Academic Leadership by Day, Student by Night: Juggling Department Management, Teaching, and a PhD Program as a Minority Woman

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Contents

Introduction

Situating and Leveling Up Identity Convergence

Shapeshifting Through Academia and Pedagogical Evolution

The Psychological Negotiations Between Authority Figure and Student

How Professional Expertise Shapes and Influences Graduate Studies

The Heavy Hand of Impostor Syndrome

Beyond Individual Experience

Recommendations and Applications

Conclusions and Future Directions

References

About the Author

Introduction

This tale of caffeine-fueled ambition and identity acrobatics seeks to present my experience as a middle-aged, first-generation Mexican-American woman, wife, and mother of neurodiverse children while contributing to ongoing disciplinary conversations on the benefits and challenges of juggling work-life coexistence, gender, culture, teaching, and leadership experience while pursuing a graduate degree. Applying dual lenses of academic-administrative shapeshifting and pedagogical evolution, I examine the psychological negotiations between authority figure and student, how professional expertise shapes and influences graduate studies, and how the heavy hand of impostor syndrome manifests across these roles.

This exploration challenges traditional notions of academic evolution while illuminating the journey of nontraditional students juggling multiple identities. These identities—as department leader, teacher, student, wife, and mother—are at times competing, at times complementary, but always converging in ways that shape my daily path through academic life. As a department leader who is determinedly pursuing a PhD at an institution separate from my workplace, where both my administrative work and graduate studies occur primarily in online environments, my journey emphasizes the importance of having inclusive, flexible educational environments. Studying at an institution different from where I work adds unique complexity to my identity convergence by influencing how I navigate and work through the challenges and opportunities that arise from existing within multiple, differing roles across different institutional context. By interweaving my personal experiences with broader disciplinary conversations, my goal is to deepen understanding of the challenges professionals returning to student status face and how they can leverage their existing and new expertise as their identities metamorphose. In this symposium piece, I will lead the reader through my personal experiences navigating academic-administrative shapeshifting to illustrate how identity convergence functions in practice, offering examples of both the good and sometimes ugly that emerge from living in a place where administration, teaching, and graduate study come together.