This is my first blog interview! I thought that it would be great to provide another person's perspective on Leadership education, and why (and how) other individuals choose to come to this field.
In the future I hope to have more interviews from people at other universities, in other countries, and even with other leadership-related interests!
Cara Taylor Miller is a 4th year doctoral student in Leadership Studies at the University of San Diego. She is a transfer student (so, technically, she has only been at USD for 2 years). When I met Cara I was pleasantly surprised by her strong interest in leadership and leadership
education. You see, Cara had been always been interested in sociology during her academic career. She completed her Bachelors degree in the sociology of religion at UC Santa Barbara, and earned a Masters in Divinity degree at Princeton Theological Seminary.I have learned so much from Cara in these past 2 years... In addition to the work that she currently does with action research and group relations, I highly suspect that Cara Taylor Miller: the woman, the academic, the researcher, will be doing some ground-breaking leadership work in the coming years. Watch out!
You can find Cara's complete student profile here.
1. How, if at all, do you think a leadership graduate program - which is highly interdisciplinary - differs from a more discipline-specific graduate degree program?
Rightly so, leadership studies claims interdiciplinarity as one of its strengths and one of its weaknesses.
First off, I transferred to USD from a discipline-specific doctoral program--if there ever was one: sociology. There are several "camps" [within sociology] that espouse certain paradigms vehemently and hock different methodologies (e.g., there are schools of thought, literal school-based factions of sociologists, and the lines are drawn clearly in the sand between them all). In general, the discipline is not on the progressive end of things, though I did run into several (already established & tenured) scholars doing some risky, pulse-pounding, innovative work.
These outliers (who had survived their own doctoral education in the "ancestor worship" of contemporary sociology, and who had survived twenty plus years publishing boring, dusty articles in top tier journals) resorted to partnering across disciplines to create something "new"--but, it was obvious to me that for "dyed-in-the-wool" sociologists this seemed akin to dating your own cousin: it's just something you don't do!
While I was a doctoral student in this traditional sociology department, I was partnered with a faculty member and I worked on his research work with him. We had myriad opportunities to design survey instruments, and to collect and analyze data. On one such project, I was thrilled to participate in the request for funding, the design of the instrument, the collection and analysis of the data, and the writing of the executive summary (what better training can a doctoral student ask for!?).
In short, I began to think that the data were showing an interesting conclusion that laid outside of sociology's categorical boundaries of race, class, and gender. The conclusion I was making was one regarding leadership. My faculty and I had no idea that leadership was a field of study, and I had no reference for the scholarly journals, academic associations, let alone any PhD programs devoted to its study. So, not thinking that there was any life outside of sociology's bounds, I continued my program in the categories that existed (at least, for me) and I did a fellowship at a large, research-1 university in California. When I left that fellowship, however, I had become even more suspicious that these categories [that I had been working within] would not sustain my research interests for long.
I loved my time at my previous universities, but I was yearning to work outside the box of research options that had been prescribed for me. To be fair, though, I didn't leave because I wanted to "cheat" on sociology's strict, conventional boundaries, that just made it easier for me to leave...
I fell in love with my husband Matt who lived halfway across the country. I grew to love him much more than I loved the program that I was in. When I realized that, I risked the two years that I had invested there, got married and moved to California to be with him. It was a splendid decision!
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