Pa Vue (Education, MA,'11) currently is pursuing a Ph.D. in the Critical Studies of Race, Class, and Gender at the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley. Vue documents her doctorate journey in detail within her informative and women-in-education-centric podcast, “on becoming educated.”
With episode titles ranging from “On Doing Everything with Intention in Grad School” to “On How to Write a Statement of Purpose,” this podcast answers a wide range of common graduate-school questions (and some that only a Ph.D. student herself would know needed answering) with a compassionate and empowering delivery. From taking the GRE to defending her dissertation, Vue discusses how she navigates every step of graduate school. The podcast's goal is to shed light on this process and make it accessible and possible for anyone who wants to change the world with a Ph.D.
"As a Hmong woman who has been minoritized, othered and erased, I feel a responsibility to my people to pursue a Ph.D. in Education," Vue wrote in her statement of purpose for her grad school application. "I came to the US when I was five years old and, like many immigrants, learned English as a survival language. I learned it so well that it became my first language, relegating my native language—Hmong—to a trick I sometimes pulled out of my pocket. Feeling this loss and the constant threat of erasure at a young age, I taught myself how to write in Hmong, and within two weeks, memorized 56 consonants, 13 vowels, and 8 tones. In pursuing a Ph.D., I hope to preserve the Hmong language and culture, investigate the role heritage language plays in students’ lives, and transform educational research by disrupting colonial systems of power.”