Settling In

By Megan Smith, Doctoral Student in the School of Social Work

Things I failed to do my first year as a doctoral student:
1. Give up my day job
2. Become comfortable in my new role
3. Do all the reading

Which is not to say that I didn’t very much enjoy this past year. I ingested a lot of academic material and a good dose of professional socialization, and I certainly leveled up my time management skills. All of this has caused me to (re)think critically about the kind of social worker I want to be and how I need to curate my education in order to achieve that.

A big part of this has been looking at why I failed at the things I did. Prior to coming back to school, I was an outreach case manager with a nonprofit working with people experiencing street homelessness. My work in the homeless community is what has catalyzed my professional trajectory since undergrad, and it’s what propelled me to pursue a doctorate. While I officially gave up my job prior to starting the program, in reality I’ve kept volunteering about 25 hours per week. My most meaningful experiences continue to come from that direct practice and community organizing work, but what I’ve learned in this program has given me a new depth of analytic capacity and language with which to process and articulate these experiences.

I’ve also not settled into my role as a student. When people ask what I do, I always say first that I’m an outreach worker. I never jump to student, and certainly not to researcher. I’ve deeply enjoyed the readings and the lectures and learned so much, and I’m grateful to have that content as a complement to – rather than a replacement for – the inductive learning that comes from practice experience. I have an incredible advisor, and it’s been great to learn how to look at big data – and yet I’m glad that this hasn’t displaced the unforgettable anecdotes I hear on outreach. I refuse to see research as divorced from advocacy, and I would without hesitation give up the offer of a tenure track position to work in Rhode Island with the community I love.

It’s also been wonderful to find opportunities that allow me to lean into these “failings,” and to discern for myself what it means to be a doctoral student separate and apart from any explicit or implicit expectations placed upon me. This has included participating in the Doctoral Puppet Slam, an ingenious BU Hub project pairing doctoral students with undergraduates in a performing arts class, a collaboration that culminates with a puppet show of the student’s work. Doing this allowed me to work with undergrads, something I miss very much, and forced me to think and talk about my work from an entirely new vantage point. Together with my advisor, I applied for and received funding from the BU Initiative on Cities, which will be used to pay two individuals with lived experience with homelessness to take part in a research project looking at how affordable housing providers discriminate against poor renters. Projects such as these affirm for me that the things that I’ve refused to relinquish this first year can be integrated with, rather than subsumed by, my academic training.

And about that third failure? I have no excuse. Read as much as you can!