Analytical Personal and Professional Update

In the short five months since my portfolio 2 review, the biggest personal change for me has

been the birth of my wife and I’s first child, our son Nash Bradshaw. Nash joined us exactly on

his due date, July 15th. One of my goals when starting the PhD program was to complete my

coursework by the time we had our first child and I succeeded in this by three weeks, having

finished my last course, EDRS 897 in late June. The past four months have been a fun

adjustment for our family and a nice opportunity for me to briefly push pause on my PhD work

while getting to know Nash and how he fits in to our family. That being said, I am now ready for

the final push and am looking forward to my final portfolio review and my proposal in spring

2019.

Professionally, I have continued working at the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) in the same

position. A large project that I have been working on, which is about to wrap up, has been a no-

cost extension to the CGS Preparing Future Faculty to Assess Student Learning project (PFF).

With our Vice President of Best Practices, Dr. Julia Kent, and an external evaluative consultant,

Dr. Kate Winter, we hosted an October convening with 39 representatives from institutions

across the country, as well as representatives from funding agencies, such as the National

Science Foundation, and disciplinary organizations, such as the American Chemical Society. I

had the opportunity to help build the agenda for the convening, plan all of the logistics for the

event, and work on my qualitative research skills by compiling data collected at the convening

and identifying themes for our final publication. Kate and I also built a data collection instrument

which was distributed to institutions who participated in the original PFF project, which I

administered and collected the data with.

Our final deliverable for the project is a guide that will be published in December 2018,

Preparing Future Faculty: A Framework for Program Design and Evaluation at the University

Level. Kate served as the primary author, however, I do see my contributions to the project

reflected in the final document. I am pleased that this document will be my second published

document.

Additionally, I have continued to work on the PhD Career Pathways Project, which now has 33

funded institutional partners and 31 non-funded project affiliates. For this project, I was pleased

to be able to further develop my skills using Tableau by creating data visualization products for

our participating member institutions from the data collected in the first semester of the project. I

was also able to greatly contribute to the CGS International Applications and Enrollment Survey

by redesigning the data collection instruments used for the project and helping create a new data

submission process using a secure online email portal. Data collection for the project closed very

recently, but the new process and data collection instruments were successful with over 360

institutions submitting data.

Despite these successes at CGS, I do miss working on campus with students. While I see value in

the work that I am doing at CGS, I have come to find that I am not as passionate for it as I am at

working in student services to offer programs and services that facilitate students’ co-curricular

learning. Nash is a big consideration in future moves, but I do believe that within the next few

months I will begin looking for a new job that focuses more on student services, either with an

organization, such as NASPA, NAGAP, or ACPA, or back on a campus.