Identity

It's Tuesday and I'm on a plane to Seattle, on my way to Anchorage tonight. I'll be attending a meeting of the Alaska Suicide Prevention Council over the next two days, barring any further explosions from Mt Redoubt.

Next week, I'll be attending a meeting of all the fellows under the WT Grant Distinguished Fellows program in New York City. I have to give a 20 minute presentation to the rest of my colleagues about my fellowship experience. I've been puzzled by what to present to this group. Surely they won't be interested in the details of my fellowship experience. I'm tempted to talk about some of my recent soul-searching, but this might be a bore as well. I could always show some pictures. Shots of Alaska and the kids are always crowd-pleasers. But that would probably be a cop-out.

Thinking about this presentation has got me thinking more about my recent malaise. I'm snapping out of it, but what's remaining with me is a blurred sense of identity. I wish I could draw better, or I would like to draw a picture of my face all scrambled up. It would be one way to show how I'm feeling. Today in class it really struck me how I don't fit into this world of academics. Sure it's interesting and I am learning a lot of useful things. But all my other classmates are on tracks to get a degree. I don't feel like their peer, nor do I have a large urge to enroll in graduate school at this point. At the same time, now that I've been away from the job for three months or so, I'm not quite sure how I fit in there, either. It seems like I've changed somehow through this experience, and I'm not sure how my re-entry to the work-world will be.

The other image that comes to mind is a scene of three islands representing the worlds of Practice, Policy, and Research. I'm in the middle, treading water, wondering which island is inhabited by a friendly tribe and where I should try to come ashore. Meanwhile I'm getting caught up in a water polo match and constantly getting shoved underwater (I tried signing up for water polo this quarter. Two classes later and I couldn't shake my fear of drowning so I dropped the class).

I'm not trying to sound dramatic. I'm not losing a ton of sleep or anything like that. It's more like a general state of unease. It's probably confounded by the fact that I'm not quite sure what my job will be when I get back to Alaska. Right when I left, our organization was undergoing a restructuring and I wasn't really assigned a seat at that time. I thought it would be more fair for the agency to organize without me and see where I fit in when I got back. Now, my boss has announced her resignation, and I'm planning to apply for her spot as Executive Director. But who knows how that will turn out.

I've also started to wonder how it will feel to return to Juneau. I miss it more and more, but I've also gotten pretty accustomed to Portland's temperate weather. It's particularly nice to see the kids playing outside all the time. And I've gotten pretty used to the amenities of a more urban lifestyle. Surely Juneau is home, but will it feel like our permanent place once again? Who knows what the future holds.

Anyways, I'm starting to get into the groove of the new quarter. My two classes, statistics and relationship-based interventions for children seem really interesting. I'm excited to get more background in child development and to hone my statistics skills more.

Progress on my research projects has been slow. I was thrilled to launch an online survey I've been working on for weeks recently, though. We finally got IRB approval and were able to launch the survey last week. The survey is designed to provide some information from the field of youth mentoring to help inform my guidebook project. I'm working with David DuBois and Tom Keller to write this guidebook on evidence-based decision making in a youth mentoring context. Our hope is that the book will provide some useful tools to mentoring professionals to help make better decisions to guide program management. So far, we've gotten a good response from the field and I think we'll get some very useful information.

Some of my other projects have kind of gone to the back burner, but I am pretty excited about my newest one. I'm writing an article with the help of some researchers to try to compare the results of the recent random assignment studies on school-based mentoring. It's really helping me read the literature more closely. I'm particularly excited that we'll also be doing some meta-analysis of the results. I think it will be an eye-opening experience. We're going to try to publish the article when it's all finished.

I'm off the plane and here in my hotel now. Talking to the cab driver on the way into town made it feel like coming home. We'll see what it feels like when I go back to my temporary home in a few days.