During the first year of my Ph.D. journey in the LDT program at UGA, I worked as a graduate assistant. As a part of my graduate assistantship, I worked as a teaching assistant for four online courses: EDIT 6190E, EDIT 7520E, EDIT 6210E, and EDIT 6200E. I assisted in grading, giving feedback on submitted assignments, finding useful resources, replacing old materials, and developing an e-learning module within the course. I have also worked as a research assistant for a project led by Dr. Stefaniak, which aims to explore diverse instructional design programs that support future instructional designers in the development of ID competencies. In the project, I assisted in data collection and review of the literature. We submitted a proposal to the conference.

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Being passionate about learning the design and processes of research, I had an opportunity to join the projects led by Dr. Ding that investigated effective ways to support the learning experiences of multilingual learners in STEM education. I assisted in the literature review and conducted a quantitative analysis, including descriptive statistics, paired sample t-test, Wilcoxon signed rank test, ANOVA, and ANCOVA. We submitted two proposals to the conferences. Moreover, I participated in writing a paper that is planned to be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal in the summer with my colleagues from a research team led by Dr. Matthews, whom I worked with during and after graduating from my master's program. The purpose of the paper is to support teachers in fostering students' sense of belongingness, particularly for marginalized students of color, in a middle school mathematics classroom. I've been assisting with coding and analyzing the data in this project.

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Besides the research projects that I am currently involved in, I worked as a teaching assistant for the EDIT 2000E course in Spring. Under the supervision of Professor Gretchen Thomas, I assisted in grading and developing online course modules. I also made videos and uploaded them to some of the modules to guide the students through each module. As a person who is deeply interested in teaching, this opportunity of teaching assistantship was so much appreciated, along with the GRSC 7770 course that I took during the Spring semester, where I learned essential knowledge and skills needed in preparing for a future instructor.

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Lastly, I want to highlight valuable experiences that I had while participating in the AECT Graduate Student Assembly (GSA) meetings. I have occasionally joined the AECT GSA meetings during the first year of my doctoral studies, which helped me get inspired by the experiences and professional development of diverse graduate students across the field and learn some of the research trends in the field of LDT. Recently, I was elected as a 2023-2024 AECT GSA CLT (Culture, Learning, and Technology) board representative. I am grateful for the opportunity to serve as the AECT GSA CLT board representative, and I am excited to join the upcoming AECT convention in October.