My PhD Teaching Fellowship in Austin

• I spent the past two weeks as one of two PhD teaching fellows at Austin this summer. It was one of the highlights of grad school for me.
• After last summer, I felt really burned out and miserable after my last internship, and wanted to have this summer to myself instead of to just another corporation. I do not regret that choice to this day. This has been one of the most fun for me in terms of summers in grad school so far, and we’re still in the middle of it.

Teaching Fellowship

• I applied a week before the deadline, prefacing it with “I probably won’t get it, but…” and to my surprise, I got a spot! I could never have anticipated how transformational and fantastic the opportunity was; the students were amazing, supportive and rooting for us, I learned that, as one of the organizers said, “your intuition in teaching is spot on”, and that you “are one of the most caring / empathetic teachers we have ever had in our cohort”. I also learned that I had a great ability to teach, and these are things that I would have rated myself horribly for before having had this experience, because I was just not every self-aware in evaluating myself in this way. I also think that in many disciplines like mine, there aren’t very good opportunities to teach; teaching is seen more as labour and something you only do if you don’t have funding from other avenues. Here, it was something you put yourself into, we were given the space to try new things and to fail, and to grow, and the experience was more than I could have ever asked for.
• On the final day, the other fellow for my module looked at me teary-eyed and said that she felt that I had really come into my own over the past two weeks, and that I had this “sparkle” (as she called it) that really lit up the room and that was so clear between the students and myself, and she was so grateful to have been there to experience all of this. I felt so grateful to have met every single person in my cohort, and to feel like I could finally be in a space where I felt valued, validated, and could thrive and grow.
• A mentor met with me online and said that I was “ebullient” since I had been here, and that it made her feel so happy, too.
• Every day there was something to do, and often there was a steady stream of activity with either persons going out, hanging out in the lounge of the 4th floor until 3am; it just went on and on. It was a space where I felt I could be myself, all of myself, and that has been so rare since I started grad school.

On the Final Day

• I began crying upon waking up, reading a student’s message about sharing their final presentation, saying “you’d like it”. I took a peek and immediately tears were streaming down my face. The final presentations were all wonderful, and so personal and incorporated so much of what we did over the past few weeks (I had covered everything from graphs using things like “Queer Ultimatum”, glitch art, audio spectrograms, blending of images, etc). It was super cool to see their journey from start to finish, and to be a part of that, and to see how much joy they found in finding community with each other.
• Some of my favourite memories were their going to Rosita’s for tacos and applauding in the elevator as they noisily made their way to the bus, our group going to Kinokuniya and eating rotating sushi, karaoke, paddle-boarding and kayaking, watching Rush Hour at 2 in the morning, watching them play Quiplash, Patently stupid, Mario Party, solving 1000 piece puzzles and the Olympics tournament for the grand first prize of a pack of cookies, or Jeopardy. Or even things like spending time watching fireworks on July 4th and deciding instead of taking the bus back home and getting squished with everyone, walking back home instead (for about an hour), and finding a bunny along the way. Or discovering someone would get Whataburger or In-n-out randomly at 1am in the lounge, while a group slunk off to party on 6th street. There are so many memories and there are no words to explain how fun and incredible my experience was!
• I leave with so many new friends, a new academic family, feeling so affirmed and that for once, I could really enjoy that I did get the opportunity not because I was lucky, or something else that dismisses who I am, but that “you stood out and we wanted you to be a part of this”; the wonderful, incredible, immensely rewarding community where I found SO much joy!
• I wished so many times in my life when I was pursing things that brought me joy that I ALSO had a community like this one!
• Not going to lie; it was HOT and humid though!

A picture tells a thousand words, so I can probably just post photos at this point.

• A Quidditch puzzle with a large number of pieces solved in a couple of days by various people hanging out in the lounges while chatting. There is a hilarious transcript of a video made when it was completed.

• We found a vegan milkshake place and there was a lot of art in the area. This is a mural.

• One of the students totally would say this, so I took a photo and showed her. It also completely matches the feeling of my whole two weeks!

• vegan milkshakes! Mine was some kind of strawberry one..with edible glitter!

• More vegan place artwork

• This place led to a lot of shouting and cheering as the students took the bus for 30 minutes to go to this place. The food is amazing. I had a large horchata that was literally the largest horchata drink I have ever had in my life!

• On the way back from kayaking and paddle-boarding.

• We went paddle-boarding and kayaking on Lady Bird lake. I loved it!

• Our group on the last day! Four PhD teaching fellows with students (25 total students, four total PhD fellows!). It was such a special group!

• One random day I was going to 99Ranch, one of the students asked me what my favourite animal was, and because I liked the squirrels in Austin, I said “squirrel”. And apparently this was the reason; they drew our favourite animal and also wrote kind words. I need to laminate this. One of my graph theory professors said she’d been teaching for 15 years and never got something so nice!

• They had taken photos (I hadn’t even noticed) from different times; when I was helping students, at socials, etc, and made this beautiful montage. Another thing to frame!

• This was next to one of my morning coffee places, Lucky Lab, which I endearingly called “Dog Coffee”. The Lavender Matcha with oat milk was a staple.

• They took us to Trudy’s the evening before we left, and they had elote, and I was SO happy! After moving from LA, elote has haunted my dreams!

• We met and had lunch with the dean, who was amazing!

• July 4th was amazing. I hadn’t celebrated with a group in a long time. They piped out classical music, which I love, and there were food trucks.

• At the end of the night, rather than opting to squeeze with all those people on a bus, a group of us walked for 45 minutes to an hour back home, and we saw a bunny on the way! I have lived in cities so my first thought is that it was a rat (lol), but fortunately, it was really a bunny!

• Apparently there was a toy museum near the July 4th Ampitheatre, so we saw someone driving by with a dinosaur.

• View on the walk to July 4th celebrations.

• One day I was walking back from class, and as soon as I got to the entrance of our accommodations, five people from our programme said they had ordered a Lyft and said they had room for one more, and asked if I wanted to come to Kinokuniya with them! So I said sure, and two seconds later, I was in a Lyft and we ended up buying a bunch of stuff, having rotating sushi and even had this robot drop us water and whatnot.

• The five of us stopping to take a photo at 85 degrees. I haven’t felt so included in things in a while. I can’t believe how easily they thought of me, invited me to things. Oh, and there is a story of how one of the organizers brings an ice-maker with him, and I was kind of jealous because we had a fridge but no ice. But there was an ice-maker that had “chick-fil-a”-style (I didn’t know this was a thing!) ice in the basement that the students had found, and one of them messaged me to ask which room was mine, and then they filled up a cup and brought me ice, which was SO NICE!!!

• The second time we went back to Kinokuniya, there was a little totoro sitting on this fella. LOVE!

• Oh hey, maybe it IS my favourite animal. Funny because we don’t have squirrels in my home country, as far as I recall. (we have oil-birds and iguanas and stuff)

• A sign near Dog Coffee!

• People in my cohort taught me about this meme on Vine.

• We went out for ice cream within a day or two of arriving!

• They took us out to dinner on the first day we arrived!

• I loved this so much! This was in our lobby.

Everything

• Everything was so thoughtful, so done with love, and care that it was so emotional leaving. But I’m part of this group now, and I am so happy for the support! I feel so lucky and grateful for the opportunity!

And that’s it!