About

I have sat on the other side of the table.

From 2021 to 2025 I was a professor, a dissertation chair, and a committee member at a large university, working with about 20 doctoral students a year. Over ten years in higher education altogether.

So when your committee leaves a comment you cannot decode, I am not guessing at what they meant. I have written that comment. I know what a chair is worried about when they ask you to “strengthen the alignment,” and I know what they will accept as an answer.

That is my whole job. I tell you what the comments mean, I show you how to answer them, and I stay with you until it is done. I will never write it for you, and I will never tell you to fight your committee.

My story

How I got here.

I have worked in higher education for over ten years, and I have done just about all of it. Success coach. Admissions counselor. Assistant director of a campus. Professor. Chair.

• At eighteen

  I was homeless. I stayed that way for six years.

  My whole dream was to help students. I wanted to be a teacher, because nobody ever told me a professor position was on the table. Once I found out it was, that became the goal.

• 2020

  I was laid off from higher education and my heart broke. I thought I was being released from my calling.

  My husband and a friend told me to start coaching students on my own.

• 2021

  They were right. I started DK Education Consulting in March.

  The rest of the dream came the same year. In October I became a professor, a dissertation chair, and a committee member at a large university.

• Through 2025

  For four years I did both. About 20 doctoral students a year inside the university, and my own clients outside it.

• 2025

  I realized something. I could help more students out here, on my own, than I could inside one university.

  So I took a leap of faith and went all the way into my business. Now I get to work with more of you, and go deeper with each one.

Coaching students through the dissertation is the part I would have done either way. It just took a layoff for me to find out.

Why nothing shocks me

I have been where you are sitting.

My bachelor’s took eight years. I was homeless for part of that time, and I became a legal guardian partway through it.

I finished my PhD in three and a half years, while raising the last brother I had guardianship over and working a full time job.

I had delays in my dissertation process. I had frustrating moments. I got 1,200 comments back on a draft. Then I cried. Then I fixed it.

I am not telling you that to be inspiring. I am telling you so you know I am not going to be shocked by whatever state your document is in, or by how long yours has taken.

Credentials

The short version.

I work with qualitative and quantitative studies. Qualitative is where I trained, where I taught, and where I go deepest. So if you are sitting on forty transcripts and a codebook that will not hold together, that is very much my lane. If you have a page of SPSS output you cannot turn into sentences, that is my lane too.

Read my published article on best practices in foster youth support programs at California community colleges.