DR. KATHERINE S. CHO

I tried making bath bombs the other day. The adventure is part of my longer exploration in trying new hobbies outside of academia. While these figurines (a penguin, an ice cream cone, a cloud bubble saying yay, a dolphin, and sphere), look pretty, don't let that fool you. After sitting out for two days, they have still not fully dried out (versus the directions which say five hours). Also, the scent of kiwi-strawberry (an ode to my youth) still lingers quite strongly in my home. And the whole process reminds me again, why I'm a terrible baker, chemist, and not-so-great cook. 

In Korean, there's a word called 손맛 (pronounced "sohn maht"). 손 translates to hand and 맛 translates to taste. Essentially, the word signifies the ability to measure without measuring— your hand can "taste" the measurements. After decades of honing the craft of cooking, we see elders wield this and be able to whip up dishes with a "pinch of this" and a "dash of that." Well... I have long desired 손맛 but have not invested the time nor acquired the skills to have it. Also, I don't have measuring cups or spoons. As a result, I "eyeballed" and "approximated" every measurement in the bath bomb process. Naturally, the end results are fizzling out. HA! (yes puns, no apologies).  


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I'm about a month into my faculty job. And with the transition, I've debated quite a bit about how to move with this blog (which in part, explains my absence in posting outside of the Random Roundup). With the new role, a new degree, a new place, and everything else that comes with these things, I feel like a lot of things have changed (and materially, of course they have). 

And yet, I also feel remarkably the same. One of my friends and I talked about the Ph.D. a while back and about its anti-climactic nature: one day you are a graduate student, the next day you are a doctor. Nothing has changed fundamentally in who we are, what we believe, what we can do, and yet to the world, everything seems to be different with those three letters. This anti-climactic-ness is similar to how I'm feeling in the present, and where I struggle with the purpose of my blog.

When I was a graduate student, writing about my experience was something I wanted to do as a form of reflection and as a way to normalize the struggles of graduate school. It felt low-stakes because who was actually reading these posts? But now as a faculty member, I think about if I should be writing with the same intentionality, although again, who is actually reading this? 

• On one hand, I feel like being transparent about faculty life is just as necessary as talking through graduate school. And, at the end of the day, I write this blog for my own purpose and if I'm happy with it, that is good, right? 
• On the other hand, I’ve wrestled with that purpose as I share my site with my own students. Will they feel uncomfortable with a too-close glimpse of their faculty member? About my own concerns and worries about the transition? Will this create a context where students don't want to “burden” me, or lose confidence in me as their advisor? And on the flip side, will I feel uncomfortable with them knowing and eventually start curbing what I write, knowing that they could come across this section of the site?
• Or, would the same intention help humanize and challenge the antiquated notion of faculty as omnipotent? And create a different, arguably better dialogue of faculty and faculty life? 

Clearly, in writing and actually posting this, I’ve decided to go ahead with whatever this is going to be. In that sense, this site remains consistently the same: an ever-evolving in-progress, and I suppose that won't be changing for a while.