In my adolescent development graduate seminar I once assigned a paper for our identity unit on narrative analysis of turning points (McLean & Pratt, 2006). The authors followed high school students, and about six years later asked them to “write about an important transition or change with respect to their understanding of themselves.” McLean and Pratt consider this event a turning point, and coded the narratives in terms of meaning-making from this turning point, ranging from no meaning expressed to describing an insight from the event. 
 
Discussing this article in the seminar made me realize that at least so far (and it’s been a much longer so far than six years post-high school), I cannot really identify turning points in my life, particularly in the career realm. My How-I-got-here narrative is much more serendipity and process of elimination than Aha! moments or turning points. I’m okay with that path at this point, and actually, I think it’s important to share that path with others. Sharing my own journey to this point with high school students, college students, and grad students can help them to understand that we do not all choose our career based on a critical, life altering moment in childhood, or our lifelong passion since we pretended to be doctors as toddlers. Some of us almost fall into our career path, and that’s okay.
 
I went to college without a major. My father wanted me to be an engineer, so I went to a liberal arts university that did not have an engineering program. My first semester, I took all general education courses – humanities, history, economics, and psychology. I eliminated, three of them, so my second semester I took sociology, political science, fine arts, and another psychology course. For four semesters, I took three courses and a psychology course, until we were required to declare a major, and I declared psychology. So essentially I chose my major through process of elimination.
 
Close to graduation, I decided that I wanted a job in market research, where I could use my research and psychology skills. I spent 2 ½ months the summer after I graduated traveling back and forth to the Brandeis Career Services Center to print my resume and cover letters on fancy paper and apply for market research and marketing jobs. And as time went on, a bunch of other jobs. One of those jobs was as an administrative assistant on a research project at Simmons College School of Social Work. The PI called me to say that the project would soon have a research assistant position available, and that my record seemed more suited for such a position. And so I began a two-year position as a research assistant on a project studying adolescent mental health. My initial reasoning was that I would use the research skills I gained in the job to then be more marketable for market research positions.
 
I really can’t think of a turning point during that first year, but I enjoyed the position, and at some point decided that I wanted to continue in psych research and eventually become a professor. I knew I didn’t want to be a clinician, even though some of the topics that interested me often overlapped with clinical psych faculty’s research programs. So I decided to apply to developmental and social psych programs. I guess that’s the closest I’ve had to a turning point. I actually had trouble writing my grad school application statement because it felt as though there should be a description of a turning point, and I really didn’t have one. I applied to 13 programs, was admitted to five, relatively easily narrowed it down to two, and ended up choosing UCLA over Virginia based on several small factors, mostly from ruling out some things about Virginia.
 
In grad school I had some interest in parent-adolescent relationships, and ended up working with Marian Sigman on a project on parent-child conversations about emotionally charged topics, including sexuality. That’s essentially how I ended up having a career studying sexuality during adolescence and the transition to adulthood – because my interest in parent-adolescent relationships led me to a project that included communication about sex.
 
My large, pre-tenure NIH-funded study on gender roles and sexual behavior? Early in my faculty career, NIH had an RFA on Gender and HIV Risk and I thought, I could pull together a proposal on that. I did, with help of awesome collaborators and students, and it was funded on the first try. My move to UConn and position as department head? Someone emailed me and asked me to apply, and… I did. And here I am. There was (I assure you) no lifelong dream to become a chair or move up the administrative ladder.
 
It is not only my career that has led to serendipity in my life. Take my bridesmaids, given that bridesmaids often represent our closest friends from all periods of life (if, like me, you get married after 30). In addition to my sisters (serendipity in the extreme?), I met my best friend in college because she moved to my dorm floor the second week of classes; we met in the bathroom when I was watering some birthday flowers. I met my best friend in grad school (and long term conference buddy) because we worked in the same lab. And I met my best friend as a faculty member at Penn State at an event scheduled by the New Faculty Club in my first months there, where the youngest people in the room found each other. In fact, many people I met that night continue to be my close friends, even though I have moved away. And, I met my husband when, during my first year as faculty, he interviewed for a position in the same department and a few months later, became my colleague.
 
You may be wondering why I am sharing all of these life details. I am kind of wondering the same thing, honestly. But I think the reason is that a prevailing narrative in our society around career development is to “find what you’re passionate about.” Or, “tell me what inspired you to be a professor” or “when did you know you wanted to be a professor?” (I get asked these latter two frequently by students who are interviewing me as part of a First Year Seminar course requirement). For me, though, there wasn’t a turning point or a lifelong passion. Do I love doing research on adolescent sexuality development? Absolutely. Do I like my job as HDFS department head at UConn? More days than not. Do I think I have the most amazing friends? Can’t imagine life without them. Am I passionate about many of the things in my life? Definitely. But my journey to this point was often serendipitous, and I want others to know that there is nothing wrong with that.
 
“Career serendipity first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on November 27, 2018.”

In my first true administrative position, as HDFS undergraduate director at Penn State (well, and honestly, in every administrative position since), I had to send emails. A lot of emails. Like, all the time. Most of the time they were informative - responding to people’s questions, updating people on information. Rarely – very rarely – they were good news. And sometimes, fortunately not that frequently, they were disappointing news in some way. Or, a request that the person may not be happy about.
 
At some point, I had sent an email, I believe making an unpopular request, and received an annoyed response. I brought the email to my supervisor, the department head, to get his advice on how to respond. And he gave me some advice that has been one of the most valuable pieces of advice of my administrative career, and that I’ve relied on in all subsequent administrative positions.
 
In certain situations… don’t send an email. Walk down the hall and talk to your colleague in person.
 
You may be thinking that email interactions are much more efficient than face-to-face interactions. That’s true, to a point. But when the email leads to an interaction escalation, it can actually be much more efficient to talk to someone in person.
 
Here are situations where walking down the hall to talk to someone face-to-face, rather than sending an email, might be beneficial:

• You have to ask a favor of someone
• You have negative or disappointing news to share with someone
• Someone sent you an email, and your reply may not be the answer they want
• The recipient may misinterpret your email
• Your colleague might perseverate on your email before you have time to respond to follow up questions (particularly if you have any supervisory authority over the other person)
  
• You have been having an email exchange with someone, and the tone between the two of you is escalating in negativity

 
Stopping an escalating email exchange and suggesting a face-to-face meeting instead may be the hardest one to do, because you’ve already started a pattern. When you’ve emailed someone, and they’ve emailed you back something snarky or rude, it’s easy to want to snap back with a response. But this situation might also be one of the most important for changing it to a face-to-face interaction. For instance, a few years ago, when I was grad director, a colleague sent an email disagreeing with a new departmental policy that had been discussed in a faculty meeting. I responded quickly with what I thought was straightforward clarification of the policy (of course, I have no idea how she interpreted the email). The colleague quickly responded with what I interpreted as a snarky email. So I quickly responded, trying, I thought, to deescalate. She then responded with more snark. And then I finally (and later in the interaction than I should have) responded by saying something like, it sounds like you’re getting upset about this policy, and that obviously wasn’t my intent. I think it makes sense if we try to talk about it in person. Do you have any time tomorrow? When we chatted in person the next day, we were both calmer, and admitted that we should have stopped the emails sooner – she said she had gone without dinner, was at a child’s sporting event, and wasn’t in a good place to be discussing a potentially sensitive topic. The face-to-face interaction undid some damage we had started, and transitioning to face-to-face sooner would have probably caused even less negativity between us.
 
Since these earlier experiences, I’ve really tried to have these types of conversations in person, or at least by phone, when possible. My new health strategy of walking the stairs hourly helps in this regard as well – sometimes I bump into someone and can quickly chat about something I want to address, in the stairwell.
 
Sometimes as an administrator, when you show up at someone’s office door, their immediate reaction is “uh oh.” I know when I was on the other side of that door I often had that “Am I in trouble?” gut reaction? That’s why it helps to also pop by people’s offices sometimes just to say hi, or to give good news as well.
 
Email is great for so many things. It’s efficient. It leaves an electronic trail of what was said/asked/promised. You can send it when the rest of the world is sleeping (whether that’s 4:00 AM when you first get up or 2:00 AM before you go to bed). But email lacks many things that face-to-face interaction has, such as facial expression, body language, tone, and the ability to interpret these in your conversational partner. Some conversations really require the subtlety of taking the time to walk down the hall. 
 
“Walk down the hall: The importance of in person meetings first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on November 15, 2018.”

If you are in an undergraduate research program, such as your university’s honors college, at some point you likely need to identify a research mentor. It is a huge commitment for you, because if you are doing a thesis, you will be spending about a year of your life reading, writing, and researching for this one paper. But keep in mind it’s also a big commitment on the part of the faculty member. I love mentoring undergraduate students on research projects, but I end up spending significant time across 9-12 months when I do so, so I only commit to it if I think it will be a good fit.
 
How do you identify an undergraduate research mentor? Here are some things to consider.
 

• What are your research interests? Think about your general interests, and what you might want to spend a year reading and writing about.
• Visit your department’s faculty research page. Read about the different faculty’s research interests, and see who is doing research that interests you.
• Ask around. Are there other students who are doing research this year? Perhaps you’re a junior and you know some seniors working on honors theses this year. Ask them for advice on whom to work with.
• Talk to your honors (or other) adviser. If you chat to them about your research interests, it may help you to narrow down whom you might work with. 
• Keep in mind that some faculty require that you work on their research projects at least one semester BEFORE you begin your independent research project like a thesis. Therefore, even if you do not plan to graduate in the next couple of semesters, you should consider getting involved in research earlier. I’ve previously discussed other reasons you should get involved in research.
• Once you have identified one or more potential research mentors, you will need to email them. This email is very important because it is the professor's first impression of you. Please consider my advice when sending this particular email, and also when sending emails more generally:
  
  1. The greeting.
  You cannot go wrong by starting the email "Dear Dr. Smith" (well, unless you're writing to Dr. Jones; obviously you need to put in the faculty member's correct name). Some faculty are comfortable with being addressed more casually, but others are not. But no one will be offended if you're too formal, and someone could easily be offended by being too casual. Don't risk it with "Dear Firstname," "Hey," "Hi Firstname" or launching right into the message. You might think that “Hey professor” or “Hi professor” sounds respectful, but how would you feel if your professor emailed you with the greeting “Hey student”? The important thing to remember: Most faculty were students and professionals in a time before texting, Instagram, Snapchat, and yes, even Facebook (and for many of us, before email), and are used to more formality in writing. Avoid Mr./Ms./Mrs./Miss. They are almost never appropriate.
  
  2. Briefly introduce yourself, and why you're writing.
  
  3. Make it clear that you've done your homework before sending the email. Say something about the work of the person you're emailing, such as "I am very interested in your research on how interactions with parents relate to adolescents' mental health."
  
  4. Don't assume that someone will immediately agree to be your research mentor. Most of the time, faculty will want to meet you in person, talk more about your interests, and see if it's a good fit.
  

 
5. Don’t assume that the professor can meet with you in the next few days. Or at one specific time that would be most convenient to you. Ask about general availability to meet, and be flexible about when you can meet.

6. You may also have to be flexible if you have very specific interests, and no one in the department studies that topic. If you email someone and start by saying "I want to do a research paper on sexual predators on social media" and that's pretty far from the professor's own research, s/he may be less responsive than if you describe general interests in social media, or sexuality, and then meet with him/her to discuss it further. Remember, too, that your research paper does not have to be on exactly what you want to do for the next 10 years. You will gain extensive experience and knowledge by working with your research mentor, so be open to other ideas as well so that the mentor relationship can benefit you both.

7. Reread and spellcheck your email! Demonstrate in your first communication that you are a careful and serious student who writes well.
 
These steps will not guarantee that the person you ask will say no. But they will increase your likelihood of a positive response, and make a good impression in the process.
 
“How to identify and secure an undergraduate research mentor first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on November 13, 2018.”

It was a small moment – in August, in a blog post about reading for grad classes, I mentioned the importance of taking an hourly break for your body. I mentioned that I’m very bad at remembering to take breaks. And I mentioned that I’ve worked with people who set their timer to go off every hour as a reminder to stand up and walk around the building. Finally, I stated, “I will now do the same for myself, so I can practice what I preach. Done.”
 
And I did. For the past month plus (editor’s note: I’m writing this message in early October), just about every day that I’ve been in the office I set an hourly timer that reminds me to get up and walk around. My office is on the first floor, which also decreases my daily movement (though my car is parked ½ mile from my office, so that helps a bit). Now every hour, the timer goes off, I stand up, go up 2 flights of stairs, across the 3rd floor hallway, and then down the other stairs.
 
It isn’t about getting serious exercise. I recognize that 1 ½ minutes around the building is not going to improve my lung capacity, strengthen my heart, build muscle tone, or result in weight loss. But I believe it’s good for me in several other ways. On days that I have a lot of meetings, many of them happen in my office (I have a small table in here) and so I could go many hours without leaving this room. On rare days that I don’t have many meetings, I can end up at my desk without moving for an extended time. So it’s good for my 50-year-old body that I move my joints around every once in a while. It’s good for my 50-year-old eyes that I stop staring at my computer once in a while. And it’s good for my cluttered brain to pull away from whatever is on that computer screen for a couple of minutes every hour. I think it also makes me less likely to get sleepy in the afternoon.
 
Here is what September, the first full month I tried it, looks like compared to prior months:

You could interpret this in a few different ways: (a) It’s not that big a difference, only adding about 4-5 flights a day; it’s a huge difference, almost doubling her monthly flights climbed; (c) she sure doesn’t walk many stairs. I choose to interpret it as, on average, I’ve increased 4-5 flights a day, which works out to 120-150 a month, and I call that a win.
 
Another telling image is to think about not averages, but day-to-day variation. So, here is each day in the month of September:

You can see here that I have a cyclical pattern, walking many more stairs during the week than on weekends (perhaps I need an hourly timer at home, too?) and also, many fewer on Thursdays, which are often my work from home days.
 
Finally, you can look at what happens on a relatively normal (on the higher than average end) day:

You can see that most of the stair walking is from 10:00 (after I teach) until about 5:30 (when I leave the office most days), though at home there is also bedtime and… bedtime, sometimes all in the same day. Also note that I often don’t carry my phone around when I’m home so I probably miss a couple of flights of stairs at home.
 
Are there negatives to this new strategy? Not really. I sometimes forget to turn it off before a meeting and it goes off, loudly. In the beginning, I would get questioning looks from my colleagues who know my office is on the 1st floor and weren’t used to seeing me much in the stairway. But look – I’m already the crazy lady who sits on an exercise ball instead of an office chair, so I can handle the puzzled looks. And it gives me more opportunities to bump into my colleagues during the day, which I like. Plus, people are getting used to it and so now, more often than not, someone in the stairwell will say, “oh, are you on your stair walk?” Perhaps I will start a trend and we will all go up and down the stairs together hourly. But even if not, I’m happy to have incorporated this one, very small, very easy modification to my daily routine to improve my overall wellbeing.
 
“Small steps: Walking the stairs once an hour first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on November 8, 2018.”

Finding articles can be challenging, but sometimes it's even harder to know what to do with them once you find them. How do you go from a 10-page dense article to a few lines in your own literature review or introduction to a study? Although I’ve previously written about what those brief summaries should look like in introductions, today I’m going to provide advice on how to read, make sense of, and summarize for yourself, the content of the articles you find.

Reading the article
Make sure you fully understand the major sections of the article, which generally have an hourglass shape:

a. Introduction. In this section, the authors are describing past work, and how their study fits into past work. When you are writing your own literature review, if you are reading a paper by Brown and Jones, and they cite work by Smith, you should not summarize the authors' summary of Smith and then cite Brown and Jones. If Smith sounds relevant to the paper you're writing, track down Smith and read it directly. When you are reading a journal article for your own literature review, you can use the introduction to find other articles, but you shouldn’t use their summaries of past work for your summary. What eventually will go into your literature review or introduction will focus on the authors’ findings. But, including their conceptual framing and theoretical perspective in your summary for yourself is often helpful.

b. Methods. A description of the sample, procedures, and measures. This section is very useful for fully understanding what the authors did, although you’re unlikely to write much about it in your literature review.

c. Results. An explanation of the statistics performed, and what the authors found. This section is important for learning the main findings of the article. However, many articles use very complicated statistics, and sometimes a reader can get lost in those details. Don't worry if you can't understand everything they did. Focus instead on their explanation of what they found.

d. Discussion. In this section, authors summarize their findings, interpret their findings, link their findings back to the literature, and discuss limitations, future directions, and implications. The summaries in the discussion can be particularly useful if you had trouble following the details in the results section.
 
e. References: This section is very useful for tracking down articles the authors refer to, that are relevant to your own work.

Summarizing the articles
When I write a literature review, I find it helpful to summarize each article for myself in the same way, in one document, so that I can then work with my summaries, rather than the articles. I provide myself enough information so that I don't frequently need to go back to the article. When I do this, I make sure to PUT THINGS IN MY OWN WORDS so I can work from the summaries and know that I am using my words, not the authors'. This point is critical for avoiding unintentional plagiarism. If you think, I’ll just copy and paste, and change it later, when you come back to it a couple of months later, you may not remember you haven’t already put it in your own words.
I also want to make sure I have enough detail about the methods so I can easily write it into my paper e.g., I need to know if it was only female participants, only one ethnic group, what age the participants were, etc. Here's an example of one I did:

Once you have summarized all of your articles, you can then write your own literature review, using your article summaries. I like to start by creating an outline of the full literature review, so that as I add each article to my paper, I can make sure it goes in the correct place. This technique also helps me realize if there are sections of my paper where I have too few articles and need to find more.
 
Having these summaries makes the transition to writing the actual paper so much more straightforward, and saves you time in the long run. And I’m all about efficiency in any way possible.

“How to read and summarize research articles first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on November 6, 2018.”

How Zumba made me a better teacher
 
Karen Kelsky describes how Zumba is an amazing release for her. In Karen’s words, “Dance has given me back to myself.  It’s endorphin-pumping fun, it’s exercise, it keeps me fit, it lifts my depression, and opens up my heart.”
 
Spoiler alert: This post is not about how much I love Zumba. Or how it lifts my depression or serves as a release for me. Instead, it’s about how my ineptitude at Zumba helped me understand my students better.

Before I describe my ineptitude at Zumba, however, it’s important to note that I completely agree with Karen that everyone should find their own thing whether it’s “running, or art, or music, or yoga, or knitting, or walking, or meditation or a hundred other possibilities.” For me, right now, it’s yoga and barre class, and reading/listening to fiction, and Rubik’s cubes.  
 
I have always been a straight A student. How often do I say this? Do I sound like the annoying brainy girl at the desk next to you in math class? I know I say it a lot, but I think it explains aspects of my personality. I don’t think I’m unique here – I know a lot of people in academia can relate. So many PhD students and faculty have similar experiences/personalities. It’s a trait I carry with me into my job. Years ago when I was put in charge of an assessment plan for our department’s undergraduate program, and the previously submitted version received marks of “acceptable,” I immediately launched a 3-pronged approach to assessment to bring us up to “exemplary.” When I do my IRB online quizzes I tend to get 100% on each module (and if I don’t, I’m annoyed). When my son mastered solving the Rubik’s cube, I had to learn how to solve it. And then he mastered the 4X4, and subsequently, so did I. We figured out the 5X5 together.
 
So, I am generally highly motivated to do well, and I generally feel as though if someone teaches me something, I can learn it. But then I took Zumba. I mostly could learn the steps and follow along. But, what I couldn’t do, is look good doing them. I would watch the instructor – who was excellent – and I would try to do the same moves, and they were… not excellent. If you look at the videos in Karen Kelsky’s post – I looked nothing like her. I looked like an uncoordinated 40-something woman trying to do Zumba. Or just like brainy 15-year-old Eva trying to stand in a circle at the school dance with her friends and awkwardly move to the music. Most strikingly, there was an upper body move (which, after much googling, I’ve discovered is called the Reggaeton pump) that looked very cool on the instructor, and very ridiculous on me. No matter how I tried, I could not master that move, even though I felt I was mimicking the instructor.
 
During a Zumba class, I had an a-ha moment. I have had meetings with students, where I am trying to explain a concept to them, that seems very straightforward and clear to me. Negative reinforcement comes to mind. And of course, I believe my explanation is very straightforward and clear. It often seemed like they were working hard in the course, but they still couldn’t do well on the exam, or clearly explain concepts in their paper. And finally, I realized what they must feel like when I try to explain a concept to them. They just couldn’t get it, no matter how much I explained it or how straightforward it seemed to me. Like me and Zumba.
 
It reminds me of Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. I know it’s controversial. I know that many researchers have demonstrated that different domains of intelligence are highly correlated, and believe that there is an underlying IQ driving these domains. I don’t dispute those claims. And yet, I also don’t dispute that most of us are not equally talented in every possible domain. That is, even if ability in these domains is generally correlated and linked to an underlying factor, we still may have differential ability across domains. There is no way that everyone is equally talented in every domain. And, we may be more teachable in one area than in another.
 
This realization, this personal realization, definitely helped increase my compassion for students struggling with a concept. Sometimes faculty attribute students’ inability to comprehend to lack of effort. But we as instructors must also recognize that inability to comprehend doesn’t always indicate lack of effort. Sometimes, things that come easy to some of us take enormous effort for others.
 
“How Zumba helped made me a better teacher first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on November 1, 2018.”