Kashonia's
Story
My
life has been a little unusual both personally and professionally. Although
I’ve traveled extensively and worked overseas, I was born and have lived my life
in Australia.
At
15, I left school, and between then and my late 20s, I raised day old calves on
a little farm in Dubbo NSW; lived under the stars on the banks of the Barcoo
River in outback Queensland where I caught ‘wild’ donkeys and trucked them to
city sanctuaries; and set up and ran several small business of my own. In the
midst of all that, I was appointed Australia’s first female oil company
territory manager, which is when I began public speaking, and designing and
facilitating public and corporate workshops.
My
life then took on a new direction and a successful media career ensued, with
some television work in Brisbane. However, most of my work was in my number one
(media) love as a talk-back broadcaster on commercial radio stations around
Australia, and in 1988 I won the radio industry’s Pater award for the best voice
on Australian radio. As well as completing too many personal and professional
development workshops to count, in 1990 I began what was to become a decade + of
academic studies.
It
was when I began my BA that I realized that although many of my former positions
involved a lot of writing and communication skills, when it came to academic
writing I didn’t have a clue what was required. All I knew was that I thought
that I was a pretty good writer and yet that was not reflected in the comments
on my initial undergrad papers. It was the ‘tutor from hell’ that changed my
academic life. They gave me a failing grade and wrote on my paper: “This is not a trip down memory lane. If
you can’t do better than this then you are wasting our time and yours staying at
university”.
WOOOO, what a comment!
I
had no idea what I was meant to have done, or what was expected. All I knew was
that I did what I had thought was the right thing to do. It was decision time.
Maybe I should give this university studying away, I thought for a moment. But
that is not my approach to things. Instead, I decided that I would learn
everything I possibly could, from as many different sources that I could find,
about writing academic papers. I sat in on the academic writing course in the
Department of English, and attended any academic writing skills class I could
find at any university in my city.
Following the completion of my undergraduate studies in Moral Philosophy and
Peace Studies, I continued at university and studied my 3 post graduate degrees
concurrently. They were a P/G Honors in Environmental Philosophy, and two
Masters Degrees, an MA in Applied Ethics, and an MS in Environmental Management
completing all 3 in 1996.
At that stage, despite my rocky start, I had a Grade Point Average of 6.4 out of
7, enough to get a government scholarship to do my doctoral studies.
It was during my doctoral studies that I began tutoring students and realized
that they were having the same problems that I had when I began my university
studies. I could either write an appalling comment on their paper, as had
happened to me, or help them understand how to write an academic paper. I chose
the later and wrote the 1st edition of this book and began running Research
Paper Writing Skills seminars at the beginning of each semester. My aim was to
teach my students in as short a time as possible, what had taken me years to
learn through trial and error, personal research on academic writing skills, and
attending numerous writing skills classes. In 2000, I completed my
multi-disciplinary doctorate, which was done between the School of Philosophy
and the Graduate School of Management at the University of Queensland. My
research focused on Virtue Ethics, Environmental Philosophy, and forms of
Spiritual and Emotional Intelligences as the foundation for ethically
sustainable practices and raising ecological consciousness.
As a Sustainability Ethicist, speaker, trainer, and coach, I
worked in Australia and overseas on a freelance and consultancy basis. I also
worked as a contract professor for a number of different universities until 2007
when I began my dream job – researching, and writing books and papers for my
Internet websites –
www.LearningLovingandLaughing.com and of course
www.ResearchPaperWritingSkills.com
My
personal life has been even more eventful than my professional life,
experiencing everything from extreme hardships to absolute miracles. One of
those miracles occurred early in 2005, when I found and moved to the place that
I’d been searching for my entire life – a little cabin in a peaceful and idyllic
bush land setting in the middle of the Great Dividing Range, on the Atherton
Tableland in Far North Queensland (on the Eastern side of Australia up near the
pointy end) |
