I want to start this off by saying that however you feel about leaving academia, your feelings are valid and you deserve the time and space to process them. When people ask me about my own career change, I talk about how it took me at least 6 months even after I committed to leaving to…
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The Story So Far: My journey from tenured Associate Professor to Senior Research Associate
One of the most helpful things for me when I was deciding to leave academia and preparing to do so was that a friend of mine was a few months ahead of me on that journey – she was applying and interviewing at the same time that I was coming to the realization I wanted…
What’s in a name? Job titles and responsibilities in “alt-ac” research organizations
This post is part of a (highly) irregular series of posts about things I learned as I transitioned from being a tenured Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice to being a Senior Research Associate at a research and evaluation non-profit. The information and advice I provide here is based on my own experience and…
Talking the talk: Describing academic skills in non-academic spaces
This post is part of a (highly) irregular series of posts about things I learned as I transitioned from being a tenured Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice to being a Senior Research Associate at a research and evaluation non-profit. The information and advice I provide here is based on my own experience and…
Putting the Pieces Together: Teaching the Role of Theory in Social Research
This piece appeared in the May 2022 edition of ACJS Today. Download my assignment guidelines here. I probably shouldn’t admit this so openly, but: as a criminal justice student, I really didn’t ‘get’ theory. My theory course seemed like a semester-long exercise in memorizing an endless litany of rival explanations for the same observations, all…
Teaching Materials: Research Methods starter pack
There is so much about academia that is grounded in competition and opportunity-hoarding. Doctoral programs can be cutthroat, pitting students against each other to compete for funding and opportunities. The job market is… well, let’s not even go there. And then there’s the mad race of the tenure track, if you can get on it…
Creative Science Communication: Student-Centered Project Development and Assessment
The following essay appeared in the Spring 2022 edition of the Division on Women & Crime newsletter, available HERE. You can find my guidelines for my science communication project HERE. “So, you let students choose their own project and make their own grading rubric?” I could hear the note of incredulity in my friend’s voice,…
Creating Mock “RFPs” for Undergraduate Research Methods
This week I tweeted a few thoughts on my approach to teaching our undergraduate “Research Methods in Sociology” and the positive response encouraged me to do a slightly more detailed write-up here. Before I launch into that, a bit of background. I teach at small university that feels more like a SLAC. We are primarily…
Community-Based Participatory Research and Feminist Criminology: Some resources
At the November 2019 meeting of the American Society of Criminology, it was my pleasure to work with Dr. Julie Yingling and graduate student Danielle Haverkate to deliver a brief workshop on community-based participatory research (CBPR). This workshop was sponsored by the Division on Women and Crime (DWC). In proposing the workshop, we argued that…
Real-world writing assignments: Resources for instructors
My little department is at a point of inflection. We have seen many retirements in the last few years and a couple of new hires — myself included! We also decided to turn our criminal justice concentration into an entire major and change our department name. We are now the Department of Sociology & Criminal…