[Mid-Career Series] Using Navigate to Plan for Full: Client Case Study with Michelle Espino (Re-Release BONUS)

In this episode, I sit down with Michelle, a mid-career scholar and second-round participant in our Navigate program, to talk about what happens after tenure and how she’s redefining success on her path to full professorship. 

Michelle shares how Navigate helped her regain her sense of freedom, recalibrate her time and energy, and reconnect to her purpose as a scholar and leader.

If you have considered applying to Navigate or if you feel frustrated on the path to tenure, this episode is for you. Listen in to hear how Michelle is creating a more human, grounded, and community-centered version of academic success.

Rediscovering Purpose After Tenure

Michelle earned tenure in 2018, and like many scholars, she expected to feel free and grounded in her work. But between taking on leadership roles, navigating the pandemic, and leading conversations around equity, she found herself depleted and disconnected from her sense of purpose. Through our conversation, Michelle reflects on how mid-career brought new clarity about what really matters: working in alignment with her values and creating space for reflection. Instead of chasing productivity, she began seeking meaning, joy, and sustainability in her work. That shift changed everything.

Guarding Time and Energy as Acts of Leadership

One of Michelle’s biggest transformations came from learning to track and honor her energy. She realized she had been giving her best cognitive hours to meetings and student advising, leaving her creative work for when she was most drained. Now, she fiercely protects her focus time, treats her calendar as a boundary, and decides intentionally when she’s available. This change didn’t just increase her output — it redefined what leadership means to her. Michelle now models healthy boundaries for her students and colleagues, showing that protecting your energy is a radical act of sustainability in academia.

Building Community and Redefining Success

Michelle’s story reminds us that the path to full professorship isn’t just about publications. It’s about community, clarity, and compassion. In the Navigate program, she found an interdisciplinary group of women and nonbinary scholars who support each other both professionally and personally. That connection helped her see that meaningful academic work doesn’t have to come at the cost of well-being. For Michelle, success means leading with heart, advancing her community, and sustaining her scholarship through care for herself and those she mentors.

“It’s really about paving the way for my community to see models of possibility. To believe that even in spaces, where so many folks talk about how the institution will never care about you. But that’s not really the point of what it is about for me. It’s more about that I care enough about my community to want to be in a position of leadership, and to be able to harness the power that I do have, to be able to advocate for my communities in a way that I can be heard in predominately white spaces and spaces where my communities are often viewed as a deficit.”

“Why I wanted to come back to the Navigate program is to ensure that I understood how to outline all of the tasks, and to really focus on that area so that I can map this for the future – know how long it takes me to complete an article.”

More about Michelle

Dr. Michelle M. Espino (she/ella) is a first-generation college student and an associate professor in the Higher Education, Student Affairs, and International Education Policy program at the University of Maryland. She investigates factors influencing educational attainment for racially and ethnically minoritized communities, with a focus on Latine students, faculty, and administrators. 

Using critical perspectives, Dr. Espino’s work exposes the social inequities that undermine individual motivations to study and work in colleges and universities. She is also the creator of the Latinx Intelligentsia podcast, dedicated to empowering Latine communities in higher education.

X: @‌laprofesora08 and @‌latinxuplift

IG: @‌laprofesora08 and @‌latinxuplift

We’re receiving applications for our next cohort of Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap®. Check out the program details and start your application process here.

CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION:

1. Our 12-week Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap® program helps tenure-track womxn and nonbinary professors to publish their backlog of papers so that their voice can have the impact they know is possible. Apply here!
2. Cathy’s book, Making Time to Write: How to Resist the Patriarchy and Take Control of Your Academic Career Through Writing is available in print! Learn how to build your career around your writing practice while shattering the myths of writing every day, accountability, and motivation, doing mindset work that’s going to reshape your writing,and changing academic culture one womxn and nonbinary professor at a time. Get your print copy today or order it for a friend here!
3. If you would like to hear more from Cathy for free, please subscribe to the weekly newsletter, In the Pipeline, at scholarsvoice.org. It’s a newsletter that she personally writes that goes out once a week with writing and publication tips, strategies, inspiration, book reviews and more.

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