Tips for (humanities?) grad students: IHE article

[mamselle]

The way scientists write papers, with lists of coauthors under the PI, is vastly different from the way most humanities scholars do em, where coauthorship is still pretty rare.   Like it or not, further, in a field like classics, there is too much that grad students, especially new ones at the sub-MA level, have to learn to do, which gives them pretty limited time to write good papers for publication, even if they really knew enough already to be writing such papers, which most will not.  Grad school is still, remember, school.

I think this culture of not co-authoring with your advisor in the humanities means that an advisor is much less invested in ensuring that a student learns how to write well. It is much easier to get a professor to comment on a paper, help frame the broad context, and to teach a student the skills necessary if they receive some professional credit (in the form of co-authorship) for the substantial effort which goes into this.

Respectfully, do you honestly know enough to come to this conclusion? 

What is up with folks on this Fora?

But that's indeed how it looks to folks in the sciences who have different parameters and expectations.

That's what I'm saying, there are very different world systems in place in various fields of study.

It would be more healing to listen to the differences non-judgmentally, and learn from them and about them.

M.   

[marshwiggle]

I think one of the pernicious effects of science upon mathematics is that deans (and sometimes chairs) have classified mentoring graduate students as a research activity instead of a teaching activity.  Of course if working with your graduate student is a research activity, then it makes no sense to put time in it if you don't get research credit, which accrues from writing papers.  If it's a teaching activity, then mentoring in how to write is part of the teaching activity that one gets credit for as teaching.  Even if there is no paper, the advisor should still be teaching the student how to write through the writing of their dissertation.

What this illustrates clearly is that graduate school is highly paradoxical; while students take a few formal courses in their discipline, they get absolutely no formal instruction in all of the things they're supposed to get out of graduate school; i.e. research and teaching. All of this is to be absorbed by osmosis, so it entirely depends on the quality and committment of the supervisor.

[dr_codex]

I think one of the pernicious effects of science upon mathematics is that deans (and sometimes chairs) have classified mentoring graduate students as a research activity instead of a teaching activity.  Of course if working with your graduate student is a research activity, then it makes no sense to put time in it if you don't get research credit, which accrues from writing papers.  If it's a teaching activity, then mentoring in how to write is part of the teaching activity that one gets credit for as teaching.  Even if there is no paper, the advisor should still be teaching the student how to write through the writing of their dissertation.

What this illustrates clearly is that graduate school is highly paradoxical; while students take a few formal courses in their discipline, they get absolutely no formal instruction in all of the things they're supposed to get out of graduate school; i.e. research and teaching. All of this is to be absorbed by osmosis, so it entirely depends on the quality and committment of the supervisor.

I agree that the quality varies, but in what are of life is that not the case? Sturgeon's Law, for those of you SF fans out there.

That said, I was required to take several Bibliography courses (which were not jokes), and Proseminars. This was in addition to supervised work as a TA and an RA.

In retrospect, there was already some "streaming" in my R1 program: students who received full funding through Fellowships were able to focus more on their research. They tended to finish faster. Students who received funding through RA and TAships, and sometimes Adjunct Lecturer positions, got more experience and mentoring in their teaching. We tended to take longer.

I was an outlier, even in the second group; by the time I finished, I had more teaching experience then most people have before their mid-tenure review. Even at the program level, I recognize that this is only a sample of a few cohorts, and not representative of the whole array. But I know that good programs give a lot of instruction in research and teaching. That's why their students are competitive, and snaffle up most of the jobs. (Although Marshwiggle doesn't mention it, they also mentor a lot of what we might call Professionalization; the kind of things that the Fora routinely discuss, but that grad students often don't know.)

[Caracal]

I think one of the pernicious effects of science upon mathematics is that deans (and sometimes chairs) have classified mentoring graduate students as a research activity instead of a teaching activity.  Of course if working with your graduate student is a research activity, then it makes no sense to put time in it if you don't get research credit, which accrues from writing papers.  If it's a teaching activity, then mentoring in how to write is part of the teaching activity that one gets credit for as teaching.  Even if there is no paper, the advisor should still be teaching the student how to write through the writing of their dissertation.

What this illustrates clearly is that graduate school is highly paradoxical; while students take a few formal courses in their discipline, they get absolutely no formal instruction in all of the things they're supposed to get out of graduate school; i.e. research and teaching. All of this is to be absorbed by osmosis, so it entirely depends on the quality and committment of the supervisor.

I agree that the quality varies, but in what are of life is that not the case? Sturgeon's Law, for those of you SF fans out there.

Yes, and often the kind of research people do depends so much on their individual project that formalized classes wouldn't be very helpful. Even in my field and sub specialty, most people I know do research that doesn't have that much in common with mine. A lot of what I learned in grad school was how to teach myself to do things. I got guidance and support from my advisor, and sometimes he had useful suggestions, but he wasn't familiar at all with the sort of sources I was using. That's actually quite common. In some ways, I think that's the mark of a good advisor. If all of your students are all studying the same sort of documents in the same sort of archives you are, you're trying to reproduce yourself rather than guide others.

This is why a good grad program is about more than just the advisor/advisee relationship. Good programs foster a community of grad students and faculty who can help with particular skills or problems.

[Morden]

That's what I'm saying, there are very different world systems in place in various fields of study.

Yes, even within the same field there are huge variations depending on institutional culture/norms. Where I did my PhD, being a TA (in my discipline) meant being the teacher of record for an introductory class with some very loose supervision from a coordinator (i.e. who would look over the final grades to make sure the average was similar to the department average for that course). It's important that recent graduates indicate on their CV exactly what a TA meant in their context.

[marshwiggle]

I think one of the pernicious effects of science upon mathematics is that deans (and sometimes chairs) have classified mentoring graduate students as a research activity instead of a teaching activity.  Of course if working with your graduate student is a research activity, then it makes no sense to put time in it if you don't get research credit, which accrues from writing papers.  If it's a teaching activity, then mentoring in how to write is part of the teaching activity that one gets credit for as teaching.  Even if there is no paper, the advisor should still be teaching the student how to write through the writing of their dissertation.

What this illustrates clearly is that graduate school is highly paradoxical; while students take a few formal courses in their discipline, they get absolutely no formal instruction in all of the things they're supposed to get out of graduate school; i.e. research and teaching. All of this is to be absorbed by osmosis, so it entirely depends on the quality and committment of the supervisor.

I agree that the quality varies, but in what are of life is that not the case? Sturgeon's Law, for those of you SF fans out there.

Good point.

But following that, how many grad students are even shown a few papers by their supervisors that are examples of well-written papers in their area (as opposed to "important" papers in their area)? Sadly, I think the answer reflects how many faculty wouldn't even really recognize a well-written paper because they themselves are subject to Sturgeon's Law.

[fourhats]

In my R1 humanities program, all graduate students were required to take a course on pedagogy. When given their own introductory writing classes, they had to meet weekly as a group led by a writing professor. They also were given TA work, and had to meet regularly with the professor who gave the lectures, and to attend all the lectures in order to best lead their discussion sections. Their grading was checked. I TA's in courses outside of my research field and by doing that greatly expanded the areas I was able to teach in when I became a professor. I graduated feeling very well prepared for my academic career. At my current university, things are done similarly. The TAs compare their notes and experiences with each other, as a cohort.

I have to say I'm rather puzzled by the number of people from fields far outside of the humanities who feel qualified to weigh on questions specific to the humanities. Of course things are done differently in other fields, as Mamselle so rightly points out.

[jerseyjay]

What this illustrates clearly is that graduate school is highly paradoxical; while students take a few formal courses in their discipline, they get absolutely no formal instruction in all of the things they're supposed to get out of graduate school; i.e. research and teaching. All of this is to be absorbed by osmosis, so it entirely depends on the quality and committment of the supervisor.

I am not sure I get the paradox. I did two years of graduate school in history in the US, where all I did was take courses (research seminars and more narrow courses on a particular topic) with the goal of someday passing the comps. Then I did three years at a leading English university where there were no classes at all.

The American experience was one of the most annoying experiences in my life, in which each professor set up a class based on his or her own interests, with no connection to what was on the comp exam. In retrospect, it did help me become well read in my field, and prepared me to teach a variety of classes (in the content sense, not in the pedagogical sense: I learned how to teach from reflecting on my own experience as an undergraduate and a heavy rotation of adjuncting positions). The time at the English university were invaluable for learning how to research.

In the humanities, I don't really think that grad school is school in the sense that being an undergraduate is--although as been noted, there is more than just the supervisor/student relationship at play. The idea is that after you have reached a certain level of basic content competency (as determined by the comprehensive exams) you essentially become an apprentice  (candidate) researcher.  Teaching, as everybody knows, was never really that important in this traditional view, which is certainly a weakness.

This could be a good or a bad model--and I think it has elements of both--but it is not a paradox. The feature noted above--that a grad student's experience takes place outside a formal classroom--is not a paradox of graduate school in the humanities, it is the basic design. As I noted, the English model is even more based on this plan--the assumption being that one would have got all the basic subject knowledge as an undergraduate.

[marshwiggle]

This could be a good or a bad model--and I think it has elements of both--but it is not a paradox. The feature noted above--that a grad student's experience takes place outside a formal classroom--is not a paradox of graduate school in the humanities, it is the basic design. As I noted, the English model is even more based on this plan--the assumption being that one would have got all the basic subject knowledge as an undergraduate.

It would be less of a paradox if you called it a "research apprenticeship" instead of "school". That would suggest that the learning was all by doing, rather than by receiving any sort of formal instruction. A postdoc is not so misleading, since it implies a working research position, without any explicit educational value.

[Caracal]

But following that, how many grad students are even shown a few papers by their supervisors that are examples of well-written papers in their area (as opposed to "important" papers in their area)? Sadly, I think the answer reflects how many faculty wouldn't even really recognize a well-written paper because they themselves are subject to Sturgeon's Law.

The first few years of grad school in humanities programs are mostly about reading. My classes were almost entirely discussions of books and articles. You discuss and critique style as well as interpretation and importance. Comps are an extension of that. The whole thing is a discussion of what are good, bad and important contributions to the field.

[mamselle]

For the sciences, this might be translated as a long, extended "Journal club," if translation is helpful.

M.

[marshwiggle]

For the sciences, this might be translated as a long, extended "Journal club," if translation is helpful.

M.

But in how many places is "journal club" very organized and methodical? We had to find papaers, present and discuss them, but there was never any expert advice on finding or identifying well-written articles.

To put in in the language of the "10000 hours" rule for become proficient at something, journal club is not remotely long enough to develop skill at classifying quality of academic writing. If a student had to analyze several papers each week, they might, but I doubt anyone comes close to that.

As the saying goes, "Learn from other peoples' mistakes; life is way too short to make them all yourself". Similarly, it would be vastly more productive for profs to point out several examples of really good papers rather than just leaving it to students to intuit characteristics of good quality.
(But of course, to do that, profs would have to actually pay attention to quality rather than just relevance to their own work.)

[jerseyjay]

It would be less of a paradox if you called it a "research apprenticeship" instead of "school". That would suggest that the learning was all by doing, rather than by receiving any sort of formal instruction. A postdoc is not so misleading, since it implies a working research position, without any explicit educational value.

This is probably true if you have a formalistic sense of "school" meaning sitting in a classroom for formal instruction. But in the humanities, graduate school is not mainly that way. In Britain, there is even less of a formal classroom education.  I should add that at some of the best English universities (i.e., Oxbridge) undergraduate education is not really about formal classroom education, but about a relationship between a student and his or her tutor. For that matter, at the university where I did my doctorate, there was classroom education in the sense that most Americans would recognize, but a large part of the student's work was revision (reading) that was done outside of the classroom setting. 

[mleok]

The way scientists write papers, with lists of coauthors under the PI, is vastly different from the way most humanities scholars do em, where coauthorship is still pretty rare.   Like it or not, further, in a field like classics, there is too much that grad students, especially new ones at the sub-MA level, have to learn to do, which gives them pretty limited time to write good papers for publication, even if they really knew enough already to be writing such papers, which most will not.  Grad school is still, remember, school.

I think this culture of not co-authoring with your advisor in the humanities means that an advisor is much less invested in ensuring that a student learns how to write well. It is much easier to get a professor to comment on a paper, help frame the broad context, and to teach a student the skills necessary if they receive some professional credit (in the form of co-authorship) for the substantial effort which goes into this.

Knowing that you're a mathematician...

I think one of the pernicious effects of science upon mathematics is that deans (and sometimes chairs) have classified mentoring graduate students as a research activity instead of a teaching activity.  Of course if working with your graduate student is a research activity, then it makes no sense to put time in it if you don't get research credit, which accrues from writing papers.  If it's a teaching activity, then mentoring in how to write is part of the teaching activity that one gets credit for as teaching.  Even if there is no paper, the advisor should still be teaching the student how to write through the writing of their dissertation.

The trends are changing, but it's still largely the tendency among folks I know (in mathematics) that a paper by Advisor and Student usually signals that, really, the student didn't contribute much, while a paper by Student acknowledging the advisor would be, under any other circumstance, a joint paper.

I think there's a cultural difference between pure and applied mathematics. I agree that my pure math colleagues are often more hesitant to co-author with their students for fear that it reflects negatively on the student's contributions, but I've never seen this to be an issue in applied mathematics, where it is routine to do so. In either case, it's understood that if the paper arises from a student's thesis, that the advisor has had a substantial input, irrespective of whether it is officially acknowledged with co-authorship.

As for acknowledging mentoring as a teaching as opposed to research activity, I can't help but laugh at that. Teaching at a research university is almost never the basis for a merit increase, although extremely poor teaching may prevent you from getting one, so I don't really see how casting mentoring as a teaching activity will improve the incentives for faculty at research universities to take their mentorship responsibilities seriously.

Speaking for myself, I currently have 5 Ph.D. students working under my supervision, and I've graduated 7 Ph.D. students so far. Realistically, it's not possible for me to have an acceptable level of research productivity, while providing students with good problems to work on, and the training, feedback, and mentorship necessary for them to succeed, without either reducing my teaching course load to zero, or by co-authoring with my students.

Even when I co-author with my students, the return on investment in terms of published research, relative to the time taken, rarely makes sense compared to collaborating with postdocs or more senior collaborators. I will also add that when I do co-author with my students, so long as they write the first draft, they're the first author, irrespective of the alphabetical ordering of our last names. To me, that's a reasonable compromise between them getting most of the credit, while compensating to some extent for the opportunity cost of the time that properly mentoring graduate students takes.

[mleok]

But in the humanities, co-authoring with your advisor comes across as co-optation.

There's no discrete dataset that's the result of a defined set of experiments with a specified methodology that can be pointed to as, "they did this, I did that."

And in fact, those circumstances in which the co-authoring happens that I know of have resulted in the advisor stealing the paper and publishing it under their own name.

There's no lab system with payments and task descriptions to tie the student to the tasks they did, so there's no recourse (past the little slips with questions that Byatt describes in "Possession") to prove active involvement in the project, and the student is ripped off.

Naming them is seen as a courtesy, if indulged in at all.

That can and has changed in some circumstances, of course, but there are large swaths of humanities work where it just can't be done the same way the sciences do it. (And I've lived and worked on both sides of that mountain).

M.

I'm just trying to understand what incentives, if any, exist for humanities professors to do an adequate job at mentoring their Ph.D. students, particularly if these students are unlikely to become tenure-track faculty at other research universities.