Meet Graduate Student Porntip Israsena Twishime

By Nusrah Azeez and Christine Souaiden

Please introduce yourself and tell us your journey from undergraduate school to higher education

My name is Porntip Israsena Twishime, I am a PhD candidate in Communication. I am also teaching a class this semester, an upper level seminar called Stories of Race in the United States. I am really enjoying teaching a class with a bunch of Communication students as well as some other students in different majors, it has been the highlight for me right now. In terms of coming to higher education from undergraduate, when I was an undergraduate student, I studied International Studies in Spanish at the University of Arkansas. I actually only took one Communication class in college. I came to UMass to do my Master’s degree and stayed here for the PhD. The reason I was so attracted to Communication, instead of staying in International Studies, was because at the foundation of my interest in intercultural and international studies was how people relate to each other and how they make sense of the world that we live in. For that reason, I thought at the foundation of that is Communication. That is how I ended up here, studying Communication in higher ed. 

Why did you choose Communication?

I find it fascinating that you can study any topic from a Communication perspective. Even if you are interested in something like environmental justice, you may not necessarily immediately think that you are going to study it from that specific lens, but you can use Communication to examine what makes environmental justice important. I really love that it is a big picture discipline where you can look at any issue that matters to you. This is what I practice with my students, you can use this field to study anything of interest to you.

What would you say is the major difference between undergraduate and graduate school?

I did not try very much in high school, I floated by, and I was not very sure I was going to college. I was the first in my family to go to college. In high school, almost all of my friends were applying to go to school. So my English teacher told me, you should apply and maybe even apply to the honors program. So I did, I got accepted, I had to put in the effort. It was not like high school. I could not just show up and take a test and get an okay grade. I had to do the readings, and had to do the homework. This sparked my interest and curiosity. College was a very different experience than high school. When I got to my Master’s program here at UMass, I felt like I was really behind and that I had a lot of catching up to do. Whereas, in undergrad there is an understanding that people are at different levels, and people come from different high schools and backgrounds that may have exposed them to certain ideas and concepts earlier on. When you get to graduate school there is a certain baseline that you have to be at. I did not get that in my undergraduate program, so I had a lot of catching up to do. Another difficult thing for me was that when I came to UMass for Communication, I only had taken one Communication class before I started a graduate program in Communication. Not only did I have to level up, but I was also with students in class who were Comm majors who had already taken a bunch of Comm classes. It was a challenge but it was also very possible. That is one of the good things about Communication: If students are interested in graduate school, it is such an expansive discipline that you can have people come from different fields. One person from my cohort was a painter, an artist, who also up until that point had taken one Comm class before he started his PhD. It is possible to enter into Comm as a graduate student and be able to catch up and do the work that you need to do to be able to create really interesting research.

As a grad student, do you feel a sense of community at UMass? 

I started as a Master’s student in the fall of 2016, so I have been here for a while now. I think that community, whether it is in graduate school, or outside of the university setting, takes time to develop. I am one of those people that prefers fewer and deeper friendships rather than a whole bunch of friends. Community takes a while to build, but I definitely feel fortunate to have my people. Sometimes they are in your apartment building, other times they are outside of it, sometimes they are former students, or professors. Community looks like a lot of different things, but I definitely feel like I have established that over the years.

What research are you working on? What is your dissertation focused on?

Currently, I am working on my dissertation, which is the main research project that I am doing. I am studying Asian American identity. The way that I am doing that is by studying stories about Asian Americans, both stories about them and stories that Asian Americans tell. Part of my research is to read these stories, then also to produce them. My dissertation is a novel. I am writing a novel about a Thai-American family whose father realizes he is undocumented. His documents are expired and so the story follow his family’s decision navigating whether or not to renew the documents and expose that the father has been undocumented, or to stay under the radar and continue living as an undocumented person. Even though it is fiction, with fiction you create the world and invent the scenarios, it is very much shaped by our current political situation and cultural moment. Part of the research I am doing is archival research where I listen to oral history about people who have experienced undocumented status in their families. I am also reading a lot. I am using the research that is available and creating a story that confronts these issues of migration and race in an Asian American context. My latest article is about the precarity of Covid which was co-authored with several UMass Comm alumni and Prof. Claudio Moreira (among others).

How intense would you describe your workload as a grad student?

The workload is definitely heavy. I think a lot about my students when I am assigning work because I know that many students are taking 4-6 classes at a time and there is a lot of work. There is a lot of work, even for one class, so I try to be mindful of that. At the same time, I was shocked by how much work goes into a graduate program that students have to put in on a regular basis. The workload was very overwhelming for me at the beginning, which was partly because of the catching up I had to do. I had to do the assignments as well as extra work to establish the groundwork for Communication for myself. The workload is a pretty big jump. I believe that due to COVID-19, increasing awareness around mental health, as well as generous and mindful professors, there is more attention to the amount of work that professors are asking graduate students to do. 

What are your future plans in this field?

In the discipline of Communication, I do not know of anyone else who is writing a novel for their dissertation. I do not know of any professors either that have written a novel as their primary research. It is not a very common methodology, it is not one that you hear a lot about. Something that I would love to see happen in my time in the field of Communication is more creative writing practices to emerge. I am going to be on the job market in the coming years and hopefully I will be able to regularly teach creative writing methodologies to Communication students at the undergraduate level. If they decide to go to graduate school, hopefully I will have the opportunity to work with graduate students as well, this could be a possibility and a more common method in the field. From my classes, it seems like students are getting interested in this. Not just for research purposes but also for their own creative expression and therapeutic use. It is helpful to do this kind of work and hopefully I will get this opportunity. 

What do you like to do in your free time?

There are a couple things that I like to do outside of my work. One thing is I really like being outside, so I try to spend a lot of time outside. Whether it is just walking, having a coffee on the porch. Another thing that I like to do is watch my little kid who is currently sleeping, she is one year old. I am trying to figure out the ways of parenting which is a lot of fun even though it can be overwhelming. Being outside, traveling, and being with my kid are the two big things I like doing.

What is your advice to Comm students and future higher-ed students?

My advice would be to give yourself time and space. What I remember from being in college is that there are so many things vying for your attention and this was before the age of social media. With the urgency of the pandemic, I cannot imagine what it is like to be in college. I do not think I would have finished college if this happened while I was in college. I did not have the resources or the support to be able to continue. So I think about that a lot. My advice would be to give yourself the time and space to play. Try not to take things too seriously. By play I mean, open yourself up to creative things, ones that you are not familiar with. That will help you orient yourself towards the things you want to pursue. You may already have an idea or a goal that you are interested in. But also if you loosen up, keeping that goal in mind, you would be surprised where things can take you if you allow them. Sometimes it is more beautiful than you could have imagined.