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

Recommendations and Applications

Looking ahead, I see two critical areas where we can better support academics who return to student status while maintaining leadership and/or faculty roles:

1. First, graduate programs must create meaningful opportunities for students with substantial professional expertise and experience to both be challenged and share their experiential knowledge. This might mean designing and/or redesigning curriculum to incorporate professional expertise and experience while pushing these students toward evolved theoretical horizons.
2. Second, leader/faculty-turned-students should actively seek opportunities to share their evolving expertise within their departments and the broader university community. In my own journey, I've found success in deliberately seeking opportunities that merge my various roles. For instance, my graduate work focusing on user experience and usability has led to conference presentations and publication opportunities that weave together my roles as leader, teacher, and student.
3. Finally, institutions employing leaders and faculty who return to student status should, as Parkman (2020) suggests, create structured opportunities for these scholar-practitioners to share their evolving expertise within their departments and the broader university community. Additionally, institutions can foster this integration through intentional mentorship programs pairing PhD faculty with leaders or faculty pursuing advanced degrees. My experience suggests that such partnerships work best when they emphasize mutual learning rather than traditional hierarchical relationships.