Abridged timeline:

• September 2003-February 2004: Apply to 5 graduate schools.
• March 2004: Receive news that I was admitted to all 5 graduate schools.
• April 2004: Decide to attend UCLA for graduate school.
• September 2004: Begin first year of graduate school.
• May 2005: Take doctoral screening exam, and pass.
• June 2005: Earn MA in Education and decide to participate in graduation ceremony. Only my brothers attend, everyone else couldn’t make it.
• September 2005: Begin second year of grad school (or year of engagement). I end up being more disengaged than actually engaged in my coursework and work.
• Summer 2006: Grapple with the question, should I stay or should I go?
• October 2006: Begin third year of graduate school and decide to stay.
• June 2007: Complete coursework.
• September 2007: Begin fourth year and start meeting with study group for qualifying exam.
• November 2007: Take qualifying exam. Earn a passing grade on 2 of the 3 papers, so I have to retake the exam.
• December 2007: Retake general question for the qualifying exam.
• January 2008:
  

  Dear Cynthia,

  I am pleased to inform you that the faculty of the Department of Education has reported that you have passed your written qualifying examination leading to the Doctor of Philosophy degree.

Yay. My parents asked me yesterday what this means. Well, it means I’m eligible to start working on my dissertation proposal. The proposal will be the plan for my study on Latino science students in college.

For the unabridged version, complete with excerpts from blog posts from the last 4 years or so, click the link below.

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Most days, I don’t bother picking up my apartment phone when it rings. I know that the person (or machine) at the other line is probably not someone I really care to talk to. Plus, people who really want to talk to me just call my cell phone. But tonight I was trying to watch a DVD and the ringing was disruptive.

The first call was a recorded message. Click.

The second call was a UCLA undergraduate calling members of the alumni association. She wanted me to sign up to host a Dinner for 12 Strangers. Um. Not likely. I have no room for 12 people at my apartment. Oh, and I don’t really cook. I’m much more likely attend one of the dinners the alumni association holds from graduate students.

The third call was another UCLA undergraduate, M. She thanked me for my donation last year to the UCLA Fund and then launched in to her spiel which would end by asking for another donation. The additional funding had helped keep the library open for 24 hours. M discussed the governor’s proposed budget cuts. And then she stopped. She asked me if I had worked for MEChA. I suspect my former employer information might still be in some kind of alumni database. I told her I had worked for one of MEChA’s programs, a counseling and mentorship program called MEChA Calmecac.

“Oh, I worked for MEChA too,” she responded.

“Which program? Calmecac or Xinachtli?” [Xinachtli is the high school outreach program.]

“Calmecac.”

“Cool. I worked at Calmecac a while ago.”

As soon as I knew M had worked at Calmecac too, I felt a connection with this undergraduate working at the UCLA Fund. I decided I’d renew my donation then. I could hear the happiness in M’s voice. I have friends who worked the phones at the UCLA Fund when they were undergrads. My recollection is fuzzy, but I think the students calling had fundraising quotas. Honestly, I wanted to help M meet her fundraising quota more than I cared about donating to my alma mater.

Sometimes I feel like grad school isn’t too different from high school. There’s cliques , popular kids (or kidz), pranks, a newsletter, juvenile jokes, desire to please and impress advisors (or teachers), relationships (people getting pregnant and having kids!) and people who don’t know what they’re doing once they leave.

I never truly clicked with my cohort. I liked them, but my interaction with them was all surface level and related to class or work. I figured I could get that deeper level of friendship from my long time friends. I got advice and mentorship about grad school from older students at work. Later, as my advisor recruited new students, I got to know them too and they became my new source of support.

But things are changing these days and now I feel like that junior who has few friends left at school ’cause she kicked it with all the seniors and they’ve gone off to college. Only in this case, my friends earned their PhDs and are off being great young scholars or they’ve moved away to be with a spouse and are working on the dissertation from far away.

I took the photo above because it reminded me of one of my co-advisees. He recently defended his dissertation proposal and moved away to be with his wife. I miss him, despite the juvenile jokes.