Hi Love!
Ohmygoodness I have so many updates and just as many apologies; I really should have kept a better ritual of keeping in touch with you over these months ;-;
First, before I get into where I’ve been, I wanted to also share with you my love my grief. About a week ago was the 6th anniversary of my cousin Noah’s death. He and I were the same age at the time; eighteen.
I miss you Noah, to this day, and I know you watch over us. I would have loved to have known what you thought of me now.
So where are we now? Well in many ways terrific and in some other ways not awesome. I’m not sure if I even could do a justice to my recent months as a student and researcher but if I had to give a TLDR,,,,
TLDR: Bro did not get into a PhD program, but it’s pretty chill because enthusiasm for ongoing research projects should carry us to a future PhD opportunity, when the time is right.
I applied to 27 different Education, Educational Policy, Educational Psychology, and Clinical Psychology with youth/adolescent specialization programs in Fall 2025 and I got no offers. I had three emphatic letters of recommendation, years of research leadership experience, an overqualified CV, and perhaps a little too much heart on my sleeve.
My GPA is 3.1, so not awesome, but I thought that my enthusiasm and unique ideas were materials which made me a sparkling applicant. So I was pretty let down for a while when rejections ebbed in. It took me months to stop feeling like I was drowning as a result of the lack of interviews or offers; as I mentioned before it took a genuinely concerning amount of wakefulness/restfulness which I was able to muster on any given day. If it wasn’t for medication I would have been bedridden due to my feeling of submerging. I ended up doing what I hate doing which is auto-piloting much of my life as though I needed to cling to survival in a moment of vulnerability. That’s what a traumatized scarcity-mindset tends to bring, so I give myself a little grace for this. I allowed myself to rot a little, and lapsed in vital self-care.
But I’m a lot better now. I spent a lot of time away from UC Santa Barbara, with my partner Jasmine, getting as much nourishment from physical embrace as was needed to fill my empty tank. I also spent a lot of time thinking about Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus which I read a couple years ago. I felt that I actually should be cherishing my experience of systemic barriers and patriarchal elitism, because they were exactly what my Absurd looked like, and I was and am proud of that. My Absurd is perhaps the most tactless iconoclasty the fields of psychology and education have yet to experience, but it will only materialize by my commitment to my dreams and my passions.
I thought about how my struggles related to my developing artistic passions, and took time to reinforce rituals which kept important things within my periphery, such as rejoicing in the struggle and possibility for failure within my goals, to know that they are real and worth accomplishing.
I don’t actually need to go to a PhD program right now, I realized this April. Yes, perhaps I was correct in insisting for many years that my primary concern after undergraduate must be research and relevant to my development of a contribution to pedagogy- I just might have been wrong insisting that it looks like immediately moving on to grad school after undergrad.
I feel like I need to curate more value and ethos to myself as a researcher and thinker before I can be readily accepted into those spaces, and to do so requires additional artistic endeavors which help further illustrate my passion!
And so, without further ado, I want to introduce for the first time ever my new project which seeks to do a lot of things and cannot be explained very simply at all! It’s called Our Giant Vision.
Our Giant Vision is a project which seeks to add an additional medium of learning to our society via social media’s ability to educate. This pedagogy entails using empiricism and processes of peer learning to proliferate movements of scrutiny, solidarity, and democracy within the real world, by empowering learners who engage with the new educational content to take on their own responsibility as teachers in specific areas in which they feel uniquely informed about.
So what do I do? I ask people about their lives, about the truth of their realities, and about their desires for the world and for schooling, so that we as a society can clarify through transparent public polling what it is we as a society do and do not agree on. I think polling of the people would lead to extremely liberating results.
Would you like some more information? Please feel free to read this document which outlines my dream for this artistic project, and what literature it is inspired by.
So I want to change the world, and I realized that researchers in the US may not be warm enough to this idea yet because they could not even possibly visualize it as a possibility. Perhaps in this way I need to go about proving many people wrong, before I can indicate to any one school that I am worthy of a PhD opportunity. We’ll see anyway.
I finished my honors thesis a few months back! I’m extremely proud of it, and also quite sad about it. I think that it could have been much more as a mixed-methods piece, and I also think that I chose a pathway which was comparatively more treacherous than simpler quantitative methods in regards to using SEM. At least I learned it though, and can say that I have some proficiencies in those areas. You can’t read about it though, because I am working on turning it into a more complete manuscript with some colleagues in order to publish it in a real journal. If and when that comes to a head, then I’ll share what I did.
I finished the final class which I needed to in order to complete my degree at UC Santa Barbara last March as well! This was extremely relieving because parts of this were fucking hard. I’m really damn glad to be done with my undergraduate degree, and I’m super excited for the things in the future to come. I think that only good things await, because everything has transformed and blossomed as I’ve been able to witness it.
I have one more quarter and two more “personal fulfillment” classes to go, but the senior-itis is definitely hitting strong. I can tell because I turn my nose up at freshmen automatically.
What else can I say in order to update folks about how I’ve been doing over the past few months? Fuck ICE, ICE OUT, LANDBACK, abolish schools if necessary, raise minimum wage, don’t use christian nationalism as an excuse to commit violence against others! <3
Take care love,
Tate
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