I earned my doctorate in the Higher Education and Organizational Change program at the University of California, Los Angeles. My dissertation explored the phenomenon of Graduate and Graduated Student Athletes, focusing on participants’ motivations to pursue post-baccalaureate coursework, their college experiences, and their meaning making processes.

To contextualize my educational trajectory: I attended a small, liberal, rural and public K-8 school, which was a district unto itself. Unlike most of my peers, I then went to a private high school in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. As I entered my freshman year at Swarthmore College, I felt well prepared and confident, perhaps even over-confident. My education emphasized the intrinsic value of learning and pushed students to be internally motivated. I had never received grades before I entered college. More accurately, my high school recorded students’ grades for the college application process, but, as a student, I never saw them. 

Given the privilege inherent in my own educational experiences, I know that my ability to both draw on similarities and to be reflective and responsive to differences between my education and the experiences of my students (and the contexts I study) is essential to being an effective educational scholar and teacher.

At Swarthmore College, I completed two majors—one in the humanities and one in the social sciences. Multi- and inter-disciplinarity is fundamental to my scholarly and personal identity. I believe that interdisciplinary studies are increasingly important to understand the world in which we live, but informed interdisciplinary approaches require a well-formed understanding of particular disciplines. In other words, students need solid foundations in multiple disciplines (e.g. a liberal arts background) in order ground interdisciplinary specialization. While at UCLA, I completed an NSF-funded Interdisciplinary traineeship in Relationship Science (IRSP: http://www.irsp.ucla.edu/index.html; for a blast from the past, see http://www.irsp.ucla.edu/Pages/GradTrainees/Haslerig.html).