LEAD 6001 Module 2 Self-Assessment for Doctoral Study Example

Fifty-Two Hours, One Old Statistics Grade and a Spreadsheet Habit: A Self-Assessment of Strengths and Challenges for Doctoral Study

Student Name

American College of Education

LEAD6001: Introduction to Advanced Studies

Module 2 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 19, 2026

Introduction

In Module 1 I placed myself near the practitioner end of the scholar-practitioner continuum, a clinical placement coordinator for a composite Tennessee BSN program beginning an Ed.D. in Nursing Education. This paper looks more closely at what I bring to doctoral study and what will make it hard. Rather than rely on impressions, I gathered three kinds of evidence during the first two weeks of the term: a log of how I spent one full week, the feedback on a writing diagnostic from the university's writing center and an honest look at my history with statistics. I then weigh three strengths against three challenges and set a response to each challenge.

Evidence 1: A Week in Hours

From Monday to Sunday of the second week I recorded my time in half-hour blocks. Work took 52 hours, including two evenings answering hospital calls about the next day's placements. Commuting took six, family and household about 30 and sleep averaged six and a half hours a night. Coursework received nine hours, almost all of it after 9:00 p.m. and in fragments of 45 minutes or less. The week was typical, not unusual, which is the point: I do not have twenty spare hours waiting to be found. Any time for doctoral work will have to be taken from something else, and the late-night fragments I used that week are the worst possible hours for reading research.

Evidence 2: The Writing Diagnostic

The writing center reviewed a three-page sample I submitted and returned two main comments. First, my paragraphs describe well but rarely argue; most begin with a fact and end without saying what the fact means. Second, my citations follow APA style mechanically, but I tend to string quotations together instead of paraphrasing and synthesizing. Both comments match my experience. My professional writing consists of emails, schedules and short reports, all of which reward clarity and brevity and none of which ask me to build an argument across ten pages. The reviewer also marked one strength worth keeping: my sentences are short and plain, and she wrote that clarity is easier to keep than to learn. The work ahead is to add argument and synthesis to that clarity, not to trade it for the dense prose I sometimes assume doctoral writing requires.

Evidence 3: My History With Statistics

My last statistics course was in 2009, during my master's program, and I passed it with a C after a semester of dread. Since then I have used counts, percentages and averages constantly but nothing inferential. Onwuegbuzie and Wilson (2003), reviewing research on statistics anxiety, described it as a common experience among graduate students that is associated with lower achievement in research methods courses and with procrastination, and they noted that it can be reduced through teaching approaches and through students' own strategies. Recognizing my reaction as a known pattern, rather than proof that I am bad at numbers, is a useful start. I manage large spreadsheets well; what I fear is the vocabulary and the tests, not the data.

A Fourth View: What My Dean Sees

Self-assessment has an obvious weakness: people judge themselves poorly, sometimes too kindly and sometimes too harshly. To check my own view I reread my last three annual evaluations, written by the associate dean who supervises me. Two comments repeat across all three years. The first praises my reliability under pressure: "When a placement collapses, the problem is solved before faculty hear about it." The second is a gentle criticism: "Shares results informally; would benefit from presenting data in writing to the curriculum committee." The first supports what I list below as a strength. The second describes the same writing challenge the writing center found, seen from a different angle: I can produce findings, but I rarely put them in a form other people can examine.

My dean's comments also point to something the time log missed. I am often the person colleagues call when they need something fixed, which is gratifying and expensive. Doctoral study will require me to say no to some of those calls, or at least to answer them the next morning. I have never had to do that, and I expect it to be harder than the reading.

Three Strengths

The evidence also shows strengths. The first is organization. My job is a large, constantly changing scheduling problem, and I am good at it; the same skill will serve a doctoral timeline with many deadlines. The second is a data habit. I already collect numbers about my own work, as the cancellation spreadsheet described in Module 1 shows, and a habit of counting is a foundation for research. The third is persistence through difficulty. I have kept a placement system running through hospital mergers, a pandemic and three deans, and I do not abandon a problem because it becomes tedious.

Three Challenges

The first challenge is time, and specifically good time. Nine fragmented late-night hours a week will not sustain doctoral reading and writing. The second is academic writing: moving from describing to arguing and from quoting to synthesizing. The third is less visible. When I read the first course discussion posts, many from people with titles such as associate dean or director of nursing, I felt that I did not belong in the program. Clance and Imes (1978) described the impostor phenomenon among high-achieving women who, despite evidence of their competence, believed they were not truly capable and that others had overestimated them. I recognize the feeling, and I suspect it will return whenever I submit work for review.

Responding to the Challenges

Zimmerman (2002) described self-regulated learning as a cycle of forethought, performance and self-reflection in which learners set goals, choose strategies, monitor their work and adjust. I will apply that cycle to each challenge. For time, the forethought step is a fixed schedule: two early-morning blocks of 90 minutes on Tuesdays and Thursdays before my workday begins and a four-hour block on Saturday mornings, protected by the family arrangements I described in Module 1. I will monitor whether I keep them for four weeks before adjusting. For writing, one paper a term goes to the writing center for review, and, in my own drafts, end every paragraph with a sentence that states what its evidence means. For statistics, I will start a free introductory statistics course this winter, months before RES6003, so that the vocabulary is familiar when it counts. For the impostor feeling, the response is simpler: I will keep a short file of the feedback I receive, positive and critical, and read it when the feeling returns.

Conclusion

The evidence describes a capable professional with real assets for doctoral study, organization, a data habit and persistence, and three specific obstacles: too little good time, a writing style built for emails and a long-standing anxiety about statistics, all wrapped in the feeling of not belonging. None of these is unusual, and each has a concrete response. Module 5 will turn these responses into a program plan with dates. The one-month check built into each response matters as much as the response itself. If the early-morning blocks fail, the plan changes before the term is half over, not after a missed deadline, and if the writing center's second review finds the same two problems, I will know that ending paragraphs with a sentence of meaning is not enough and will look for a writing group.

References

Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The impostor phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241-247. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0086006

Onwuegbuzie, A. J., & Wilson, V. A. (2003). Statistics anxiety: Nature, etiology, antecedents, effects, and treatments: A comprehensive review of the literature. Teaching in Higher Education, 8(2), 195-209. https://doi.org/10.1080/1356251032000052447

Zimmerman, B. J. (2002). Becoming a self-regulated learner: An overview. Theory Into Practice, 41(2), 64-70. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4102_2