Currently, I’m coming to the end of my first year as a doctoral student at Howard University. I have spent the last school year attempting to balance being a full-time instructor in the School of Business and a full-time student in the School of Communications in Communications, Culture and Media Studies Program. As I’ve started writing research papers and thinking about what the future holds for my academic career, I thought I would start blogging my academic progress on this site. Use it as a way to talk about books I loved (hello, Algorithms of Oppression), theories that make my brain explode; just a general space to share this journey towards getting a PhD. I’m not a stranger to blogging and sharing my stories (my old blog and current blog), but blogging about academia is new to me. A different story to tell.
And just as I think I’m ready to start writing about what I love about academia, COVD-19 hits and everything is upside down. I’ve been home for the last four weeks and this is the first time I have actually felt like I can come up for air and collect my thoughts. Between teaching online and sitting in online courses myself, at the end of the day staring at a computer screen is the last thing I want to do. But as I dive deeper into the academy, I feel like these thoughts and ideas that I have should be written down, categorized and saved in a space even if it’s just for my own record. It’s like my own personal ethnographic study.
Welcome to my field memos. Notes about what this process is like, what I’m experiencing and what happens over the course of my academic studies.
Professor DWJ 