Education

HS Guidence Counselor: "You're not really college material"

My educational journey is an important component to who I am & how I see my place in the world.

To tell you the truth, I barely graduated high school. My life could have gone in a completely different direction, and it almost did.

I proudly consider myself to be a "non-traditional" student, and I celebrate the non-linear path that led me to where I am today. Come to my office for a cup of coffee and I'll tell you all about how I barely graduated high school, how my counselor told me that I wasn't "college material", and how many detentions & Saturday schools I had to go to so that I could walk at graduation. Failure is crucial to my story.

I'll admit that I definitely wandered quite a bit, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with my life. I was an Art History major for about a minute, then a History major (focusing on the social & political aspects of American history) for the majority of the time I spent in community college. I earned my first 2 Associate's degrees in 2006 & 2007 in University Transfer (a broad Liberal Arts program that sets students up to transfer to 4-year institutions), & History.

A funny story about when I was completing these degrees -- whenever I had the need for a elective or 'fun' class, I always took something in Psychology. Several years after I graduated from SRJC, I was thinking of taking a course or two & while looking at my transcripts, I realized that I had actually taken enough 'fun' Psychology classes to fulfill the requirements for the Associate's degree in Social & Behavioral Sciences, so I graduated with my 3rd AA in 2013.

Queen of the sidequests

While I loved most of my time at SRJC, I felt burnt out & confused while trying to find my true purpose. 

I made the decision to leave academia, & I worked for 10 years at various customer-service and management-focused jobs. I did a lot of different things; I worked in jewelry stores, I started & ran my own business boarding horses & teaching people how to ride, and I sold high-end furniture & design services. 

This is also where I gained an appreciation for statistics after many years of poor experiences with math. I am deeply humbled by the incredible humans who mentored me, as they allowed me to see that I was far more capable than I had ever thought. They pushed me forward with their love & kindness; I cannot imagine where I might be without their help & guidance.

I graduated from California State University, Sacramento in the spring of 2019, & was accepted into graduate school at University of Nebraska-Lincoln for the fall of 2019.

Finally pointed in the right direction

For my dissertation, I developed a novel measure of comprehensive, multidimensional wellbeing specifically targeted at the developmental period of emerging adulthood. There is a significant gap in the research literature regarding how to measure wellbeing during this unique developmental period. What I've found is that very few researchers have utilized the help of the population they are attempting to study, so I wanted to use my study to amplify their voices using both quantitative and qualitative methods using a convergent parallel mixed method research design. Participants in the quantitative sample were asked to complete a series of surveys about their wellbeing, mental health, and happiness, as well as to share any symptoms they were experiencing of anxiety or depression.

While conducting this study, I recognized the demographic makeup of a midwestern sample, and because I was most interested in capturing the personal narratives of traditionally marginalized individuals, I over-sampled in these special populations for both the quantitative surveys as well as in the recruitment efforts for my qualitative focus groups. I used quantitative reliability and factor analyses directly integrated into the rich qualitative data from my focus groups in order to develop a nuanced measure, the Multidimensional Wellbeing Scale for Emerging Adults (MWS-EA; Wick & Clark, 2024), which I hope to pilot in 2025 (if interested in learning more about this study, please see The Wellbeing Project).

I was given the opportunity to teach from the first semester I came to UNL, and I have completely fallen in love with teaching statistics and research methods. There is nothing quite as tangible as seeing the moment when my students "get it", and I live for helping students move beyond their previous bad experiences and beyond what they believe are their limitations in math. In Fall of 2024, I took on a new role as a lecturer in the Psychology Department at my undergraduate alma mater, California State University, Sacramento, and I am currently teaching the third class in a series of 3 required statistic and research method course arc. As someone who has dealt with significant difficulty in my relationship with math, I teach in the way that I needed to be taught, with focus on making statistics and research approachable and understandable rather than subscribing to the gatekeeping that can happen with complex subjects and jargon. Unfortunately, university budget constraints did not allow for me to teach at CSUS past this first semester, so I am now searching for my next big adventure.