Abstract
My first week of graduate school in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland in September 1992 was quite memorable. In 1 week, Charles Wellford had us delve into the classic American Bar Foundation Survey on criminal justice as well as Packer’s two models of the criminal process, Denise Gottfredson had us think about research design, and Doug Smith, well, he had us shaking in our pants as we started “introductory” to graduate statistics in criminology. But there was nothing “introductory” about that class. Why you may ask? Well, we didn’t have the option of point and clicking anything. We used a statistical program called GAUSS, with its nonexistent help function and its user-driven code to make it do what you wanted it to do. It was in that first week of graduate school and the remaining 4 years of my graduate school career and the constant presence of Doug Smith that taught me the craft of research, one that was focused on (1) asking very specific and original research questions that could be answered (as best as possible) in a yes/no fashion and (2) whose findings were interesting regardless of how they came out. That training and subsequent research experiences with faculty and colleagues alike are what taught me that research is not an outcome but a process, one that takes time, care, and attention. But to understand how I see research as a process of discovery, I need to take the reader through a brief, longitudinal journey about how I got to where I am, what I have learned in the process, and my hope for what my students will take away and improve upon in their own careers.