A Study of New Professionals in Student Affairs: Women’s Early Career Experiences in Their Own Words
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My feminist qualitative study examined the lived experience of five young women working in the field of student affairs and services in British Columbia. Using this feminist approach I explored their stories, views of gender, and conceptions of leadership. Central aims of this study were to uncover unexamined perspectives of these young women working in the field and their perceptions of leadership. By lending legitimacy to women’s experiences my study provides insights that have been discounted in the literature, as well as due to women’s age, level of experience, and gender. Ultimately however, these insights could have a positive impact on practices in student affairs and services. I gathered data through semi-structured interviews and a focus group. My research findings demonstrate the importance of mentorship and support, particularly from other women, as well as the broad impact of gender and age on the experience of student affairs professionals. My research also reveals the wide variety of ways young women are engaging with professional development and leadership as part of their work. This lends new insight into the current student affairs landscape as lived by young women, what impacts their experience as staff and leaders, as well as their vision for themselves and for the field in the future. I conclude this thesis with recommendations aimed to improve the experiences of new professionals and their supervisors, and to influence positive change within the systems and institutions in which they operate. Conducting this study with practitioners in British Columbia contributes to the research landscape by providing research from within the Canadian post-secondary context. It also provides research focused explicitly on women working in the field and on the experiences of new professionals from their own perspective, both of which are currently under-explored areas of student affairs and services research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".