Life Update & (Slight) Changes to "Discussion Board"
I am currently undergoing a huge life transition, which naturally makes it a perfect time to write my first Substack post in nine months. This academic year was easily my busiest to date, in part because I was hard at work on PhD applications in the background. I’m very proud to say that work paid off. This spring, I was accepted to SUNY Albany’s English program with a teaching assistantship! I’m starting this fall with a specialization in Rhetoric and Composition Studies and I couldn’t be more excited.
For anyone wondering, my research focus will be in first-year college writing pedagogy, which was not what I thought I’d be doing when I was an M.F.A. student writing poetry. At the time, the only thing I imagined myself teaching was poetry or fiction workshops, but college writing upended my career goals in ways I never anticipated.
After I survived my first semester as an adjunct (with several moments of existential career doubt and panic), I couldn’t stop thinking about how I could not only improve as a teacher, but how I could try to make this specific corner of academia better for everyone within it (students and instructors alike). Now, it feels surreal to think I’ll be devoting the next several years of my life researching ways to re-imagine how writing is taught at the college level.
While I’ve not written on this platform much, the way I want to use it is changing. I started it primarily because I wanted an excuse to write more, but the kind of things I thought I’d want to share here fluctuated constantly. Fortunately, the part about wanting to write more worked out though (albeit not publicly). But pretty soon I’ll be writing far more than I ever have, and I know I’ll want to share much of it.
Based on the content and writers I’ve been engaging with on Substack lately, this feels like a good place to house reflections on my academic endeavors and things I learn in my growth as a writer and educator. That’s all I have for now, but stay tuned. Essays on my teaching experiences and more are on the way this summer.