I enrolled in a doctoral certificate program in gerontology at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD), in 2004. Because I was interested in the scholarship of teaching and learning, and involved in the leadership team for the Georgetown University Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience's participation in the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate (CID), I *also* joined the CID cluster at the University of Maryland - as a student. We were invited to write an essay summarizing our experience with the CID cluster at the end of the 2005 academic year, and this was my essay. I had worked with a PhD student at UMD to understand the various "scholarship" models that the scholarship of teaching and learning encompasses, and although we did not complete our qualitative evaluation, I came to several -methodological - realizations that this essay represents. umcp.essay.15feb06.doc