 Michelle Villagran is our first faculty spotlight participant. Michelle, thank you so much for volunteering to go first. This follows on the presentation that Anthony Breuer did at our last meeting, along with Kristen Rebman about research that led us down the garden path and then we got lost and went somewhere else or whatever. And it led us to talking about our journey as scholars and how every person has a different story and it is part of the formative process of other scholars. So Michelle volunteered, we decided this would be a great feature for each one of our cohort meetings and Michelle volunteered to be the first to do that. So I'm very excited, I'm very happy that you are presenting to us tonight. So please go ahead and tell us about yourself. Well, thank you, Mary. I feel after I volunteered, I shouldn't have because when I started putting this together, I don't know, I started questioning lots of things about my own journey. So it was like a self exploration and the presentations are gonna be a little different than my typical as many of you've seen how I present. I think this is more tips and from my experience what worked, what didn't work, where I still have my own fears, we'll say, if you will. Yeah, yeah. But I don't know, is this fun to do, but I'm still questioning a lot of things. Anyway, so let me share my screen. Oh, I cannot, so it's host disabled. Can you give me, let's see, oh, did it work? Mary, I think you need to give Michelle sharing privileges. Hmm, I should have heard you. Let me try it again. No, I should be able to, it looks like I can share now. Now I can. I just wanna hide myself and all of you, put you over here. Okay, can you see my screen? Yep, looks great. Okay, so let me honestly thank you for your presentation because I did a little piece of that in a recent T3 for our faculty and especially in Canvas and how important accessibility is. So I really appreciate you sharing all of that and I just learned quite a bit from you that I didn't even know, so thank you. Cool. So when I was putting this together, the whole term scholar was fumbling me all up to be quite honest and I had to go do my own hunting for, well, what is a scholar? When did I become a scholar? Who is a scholar? Where does it start? And as I'm sure many of you know definition-wise, I wrote down three different definitions that kept coming up as I was looking at literature. So a person who pursues academic and intellectual activities, a specialist in a particular area, a learned person with a profound knowledge in a specific subject area. So as a student you are a learner, you're learning and as a scholar you are learned in a specific area. Now I don't know that in my head I necessarily agree with that because I know there's a distinction between student and scholar, but I've been a lifelong student and I feel I'm still a lifelong student even though I'm not pursuing another academic credential, but I'm still constantly learning. So I was really struggling with the scholar term when I started putting this together. And I thought I would separate it into kind of the past, the present and the future just to frame it. So in the past, and I don't know why I said again, difficult decision. It's not like I had these like, I have to make this big decision, but I think we all, and I'm talking about with the term scholar here, but I think we all start somewhere. So, and I'll talk about which I think are the two points in my life where I felt that I was a, I would say a scholar in the sense of an academic research scholar or scholarly, producing scholarly works. So where was that start? Again, I mentioned a lifelong student. So I'm still learning. I feel like I'm a student even in my profession continually staying on top of my area of expertise, but because I'm that student, am I not a scholar then? Okay, so my scholarly yet, this is where I'm like going down this scholarly hunt and how in the past, I have pivoted quite a bit as you'll see. So to give you some context in my background, I was a practitioner for a while. I worked 10 years in the public library. So I was a public library and that was my first job was in a public library. I say that they, I blame them. Actually, I thank them. I don't blame them, but I really thank them for then introducing me to, you could get a degree and become a librarian, a professional librarian. And I was really interested in law. So I actually wanted to go to law school. I took the LSAT twice. I was going down the legal track until I learned about law librarianship. So I did a pivot, still practitioner into the law library space. I worked in law firms, but then I also worked for a legal vendor, which was a pivot. I was seen as going to the dark side, which Letty might understand working with vendors and publishers, right? Yeah, so even though, but then you're not on the dark side. It's like it's all of the fun world that you didn't even know about. And then I was doing a lot of consulting, both I ended up working for, I was the director of recruiting and doing needs assessments for libraries. A lot of fun work. And then got laid off twice in my life. And in one of those laid off times, I didn't have a job and I decided to start my own consulting firm, Cultural Co, which I still today have and still do some consulting work around cultural competence, cultural awareness, cultural values, diversity, equity, inclusion, emotional intelligence and dispute resolution, which all are from my past and have kind of threaded together into my consulting work. And then the academic world kind of, it came to me, I didn't necessarily go to it. So I didn't know I necessarily land in an academic tenure track position where of course, risk or our research and scholarly production is very important. But along the way in my past, I really believed, and this is maybe because I have more of the corporate mindset and I was practitioner and doing consulting that I needed to get some real expertise behind the topics that I was researching and I was interested in. So my dissertation was on cultural intelligence. I first learned of the term in 2008. I ended up getting level one, level two and advanced certifications all on cultural intelligence and now teach a course on cultural competence and cultural intelligence is a big piece of that course in the high school. And that stuck with me since, since I've learned of the term and I apply it like every day. Same with dispute resolution or conflict management. Here's a pivot. I was working on my dissertation and I decided, well, why don't I just go get a certificate? You could get a, this is at Pepperdine, you could get a certificate in dispute resolution. It was a joint degree with your doctorate. So I said, okay, let me do that. So then I had a certificate in dispute resolution and it was only I think four or five more classes. But then, hey, why not go get another master's? Let's just take a little break, take a year off and go get a master's of dispute resolution. So I was here pivoting back to my interest in law, right? Even though I was working in libraries, still love the law, still working on my dissertation around cultural intelligence and law libraries. So I was trying to make this little niche area and pull it all together, but I had to pivot. I took time off away from my dissertation. And then I got married because you know life happens and things happen when you're progressing through life. But I never wanted to lose sight of the cultural piece which actually ties significantly into a diversity and equity and inclusion work. And so I said, I need to really get certified in these areas. And then I ended up getting certified in EDI as well. So that's a little bit about the past, practitioner oriented, not really producing scholarly works, if you will, or as we think of it in, I would say in academia. But I had this like epiphany that I am a scholar now, not now, but I have this epiphany that when I was putting this presentation together that I have the expertise and I've had it for quite some time in some of these areas, the cultural intelligence. I first got certified in 2011, long before I finished my dissertation in 2015 or at my doctorate. So, okay, I felt that I was a scholar probably then leading down that path because I'm pursuing these intellectual activities related to the cultural intelligence and really building up my area of study. And of course, along the way, there's imposter syndrome and you get scared. And then being a faculty of color and even just a person of color before becoming faculty, am I gonna be accepted? You know, all these things, right? We're flowing and still even do sometimes today are in my mind and impact the, I would say the journey to still being a scholarly academic. So let me give you an example of kind of past to present. I did a lot and I still do a lot of presenting. I've enjoyed presenting. My presentation is really well attended. I've just really enjoyed presenting. And I focused a lot when I worked for Thompson Reuters I focused a lot and learned a lot from them about putting presentation techniques, tactics, a lot of things you might learn in Toastmasters but really applying those. And I had never thought about taking a presentation and then turning it into a publication or into a piece of work that later on someone would read. I had never thought of that. I'm here presenting at conferences. But the conferences I was presenting at were primarily practitioner-oriented conferences. They were not conferences that I would consider are scholarly or academic types of conferences. And then through my consulting, I have several case studies that could be published. They haven't been published. So there's another area, this is kind of my future work but I never thought about it at the time when I was doing this work. And then the connections, I've made a ton of connections, right? You go to conferences and network and all of the connections you make. So these could be your future collaborators or your future partners on a publication or your support network. So I didn't really have this grand plan. Nothing was planned. There was no plan, not planned at all. And not a part really of my plan. I wasn't planning to go into academia where I would have to then be required to publish and do a lot of scholarly production. Now, I would say though, maybe not so much in the public library, but when I was, even when I was working with Thompson, so when I was on the legal vendor side and the consulting work, there was a lot of research that was involved and a lot of reports that came out of it or even a lot of it was internal or maybe for clients. So there was a lot of scholarly production but at a different level, I would say, or just a different different audience, of course. So while, and here's my little catch all at the bottom. Well, to me, research and writing was never my focus. It was actually embedded in pretty much everything I was doing, but I didn't really realize it and connect the dots until I landed in academia. So my to-do list, and this is kind of fast-forwarding a little further so now I'm talking about present day. When I did fall into academia, it was actually in 2009. I was, it was a part-time position as a coordinator, really doing recruitment. I didn't start teaching until 2013 at a face-to-face program in Burbank at Woodbury University in their conflict management, as a master of arts, but I taught conflict management and it was to all law enforcement students. So those working in law enforcement agencies. And once I came into a Tanner track, which was 2018, I had to do a significant, I would say, mind shift where my mindset had to change. I was very practitioner-oriented, even teacher-oriented, if you will, even though I'm still teacher now, right? And then consultant-oriented, but I had to think more like an academic scholar and it took, it's almost like, you can't just flip the switch, but it took practice and I'm still practicing and working on it. But I think that's where finding writing groups, writing strategies, support networks have really helped. I have a one-hour slot every day that I dedicate to my research and scholarly production and that could be outlining something that could be during revision and revise and re-submit. I just had a journal, actually an article that got accepted to the Journal of Academic Librarianship. So I don't know when it'll be out, but it just got accepted last week. And all of these things, because of the time I've committed are moving forward. And even with conferences and organizations, I think it's really important to stay connected with those, we'll say practitioner-oriented associations. We'll use ALAs an example. For me, that one's, to me, it's more the practitioners in the field. And it's important to stay connected and be a part of those when you can. But if it's between that and say Elise or say another scholarly conference, I would feel where I could present my research and then out of it might come a publication. I probably would lend more towards Elise. So I have shifted my conferences, my association memberships that I'm a member of to be in the space I need to be in now. But also I say leverage, so dual outcomes. I got asked to keynote two years ago for Pennsylvania Library Association for their conference and also Minnesota Library Association. I keynoteed both of them, but out of them, Pennsylvania, they actually have a peer-reviewed journal. And I did some researching, found their journal and was able to take pretty much my keynote and then I did a whole survey, produce that into a publication in their peer-reviewed journal. So when I say dual outcomes, really leveraging if you do present somewhere or whatever it is, make it a twofer. So you get two things out of it, not just one. And find those partners and collaborators. So Anthony, I know you're here. Anthony and I are working together in first generation work, first generation students work as well as submitted a grant together. Dara, I don't know if Dara's here, but her and I are continuing to collaborate. We have another grant we're submitting, I think two more, we're working on. So if you can find those partners or collaborators, it's almost like find your people. I don't know how to say it better than find those where you have a vested interest. It aligns with your scholarly area of expertise. And it may be, you might think, this is not my area at all, but maybe it is, it might be a slice of it or it might be an addition and you might need to sell it to that person that say, no, I can bring this contribution. So again, what can you contribute? And continue to learn. Bumps on the road, oh my, yes. This is where you got to take a breather. Again, it's the, you know, we never know what life might give us, right? Or what might could happen and you might have to take a break or just take that breather. Never say never. So I was on the beach with my best friend who is a, she's, was a former chair and she's still at Cal State Northridge. And we were there and she's been in academia for a long time. And I told her, because we're talking about tenure track and, you know, going to academia and I said, I will never, never go into academia in a tenure track position. And here I am. So never say never, because it will happen. And it just, I just had a pivot, I think with where I wanted to go and actually fits very well in what I want to do and what I'm currently doing. Look at your supports again. I mentioned your support networks, your resources, your connections, all of those, your students, your peers or those in your cohort, your professors, your supervisors, keep in contact with them and foster those relationships. So don't just say, well, we'll stay connected. And then you don't water that relationship so it can continue to grow. And do learn when to say no. I'm still struggling, but I am saying no. And there's a nice little meme that's floating around about November and November is the month to say no because you don't want those individuals to steal your, I think it's about, that one's about joy and enjoyment. But I'm gonna say, you don't want them to steal away your precious time you need to do your research. And these are the two, I think pivotal points where I was like, I am a scholar. I am a research scholar. In 2018, I don't know if it was, it might have been 2017, I presented at the International Association of School Libraries Conference, Practitional Oriented Conference, not my area, I'm not a school librarian, but Leslie Farmer, Dr. Farmer, who's at Cal State Long Beach, came to my session and then she said, why don't you write a piece for our, the School Library Association, their journal, their knowledge quest. So that really, to me was my first peer review, it was editorial peer reviewed publication. And three years earlier, thanks to my former mentor, Rest in Peace, Dr. Chandler, she pulled me in into a book project. It started in 2015, they got published fall 2018. I wrote two of the chapters, I did the survey with her, but we really looked at diversity within the American Association of Law Libraries and about minority leadership. And we conducted interviews and it was a big project, but that's where I really got integrated, I was saying, to the scholarly world and can never thank her enough. So persevere, I am a scholar and you are too. And lastly, I have just two more slides, I believe. Important things, I feel like a pep talk for myself too. You can do this, we can all do this. Some projects will die. I remember Anthony at your presentation, you mentioning some things do die or you don't go that route, it happens. But could you bring it back from the dead? Could you resurrect it in a way that maybe it's incorporated in a different way? Maybe it's not that journal publication. Maybe it's a speaking engagement, but then you're pulling in one of your peers or even a student and then you're gonna submit a grant or you need a partner on the grant, but the topic is from the project that died. I have one right now that's dying and I'm trying to keep it going, but the initial intent I would say of this prize is gonna be a journal article around racial diversity in law libraries. I think we're gonna take a different approach and it's gonna be split into two different projects because one, there's the racial diversity, but there's so much more diversity. So looking at neurodiversity and other aspects within law libraries, not just focusing on racial diversity. So it might end up being two projects. And there's other opportunities, I mentioned grants, so that's another way to really build up your scholarly and it could be a small seed grant and then just grow larger and larger and going beyond the local. So don't just look for local friends, local partners, local collaborators, but look beyond, look states away, virtually away internationally and leveraging it all. So my last slide, and this isn't really, I don't know if it's future, but it's taking charge of your own journey. We each have a different journey. So a lot of things today might not even resonate, some might, all of it might. But thinking about, well, who am I? Who do I wanna be? And this is almost like set up those goals with smart goals. Who do I want my, what do I want my contribution to be? Why is what I'm researching important? How can I get there? Where do I wanna make that impact? And I say, it's the continuous journey. Some of you know I'm a runner. Though lately, I did one run this month. I did San Jose in October, but because of COVID, I was not doing any virtual runs. I was running on my own, but it's not just a marathon. It's actually more of a triathlon because you do have to pivot and it's not just one sport. It might involve three or even more. So 2008, that was my first marathon in Vegas. That's the bottom photo. I don't know the top photo, it was from somewhere. And that, the UR Amazing was from the LA Marathon, I think eight years ago. It happened yesterday, but I did not run it. I cheered for people, but a woman had that sign and it just wants, I wanna share it here to tell all of the students that you are amazing and to take charge of your scholarly journey. So that's it. Questions? Thank you so much, Michelle. That was wonderful. Whatever feelings you might have had about having agreed to do it. I think that that was just great. And I feel like over the months when we do this and when other faculty tell their stories, they're all gonna be different. And yet we see these threads that run through them. The never say never, the unexpected opportunities, the twists and turns, the pivots and so on. So that's wonderful. Are there questions or comments for Michelle? Well, Mary, I didn't wanna sound negative, but I do thank you for allowing me to volunteer and be the first one. Absolutely. Oh, I appreciate it so much. I love it so much. We appreciate it very much. It made me, I don't know. It was like my own little self-exploration and it just felt good, but it also made me, I have all these questions now. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, that's great. I see a lot of comments. Thank you, Leti. I was gonna say, yeah, it's just encouraging to hear that you're always processing. You're always recasting your sense of yourself and the value you can bring and that we're not alone. I think a lot of us on the kind of student and candidate side worry in these transitions and different thresholds and I don't think that ever ends, right? So it's just very encouraging to hear your reflections on your own journey. Thank you. Well, thank you. Yeah, I wanna thank you too, Michelle. I do know that it's not easy just to re-rack the balls for one brief presentation that contains your journey. So it's great to do that. I remember when I was applying to get the position at San Jose State, Dr. Bill Fisher asked me a particularly provocative question during the interview. I was a practitioner at the time. I was doing talks and I was publishing my little opinions from the field and I wouldn't say puffed up about myself but I knew what I was doing as a practitioner. Bill's question just came like a shot out of the blue just to kind of slap me into awareness. He said, he asked, why do you wanna change careers? I saw it or I was pretending to see it as a, well, it's just another part of the field, but it's not. Being a practitioner, being invited to give talks, giving workshops, being referred to, yada yada is all very fun. It's very ego boosting and all of that. But then when you start as a scholar, you start with the scholarship. You start at the beginning. You have to develop methods. You have to create and analyze data and you have to synthesize that data within the broader scholarship in which you're entering. So you're starting over. I think a lot of us, I think a lot of us have that when we come out of the field. Librarians in libraries, libraries of library faculty tend to come from the field the way Michelle did, the way I did, but we do have to pivot, as she said. And it's sometimes not easy to do, to give up all of those, those accolades that we were getting. But it's necessary if we're gonna be successful as an academic scholar. If you're gonna stay in practice, that's different. But if you're gonna come in and be a scholar, you've gotta change gears and it's not easy. Yeah, Anthony, I just wanna say it. And I think it's not for everyone too. Like it's actually, it's worked out fine for me. I'm very happy that I said never say never. I said no when I hear, and then here I am and I've been nothing but happy with it. But it is a shift. It is a very different shift. It's almost like going to the dark side in the way, like going to a vendor. It's a whole shift. It's just very different. And it is important. We may look back on our journey as students, to the point where we entered a PhD program and it successfully completed that. And the things you described about your certifications, your other master's degree and so on, that's very interesting, the sort of opportunities that come up and the way it all weaves together then to be part of your journey. But also it's so important for our minds to be open to the fact that it's like, okay, I'm really good at being a librarian. I believe, you know, however, that doesn't mean it's, that doesn't mean that that's just the same then. When I, you know, when I entered this new field or this new part of the field, it's gonna be exactly the same. And I am stubbornly gonna cling to that, you know, that it's so important to, you know, to open our eyes to what we're being shown and told. I agree that I have one last thought with that is that it's almost like doing your own skills assessment in a way. Like when I was putting this together, I had to think back, well, what were the things that now I really, I have like built this little niche area of my expertise in certain areas. And so there might be things for all of you, all of you students there that you can then pull that in. Don't just let it go because I think it adds value, even if you might not see it and where it might be in the future, but it's a piece. It'll be a piece of that future position.