DR. KATHERINE S. CHO

Despite the exhaustion of creating and maintaining scholar profiles (see article about this fatigue here), one of the main arguments for why we need profiles like these, are because as people learn about our work, they're going to Google us and search for us. So here are some tips about making, maintaining, and weighing all these things...

If you ask anyone who has talked to me recently, you know that my current favorite productivity platform is Notion. I use it to plan my semester (template and deeper explanation here) and started a Notion series on my Design section here.  For me, the platform has enough tailoring to suit my needs where I an use it as a landing page for links, articles, even syllabi, while also being pretty.

I posted earlier about virtual writing groups or cafes [here], about the Mike Rose format [here], and wanted to expand a bit more about the structure and types of writing groups. As a note, there's no one way to do writing groups and you do not have to be part of a writing group. Some folx work best outside of them and that is perfectly okay. But for those of you who are interested, here are some things I've learned... 

At first, this was going to be only a part 2 but I realize that this is likely a much longer series, and I especially wanted to have the "Mike Rose writing group" be a separate post in it of itself.  This is the format I learned from the late, great, Dr. Mike Rose. He taught a generation of folx at UCLA this format and I still utilize it with friends in writing groups. 

As part of our master's program (in Student Affairs in Higher Education), students develop an electronic portfolio or e-portfolio. Within it, people share their biographies, philosophies as a scholar-practitioner, as well as provide artifacts regarding their professional and personal experiences. In all of this, is the conversation of how to design a user-friendly platform.  Here are some pieces of advice and slides I made for them. 

I decided to do a part 2 that build on a previous post I did about resumes here. While this post has some overlap, I want to focus on the importance of words and word choices for this one. More specifically, how we write about and describe ourselves sets a tone about our valuation and expertise. One of my common comments to students when reviewing their cover letter is: don't write like you are a student. What do I mean by this? 

Even prior to Covid-19 and the rapid shift to virtual spaces, I've been part of communities (both national and international) that have relied on platforms like Zoom and Skype to build together. And, over the past couple of years, I've appreciated learning about more platforms that have particularly lended well to social building in ways that feel more like wandering in a room compared to conference call session type settings.

The past couple of weeks have felt like nothing but a torrential downpour. I wrote this statement/non-statement to my students in trying to process, ​and, as an educator, provide resources for (deeper) learning and tangible steps, which I've done in the past as well, as seen here. For this particular statement, I blogged briefly about it here as well. 

With the tragedy of March 16 (you can read my statement about the Atlanta shootings here), I've had numerous friends check-in and also had some great conversations with friends and colleagues about how to check-in: check-in with friends, check-in with colleagues, check-in with neighbors, for solidarity, for support, etc. So here are some things I wanted to add:

I was featured in a podcast episode recently (or, somewhat recently because my send of time means nothing at the moment). I had a blast talking to Dr. Marvette Lacy, reflecting on finishing the dissertation during the pandemic, and considering how I had to bo re-learn and unlearn many of the habits I had "picked up" while trying to "push through" the dissertation. I figure that some might resonate... 

After moving, I've been experiencing a "real" fall - or at least the commercialized fall I've envied on television. With the last day digest for fall underway, here are some articles that have come across my radar. I had a bit more time to breathe so the range is as broad as ever, with no concrete theme running through. Hope you enjoy!

One of the things that feels hardest about writing is the period of time before putting the thoughts onto paper— or more accurately, the swirling complex tangled knot of all the ideas and things you are thinking that you have to parse out in your head to then even get to the place to start thinking about what goes down onto the paper...

I am still coming to terms that October is here. In the midst of the transitions, I’ll admit that I haven’t read as much as I've wanted. For the time being, I'll be switching the last-day digest to a seasonal last-day and post every 3 months. While I've enjoyed these posts, the combination of time constraints and posting schedule has made most of my posts become digests, versus the content I had originally planned.

(I updated this from the original post on January 10, 2020 to add a couple more things now that I've had some distance.)

The process is stressful. So stressful, and I feel like there's so much hidden knowledge, so to help fight that, here are some tips about how I managed the process, stayed organized, and resources I found most helpful. 

August has served to be a huge month of transitions on my end, with a cross country move, a new job, the finish of my dissertation, on top of the continued heaviness of Covid-19, the failure of institutions in Covid-19 prevention, and of course, the continued violence against Black folx in America. This month's digest is shorter and I contemplated whether to even share, but figured I'd share nonetheless . 

July's list is a little shorter as I've been preparing for a cross-country move. But, in a lot of ways, the theme is more or less the same that we've been reading: about institutional failure, the exhaustion of activism, and interrogations of what we know and experience. 

Hope you enjoy reading some of what I've read thus far. 

I want to say first off, that I feel VERY silly writing this post as I am about to start my faculty position. So to be explicitly clear, this is less about my own personal advice, but instead, an amalgamation of guidance and advice I've amassed in preparation for the role(s) I am about to step into. So with that, here are some of the things I've learned thus far... ​

Yes, this photo is from my instagram. This post is a bit of a repeat, but I wanted to go back to the basics in terms of how I plan for the week and for the month. 

In all my avid love of bullet journaling, I still recognize that it can be really difficult and a bit overwhelming, so here are some of the basics (that for full disclosure, overlap with one of my previous blog posts as well.)

Similar to the May's "Last Day Digest," the links encompass a wide range of publication types, whether that is blogs, scholarly output, op-eds, and other media like podcasts and youtube videos. They are an amalgamation of things I have found to be thought-provoking and compelling, but by no means are endorsements of the authors, organizations, and ideas. Also they're in no particular order.

It's been a heavy week with the murders/deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade, Ahmuad Arbery, Nina Pop, and countless others that reinforce how important Black Lives Matters. This is not new and is too normalized for something that should have never been normalized. Here is a landing page of resources in how to support Black Lives Matter, links for educational materials and resources for learning and unlearning, as well as some great pieces offering nuance to politics, language, and other things to think about. 

As a new type of post for this page, I'm putting together a monthly digest, if you will. I come across a lot of great articles, some self-discovered and many that are recommended by friends, colleagues, and mentors. In trying to figure out how to share what I've been reading, absorbing, learning, reflecting, I've decided to share the collective links on the last day of every month, kind of like a roundup of sorts. 

As the physical distancing continues to flatten the Covid19 curve, I've been privileged to have access to many resources (and also admittedly overwhelmed by the volume of emails). These resources have ranged from tips about how to build community online; to the history of Yellow Peril and the current framing of anti-Asian rhetoric; resources about teaching, and much much more.