This time last year, I was at the height of job searching. I was focused on finishing my degree and getting a job, confident that I would then be headed for smooth sailing. The problem with my intense focus on the job/degree goal is that I didn’t understand that challenges that would await me on… Read More
One Word for 2013: Momentum
For the second year, instead of choosing a New Year’s Resolution, I am choosing One Word to live by in 2013. This is a widely-shared concept that you can find more about on sites like My One Word and One Word 365. I was first introduced to One Word last year by my colleagues in the… Read More
A Year of Change
The first blog post I wrote on this website almost a year ago was about the “One Word” that I was choosing to live by in 2012. With what I now recognize as an impressive amount of foresight, humility, and a good dose of crippling fear, I chose “change”. Even now, it feels empowering to… Read More
The Dangers of Getting Comfortable
We all want to be comfortable; we want to feel secure, cozy, protected, and liked. It’s nice for the world to give us a big hug every day and tell us we are doing a good job. However, this comfort that we seek can easily become stasis, which is the lethal enemy of innovation, progress,… Read More
Belonging.
Nancy Schlossberg’s theory of Mattering and Marginality has always been one of my favorite student development theories. This is partially due to the simplicity of it and partially because it (and her transition theory) are ones that I so easily and consistently apply to my own life. Schlossberg’s theory outlines five aspects of mattering: attention;… Read More
Helping.
Last week was one of those weeks. You know, the kind of week when I said things like “I miss grad school, when things used to be simple and easy”. Which must mean that I was delusional, because grad school was neither simple nor easy. I returned from the beautiful lull of a three day… Read More
Why Motivation Matters: What we can learn about supervision from “Drive”
While reading Daniel H. Pink’s Drive this week for the #SAChat book club, I had a few moments of clarity about supervision and personal practice. Sometimes I feel that there is always a question of “How do we get student staff to do what we want them to do?”. We, as professionals, similarly ask ourselves… Read More
A Question of Faith
Religion and higher education. We have a weird, frightened, tenuous relationship with religion at secular institutions of higher education. This topic has been floating around in my head for a while but has most recently been brought to the fore by this week’s book club co-sponsored by @The_SA_Blog and @CronkNews. For the summer #SAChat book… Read More
Book Review: Not Quite Adults
I’m 23 (going on 24), which means that Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why It’s Good for Everyone (Settersten and Ray, 2010), is not just a little pro-devo for someone who works with an 18-24 population. This book pretty much describes my life. As I write this,… Read More
Important Life Lessons That We Can Learn from Cats
Hear me out on this one. Yes, this may be a thinly veiled excuse to show you pictures of my cats. I’m going to go ahead and say that 2 weeks after graduation, I have not yet become a crazy cat lady. But I do spend a lot of time with these little fools. Some… Read More
