Philosophy of Practice

My practice is grounded at the intersection of two disciplines, positive psychology and higher education, which together shape how I understand student development, design programs, and lead organizations. In May 2025, I completed my MS in Psychology with a Positive Psychology concentration at Arizona State University, earning the degree With Distinction and a 4.00 GPA, a credential that preceded and philosophically grounded my MEd in Higher and Postsecondary Education, conferred in August 2026 With Distiction and a 4.00 GPA. These frameworks are not complementary additions to each other; they are, for me, genuinely inseparable. The question I bring to every advising interaction, every curriculum decision, and every governance challenge is the same: what conditions allow this student, this particular student, with this history, to recognize and act on their own capacity?

Core Framework: Agency and Resilience

At the center of my practice are two constructs that I have come to understand through both formal disciplinary training and lived experience: agency and resiliency.

Agency

By agency, I mean a student’s experienced sense of authorship over their own development, the belief that their choices matter, that their presence in an institution is legitimate, and that they have the capacity to act on their own goals rather than simply respond to the structures around them. Agency is not confidence. It is not optimism. It is the functional conviction that one’s actions are connected to outcomes, and it is cultivated, not installed. My role as a practitioner is to design adversarial, programmatic, and curricular environments where students practice exercising it.

Resiliency

By resiliency, I mean something more demanding than the word's popular use suggests. Resiliency is not simply bouncing back from adversity. In the tradition of positive psychology, resilience is the capacity to engage with adversity in ways that produce growth in the face of challenge, ambiguity, or failure, and to emerge with a more complex, more integrated sense of self and purpose. This is the resiliency I observed in student leaders navigating Senate conflict. It is the resiliency I tried to model during the mid-semester supervisory transition in my practicum placement. And it is the resiliency I most want to develop in the students I serve.

Both constructs draw on positive psychology’s formal literature Seligman’s work on learned helplessness and flourishing, Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, and Duckworth’s research on grit and are situated within the student development frameworks I have engaged across my HED coursework, including Sanford’s challenge and support, Perry’s scheme of intellectual and ethical development, and the self-authorship literature that runs through Baxter Magolda and Kegan.

Core Framework: Equity-Centered Approach

A strengths-based, agency-centered framework is only meaningful if it is honest about the structural conditions that constrain agency in the first place. Positive psychology has been fairly criticized for locating flourishing in the individual while under-rating the systems that differentially make flourishing available. My practice takes that critique seriously.

I grew up in rural northern Nevada as a first-generation college student and child of immigrants. That experience is the source of my commitment to students who are not already positioned to succeed, students for whom access to higher education is itself an act of resistance, and for whom the absence of visible models is a real and ongoing cost.

Equity, in my practice, is not a value to be declared. It is a question to be asked repeatedly: who is this designed for, and who does it leave out?

Core Framework: The Positive Psychology Lens

My MS in Psychology, with a concentration in Positive Psychology, is best understood not merely as a credential but as a philosophical approach that provides a formal grounding in a specific perspective on human potential. While deficit-focused frameworks inquire about what is wrong and how to address it, positive psychology explores what is already functioning well and how to build upon it. This shift in perspective significantly influences how I design programs, frame advising conversations, and understand the purpose of student development. It is not a minor addition to higher education theory; rather, it serves as the lens through which I interpret it.

Core Framework: Theory-To-Practice Bridge

ASUN New Officer Training — April 2026

I designed and facilitated ASUN New Officer Training for incoming ASUN officers. The curriculum was built explicitly around agency development, not telling students what leadership looks like, but creating structured conditions in which they practiced making decisions, navigating disagreement, and claiming authority in the presence of peers. The facilitation guide included SAY THIS scripts and WATCH FOR coaching notes oriented toward recognizing moments of agency in real time and naming them back to students. The Leadership Promise closing activity was designed as a structured self-authorship moment: officers articulated their leadership identity publicly, in their own words, anchored to the themes they had heard from peers across the day.

UNR Athletics Practicum — Spring 2026

During my practicum with Nevada Athletics Student-Athlete Development, I developed a men’s student-athlete wellness group in partnership with UNR Counseling Services. The initiative drew directly on resiliency frameworks, the idea that naming difficulty and building coping capacity is a form of strength, not its absence. The group was ultimately canceled one week before the scheduled session due to factors outside my control. Navigating that cancellation, maintaining professional relationships, documenting the work, and resisting the impulse to treat the outcome as a reflection of the initiative’s value was itself a practicum in the resiliency I had been trying to teach.