Around this time last year, I was explaining to my replacement at work the steps I take to monitor international disasters. I was wrapping up my professional life as an information manager for non-governmental organizations responding to humanitarian emergencies, and gearing up to start the Ph.D. program in Engineering Management at GW to study humanitarian decision-making.
I loved my work, and it wasn’t an easy decision to step down and return to school. Now that I've finished my first year in the program, though, I’m glad I made this leap, despite all the ups and downs.
Parts of the transition back to school have been relatively easy: I’m already used to working odd/long hours on tight deadlines while juggling multiple tasks, similar to navigating multiple courses taught by different professors with different expectations.
I’m also used to managing a flood of information and putting them into chunks that I can use and make sense of. And while I work hard to make good grades, having been out of school for over a decade gives me the perspective to focus on learning the material so I can apply the theories and methodologies to the humanitarian sector, which is my ultimate goal. It feels like a luxury to be able to focus on learning a difficult tool or methodology or theory and to spend real time thinking about a problem.
But I’m new to the engineering management field, so I had no previous exposure to technical skills like coding or other vocabulary that my fellow students already know. Luckily, my faculty advisor, Erica Gralla, is familiar with the sector I am coming from, which was enormously helpful when we had the initial discussion about my strengths and knowledge gaps. She continues to be helpful as I go through the program.
Wanting to get as much out of this first year as possible, I immersed myself into the program almost entirely and rarely spoke to my former colleagues. However, I have found that staying in touch with them periodically has helped me re-focus on why I am doing this program and what I hope to accomplish.
Our conversations have also prompted me to think about things I’ve learned this year in a new way, making connections to the work that I hadn’t yet made. As my research focus develops, my faculty advisor will enter these conversations, too, and I’m looking forward to bridging my professional and my student lives more closely in the future.
