Tips for (humanities?) grad students: IHE article

[polly_mer]

https://insidehighered.com/advice/2020/08/06/five-key-things-every-grad-student-should-know-opinion

These tips are not all that relevant for my fields other than the advice to pick a program that tends to place graduates in the jobs that you want.

The description of how to use the TA time sitting in class is not how I'd want my TA to spend that time.  The point of attending lecture is to prep for the questions that students will ask during recitation and to work related, but different, problems.

[Wahoo Redux]

Sure.  Good advice for someone just entering grad school.  Nothing groundbreaking. 

[Parasaurolophus]

Brennan's always saying the same things.

I'm surprised he requires his TAs to attend class, however. Seems like a waste of the TA's allocated hours, at least most of the time.

[kaysixteen]

This is horrifying, not necessarily because it is all that wrong, in today's climate, but because this clown seems to approve of this.   What the hell is the reason to go to grad school in the first place, if the 22yo brand new grad student is ready to be writing professionally publishable articles from his first day in grad school?   And how many such students, even at the best programs in their fields, are really anything like this?   Certainly almost no classicists would be, even those writing papers in aspects of classics not requiring PhD-level language competence in Greek or Latin.   And I will die on the hill of asserting that they should not be, and that the purpose of grad school is to make them competent to do so.

Covid will of course make academic hiring all the harder to accomplish, and this means grad schools will have to show responsibility, and begin to reduce the number of students accepted, and probably ratchet up the standards for PhD awardance as well.  But this would not entail making 22yos' papers normative, or magically making such papers professionally competent.

[Hegemony]

I think Kaysixteen is taking these instructions a bit over-literally. It doesn't mean that every seminar paper should be whisked off to a journal. It means: make the most of your seminar papers; don't get drop them at the end of the term and never think about them again, but regard them as the first step toward a potentially publishable piece of work. Design them as such when you're thinking through your topic, be as professional and complete as you can when writing them (e.g. don't leave the important citations for "sometime later"; get it all in there now and save yourself trouble down the line). Take the prof's suggestions and work to develop the most promising ones into your first publications. Much easier if you have been thinking in terms of producing publishable work all along. Sure, some of them will never be publishable. But thinking of multiple uses for each endeavor saves a lot of time and effort.  This is standard-issue advice for my grad students. There's nothing in there about being ready to publish on one's first day in grad school.

I think the advice is all sound stuff, maybe obvious to us but not so obvious to beginning grad students. No quarrels about it here.

[spork]

Number 5: "For instance, the top 60 English departments overwhelmingly hire from the top six Ph.D. programs." This translates to "If you can't get into one of the top six programs in your chosen humanities field then don't go to grad school." And I wholeheartedly agree with that.

[marshwiggle]

https://insidehighered.com/advice/2020/08/06/five-key-things-every-grad-student-should-know-opinion

These tips are not all that relevant for my fields other than the advice to pick a program that tends to place graduates in the jobs that you want.

The description of how to use the TA time sitting in class is not how I'd want my TA to spend that time.  The point of attending lecture is to prep for the questions that students will ask during recitation and to work related, but different, problems.

This seems to be a humanities-specific thing. I've never seen it in STEM. Even if TAs are doing tutorials, they don't need to sit in lecture. If the tutorial has to go over the chain rule, the TA does that. There's no need to see the professor teach the chain rule for the TA to go over it.

[dr_codex]

https://insidehighered.com/advice/2020/08/06/five-key-things-every-grad-student-should-know-opinion

These tips are not all that relevant for my fields other than the advice to pick a program that tends to place graduates in the jobs that you want.

The description of how to use the TA time sitting in class is not how I'd want my TA to spend that time.  The point of attending lecture is to prep for the questions that students will ask during recitation and to work related, but different, problems.

This seems to be a humanities-specific thing. I've never seen it in STEM. Even if TAs are doing tutorials, they don't need to sit in lecture. If the tutorial has to go over the chain rule, the TA does that. There's no need to see the professor teach the chain rule for the TA to go over it.

Not only did I attend all lectures as a Humanities TA, but I attended the lectures again in the course that I TA'd twice. I was a little surprised at that last requirement, but it was an eye-opening experience. The first time, I was absorbing the course content along with the students. The second time, I had a much better sense of the threads that the Professor was weaving, and I was able to pay much less attention to what she was saying, and much more to how she was doing it.

If your goal is to master the material, you probably don't need the lectures. If your goal is to master teaching the material, you almost certainly do.

I should add that I was lucky enough to be enrolled in one of the programs that did place almost all of its PhD students in tenure-track positions. They have branched out somewhat in the meantime, as the job market in my field has cratered, but training for jobs in higher education remains the goal.

[fourhats]

Teaching in the humanities is very different from teaching in STEM. As a graduate student TA, I was required to attend the lectures, and it was enormously helpful. It's not just about facts, but about ways of thinking about the subject, different perspectives on it, and as stated above, the weaving of these ideas over the term or semester in order to work constructively with the students.

There is also give and take in the class, so it is good to know what students are asking, and how the professor is responding to those questions. As a long-established professor, I require TAs to attend the lectures. This is not just good for the students they work with, but how graduate students learn the field: both in what they can learn from the professor, but also in how to deliver a meaningful lecture. They are there to learn as well as to teach.

[Hegemony]

In the two humanities programs I'm involved with, all of our TAs are required to go to all the lectures.

[jerseyjay]

I agree that this is not groundbreaking. However, one of the things that I disliked about grad school (in history) was that nobody really told me the things that everybody already knew. This may be a problem with my (original) advisor, or the program, or whatever. Also, since many graduate faculty went to grad school 30 years ago, when things were not the same in many ways, they might have different conceptions.

Regarding the two things that people have mentioned:

1. TAs going to lectures. I think that the author is saying that since you have to go to lectures anyway, you should make the most of it in terms of preparing your own courses and your own work. The assumption is that TAs go to lecture. This is certainly true when I was a student, in history. And in all my humanities or social science courses, this was also the case. I guess this is not the case in STEM. In history, an introductory course does not just present the facts--although it does do that--but also gives a framework to look at them, and if I, as a PhD in history, somehow had to be a TA for another historian, even in a subject that is my specialization, I would absolutely want to go to his or her lectures so I know how the material is presented.

2. Publishing. Again, I don't think that the author is saying that every seminar paper should be ready to send to PMLA or the AHR. Rather that a grad student should see his or her seminar papers as laying the basis for publications. When I went to grad school, the wisdom was that the seminar papers should be a chapter in the dissertation. Now it is even more brutal than that.

Personally, I think that the article paints a bleak picture of graduate school. As the author states: "Grad school is now less a time for development and more like an extended audition. That might be regrettable, but it's what academe has become."  Leaving aside if grad school was ever very good, I think that this captures what it is now. Personally, this is one of the reasons I probably would not go to grad school in history today. But for those who insist, I think it is okay--not brilliant, but okay--advice.

Of course, there are other things I would suggest (including going to the dentist often).

[Parasaurolophus]

I mean, I'm in the humanities too (philosophy). And while it's not weird or anything for TAs to attend lectures, my sense is that it's more common in our field for TAs not to be required to attend. This has been generally true of the people I know. And for my own part, out of the 13 courses I TAed as a graduate student, TA attendance was only required in one of those. The one time I had a TA, I didn't require her to attend, either (we listed the unfilled hours as 'attendance', but I made it clear she didn't need to, and she didn't).

Shrug.

[polly_mer]

I'm in STEM and knowing the material is absolutely not the same as knowing how to present the material or knowing what questions students will ask, especially for someone for whom the material came easily.  I was horrified at the questions I received the first time teaching my first classes because it just never occurred to me that people somehow got through the prerequisites without being able to apply the lessons.  I didn't anticipate at all having to answer questions from everything along the prerequisite chain, not just the new material and the last unit in the immediately prerequisite course.

The advice in the article to focus on publication from coursework is just inapplicable to any of my fields.  Better advice is to focus on one's research and make professional connections in the broader community of government, industrial, and other employers.  Almost no one should be on the academic track when the good jobs are elsewhere.  Publications are good, (inter)national presentations to advertise the publications are necessary, and developing skills well beyond formal courses is essential.

I was annoyed to see no advice to graduate students on activities they should be doing in grad school to be ready for non-academic jobs that are commensurate with being a professor., especially in the fields where few will become R1 faculty.

[pgher]

I'm in STEM and knowing the material is absolutely not the same as knowing how to present the material or knowing what questions students will ask, especially for someone for whom the material came easily.  I was horrified at the questions I received the first time teaching my first classes because it just never occurred to me that people somehow got through the prerequisites without being able to apply the lessons.  I didn't anticipate at all having to answer questions from everything along the prerequisite chain, not just the new material and the last unit in the immediately prerequisite course.

The advice in the article to focus on publication from coursework is just inapplicable to any of my fields.  Better advice is to focus on one's research and make professional connections in the broader community of government, industrial, and other employers.  Almost no one should be on the academic track when the good jobs are elsewhere.  Publications are good, (inter)national presentations to advertise the publications are necessary, and developing skills well beyond formal courses is essential.

I was annoyed to see no advice to graduate students on activities they should be doing in grad school to be ready for non-academic jobs that are commensurate with being a professor., especially in the fields where few will become R1 faculty.

I'm also in STEM. I didn't manage to get anything publishable out of any of my coursework, but some of my best students have. Only in the most advanced classes, and generally in tangentially-related topics (so they wrote about applying methods from field X to problems from field Y).

In general, I thought the advice was good in broad themes, but overly narrow in the specifics. Perhaps the best way a grad student would use this would be to ask their advisor if they should, e.g., be writing a paper now. The answer is probably yes, but probably not exactly as the article described.

[kaysixteen]

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.