As I approach the dissertation phase of my program I am becoming more anxious about completing the most critical part of my graduate training but excited about the thought of finally obtaining my degree. Although I already began the program with very clear goals, I feel as though the more experience I gain, the more defined my professional, research, and academic goals become. Specifically, in terms of my professional goals, I have always known that I wanted to be in academia and conduct research in a field that was of interest to me. However, I am now more open to other positions outside of academia. Additionally, the more I learn about research methodology and theories, the more refined my research goals become.

            During my second year, I had designed, carried out, and completed a research project in addition to submitting my undergraduate thesis for publication. Although I enjoyed streamlining and picking out the theoretical and methodological details of my research project, I realized that I am more passionate about the topic itself than of the actual research process. Specifically, although social cognitive theory, self-regulation, and motivation have and will continue to serve as the foundation of my research, the more I learn about education, the more interested I am in how these constructs operate with regards to race and gender.

As I said in my previous goals statement, learning about Critical Race Theory opened up my mind to the bigger problems in education. However, I struggled to find a way to empirically research these concepts within the domain of education. Therefore, to pursue my new passion in social issues, I began to read and expose myself to social justice issues and discovered the idea of stigma consciousness and stereotype threat. The work of Steele, Aronson, and Pinel has undoubtedly refined my research interests and goals. The more I read about the concepts, however, the more overwhelmed I became at exactly how I was going to untangle the relationship between stereotypes, self-regulation, and achievement.

In order to successfully untangle that relationship, I decided that my first step was to equip myself with the proper methodological skills. Therefore, my main academic goal was to take as many methods classes as possible while I delved deeper into the stereotypes and self-regulation research. As I discussed previously, I am more interested in quantitative techniques than I am of qualitative methods, however, as I read deeper into the social justice and stereotypes literature, it was apparent that a qualitative approach was also needed. Stereotypes and learning is such a complex topic that assigning a numerical value to “measure” these constructs does not accurately capture its complexities. Therefore, I decided to enroll in a mixed methods course. Although it is still quite difficult for me to cohesively and appropriately mesh together two different methods, it is one of my goals to master this type of approach so I can affectively reach my research goals.

As I was completing my stereotypes project, I was also submitting and resubmitting my thesis for publication. In fact, I am currently waiting to hear back from one of the journals about their decision. During that same time, I had also submitted my stigma consciousness study for publication. Although I had mentally prepared myself for rejection—coping with the actual rejection is not easy. This process is very frustrating and demoralizing because the manuscript was rejected several times and with each time, revisions had to be made. Although it is my goal to publish, I began to wonder what type of impact that would have on the status of education and as a professor. I think that this program emphasizes to students to take the leadership role and use what we learn and our degree as an opportunity to make a difference. I had worked very hard on my stereotypes study and as I was submitting it, I was excited but also wondering about: “what happens next?” What will happen after it gets published? Unsurprisingly, it was rejected and I currently have 5 pages of revisions to complete. This was when I began to question how effectively my professional goal will meet my long term personal goals to actually make a difference. I truly do want to make a difference--which is the ultimate driving force behind my motivation to complete my doctoral studies. In the Program Evaluation course, I learned that there are other just as effective outlets for advancing education other than academia. In fact, the instructor even mentioned that academic research may take a back seat to evaluation research, where the impact of evaluation research may supersede the impact of academic research. Therefore, I realized that I do not need to have an academic position in order for me to feel satisfied. I will be content with my career as long as I am in a field that advances education through research. I realize that I will be satisfied with any path I take in my career (e.g., academia or private), as long as there is a good balance between research and application.