I’m currently a first-year doctoral student in the Higher Education Administration Ed.D. program at the George Washington University. While GWU offers a traditional doctoral program experience at their Foggy Bottom campus in the District of Columbia, I attend classes at the Virginia Campus near Dulles Airport. I have chosen the cohort program model that GWU offers. In this program, a number of students are admitted each fall. This cohort of students takes all of their courses together for the first two and a half years of the program, seven credits each semester during the fall, spring and summer.
Decisions Decisions! (or Part Four of "How I Found Myself to be a Doctoral Student")
After what seemed like years of waiting (but was actually more like 6-8 weeks) I started to hear back from the institutions to which I had applied. Something that was surprising was the lack of real information that admissions decisions included. I imagined the “fat envelope” that I remember from my undergraduate acceptances, but in reality what I was getting in the mail was usually a single page letter.
Stepping Out Onto the Tightrope (or Part One of "How I Found Myself to be a Doctoral Student")
During the fall of 2008, while I was finishing my masters degree in Higher Education at Penn State, I decided that rather than taking a break from school I would try to move directly into a doctoral program.
