My Path to Becoming an Independent Researcher

Casandra Hockenberry is a public policy professional specializing in elections and an independent researcher focusing on community. She travels significantly for her day job and fits her research in on airplanes and in the evenings. In her spare time, she reads, journals and spends time with her partner and her two dogs in Lexington, Kentucky.

I have always loved to learn. Friends and family often make fun of me because I am a person who hates to wonder. By wonder I don’t mean to be in awe of something. I love that feeling. I am referring to the concept of being curious of an answer but never knowing for sure what that answer is. When I was younger, we did not have the internet at our fingertips. There was not the opportunity to have the breadth of human knowledge at your fingertips.

Who was that actor in the background of that scene in the TV show? What is that song playing in the grocery store? Who is Ethan Allen and why does he make so much furniture? You just had to wonder or find someone who you knew that had the answer. When I was finally able to answer all the questions I wondered about, it became almost a compulsion. I hate to wonder. I want to know. And so, over the years I have spent hours at the computer or on my phone following an endless pathway of searches and interlinked concepts, ideas, figures, etc. Anything that I was curious about got researched. Some days I wouldn’t go to sleep until 3 or 4 a.m. I was so busy going down the rabbit hole.

Most of my knowledge base has come from this endless curiosity. The interest would sometimes last 10 minutes and other time a couple of days, but it always passed. So, last year when I felt this tug to start digging into research around community, civic engagement and how these things can improve our lives, I wasn’t surprised. I had felt this feeling before, and eventually it would go away. So, I started spending my (not so) ample free time digging into the basics of community and civic engagement. I started by re-reading Bowling Alone. This book serves as mandatory reading for a number of political science and sociology classes. From there, I identified a number of other books that may be of interest to me, all with the expectation that eventually I would lose interest and dig into my next curiosity.

But then something interesting happened—the interest didn’t subside. Now I was in a predicament. I didn’t know what to do. I had joined Accepted Society the year before as I was trying to find community. I thought a community of individuals in academia may be a good fit. I hoped that my work in public policy was close enough to academia that I might fit in. I also thought that this community may understand my desire to learn. Spoiler alert: this community was perfect. I am so thankful for the Accepted Community because while they were accepting of me as a knowledge worker full stop, they also encouraged me to take a chance on myself and my other interests. The community told me it was ok to do this research on my own. They assured me that I did not need to go back to school (thank god!). They told me that researching for research’s sake is a worthwhile time.

After all of that encouragement, I took a leap that I never expected. I applied to the Accepted Society Researchers Program. This four-month long program is for independent researchers. There are weekly seminars where you learn about conducting independent research, including how to get through all those journal articles you have saved in Zotero, methodologies for research and developing an end product. You have the opportunity to have one-on-one chats with Cait and Katie, who provide invaluable insight into the research process, not getting overwhelmed by the comparison game, and constant encouragement that you are perfectly positioned to do the research that you care about. The best part of the program was that I got to build relationships with an inspiring cohort of fellow independent researchers. The other researchers were each doing a project so unique to them but that I was so excited and fascinated by. I told each of them how excited I was for their work. At some point I probably sounded like a broken record, but I stand by my excitement. They are conducting amazing research and as Katie and Cait constantly reminded us, they were uniquely positioned to do that research. I know that if they decide to publish their work, it will be absolutely amazing and will undoubtedly make an impact in their respective fields.

This program helped shape what I wanted to do with my research. As I mentioned, I’m not an academic and unlike many of my fellow Researchers, I am not interested in pursuing a PhD. I have my law degree and that experience was traumatic enough. No, the research that I’m doing is something that I think will be most useful outside of academia. Instead, I intend to share my research with everyone on my personal website. I want to create a space (and even a community) where others can learn to create their own communities both in the place where they live and with others like them. The Researchers program gave me the tools I needed to build this space and ensure that it is supported by facts and rigorous research. The program made sure I knew that rigorous research can be conducted outside of the Academy and made available and accessible to everyone.

Our next cohort of ‘Researchers’ will be open April 27! Apply here