Advise Aspiring Grad Students

[polly_mer]

Every year, people enrolling in graduate school seem surprised by certain realities.

Post here your best advice that you wish you had known and tips that will make life easier.

My first few suggestions:

1) Have parts of life that aren't related to your academic dreams and nurture those parts.  For example, I played board games nearly every Saturday afternoon with folks who weren't in grad school.  The extra perspective on life outside of the grad school grind was very useful.  Other people may find solace in hiking, music, or cooking.

2) If you find yourself spending a lot of time and energy on something that isn't research and teaching, ask yourself if you're feeling the call for another life path.  That something could be mentoring, outreach, or another intellectual pursuit.  Most people hit some wall in their studies, so spending a weekend or two binge watching a series is not a new calling.  However, spending one's time working with the scientarium to do outreach with middle schoolers or looking forward to organizing the Nth symposium over doing any research may be an indication that one may need to examine priorities and start making plans for a life that includes necessary things that bring one joy that may have a career path other than becoming a professor.

3) Prioritize sleep and nutrition.  There will always be another deadline and something you should be doing.  Learn how to say no to excess workload and get a good night's sleep.  This is your real life now; don't rush through everything to get to the next thing hoping that someday you will have enough <whatever> to be allowed to slow down and enjoy.

[aside]

Good sugestions, Polly.

From a CHE post of mine:

Get to know your professors and your colleagues, even the ones that are hard to know.

Get involved in the profession.  Attend conferences in your field and introduce yourself to the people working in your area.  Networking has many benefits.

Opinion comes easily; knowledge is hard work.  Be informed before forming opinions.  Do not attempt to critique that which you know little about.  Context is vital.

Question everything, but do so respectfully.

The hardest job to land is the first one; do not think yourself too good for a particular job.

It takes a long time to earn respect or to establish a career yet only a few moments to destroy either.

[Puget]

All of these are good! Some of mine, from my own experience and now mentoring my own grad students. I'm in a lab science, so usual caveat that some of these may not apply to all fields.

1. You are not an undergrad anymore. It's not about doing well in classes now-- you need to do well enough in classes efficiently while putting the majority of your time into research. This is the biggest place I see first year PhD students flounder and I explicitly have this talk with mine right away.

2. Insist on having an individual development plan. Talk early and often with your advisor(s) about your plan A, B, and C and the skills and experiences you need to be successful in each. These plans will change-- that's OK, but you need plans.

3. Establish good organizational and time management habits from the start. Look around for the more senior grad students who are the most productive while still seeming to have a good work/life balance and ask them for their tips and tricks. The goal is to be productive not busy.

4. Yes, we want you to follow your interests, but you also need to be pragmatic and programatic in your research. Find a promising (tractable, fundable) corner of the research universe and start beavering away at it. Become known for something. I've known some very good, productive researchers who ended up without faculty positions because no one (including themselves) could identify the big research questions they were aiming to answer and why they were important questions to answer.

5. Depending on the college you went to as an undergrad, you're probably used to being the best student in the room nearly all the time. That's different know-- your fellow grad students all have things they are better at then you. Some of them are probably just plain smarter than you. You can decide to react to this in one of three ways:

a) Feel like an impostor and be intimidated
b) Get defensive and competitive and act like a jerk
c) Decide it's great! Identify the things you're good at, find the people with complementary skills and compatible interests, and start collaborating.

Choose C.

I'm sure I'll think of more later, but that's my top 5.

[Tenured_Feminist]

Get your coursework and exams done expeditiously. Exams don't get easier if you put them off.

[apl68]

So far nobody here has given a piece of advice that I can recall encountering in six years of grad school.  Did I fail to hear what they were saying to me, or was I advised by wolves?

[traductio]

For students in the humanities and social sciences -- grad school is the point where you own your work. I mean this in an active sense -- own your work. If someone mentions something in class that you're not familiar with, look it up. If you find a reference to something useful, read it.

To put this another way, now's the point where you get to set the criteria by which we (your professors and peers) evaluate your work. What do I mean? Find an essay you like. Why do you find it compelling? Take a look at the structure, the strategy the author has used to set up and make an argument. It's a question of recognizing structure and rhetorical strategy -- the tools for claim-making are all right there, but you have to work backward from the essay itself to find them.

And above all, cultivate your curiosity -- not just about your work, but about cool things happening in your town. Find the cool local beer, go to the local art festivals, root for the local sports team. That curiosity will serve you well in your work, too, even if its effect isn't always direct.

[Thursday's_Child]

Don't go heavily into debt for the degree.  Learning to live simply but well (when to scrimp, when not to, how to have fun and relax for little or no cost, etc.) should be one of the most valuable lessons from your grad school years.

[polly_mer]

So far nobody here has given a piece of advice that I can recall encountering in six years of grad school.  Did I fail to hear what they were saying to me, or was I advised by wolves?

Do you disagree with the advice here or are you leaning towards wolves?

Are we missing something that you found extremely important?

[mamselle]

Or maybe apl68 means that their advisors never gave them any advice, and the things posted here would have been useful?

Can you clarify, apl68?

Inquiring minds (such as they are here) want to know!

M.

[drbrt]

It is easy to overprep classes. Don't be afraid to use the CASE Principle (Copy And Steal Everything) to keep your head above water. Also, if you accidentally use the wrong kind of marker on a whiteboard, scribble over the mark with a dry erase marker and it should erase.

[apl68]

Or maybe apl68 means that their advisors never gave them any advice, and the things posted here would have been useful?

Can you clarify, apl68?

Inquiring minds (such as they are here) want to know!

M.

What you said.  Much of this advice would have been useful.  I don't remember hearing any of it in grad school.  No wonder I felt like I was floundering so much of the time.

[adel9216]

This is good advice! Thanks everyone for your input.

[spork]

Don't go.

[clean]

Don't go.

If you ignore this advice and go,
Dont Pay!

If you have to pay tuition, and if you have to pay room and board, it will be hard to recover from this 'mistake'.

If the program doesnt offer tuition waivers and pay a stipend, find another program. If you were not competitive enough to get a tuition waiver and a stipend sufficient to pay  ALL of your living expenses while in the program, (including the dissertation stage), then this isnt an area for you. 

IF you ignore this and you Go and you PAY, For Heaven's Sake DONT BORROW!!


Have you heard something like this before:
How do I amass a Million Dollars if I work for a university?
Answer:
Start with 2 million dollars. 
Lately, it seems that the longer I work, the more faculty members I see that were 'sold a pig in a poke'.  The reality is more likely that their vision of the future was plain wrong and that research to investigate the financial risk and rewards before deciding to go to graduate school would have been far more rewarding and lucrative than anything that they do in or after graduate school.

Unfortunately, those that are 'exceptional' enough to get into graduate school believe that they will continue to be the exceptions and will earn six figure salaries as soon as they graduate and they instantly land their first job teaching in their  discipline ( and if they are not successful at finding a job right away, they will teach at a community college as a 'fall back'.)

(I wish that the last part was sarcastic, but I was actually  told that by someone studying in a liberal arts field at the university I was attending at the same time.  The last I heard, s/he was teaching at a private high school after failing to get other offers).

Before you even pay the application fee, PLEASE do some research into the job prospects and salaries of graduates in the discipline you currently aspire to join.  Look at the Occupation Outlook Handbook for job prospects and salary information and dont think that you will be at the top of the ranges!  Few are! .

[glowdart]

Have grounded answers to all of these:

Why are you going to grad school?

Now, without emotion, why are you going to grad school?

Do you need to go to grad school to get to your last answer?

If you are taking out loans to supplement your funding package, then what is the minimum salary you will need to pay them back assuming your funding stays the same and you finish in an average amount of time. Now add three years. Is that a reasonable starting salary in your area in higher ed or in your industry? If not, then don't do it. (I never say never on loans because not everyone is independently wealthy or coming from money or has family support and grad school cannot continue to be for the privileged.)

What will you do with this degree when you do not land a FT faculty job? Do you need the degree to do that?