Samantha Didrichsen, MSED.

So Spring ’24 has proven to be a pretty busy semester. Outside of me teaching LAI 205 (which has been fun!), I’ve successfully been able to be accepted to a multitude of talks surrounding the HTKS-Kids paper that I’m currently revising! Besides ISLS in June and AERA next week, I was able to practice and work on my research talk skills, including professional socialization, with two UB experiences I had the week of March 25th-March 29th!

March 26th was the day of the Graduate School of Education Research Symposium. Not only was I going to be giving a 12 minute talk on my HTKS-Kids research, but I had voluntarily signed up for a Fellows introduction research panel after the symposium’s keynote speaker lecture to give everyone a taste of what my talk would be about. My full talk that afternoon should have been an easy talk to give, as I had practiced feverishly the day before. However, something happened that I couldn’t prepare for.

I was scheduled to talk at 3:15 during the final panel block of the day. However, towards the end of the second panel block, the alarm in the building went off. While there are rumors circulating between it being a fire drill or an active shooter drill, these are minor details surrounding the issue of the now shortened timing of the remaining talks. When we got back inside, some talks were completely skipped, while others were shortened. When the third block came about, mine and others in my block had shortened talk times. Couple this with the GSE symposium laptop freezing on me and Zoom apparently having issues, what could have easily been danced around turned into, what a faculty member said of my first-time talk experience, “baptism by fire drill.” Because of all of this, though I handled it the best I could, I wasn’t able to successfully wrap up my talk cleanly.

Admittedly, I felt really bad about this as days went on. My anxiety disorder really was rising, and by Friday morning when I was scheduled to give another research talk through the Office of Fellowships & Scholarships, I was sick to my stomach. I was completely in knots. I fought with myself internally, as I knew that I could do this. But when you have mentally illness, though treated, sometimes this can be very hard, which can clearly be seen as I was fixated on this first experience all week.

It was a blessing in disguise. Besides the fact that we had no alarms go off, and I brought in my own laptop to project the presentation, the people that were registered to come ended up, surprisingly, being colleagues and friends of mine! We were expecting a few more in attendance, but I’m so happy that people who loved me attended my talk. I was able to give a full 20 minute presentation on my talk (honestly, it may have gone a little bit longer than that), and engaged with my audience in another 15 minute Q&A about my study.

It was so exciting, and I felt so good afterwards! It made me feel so much more comfortable and confident in what I knew about the study and talking about it.

I’m hoping to be able to use this as the foundation for my roundtable talk at AERA! I’ll be talking about his research study. If you’re attending, this is my roundtable session on April 13th at 11:25 AM. I will also be presenting a poster on April 11th at 4:20 PM as a co-author alongside the first author and my colleague, Tanya Lewis-Jones, titled, “The Role of Racial Congruence in Early Educator-Child Linguistic Interactions: Implications for African American Learners.”