Welcome back to Kaity’s Colloquium. I am getting back to blog my series which include really anything and everything I think is pertinent to education or at least has applicable ideas to the education world. If you are new here welcome, I am Kaity the co-founder and STEM director of MPASS Education. I arrived in the education world in a rather untraditional route. I started as an Architecture major and realized I can’t draw worth a lick, so I transitioned to Construction Management. Unfortunately, this never felt right even though I was doing many of the things I really liked about architecture including creative problem solving, and maximizing or minimizing type problems, but the culture of the job was not aligning for me and my future goals. All the while I was taking sociology classes as just a fun “extra” class. I loved all of the professors I had, and every semester I had to narrow down my selection of the sociology classes that I wanted to take to just one that would fit within my schedule. So going into my senior year of college, in the midst of applying to graduate I switched to being a sociology major. To graduate “in time” I had to take the hardest classes (those that I was avoiding as a minor) all at the same time. But I finally felt at home in a major. I was writing close to 20 pages, conducting extensive research and fine-tuning papers every week but was loving every second of it. I then found data analysis and research methods. This is where I saw my future and found my home. I graduated with my bachelor’s and took a gap year to really figure out what realm of sociology I wanted to further my studies and dedicate my research towards.
I must have impeccable timing, just as I was accepted into a grad program and was sorting out housing COVID hit. I literally had an appointment to sign a lease 2 days after lockdown! Therefore, my Masters became 100% online as well as the responsibility for my Graduate Assistant work. As if getting a Masters and an advanced certificate simultaneously while being a graduate assistant wasn’t hard enough let’s throw a global pandemic into the mix as well as co-founding a business. We started Morris Education Partners in the spring of 2020 which grew into MPASS Education. So, leading into the second year of my master’s program I scaled back my work as a graduate assistant, to have more time to grow and build the company.
All this to say that I bring a very unique lens into the education world. I am not a formally trained teacher but have been involved with writing, reviewing and evaluating assessments (national as well as state level) since my undergraduate work, where I was an educational consultant with Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity at Stanford University as well as consulting with state, regional and local educational service centers and school districts. Since graduating with my master’s degree and being certified in institutional research, I have found ways to merge these worlds to better understand the educational system from a sociological perspective.
If you are still here somehow, I just want to throw in a caveat that these blogs will not be this much about me ever again. Here is where I will merge education and sociology in some odd ways but always with a fun spin. Some past blog topics I have covered are how dress codes perpetuate gender ideologies and hinder females within the educational system, the gender inequalities in sports, so if you are interested, please check out the past blogs. Some of my upcoming topics include the historical and sociological acceptance of someone declaring they are “not a math person” as well as a Wicked countdown, where I will apply Wicked takeaways into the classroom and into the world today.
I will try and post every other week sometime a standalone topic other times as part of a larger series.