By Carina Butterworth
September 30, 2021
First of all, I want to acknowledge that today is Truth and Reconciliation Day. The stories from the indigenous peoples in Canada are horrifying and I hope to some day work with them to help create a safer environment for them. I also hope to one day bring their knowledge into my work as it complements everything that I do and drives new avenues that they can be incorporated.
It's been a crazy few months. September has to take the cake when it comes to me being busy. Having to get organized to start up the semester and motivate my students to get engaged in my class is always a challenge (and a lot of work) to start with. I am constantly planning new activities, new information, dealing with IT issues, and other normal start up effect. I love my job - for the most part, the students are fantastic, but I do miss being in the classroom. It's hard when the students sit in silence on the other end. Because I can't read their faces or get a sense of whether they understand the material, I just continue on. Unfortunately, I have not mastered reading minds. But, I'm working with what I can and doing what I can to keep the students from falling behind.
Then comes the other work. Some of the opportunities are amazing, such as collaborating with other programs for capstone project ideas and getting details on other projects coming up at work. There are some items that are mundane, like accreditation work. And that is always last minute, so I spend my Saturdays working on accreditation materials so that they are ready. Then there is dealing with the odd student with the bad attitude or the at-risk student that finds every reason why they can't actually hand in any assignments. Generally, I can mitigate the issues, but there is a significant emotional load trying to keep myself and my assumptions in check. Trust me, blaming an instructor because of not reading any communication is more than frustrating. And perhaps, because I'm a student myself, I have even less patience for these students. I have an amazing boss and he supports me in all that I do professionally. I'm lucky that he told me to just send bad-attitude students his way.
A tiny picture into the chaos surrounding my desk at the moment
After this is all dealt with, then I can be a student. So, one massive milestone this last month was my completion of my "stage one candidacy exam", which really was defending my proposal to do my thesis. The preparation, the studying of basic concepts, the rewriting of the proposal, and the many versions of presentation that I did were a massive sacrifice of time and self-confidence. I melted down a couple times with the belief that I'm just not smart enough to do this. It took every reasonable neuron in my brain to convince the unreasonable neurons that I wouldn't be where I am if others (like my supervisor) thought I was incapable of succeeding. Not many people see this side of me where I struggle. The absolute worst statement to hear is "well, you are smart, you can do it." Honestly, "smart" has nothing to do with it. It is effort and motivation. It is believing that you can do it and putting forth the full effort into learning what you need to so you can do it. The amount of pressure that that statement gives is sometimes too much - can you imagine if I failed? How stupid do you think I would feel? I would much rather hear "you work so hard and that will likely pay off." With this statement, I can actually do something about a failed situation, I can't if I'm just not "smart."
Back to the topic, the proposal defense went very well. I had some fantastic feedback from the committee and the questions asked of me were valid and were actually within my knowledge realm. The only "I don't know" was about the physical system itself, which was outside of the scope of my project, but it is an easy piece of information I can look up. There's nothing more nerve racking than sitting in a Zoom waiting room while the committee is deliberating about whether you pass or not. Funny story, but I thought it was going to be 20 minutes or longer, so I was playing with my dog to help me calm down. Then I heard noise on my headphones and turned to see that I was back in the room with me video on, and that was in less than 2 minutes. Oops! I'm just glad I stayed online!
Oh, let's not forget that scholarships are due at the end of September too! I had to submit many documents to an award called NSERC, which is a big award for funding students. This is another document that was going through several iterations for 4 different documents. Plus there is the need to request references, request transcripts, and stay on top of all the revisions that are in all the documents. There are also very specific formatting requirements for each one. The hardest part is staying under the limits. It turns out that I might do a bit too much and have no space to talk about them! I also applied for another smaller scholarship and needed even more references for that one. It was a bit crazy. Everything required a proposal, so my computer folder system is very, very organized with a very specific format for file naming. Otherwise, chaos is an understatement.
And finally, my course. I am super excited about this course I'm taking on Medical Imaging! I get to learn about ultrasound, CT, x-ray, nuclear medicine, and MRIs. The professor has a very cool way of setting up the course, where it is a flipped classroom. There are small weekly assignments, small weekly quizzes, a discussion about different required paper readings, two flipped classroom assessments, and a project. It strikes me similar to what I do in my classes, so I let the professor know that I teach full time and am excited to help out where I can. I offered to go first for the flipped classroom assessment. Well, with my proposal defense less than a week before the class, that might have been a bit much, but I did it. I had the best partner to do the class with. We decided on being news reporters and had the topic of ultrasound hardware and image creation. How fun is that! My partner did an amazing job of the powerpoint presentation with scrolling "Breaking News" section and a "Live" blinking light. We used microphones and were interviewing the audience. It was so much fun. I am really proud of our handout for the class though. It was to be used during or after the class as a review. I've attached it here if anyone wanted to use a similar idea (or learn about ultrasound). I had it printed at Staples so that it would look professional (which was really expensive, but the compliments made it worth it). The amount of hours to do it ate into my life, but I learned a lot and wish that I could engage my students as much as that. Some of my classmates commented on how well I present, but that really comes with practice. I can easily slide into a role and act it out when it comes to talking technical. Feel free to reach out if you would like any ideas or help with creating a handout like this:
All of this happened with having two children who are full swing in activities, two dogs that always want my attention, and my husband who was on-call for work the same week as my proposal defense and the flipped classroom assessment. As September comes to a close, I look back and am excited at how successful I was even though I was overwhelmed. Honestly, if you don't test how much you can do, you'll never see what you can accomplish.
"Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts" - Sir Winston Churchill
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