Blog 6 - I am a PhD Candidate!!
Well… life as a grad student has been absolutely crazy recently. It’s ironic that my last post was me talking about how I want to post on here more, yet a year later I have made no new posts. Honestly, I knew this was going to happen, but it is what it is, I’m posting now and that’s all that matters! And this post is a big one because I am officially a PhD Candidate now!!!!
I want to make a separate blog to talk about my experience going through the qualifying exams, so for now I just want to give an update on life as a grad student :) In the past year I have accomplished a ton and been through many challenges that have shaped who I am as a researcher, educator, and person.
One big accomplishment I want to highlight is my first publication! That’s right, I am officially a published scientist!!! I spent my first two years developing and implementing a gamified procedure for the quantitative analysis lab. If you’ve taken a quantitative analysis lab, you might remember that many of the experiments involve a titration. In my experience, every experiment was a titration. Previous literature has reported that this can lead to a phenomenon called “titration boredom”, which can lead to decreased student motivation and engagement with the chemistry content (Deavor, 1994). Additionally, despite the fact that students are often completing several titration-based experiments throughout the lab, literature suggests that students often face challenges in comprehending and explaining the chemistry concepts behind titrations (Wang and Lewis, 2020; Orgill and Sutherland, 2008). In attempt to overcome this, I developed a gamified procedure for one of the experiments to try to increase student motivation and engagement. This simply means that I redesigned an existing lab procedure to include game-play elements, such as points or levels. After the implementation of my redesigned, gamified procedure, I asked the students to talk about their experience. I found that the gamified procedure encouraged students to think deeper about the chemistry concepts in connection with the experiment and overall enjoy the experiment (Stewart and Atkinson, 2025).
This project was my introduction to chemistry education research, and I loved every aspect of it! I loved getting to develop the project (with the help of my advisor!) and see it all the way through. I will admit that the process of writing the manuscript was harder than I expected. I felt like I didn’t know where to start, but once I got going it fell into place :) I went through many rounds of edits with other graduate students and my advisor, which helped me learn more about scientific writing! I also, of course, went through a couple of rounds with edits from reviewers, which also taught me more about the process of publishing manuscripts. I learned how to receive and respond to feedback from experts in my field. Finally, after many rounds of edits, I got the notification that my publication was going to be published! Here is the link to the publication if you want to read through it: Quantimon: A Gamified Laboratory Experiment for Undergraduate Quantitative Analysis.
Along with my accomplishments, there have been many challenges. Throughout the past year I was undergoing my qualifying exams to become a PhD Candidate. I knew this wasn’t going to be easy, but it was much harder than I expected. I struggled a lot with managing all of the academic and personal demands throughout the year. I will go into all of the details in my next post, but for now I want to simply say that this process taught me a lot about how to be a better researcher and academic. I have learned how to better manage my time to be as efficient as possible, while also maintaining a healthy work-life balance to not jeopardize my mental health.
Anyways, all of this is to say that I am excited for the next phase of my PhD! It’s time to really focus on my research and think about future job plans (terrifying…). Hopefully I can also focus on being more active on social media and really begin to network and make friends in this community :)
