One Year After Graduating with a Ph.D. in Psychology

Updates. And writing all the things... a novel, content for a mental health app, poetry.

Hey y’all,

This post will be a different format than previous posts. Read on for updates!

Last year (2023), I passed my dissertation defense in April and graduated with my Ph.D. in Psychology (Cognitive-Behavioral Neuroscience concentration) in May. My dissertation was on context-dependent mechanisms in numerosity-time interactions. Basically, the different things in our environment that influence how we experience and use time, like study design, number of objects in our environment, how long objects are present in our environment, etc.

It was a joy to have my at-the-time 2.5-year-old daughter watch her mama walk across the big stage for a degree that only 1% of people globally and less than 2% in the United States earn, and even fewer women have (2% compared to 2.5% men).

I have sacrificed a lot for this achievement, living well below the poverty line for most of my adulthood and experiencing a decade of chronic stress. When I married my husband in 2015, I was finally no longer “poor” but we weren’t exactly well off. I’m a frugal person by necessity, and dare I say nature.

It’s been a belt-tightening challenge to make ends meet as we had to live in separate states for the first year of my Ph.D. journey. We moved from central Texas (think: between San Antonio and Austin) to one of the most expensive U.S. cities, Washington, D.C. metro. But we survived and are still surviving. We aim to thrive, not just survive, and we are finally making progress.

I’m still writing, but instead of academic manuscripts, I’m now writing content for a mental health app that specializes in helping teens and young adults. I love taking complex scientific information and making it easy for others to understand. Making science accessible benefits everyone, especially those in desperate need. I wish there was an app for mental health when I was a teen! Perhaps life could have felt lighter and less confusing.

I’m also writing an upmarket fiction novel about a woman’s journey through the complex grief of losing someone who was the source of her childhood trauma, and the bumpy path to her self-acceptance. I’m really excited about this story and hope I can share more about it with you soon.

Until next time, take care!

– Candice

This is a cross-posting from my Buy Me a Coffee page.

Photo: I got professional headshots done in early 2024. I feel so official!