Finally, the IRB approves!

In June of 2015, I was on the brink of turning 29 and had just signed all the papers to become the new owner of our little house by the ocean. A week later, I would be fully enrolled in a doctoral program.

I have never done things small.

Today, I am on the brink of turning 32 and am about to have my first baby. Today, I have also been married for 6 months already as well! I don’t know where that time went, but it went.

But also… today, I finally got full IRB approval for my dissertation study, which means that this summer, as I am having Logan, I will also have to be writing the first two chapters of my paper to be ready for the next school year when my data collection will begin in September.

The hiccup in the entire process for me was that I needed a supervisor to sign off on allowing me to talk to teachers. It’s incredibly hard to get in touch with someone who does not work in your building and really, has no idea who you are amongst a sea of other employees too. I was getting annoyed with the entire process.

However, something changed in me this year. I’m not sure what it was. I used to be someone who internalized a lot of stuff and who, more often than not, took other people’s issues/opinions/lack of responses as some reflection of me. The more I think about it, the more deeply rooted in my upbringing I think that all is, but that’s for a much deeper post some other time.

Something did indeed snap within me this year, and I just got really tired of being pushed around and swallowing how I was always made to feel mad, inadequate, wrong, or what have you in whatever the situation, and always by other people. So, when I saw one of the potential people at work yesterday who could very well help me in that scenario, I literally pushed my way through a crowd of children and inserted myself into the conversation he was having.

I introduced myself, who I was, and what I needed. The surprising part is that he knew exactly who I was and was more than happy to give me the letter that I needed. Within 20 minutes, the IRB had a digital copy of the letter they were not going to let up on, and this morning, as I was talking to my dissertation mentor about how I was hopeful that this meant the conditional approval would be lifted in favor of a full approval, the email came in that it was in fact, fully approved and that I was cleared for data collection come September.

Sometimes you just have to push back and you’ll get what you need in order to be where you need to be.

Katherine Kuzma-Beck Hart is an Adjunct Professor of English at Mercer County Community College. This story was published on May 17, 2018, on Katherine’s blog (available here), and has been republished here with her permission.