Finding Passion and Purpose: Christina Blitchok's Insights on Graduate Education

Graduate school is an adventure, a transformative journey that pushes individuals to explore new horizons and discover their true potential. In a recent episode of the Victors in Grad School podcast, Dr. Christopher Lewis sat down with Christina Blitchok, Director of Alumni Engagement at the University of Michigan Flint, to unpack her unique journey from undergraduate studies to a fulfilling career path, underscoring the value of flexibility and perseverance in education.

The Decision to Pursue Graduate Studies

From English Major to Education Advocate

Christina’s academic journey began with a Bachelor's degree in English Language and Literature from Albion College. Despite the common perception that an English degree naturally leads to a career in education, Christina initially had no intentions of teaching. It wasn’t until her year with AmeriCorps, working as a reading fluency tutor in California’s Coachella Valley, that she discovered her passion for education. Inspired by the impact she could have in the classroom, Christina returned to Michigan determined to pursue a Master's in Education, compounded with a secondary certification at the University of Michigan Flint.

Choosing the Right Graduate Program

Why University of Michigan Flint?

In her conversation with Dr. Lewis, Christina elaborated on her decision to enroll at the University of Michigan Flint. Familiarity with the campus and its intimate, collaborative learning environment played significant roles in her choice. The program’s affordability and the accessible, supportive faculty made it an ideal setting for her intensive studies. Working directly with faculty and gaining real-world experience taught Christina invaluable lessons that would shape her career.

Transitioning and Thriving in Graduate School

Learning to Adapt and Overcome

Christina emphasized the transition from undergraduate to graduate studies as a critical period of self-discovery and adaptation. Unlike the lecture-based format of many undergrad courses, her graduate experience was collaborative and discussion-driven. This shift challenged her preconceived notions and honed her ability to engage with diverse perspectives. She also highlighted the need for practical time management skills, given the life changes she navigated, including working part-time and planning a wedding while studying.

Career Pivot After Graduation

Embracing Change and New Opportunities

After earning her degree, Christina spent three years teaching high school before realizing that her career needed to pivot due to personal circumstances, including the birth of her first child. Understanding the flexibility required in life and career, Christina transitioned into freelance writing and editing roles, leveraging the skills and perspectives gained during her graduate studies. Today, she works in marketing communications and alumni engagement, continuously applying the critical thinking and empathy fostered during her education.

Advice for Aspiring Graduate Students

Keys to Success in Graduate School

Concluding her interview, Christina imparted valuable advice for prospective graduate students:

1. Seek Mentorship Early

   : Establish connections with faculty and cohort members who can provide support and accountability.

2. Stay Flexible

   : Remain open to experiences and willing to evolve.

3. Combat Impostor Syndrome

   : Recognize that everyone is learning and growing.

4. Develop Effective Study Habits

   : Tailor your approach to suit your unique needs and circumstances.

Christina’s story is a testament to the transformative power of graduate education. By embracing flexibility, seeking mentorship, and staying open to new opportunities, she exemplifies how one can successfully navigate and thrive in the ever-evolving landscape of academia and beyond.

 

 

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:01]:
Welcome to the victors in grad school, where we have conversations with students, alumni, and experts about what it takes to find success in graduate school.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:12]:
Welcome back to Victor's in Grad School. I'm your host, Doctor. Christopher Lewis, director of graduate programs at the University of Michigan, Flint. I'm really excited to have you back again this week. As always, every week, you and I are on a journey together. I call it a journey because it is a journey and you are on a journey as you're thinking about graduate school, as you're thinking about the next steps for yourself, as you're thinking about where you are in this continuum of thinking about graduate school, you could be at the very beginning. You might just be starting to think about, I think I might need additional education to be able to get that job that I've always wanted to move into that career, to be able to move up in a career, to get that promotion, to be able to do different things. Everybody has a different reason for wanting to look at that.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:59]:
You could be someone that has already applied. You might have already applied and maybe, maybe you got accepted and now you're saying, is this the right step? Am I doing the right thing? I've gotten accepted. Do I want to make this jump? You could be in graduate school. Maybe at the very beginning, you could be getting closer to the end and seeing that light at the end of the tunnel. And no matter where you are, this podcast was built to help you to be able to find success in that journey. That's why every week I love being able to bring you different people with different experiences that give you an opportunity to be able to look at graduate school in a little bit different way. This week, we got another great guest with us today. Christina Blitchok is with us today and is the director of alumni engagement at the University of Michigan Flint.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:01:45]:
And Christina did her undergraduate work at Albion University and then Nope, Albion College. She did her undergraduate work at Albion College and then decided to get a master's of education degree at the University of Michigan Flint. So we're gonna be talking about that journey that she went on, learn a little bit more about her, and I'm really excited to have her here. Christina, thanks so much for being here today. I

Christina Blitchok [00:02:10]:
am so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:02:12]:
It is my pleasure. Really excited to be here with you today and to learn a little bit more about your journey. And speaking of the journey, I wanna go back in time. I talked about the fact that you got a bachelor's degree in English language and literature at Albion College. And when you finish that, there was a little bit of time and then you made a decision to go back to school. And I know within that you, you jumped in, you got a little bit of experience. You did some work, you did some work after college where you used that English degree to be able to do some editing work, and then you were doing some English instruction. And so bring me back in time and bring me back to that point where you just said to yourself, I've gotta make that step.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:02:54]:
Why did you decide to go to graduate school?

Christina Blitchok [00:02:56]:
Well, it's actually kind of funny when I was getting my English degree at Albion, everyone asked me, are you going to go into education? Because English is one of those degrees that, people pursue it because they love it, and there's not necessarily a very clear career path, after graduation. And my response when I was in college was a vehement no. I will never be a teacher. I will never go into education. It's just not something that I saw for myself at that point. But I think if I've learned anything, it's never say never. And that different experiences and different perspectives can really change your trajectory if you're open to it, if you hold things loosely and just kind of follow where your passions and your experiences lead you. So, after I graduated from Albion, I didn't have a clear a clear direction.

Christina Blitchok [00:03:52]:
I thought about publishing, but publishing is unfortunately a really hard industry to get into right now. So I decided that I didn't wanna be idle and I didn't want to fall into a trap of jobs that I didn't necessarily feel passionate about. I'm kind of one of those people who needs to be passionate about their work, find meaning in it. I knew that I wasn't destined for, you know, punching a 9 to 5 job. So I enlisted in AmeriCorps, and I wanted to get out of Michigan. I love travel. So I actually signed up for an opportunity in Indio, California serving the Coachella Valley and English language learners in elementary school as a reading fluency tutor. And I should have anticipated it, but I fell in love with education.

Christina Blitchok [00:04:39]:
And I fell in love with the impact that you can have on individual students' lives as an educator. So when I came back after my year in AmeriCorps, I had a fire lit under me, and I wanted to pursue education. And one of the things that pointed me to grad school was the incredible opportunity that University of Michigan Flint had in combining a master's in education with a secondary certification. So I didn't need to go back and start from square 1 and, get an undergrad degree in a in education and then be able to get certified, but I could combine the 2 and really dive deep in a really, really shortened but intense time frame. And I loved my experience there. It was it was a wonderful opportunity. It was a great decision. And I really appreciated the flexibility that it allowed and just building on things that I had learned in my undergrad, and then kind of propelling me forward much faster than going back and starting from square one would have.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:05:44]:
So talk to me a little bit about the decision, the decision that you made to go to the University of Michigan Flint. There are a number of different programs, not only in the state of Michigan, but beyond that offer the credential that you receive to be able to take a degree and turn it into something that you could teach. And the University of Michigan Flint's had one for a number of years, and you ended up choosing to attend the University of Michigan Flint. But as go back to that point where you were making those decisions, what were you looking for? What made you decide that University of Michigan Flint was the right program for you?

Christina Blitchok [00:06:17]:
Right. So I grew up in Fenton, which is about 20 minutes south of Flint. And I had been on U of M Flint's campus all throughout my life with different competitions and different camps. And so it was a place that felt familiar and felt comfortable for me, but I also loved the passion behind this particular program. It was just so much more personal. I was able to talk to the adviser right away. I was able to talk to some of the faculty because in a master's course, you are so personal, and it's so intimate, or in my experience, it was so getting to know those personalities and being able to talk to them 1 on 1 while I was making the decision of where to apply was really beneficial to me that I that I knew that that their perspective and their personalities were ones that I could see myself really diving deep with the affordability was also there. You know, going back to school just like a year and a half, 2 years after getting out of undergrad at especially at like a private school like Albion, affordability was a big factor.

Christina Blitchok [00:07:30]:
But then I also was able to work on campus during my time, and I was actually an English instructor for a Saturday camp, the health professions school had for high school students. So I was able to get real world experience on top of my coursework. And I think that that would have really only happened as easily as it did a place like University of Michigan Flint, where it's smaller, everyone knows you, they know what you're looking for, they can help connect you. And the collaborative nature is really strong at this smaller sort of university. So talk to me about AmeriCorps,

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:08:06]:
because that's not a topic that we've talked a lot about in this podcast, podcast, but it is an opportunity. It is something that someone can take advantage of, whether it's right after an undergraduate experience, right after a graduate school experience that they could take advantage of to be able to use their degree, their education in a different way. Talk to me about what made you decide that you wanted to do that and use that English degree in that way and what you had to do to be able to be a part of that program.

Christina Blitchok [00:08:38]:
I'm a researcher and I like having a plan. So I took the summer after I got my undergrad degree and just researched all of my options. In that time, I applied for some jobs. I looked into some internships, and I landed on AmeriCorps. The way that it was pitched to me is it's the domestic branch of the like the Peace Corps. And that combination of service and service and vocation was really attractive to me. I do. I did love working with kids.

Christina Blitchok [00:09:13]:
I loved my dad's family was Hispanic. So I loved the idea of getting in touch with some of my cultural roots and being in being in an underserved community. And I really just wanted to broaden my horizons. Flint actually has a lot of great AmeriCorps opportunities, but it was a little close to home for me. So I I wanted to get out there and I wanted to learn learn things that I hadn't necessarily learned in the classroom in my predominantly white private liberal arts school. So that opportunity to expand my experiences and my perspectives. The process was relatively easy. AmeriCorps had at that time.

Christina Blitchok [00:09:55]:
I'm not I haven't been on the website since, but they had a pretty great search function where you could search any you could filter down the type of opportunities that you were looking for based on location, based on based on the type of opportunity, if you wanted to be an education, if you wanted to be a nonprofit. So I was able to narrow it down. And then this opportunity in the Coachella Valley really stuck out to me. I was born in California, although on the western coast. So it was some place that was relatively familiar. I had some family in LA at the time, so it wasn't it was getting me out of my comfort zone, but was still a safety net. And then the education factor, being able to use my English degree, being able to learn more about the fundamentals of reading that I'd kind of taken for granted, you know, 4 years into writing papers and reading Britlet. So yeah, it was a relatively easy experience from first deciding that AmeriCorps was something that I wanted to pursue to getting my acceptance.

Christina Blitchok [00:10:55]:
It was in the span of a month or 2. And then I was packing up and driving across the country with all of my belongings. So it was a great experience. I'm very thankful for it.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:11:05]:
Now we already talked about the fact that you made the choice after AmeriCorps to go back to school to get that teaching degree. And you chose to go to the University of Michigan, Flint. Now as you make those transitions, transitions from undergrad to grad, it is a transition and there are things that you have to learn along the way to be able to be successful in that transition. But you were successful. You found success in graduate school. What did you have to do to set yourself up for success? And what did you have to do to maintain your success throughout that graduate school journey?

Christina Blitchok [00:11:39]:
On a kind of ideological level, in grad school, I had to confront a lot of my a lot of my biases, a lot of my preconceived notions about how the world works. I feel like there's a level of hubris when you get your undergrad degree that gets torn down pretty quickly when you're in grad school. You know, just that higher level of of research, that higher level of thinking, that pushback that faculty gives you. So going into conversations, especially with cohort members, like cohort members can sharpen you and and really help you grow by adding in their different perspectives. A lot of my undergrad courses were lecture style. They we were just absorbing expertise from a faculty member. And then really a lot of our own analysis was done individually where my grad school experience was very collaborative. We would read a text and then we would come ready to discuss it, ready to share opinions, ready to disagree on things.

Christina Blitchok [00:12:48]:
So that was not something that I was very used to. And being able to find my voice in that sort of situation, being able to kind of synthesize my thoughts and rather than write a flowery paper about them, be able to argue with them with someone, who had different experiences than I did. That was difficult at first. Also just the academic side. My undergrad experience was kind of in a bubble. I was there to study. I didn't I had a very part time campus job, but for the most part, my entire world was focused around academics where in my grad school experience, I was working part time while balancing studies. I was getting engaged.

Christina Blitchok [00:13:33]:
I was planning a wedding. There was a lot of life that I had to balance things with. So my studying habits had to change. It wasn't just gonna happen on a quiet night after I got home from whatever campus activity, like it needed to be scheduled. It needed to be more regimented and it needed to be more flexible. I couldn't be so precious about my study and surroundings and you know, waiting for my favorite table in the library to open up like it needed to happen when it happened. And that was a great lesson in flexibility.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:14:05]:
So one of the questions that I'm going to ask you is this because you did complete your degree, and you went off, and you taught for a few years, and then you left education. So talk to me about getting that degree, using it, but then pivoting and finding that maybe being in a classroom was not where you were meant to be, but that a different path was right for you.

Christina Blitchok [00:14:33]:
I loved the 3 years that I spent in a classroom. I felt like I was very well prepared and it was everything that I hoped that I would be. I loved that impact that I had on students. I loved the relationships that came out of it. I loved the creativity of lesson planning and building curriculum, but I actually left the class room when, you know, I talked earlier about flexibility and being able to pivot and how different different experiences and perspectives can kinda change your trajectory if you're open to it. And I got pregnant with my first child, and I felt the need to pivot in that moment. And I think that my journey up until that point, not knowing what I wanted to do, feeling led to education, doing my grad school experience and then teaching, like, it kind of was a perfect setup to I wasn't completely thrown off course by the idea of taking a moment to figure out if teaching was still right for me. Like, it wasn't as scary as it would have been if I had come out of undergrad with a very firm idea of what I wanted to do and then not being able to deviate from that.

Christina Blitchok [00:15:47]:
It's funny, like my degree is in education, but I feel like I still use a lot of what I learned in my grad school experience, if only because my experience in my master's course opened my eyes so much to experiences that were not my own. You know, a lot of my coursework was in Detroit Schools and kind of the unbalanced education system and, you know, the systemic problems that I was very unaware of growing up in suburbia. And it's something that I continue to be passionate about today. It's something that makes me really passionate about the city of Flint, where I ended up landing and living and raising my family. So I am still thankful for my master's degree and my coursework even if my trajectory pivoted. It's something that enriched enriched my perspectives. It shaped who I am and the skills that I learned in research and collaboration and being open to other people's perspectives is something that's gonna serve me even when I'm retired and out of a career altogether. So after I decided that the classroom was not going to be a place where just in my personality, I'm very introverted.

Christina Blitchok [00:17:02]:
I gave my everything to my students and it left very little for my outside life. So I transitioned to more freelance and editing, freelance writing, and allowed me to stay home when my children were young. And then I started working hybrid in more like marketing communications engagement roles. And I think that my experience in my getting my grad degree really helped with that role because it allowed me to really listen to other people's stories, to learn from other people's experiences, and then be able to connect with them even if there was differences. So yeah, and now I'm here and I'm loving it.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:17:42]:
So talk to me about what you have taken out of that graduate degree that you find that you're using on a regular basis in the work that you're doing today?

Christina Blitchok [00:17:52]:
I think that working in a place especially like U of M Flint, really my experiences and and all that I learned really set me up well to understand not only our incoming students, I was a senior English teacher in high school. So the students that are joining us in the fall are exactly like the students that I saw and waved out the door every May. So I understand their thought processes. I understand what they're looking for. I understand how many of them see themselves as academics, the wounds that they have, the wounds that growing up in the education system can inflict on you, things that they believe about themselves. I understand the impact that faculty and staff can have on student experiences and then how that translates into alumni experiences. I understand that one positive relationship can really change the trajectory of someone's academic career. One person that roots for them, one person that believes in them, one person that says I see you and I understand you, that can really have ripples of impact for years to come.

Christina Blitchok [00:19:01]:
And I saw it as a high school teacher. I see it now working in higher education. My ability to collaborate with people who don't agree with me, that comes from my experience in my grad program. Being able to empathize and honor other people's stories, even if they don't reflect my own. That came from my experience in my grad program. My ability to put aside personal opinions to come to a solution that came from my coursework. And then just my awareness of a world outside of my own experience that came from my coursework as well. And the willingness to be self aware enough if I'm not looking beyond my own experiences.

Christina Blitchok [00:19:50]:
So there's practical things. I think that I'm a much more focused person, I learned how to hack my personality and be able to, you know, be able to get things done even when life is crazy and manic because my life definitely reflects more my grad school experiences rather than my undergrad. I've not been in the same sort of bubble. So So just being able to to get work done, to prioritize tasks, prioritize my own learning, no matter what else is going on around me has been really helpful every day.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:20:22]:
Now as you look back at your graduate education, and you think about others that are thinking about graduate school, what are some tips that you might offer others that are considering graduate education that would help them find success sooner?

Christina Blitchok [00:20:34]:
Lean into mentorship right away. Start identifying people whether it be faculty or staff that you feel like would be able to support you and keep you accountable and give you that example of what's possible after you graduate. Don't wait until you're struggling to reach out for help. It's much easier to front load that support. Don't hesitate to make connections with your fellow cohort members. Don't listen to the voice of impostor syndrome. Nobody knows what they're doing. That's a secret that I learned only recently.

Christina Blitchok [00:21:14]:
Nobody knows what they're doing. So don't be afraid to ask questions to be vulnerable, lack of vulnerability, The only thing that it achieves is closing you off to learning and growing. So you don't need to have things figured out. You don't need to have all of your ducks in a row to apply or to start a degree a lot. And in fact, I I think that you're going to be much more successful if you walk in open to experiences and open to where your coursework might lead you and that nothing is wasted. No experience is wasted if you've learned something and if you carry something from that experience with you. And then just practically find study habits, find times, find find resources that work for you even if they don't look the way that you think they should, or if they don't look the same as your other cohort members or find something that that speaks to you and that works for you.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:22:10]:
Well, Christina, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for sharing your journey today and all that you've learned along the way in this journey that you've had thus far, and I truly wish you all the best.

Christina Blitchok [00:22:21]:
Well, thank you so much for having me. This is great.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:22:24]:
The University of Michigan Flint has a full array of masters and doctorate programs if you are interested in continuing your education. Whether you're looking for in person or online learning options, the University of Michigan Flint has programs that will meet your needs. For more information on any of our graduate programs, visit umflint.edu/graduateprograms to find out more. Thanks again for spending time with me as you prepare to be a victor in grad school. I look forward to speaking with you again soon as we embark together on your graduate school journey. If you have any questions or want to reach out, email me at [email protected].