Lesson Notes

Welcome

Welcome, dear scholar. I am honored to join you on your journey. The contents here are intended to help graduate students navigate the mental-emotional-spiritual challenges of entering the institution of academia. The topics here have been designed centered on the needs and experiences of those who identify as "other" and work from the margins in academia--broadly understood. I believe that academia's greatest potential is in the holistic success of people bearing silenced perspectives, so that they may work with love and purpose for themselves and the world. Higher Learning with Higher Love can be engaged separately or together as the workbook and/or the online self-guided course.

• Intentions of the course are to guide students to:
  • (Re-)Align with inner purpose, vision and goals for your own education.
  • Acquire skills to proceed with personal strength through the process of higher education.
  • Work with love (for self, for others, and for your scholarly products).
• The course would most benefit current graduate students. Prospective graduate students, and early career academics may also benefit from the course.

About Me

I am an early career academic. PhD in Anthropology. I study disaster and media infrastructures in the Philippines. My journey through higher education started back when I was 21 years old, when i decided to pursue college. The pathway I took was through the public community college system of California, to later be admitted as a "transfer student" into the University of California. I found over time that I was understood within the university system as a "non-traditional" and "diverse" student.

• Experience
  • I naturally gravitated toward mentoring my peers as a graduate student, showing those who had just entered the program how to navigate the university, studies and people.
  • This converted organically over into mentoring students as a teacher.
• I was inspired to mentor and create this course because I noticed that many of us are entering higher education from a diversity of backgrounds into a system that was not necessarily designed to understand and work for a diversity of backgrounds.
• I believe that academia's greatest potential is in the holistic success of people bearing silenced perspectives, so that they may work with love and purpose for themselves and the world.

Course Overview

• Topics. Intention behind topics.
  • Heal the Hustle - Where does your hustle come from?
  • Unlock - What have you learned to lock away?
  • Inner Alignment - How do you align with your work?
  • Your Togetherness - How do you cultivate your "togetherness"?
  • Topics interconnect. Addressing holistic aspects of your development as an academic.
• Course format
  • Each topic is structured by intentions and practices
• Lessons can be taken as is, or expanded on in additional mentoring sessions.