Dr. Catherine Cherrstrom shares her journey from a 27-year banking career to earning a PhD and joining the professoriate. She discusses her dissertation on midlife career transitions for women, the “expert–novice–expert” arc, and the practical strategies—mentorship, small daily writing habits, collaboration, and productivity techniques—that helped her succeed.

This episode offers encouragement and concrete advice for anyone considering or navigating a doctoral path: break large goals into steps, find supportive peers and mentors, and lean into the skills you already have.

In this episode, Dr. Devorah Lieberman discusses purpose-driven and principled leadership in higher education, the importance of mentoring and building diverse leadership teams, and the evolving challenges facing colleges today.

She offers practical advice for early-career academics, alternative approaches to admissions and student success like "Earn to Learn," and reflections on balancing professional impact with family and values-driven service.

This episode of The Educator's Lens follows Dr. Olaby reflecting on how a Harvard Graduate School of Education course reshaped her views on admissions, evaluation, and teaching. Key ideas include Kahn’s critique of democratic inequality, Freire’s problem-posing alternative to the banking model, and Yosso’s community cultural wealth.

She describes concrete changes she made revising participation criteria, expanding access to mentorship, using pulse check-ins and peer circles, and introducing the H-U-M-A-N framework (Honor lived experience, Understand context, Motivate meaning, Adapt feedback, Nurture growth), to support first-generation and working-class students in technical fields.

The episode closes with a call for equity audits and policy redesign to lift standards in ways that recognize students’ assets, foster belonging, and dismantle hidden hierarchies in higher education.