Our Next Step: PhD's

As many of you may know, we've been planning to go back to grad school for our PhD's after we finish here in Japan. We've both found the area of engineering education at all levels (pre-K and up) to be a very interesting area to research, and reasonable to make careers in. We have very distinct target areas of study within the field (education is a huge, huge area, and engineering education is fairly multidisciplinary) but we are definitely looking to do research-based education work. To more fully understand the research craft and apply the problem solving and design methodologies of engineering to the area of education, professionally, we need to go back to school.

Being contractually obligated in Japan for a couple of years, we had plenty of time to study our areas of interest and schools that offer appropriate PhD courses and programs. We found that Purdue University was really the #1 school for our purposes, beating the competition in virtually all areas and aspects we could assess. Under those circumstance, Purdue became really the only school we wanted to go to, so last March we visited their Open House to be darn sure we knew what we were signing up for. We came away deeply impressed, and our intentions became plans, which are now becoming reality.

GRE exams were taken (and blown out of the water, I might add), letters of recommendation were requested, application essays and documents were written, re-written, edited, re-edited, edited again, ad nauseum, and applications were due December 15. We waited with bated breath and increasing tension until we were notified that we have both been accepted to the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University and will be getting paid to work on things we are very interested in. Classes there will start in August, and we're very, very excited to be back in the US with such a great opportunity in front of us. We've got some pretty serious adventuring being planned for the summer, but we can now say that at the end of all that, there will be a long, hard, sleepless, brain-twisting PhD-bound road in front of us, and by golly it looks fantastic.