home and comforted me in this moment, where I could not even console myself. I took a whole week to wallow and process everything that had happened. It was a lot. Grad school is a lot on its own, but this was too much. Meanwhile, in my defeat, I was supposed to be excited at the fact that I would be interviewing for the SRCD Federal Policy Postdoctoral Fellowship. In the following weeks, I was preparing for the fellowship interview and attempting to wrap my head around having to write a policy paper (which for the record I had no idea how to write), but here we were, I had to take the next step! (cue the Frozen 2 “The Next Right Step”! Song!) 3 weeks later I was in Washington, D.C. pulling it together to interview for the SRCD Federal Policy Postdoctoral Fellowship. I was honestly very excited! I knew that the fellowship could be an amazing next step for my career, but below all that excitement I was scared because I was not sure if I would be able to graduate on time to pursue this awesome opportunity! I still was figuring out what my dissertation would look like and trying to pin down a date for the second dissertation proposal. At that moment, I knew that the only thing I could do was put my best foot forward and show how much I desired this opportunity, how much this opportunity aligned with who I am with this person. When I walked into the SRCD office I left all the doubts and uncertainties at the door, and let the authentic, unapologetic Lorena shine through. The interview went AMAZING. I felt amazing. I was on top of the world. For the first time in graduate school, I felt like I was speaking my truth and being myself. No judgment, no halts, the interview committee was there to hear me speak authentically and 100% me. Even when the committee asked if I had any early childhood expertise, I confidently answered that I did not but that I had plenty of experiences that I could bring to the fellowship that would help me grasp the area without any issues. I remember walking out of that interview with a big smile on my face. For a split second, the world seemed perfect. I felt the happiest I had been in years. I was free. I WAS FREE. At that moment, I knew that pursuing this fellowship was what I needed to do next and that I was willing to bust my ass to finish this dissertation BECAUSE I KNEW in my heart I had a chance at a fellowship spot. The fellowship was for me. Doing this interview brought back this fire to my soul that had been missing and had been put out by the defeat of my initial dissertation proposal. I came back with stride. I was ready. I was going to finish this dissertation! Sure enough, I put a re-proposal meeting on the calendar and I had a vision for what that policy paper in my dissertation would look like. I know it sounds like everything was fine moving forward. It wasn’t, though; the doubt and the fear constantly would creep back when I least expected it. I would cry at night sometimes feeling like a fraud. It was hard, but I would always come back to how I felt in my interview and that kept me going. It kept me alive. Flash forward 3 weeks after the interview, I found out I was a fellowship finalist! Now it was time to interview with all potential placement offices to figure where I would end up. I interviewed with 4 different placement offices, but I had no idea where which would be the best fit because I was the only person out of the finalists that studied adolescents and not young children. I still knew in my heart that I had a great chance at scoring a placement. Meanwhile, a global pandemic ALSO hit! This event heightened my anxiety to 1000% past what it already was given all these things going on in my life. While my world and the ACTUAL WORLD were crumbling around me I needed to keep my eye on the prize. I now also had all this travel money that I could not use because no one would be traveling for the foreseeable future. I took a plunge and knew a little extra help would not hurt me. I hired a dissertation coach! Having a dissertation coach was great because I could have extra help editing my dissertation, along with someone to coach me through the difficult humps of the dissertation. If you need additional help, I highly recommend the dissertation coach services to help you reach your goals! I had my coach, I had my goals in order, I had myself in order as much as I could. The next proposal meeting would be at the beginning of May. I was ready this time I would not be thrown off my feet. Sure enough, the second proposal meeting came and went, I finally passed this time, but y’all, my committee was still as tough as can be! I remember them questioning the hell out of me about my policy paper, and I honestly just had to say look, y’all, I am NOT trained enough in policy for me to say I know what I am doing. I did my best here based on my knowledge and the assistance I had from my coach and the committee member working closely with me on this effort. Regardless of how it went, I was glad to be out of that virtual room and to have passed. I was like LET’S GO, GET THIS DONE! Flash forward to June, and countless therapy and reiki appointments in between to keep me floating and alive, I HAD A FULL DRAFT OF MY DISSERTATION. I felt the finish in sight now. If you have finished a dissertation, you all understand the amazing feeling of having a full draft. Honestly, it feels more exciting than actually passing the defense haha (well in my case because I had more revisions after I passed LOL). I was a month away from my defense at this point and simply had to get feedback from my adviser and prepare my presentation for the big day. I was moving along, I had a kick to my stride. I was coming back into myself. And then …. The week before my defense I had my last one-on-one check-in with my adviser before the big day. I was honestly expecting this to be a chill meeting since my dissertation had already been submitted to my committee, but to my dismay, it was not. I will never know if my adviser was having a bad day or if she was just more scared about my defense than I was (you know, with me being her first graduate student to defend), but it was A LOT. She spent the entire meeting telling me how I should have taken an extra year in the program instead of finishing my Ph.D. in 5 years. And even more, she told me that my trying to finish in 5 years was the reason she had to give up her weekends in the last few years to help work on my stuff. And to top this all off, she also warned me that I should have a back-up plan for after graduation, in case things did not go the way I expected. I was utterly dismayed by the fact that the person I thought believed in me the most felt so uncertain about me and my future. Mind you, at this point, I had already received an offer and signed my contract for the SRCD Federal Policy Postdoctoral Fellowship and had also been offered their State-Level Policy Postdoctoral Fellowship. If anyone needed any indication that I was ready to launch, there was the evidence!! But she had an entirely different opinion of everything I had been working towards in the last few years. It made me see the last 5 years through a completely different lens. I spent the rest of that meeting nodding my head and trying to defend myself where I could. I felt like, wow, the one person I looked to for advice and guidance had let me down, and right when I most needed a word of encouragement. Despite this, I pulled it together and leaned into the gratitude I had for my adviser. I gave her grace and focused my eyes on the prize. As I mentioned before, part of me believes that as her first student to go through this whole process she probably was even more scared than me and some of that was projected onto me. That taught me A HUGE LESSON—how you treat others is really a reflection of your internal self. It is also an important lesson about practicing gratitude! Rather than be upset, I used this opportunity to practice gratitude for my adviser because I will always be grateful for her, always! But that did not take away from what I felt when this was all said! Thankfully, as you would expect, I passed! Dr. Aceves was born! I did not escape free of revisions, but thankfully I made the deadline for completion to begin my postdoctoral fellowship, WHICH I FREAKING LOVE! I wanted to share this piece of my life with you to show you all that life is not always perfect. I know many folks think I am just another success story, but behind all this success there have been really ROUGH AND DARK days. It is very easy to judge a book by its cover when you don’t know the stories written within it. I want you all to know that if things do not go according to plan or if you think you may have failed, YOU ARE NOT A FAILURE. You may just need to rearrange the original plan and pick up and keep going. Even if it is just baby steps, do not give up! But as you hit those rough patches make sure you surround yourself with folks who are the biggest cheerleaders AND also push you to be the best version of yourself! And do not be afraid to ask for additional support whether it be having a mentor beyond your adviser, hiring a dissertation coach, going to therapy, or whatever serves you best. We all need additional support to help us be successful, especially when things are hard. And the most important lesson is to know life will shake up your plans once in a while and that is okay. It does not mean that you are a failure and that your path is not meant for you. There isn’t always a complex meaning behind the bad things that happen to you. Life has a beautiful plan for you, and I hope you trust it a bit more and know how amazing and brilliant you are! And maybe a year, or many years, later you will have a clearer picture as to why things happened the way they did or a better understanding of the lessons learned from those periods of your life. I am already seeing the fruits of my challenges shining through. I named this post, “Stars Shine the Brightest in the Dark” because I learned successful people like you and me sometimes have these challenges, but that does not take away from how amazing we are, how talented we are, and how much the world needs us and needs to hear our story no matter what happened! I hope this inspires you to share your story because you may empower others around you. With love and empowerment, Lorena As of lately, I have been reflecting on how I got to the point of actively choosing not to go into academia. This change in career path was already in the making long before I had any idea it would become my path. I started my research career like many BIPOC first generation students, I was a McNair Scholar. Through this program, I was actively socialized into believing that I was going to be a professor and researcher in academia. And honestly, I loved this idea. I loved the idea of being able to advise other Latinas like myself through the PhD process, but what I did not know was that academia was more than just working with students, it is a whole host of structural inequities that I would throw myself into simply to survive and hope that I could make it. But let’s start at the beginning... So I started graduate school with a plan to become a professor after I finished my PhD, move back to AZ, and live my happy dandy life! But then...I encountered my first road block… studying communities of color at prominent Research 1 universities. I earned my PhD from Penn State, which is in central PA. Meaning there are not many communities of color nearby to study and learn from. This rude awakening happened when I was actively doing data collection with my adviser and another lab in Harrisburg, PA which is an hour and half from Penn State. An hour and half may not seem that far away, but that distance and time starts adding up when you have to travel twice a week and carry on with course work and grad school milestones. The first few months of data collection honestly were fun! It was new to me, I was getting to work directly with families, and learning the ins and outs of data collection on the ground level. But all of this quickly got old 6 months into data collection. It was very stressful when you would work to make all the preparations for data collection, only to have one of the four families show up for their interviews. Or even worse when you have to give up your entire weekend to collect data on 10 families and then return to your regularly scheduled routine on Monday. And to my surprise this was just the beginning of all this work, because after we completed this project, our lab was conducting a project being led by our team. It was a lot. It was exhausting and after a while, I honestly was not enjoying research anymore. And to add to the lack of joy, I got very sick for three weeks! I remember week 2 into being sick (I had never in my life been that sick), I broke down crying because I was losing hope. At that moment, I questioned what I was doing in grad school and if it was for me. This moment of darkness, opened the door for me to see what was beyond academia. At that moment, I was inspired to look beyond the ivory tower. From that moment on, I decided to not go into academia, but I did not know what the hell came next to be very honest with you all. Everything I shared above with you happened during my 1st and 2nd year of grad school and what came next was where it all turned around for me. In the spring of my 2nd year, I attended a conference. I already had the idea of not going into academia so I attended a non-academic career panel. At the panel, I asked if I want a non-academic career. What should I do? And the panlist simply responded “get an internship”. I was like cool! Get an internship, I think I can do that. And sure enough I DID NOT KNOW how to do that. In year 3, I kept trying to explore what a non-academic career meant to me. I attended panels in my department and at conferences, but I was still not in the know. But then in the spring of my 3rd year, I got an email from my IES fellowship listserv that IES was looking for interns in their National Center for Special Education Research. While I do not focus on special education research, I thought it was worth a short especially because I was an IES predoctoral fellow. I plead that you all follow my example in throwing your name in the hat even if you are not the ideal or best fitting candidate because you never know what may come from it! Sure enough, I submitted my materials and hoped for the best. I actually interviewed for the internship! They were interested in me! I was super excited and I am pretty sure my excitement could be felt in my phone interview. But then the difficult news came, I was not being offered the internship. And it was simply because of fit and not because they did not think I was qualified. The person who interviewed me did tell me that she forwarded my application over to the National Center for Education Research because she thought very highly of me and that I would be a perfect fit for NCER. I was devastated by the rejection, but what came next is what literally opened the 100s of doors that I now have open to me. NCER was actually still looking for interns. The next day I interviewed for a summer internship with NCER and 3 days later I was offered my first summer internship! Summer of 2018 I was headed to D.C. for a summer internship in the U.S. Department of Education. I couldn’t believe how I somehow managed to make that all happen, especially for a first generation Latina student who was still learning so much about the social capital she was missing! Summer 2018 was the best summer of my life. I LOVED my internship. I LOVED the team I got to work with! I LOVED all the projects I was working on! I also enjoyed all the folks at NCER who were truly invested in helping me learn all I could about non-academic careers by connecting with so many people in the D.C. network. To this day, I am still in touch or mentored by folks I met during this internship. And it opened my eyes to the BIG wide world of non-academic spaces. There are SO MANY PLACES and things you could do with your PhD outside of academia that you can't even begin to imagine (I plan to do a whole blog post about this soon!). It is safe to say that I came back to Penn State with my heart so full and with a new found purpose that fueled me to finish my PhD. Because the dissertation phase of my PhD was rough and having this fire relit in me honestly is what got me through. I ended up going back to the U.S. Department of Education for Summer 2019 for a joint internship in the Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Program Development and White House Initiative for the Education Excellence of Hispanics. I actually landed these internships because of folks I had met the summer before. Networking and relationships go way further than you think! This second time around I fell in love with federal service. I want to be a federal servant and serve the U.S. with my PhD. And today, I am still figuring out what exactly I want to do in the federal government (although if you are close to me you already know my dream job, and once I land it I will share it with the world!). I am currently serving as an SRCD Fellow at the Administration for Children and Families. I do know I want to be a federal servant. We need more Latinx leaders in the government to push programs and policies that serve the Latinx population. So if you find yourself in a place where you are questioning what you want to do, give yourself the space to explore! Although, I did not go into academia. I think academia has the potential to be an amazing place and I know many friends and scholars who are still on that path. I will cheer them on and support them in any way that I can because we need PhDs everywhere, academia and non-academic spaces. What really matters is that you find that passion, that thing about whatever path you choose that lights the fire inside of you that will keep you going when things get hard or boring. Because I can tell whatever route you take you will still face challenges because such is life. I encourage you to use the freedom in grad school to not only build your research niche, but also to build and discover the person you are and want to be. I honestly think learning and discovering who I am was the most valuable thing I gained from my PhD. I am now confident and secure about where I am headed because I am doing the internal work of learning who I am and valuing myself. Remember at the end of the day a career is just a small piece of the amazing person that you are! Do not allow grad school or your career define you, let it just be a part of you. You are more than your PhD, your career, or the papers you publish. I hope me sharing this part of my complex story inspires you to put yourself out there, take some risks, and do things that not everyone else does because you never know what you will learn or even better what you will gain! With much love, Lorena |
AuthorDr. Lorena Aceves unapologetically telling you the real deal about being brown in an academic world, but deciding she is going to be her authentic self and make her wildest dreams come true en esta vida! Archives
November 2022
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