This fall I will be beginning my PhD program at an R1 university that is highly regarded in my field. I come from a SLAC and am unfamiliar with the culture of R1 universities and graduate programs in general, but I am in contact with several second and third-year students in my program and am asking them every question I can come up with about grad school. I have visited the campus and met with some of the professors, and while I liked what I saw and heard, I still feel in the dark about what I'm getting into.
I'm very happy because I got a prestigious fellowship, I'll get to study Old Rodent heroic poetry, and it's the program that I wanted, but there's still something twigging me. It's like I have pre-emptive Imposter Syndrome.
So I guess my question to you is this:
Q: What advice would you give to a new graduate student in your program to help the student stay sane but also navigate the PhD successfully? Alternately, what was the best advice you received when you were the new grad student?
- The Mad Dreamer
Get out while you still can. There are so very few places in the world that Old Rodent Poetry translates into Food that you'd be better off taking your student loans and buying lottery tickets, at least from a financial standpoint.
ReplyDeleteHowever, if you are already on degree number three, you probably aren't following this path because of the figurative (and only figurative) pot of gold at the end. Here's some advice gleaned from my Applied Hamster Fur Weaving degree-in-progess and from watching my spouse through three years of job hunting and the previous dissertation completion in Xth and Yth century Hamster tales.
Talk about money. Your fellowship may mean this isn't needed, but any questions in your mind about how much you'll get, compared to how much you'll need, should be voiced to someone qualified to answer. You should NOT have to take on additional debt to complete this PhD. If your school thinks you should, you should look for different schools.
Demand teaching opportunities. Maybe not right now, but before you leave you should have taught (mostly by yourself, maybe with a mentor looking over your shoulder) more than a few classes, preferably different, preferably both in your exact field and out of it.
Publish. This is life and death. You must publish now, and continue publishing until tenure. Just because The Journal of Ancient Rodent Heroics is the best in the field doesn't mean you should wait 3 semesters trying to get something into them. Quality is important, but it is not a question of quality OR quantity. Without quantity you will die.
Advice that may or may not be worth taking: try to line up a publisher for your diss before completing. There is something magical about a book, and in this land of millions of literature lemmings jumping off cliffs in search of jobs, a little magic can go a long way.
Lastly, find non-academic sanity. Whether this is your neighborhood kickball team, or the church choir, or teaching hamster-scouts how to tie knots. This is so very important. Having good friends you can gripe about students and advisers and diss stress with is great, but having a place to go to where no one talks academia is just wonderful.
Good Luck!
Fortunately, this fellowship means I don't have to worry about student loans. No loan debt coming out of undergrad and no need to take out loans during graduate school. Even if I could try to get a job right now that would pay more than my stipend, I really want to teach and my stipend is already triple what I make working my current tea-partying warehouse job.
DeleteAs for teaching opportunities, I'll be getting four years of teaching experience during grad school. It's the part I'm most looking forward to. I know I'm going to wind up with a number of flakes and outright idiots, but I made my peace with that when I was a Freshman and saw that nothing had changed from high school on that front.
Your other advice sounds good. I'm looking at my grad school's fencing club as a way of giving me a break and continuing with a sport hobby that I've loved for the past five years and don't want to fall out of. As for lining up a publisher, I will be on that. I've been a keener by nature since Kindergarten and I really like to have all my ducks lined up in a row.
Thank you very much, Alan. I really appreciate it.
Ad "Alternately"--Some of the best (and very practical, albeit not academic) advice I received years ago from a friend before I started a graduate program: buy more underwear. Seriously. You'll have a lot less time to do mundane things like laundry. Really, "buy more underwear" functions well as a metaphor for other non-academic aspects of grad student life: cook once, eat thrice. Don't waste a trip. You get the idea.
ReplyDeleteMore underwear.... Definitely. More socks too. I don't think I have a pair of socks without holes anymore.
DeleteSecond this. There was a Woolworth's directly across the street from my grad school campus, and the underwear department got a good deal of business from me. It's now been replaced with something decidedly more upscale and less useful.
DeleteOh -- and if you're living with your fiancee, make sure that you're doing your fair share of the laundry and other housework, not matter how busy you are with grad school.
DeleteWhile is isn't the popular thing to point out, you should always ask yourself "What's next?". While studying the great mysteries of the universe OR reading ancient and archaic texts is awesome and can be its own reward, I tend to think in a more practical way. What is the job market like in my chosen field currently? What are my chances of finding solid employment after investing four or five years of my life in this area?
ReplyDeleteAs a practical person, I would think that the best method for achieving my goals would be to study a field that appeals to me on an intellectual basis AND would result in long term employment and stability and allow me to continue to work within this field and continue to plumb its' depths for the long term future.
As for an advisor, the most important quality of any advisor is that your advisor be a good person first and foremost. I've seen enough unethical behavior and having an advisor that values you as a person of worth and integrity is the best place to start. Who wants an advisor that would scam of their grad students for sex or power regardless of their publication record or their grant success?
My secondary area of study will be on certain genres of modern Hamster novels and short stories. Being able to relate that back to Old Rodent heroic poetry doesn't seem like too far a leap for me. I'm also fluent in Gerbil and can do interdisciplinary work on the differences between Hamster and Gerbil stories. Do you think that would increase my chances of finding solid employment?
DeleteI know the humanities are a difficult job market due to the overabundance of candidates, but I'm determined to wade in anyway. I'm scrappy and I'm confident in myself. It's what I really want to do, and I'm one of those "pursue your passion" Romantics.
Thank you for the last bit, as well. There are a few professors I'm really interested in working with, and everything I hear from the other grad students is good. I will certainly avoid scummy professors. I try to avoid scummy people in general, so that should turn out easy with any luck.
Here's my advice:
ReplyDelete1. Don't have a baby in grad school. No matter how many of your cohort decide that their dissertation is the time for breeding, don't do it.
2. Find out who the drama queens and kings and other malcontents are and stay the hell away.
3. Don't try to respond to the girl who makes 30 minute comments on Emile Durkheim in your seminar on 17th century Chinchilla breeding. Let the egomaniacs have their space.
4. If chosen for a committee, don't show them that you are too useful. You'll end up doing all the work.
5. Be prepared to find out that, after years upon years of being probed and prodded and tested, you will either be considered over qualified or under qualified for those secretarial positions you will be applying for when you have bad luck on the job market. Who knew that typing and filing and answering phones were such precious, specialized skills?
6. Prepare to effectively be a temp for the next seven to twelve years of your life. Don't be too proud to apply for food stamps and section 8, if necessary.
7. Realize that you can study about Old Rodent heroic poetry on your own and that you don't need a PhD in order to enjoy it.
Sorry for the cynicism, but if none of this deters you, I wish you the best.
No worries on the cynicism. As I said in my email, I've been reading you guys for a while. I understand the cynicism, and I understand the very good reason for it. I am happily undeterred, but you give good advice.
DeleteI'll have to work with my fiancee on point 1, though. She wants to make a baby before she's thirty, but I think I can nudge her back a year so I can finish the dissertation before getting to a baby.
Thank you.
My best piece of advice is:
ReplyDeleteFor the first year at least, keep your eyes open and your mouth shut.
I hate to disagree, and maybe it would be better for men (which the Mad Dreamer appears to be), but I have female friends who were judged as not up to snuff because they were "too quiet" in seminars (the fact that the males kept passing the conversational ball among themselves, and the women had to actively strategize methods for entering the conversation outside of the classroom notwithstanding).
DeleteI think this might be better advice for the first year of the tenure track.
For the first year of grad school, I'd say keep your eyes and ears open, and be aware of whether you're taking up more than your fair share of air time. If you have any suspicion that that might be the case, practice biting your tongue 50-75% of the times you have the impulse to say something.
I've been getting good practice in on biting back my tongue the past few years, but it came most clearly when my advising professor told me I had a tendency to dominate the discussion during class and that a more relaxed approach would help me. It has helped me. My philosophy going forward from there has been to be unafraid to speak, but to know when speaking will be worthwhile before doing so.
DeleteDon't become a lonely Playboy playmate who dies a grotesque death in her Los Angeles apartment.
ReplyDeleteAnd keep in touch with your undergrad proffies and mentors. They got you that prestigious fellowship. They did, you know? You might be a genius, but you wouldn't have gotten that offer without them. So write each of them a little note at least once each year... indefinitely.
I don't think Heff would like me very much as a Playmate. I'm not really his type.
DeleteI definitely plan to keep in touch with my undergrad proffies. I'm not moving until late in the summer, so while I'm still up here I'll actually be helping out a couple of them with their printing press. Hopefully I can learn something about printing, too.
Second point #2 a million times over. I was on the short list for a job in Lemming Studies this year--I primarily do Philosophy of Weasels, but had put in some significant time in Lemming Studies.
DeleteSo I needed to brush up. I emailed all of my grad school advisers who were interested in Lemming Studies asking for required reading, advice, and the like. They all responded with some variation on "you'll be fine, slugger!" I also, on a whim, touched base with my Lemming Studies professor from way back in undergrad, who promptly sent me an immense email with suggested readings, an overview of the field, which Lemming theorists were in style and which weren't, really dynamite stuff.
I wound up getting the job, I think in large part because I followed her advice. Seriously. Never burn any bridges. Don't even put out any cigarettes on them.
Learn to triage. (And to be clear, I'm not suggesting slacking or flaking, but developing the incredibly useful and sanity-saving skill of learning to judge how to best allocate your time and resources.)
ReplyDeleteNot every class or reading will be equally useful to you. Not every prof will be needed to write you a letter of recommendation down the road. Learn to be OK with putting the A+ in where it's warranted, and the A effort into situations where good enough is good enough.
Find a way to keep having a life. Set aside a few hours a week, even if it's just while commuting, to do things like read for pleasure, listen to music, work out, or take advantage of students discounts at galleries and performances. Don't neglect your relationships, because they will anchor you and keep you sane. Take all of these things as seriously as you would a course, and allocate time accordingly.
Make a few real friends in academia, inside and outside your program. They will be your lifelines (and sometimes, you will be theirs). As much as you need people outside the academy to keep you grounded, you also need people within who are sharing your doubts and struggles, to bitch about the politics/laugh about the absurdities with, to show your work-in-progress to, to understand just how significant a feat it is to publish that article and celebrate accordingly.
Realize that no matter how smart they may sound or how confident they may appear, every single one of your peers is as terrified and insecure as you are.
Neither an asshole nor a pushover be.
Make as few other major life changes as possible during the PhD (see: now is really not the time to have a baby).
During the dark nights of the soul (and there will be many), try to remember what made you fall in love with your topic in the first place.
And finally, listen to Stella.
Best of luck.
Some truly great comments/advice above that you should heed.
ReplyDeleteAnd something that I still struggle with from time to time - learn how/when to say NO! Hopefully, just saying NO from time to time will allow you to have a life and keep your sanity!
Good luck! :)
CB
From Steve Stearns' Some Modest Advice for Graduate Students:
ReplyDelete"Never elaborate a baroque excrescence on top of existing but shaky ideas. Go right to the foundations and test the implicit but unexamined assumptions of an important body of work."
The PhD program feels like an apprenticeship. But it's not. You and you alone will be the one to get you a job. And when you get a job, it will still be that: a job. You will have issues with pay, terrible colleagues, rude "customers," and the rest.
ReplyDeleteSo while you're going through this program -- that will probably lead to more unemployment -- enjoy yourself. It's not a landing platform waiting for life to take off. It's life itself. Don't wake up in 8 years realizing that you lost all of your 20s (or 30s).
Most important and best advice: learn to say "no". While it's important to get teaching experience, you need to work on your thesis. A class here and there is awesome, but it's easy to get flattered by offers to do more, or to do marking or whatever. Say "no".
ReplyDeleteWhile it's good to go to conferences, you should go to ones where you are giving a paper in your actual field. While it's flattering to be asked to go to some big conference tangential to your work, it's not necessary. Say "no".
While you probably feel like you want some support, and a study group can be helpful, don't get sucked into a whole bunch of busy work with other students. While a reading group on Old Hamster might sound fun, unless it's directly relevant to the skillset you are developing, say "no".
No matter what you think it's going to be like, you'll be wrong to some extent. Be prepared to think on your feet, adjust your expectations, and get as much as you can out of the experience that you want. Notice I said YOU, not your advisor, not your classmates, not your favorite professor. You and you alone will have to live with the outcome of your studies. If you want to start thinking about job opportunities down the road, look at everything possible and find out what you think you'd be willing or able to do. If R-1 is your dream job, there are certain things you do to prepare for that. SLAC, CC, and "real world" also have different requirements.
ReplyDeleteI was that naive person who went in thinking it would be a mentorship because I came from a SLAC background and an R-2 master's program that were both structured that way. I found out R-1 was a totally different beast, and the people there thought I was crazy for wanting a job that primarily involved teaching. One of my dissertation advisors grudgingly accepted that maybe I might have to settle for a SLAC, but he was aghast that I was applying to CCs. But he's not paying my bills or living my life, so he didn't get to make that choice for me. Don't let anyone else make the choice for you. Economic circumstances may dictate your fate, but don't let someone else's desires shape your studies or career path.
Follow all the advice above for building an academic career, but also have a non-academic Plan B. It can still be related: museum/library work, teaching in a prep school (which isn't too unlike a teaching at a SLAC in many ways, and the fencing would probably go over well), publishing. Or it can be something completely different (and, undoubtedly, more lucrative). Having a fiancee who is anxious to start a family will probably help with this; you should talk over alternative plans, and a timeline for implementing them, now, and continue to touch base on this subject over the course of graduate school. It would also be a good idea to begin talking about what geographical options will work for both of you, especially if her profession is less than perfectly portable.
ReplyDeleteYou sound very driven -- more so than I ever was -- and that may help, but anyone who's landed a tenure-track job in the last decade or two, and is honest with him/herself, will tell you that there was an element of luck involved, as well as lots and lots of hard work. Even having a respectable undergraduate degree and a full-ride grad fellowship and a degree from a highly respected program at an R1 university (all things I, too, can claim) doesn't mean you'll definitely find a TT job, let alone a TT job at the kind of institution, and in the kind of city/town/countryside, you'd prefer. So, yes, enjoy the ride, spend your twenties doing what you love, plan to finish up in good time (but with publications and a diss that's well on its way to becoming a book) -- and do so with the knowledge that, at 35 or 40, you may be doing something professionally that draws on some of the skills you developed and/or demonstrated by getting a Ph.D., but is not at all what you envision now. And you may be quite happy doing it -- all the more so if you start exploring possibilities now.
Would it be thread jacking if I asked those advising against baby-makin' during the doctorate to elaborate? I'm a first year Ph.D. student getting married this summer, female, and 28. I plan to finish in five years, but that would still make me 33 on the job market, and we all know what they say about fertility after 35. On the other hand, my sig and I may not be able to afford a sprog while I'm still in school, which would make the question moot . . . but seriously, drunk and noirazul, can you say more?
ReplyDeleteIn my experience, those who are going to get derailed in the dissertation process will do so with or without a baby. I had a baby in grad school and finished faster than the rest of my cohort. I had another one while on the tenure track and am managing to stick to the writing schedule I proposed to my publisher just fine. The key is that you must be organized and you must be diligent. That is, if you say you will write for X number of hours every day, you do it, even if you only had three hours of sleep because your baby wanted to nurse a ridiculous number of times during the night and your older child is obsessed with waking up to use the potty (can you guess what kind of night I had last night? Back to work!).
DeleteIn grad school, I studied under one of the founding mothers of feminist criticism. Her advice was actually to go ahead and have children during grad school, because the juggling wasn't going to get any easier in the foreseeable future, and getting pregnant might well get harder. Several of my cohort followed her advice without, so far as I know, disastrous consequences (the job market was disastrous, but that's a separate issue. As far as I can tell, the mothers didn't do any worse than the non-mothers, which is to say that pretty much everybody had a hard time).
DeleteThat said, my closest grad school friends all waited until after they defended. One managed to get tenure and then get pregnant in her very late thirties(with a bit of pharmaceutical support, but no heroic measures) and is busily but more or less successfully juggling elementary-school-aged kids and ever-increasing administrative burdens; one happily settled into a variety of fairly well-paid non-academic jobs, got pregnant in her mid-late-thirties, and spends a lot of time finding summer camp schedules that mesh with each other; several juggled trying to get pregnant with holding down various sorts of non-TT jobs and trying find TT jobs, with the results including several live births, several miscarriages, an adoption, a part-time job that the holder would prefer to be full-time, and a relatively late entry onto the tenure-track after years of non-TT work (and with some help from the bargaining chips provided by a spouse's TT job and joint outside offers). Several others of us are childless more or less by choice (in my case, because I don't have a partner, don't think I'd make a good single parent, and couldn't afford to be one even if I would).
I don't think there's an easy way. The compromise position in your case is probably to defend and try to conceive soon afterward, since the chances that you'll spend several years on the market are pretty high anyway. I also know several people who defended a month or two before giving birth. It's a gamble, but a very good incentive to finish by the planned deadline (and for advisers not to draw out the revision process unnecessarily). Others manage to juggle new motherhood and the tenure track, with some help from provisions that stop the tenure track, and many succeed, but that looks like a very tough, very stressful approach.
^^ THIS is what I'm dealing with now. At 36 I've never felt so old and pressured in my life. Of course, I've never been this old before either.
DeleteMy personal bit of advice is to get a degree that says what you will be doing as a professional. This may not be popular here, as I'm sure there are many people who didn't do that. Be an architect and go to architect school, be a physician and go to med school. This creates a much better chance of getting a job.
For the record, the majority of you do have jobs and are brilliant, but can you say that of everyone you went to school with?
When teaching, remember that everyone feels underprepared and/or like a fraud sometimes. But your students have no clue, so fake it until you make it, as far as feeling like a competent and confident proffie.
ReplyDeleteBe kind.
If your lecture hall/classroom/lab tends to be chilly, wear a padded bra.
As the commercial use to say, "Never let them see you sweat." It is OK to say, "I don't know the answer to that; I will have to get back to you." But if you feel under prepared or like a fraud sometimes, do not let them notice.
DeleteI always remind myself that I know more than they do.
DeleteI advise my female students that if they're planning to have children, the time to do so is when they are in the relationship in which they would like to have children, and can afford it. During grad school is fine. It may mean that you'll take an extra year to finish. This does NOT MATTER. Nobody will even notice.
ReplyDeleteWaiting until after you've got tenure and then being unable to have children when you wanted to, however, does matter. It matters a lot.
Less than half of academic women have children. This is far, far lower than the average for the non-academic population (which is in Canada 1.58 children per mother, though I can't find a way to get Wolfram Alpha to tell me how many women in the general population have no children; someone help me here please?). Presumably fewer academic women wanted to have children, but I doubt that accounts for the entire gap. In my entire graduate class, all the men have children and I am the only woman, of 8, who both finished a PhD and had children, and I know that at least some of the other 7 did want children. If you want to have children, plan ahead, and don't put it off.
Oh, I should say - I did wait. I didn't meet my husband until my late 30s and I have two children, both born in my forties. But I am spectacularly lucky; late fertility runs in my family. I mean, spectacularly. Do not count on this kind of luck.
DeleteI personally am finding out first hand what a waste it was taking birth control for all of those years. Apparently it didn't matter!
DeleteMy advice is: draw a line in the sand. Say, "In X number of years I will have Y kind of job in Z kind of place," and do what it takes to get that. Have a little wee bit of flexibility; maybe X + 1 will make sense down the line. But have a plan B, and if X + 1 passes get out of the profession with a clean break. You will be young enough to start all over. It's the people that let themselves be spun by the eddies of the job market indefinitely who end up bitter and terrified.
ReplyDeleteAlso, don't wait to have kids. I did, and only the fact that lesbians get automatic fertility treatment got me my kid before age 40 -- without, it might be noted, a sibling, and I would have liked two. I then got caught in between a small child and dying parent, and just about died myself.
Oh, and -- don't become anyone's protege (insert accents where necessary). That's certain to blow up in your face. Choose several mentors and don't hitch your wagon to a big star expecting that that will make everything easy.
If you can stand to continue teaching after your experience in grad school, then go for it. Given what I read on this blog and my current state of mind, I'm tempted to yell: "Run, Dreamer, Run."
ReplyDeleteI went from a SLAC to an R1 for grad school. The biggest difference I noticed was that you could blend in pretty darned well if you wanted to, and that came in handy from time to time. Since you already have a job and expenses paid, no need to stand out in ways that give you more work. Don't get suckered into doing projects for professors. That was my biggest mistake ("co-authoring" papers). I was used to professors at my SLAC being ethical; not so much at the R1, where several professors used students to help them (i.e. write complete articles for publication). I was unprepared for how to even deal with that. You seem more savvy than I was, however, as a naive 21 year old in PhD school.
Other advice: enjoy grad school. It most likely will be the last time you have time to really sit back and enjoy learning for the sake of learning. That said, given your history to take your time in undergrad, perhaps you will do the same with this experience. :o)
Finally: don't get involved in department politics. Ever.
Congrats on the opportunity!
Have a snappy reply for relatives who ask, "Old Rodent heroic poetry? What are you going to do with THAT?" This astronomy major started getting that when he was five years old. I suffered for my art, and now it's YOUR turn! ;-)
ReplyDeleteBe prepared, once you reach your second year of grad school, for relatives who ask, "Are you STILL in grad school?"
You do know about job prospects in academia, and in your field in particular? Even if you do, you should be asked this more than once, to make sure.
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DeleteDon't worry about being from a SLAC. If this R1 is what you say it is, it's likely they will like good ideas, well expressed. If you have them, and do that, you need never worry about imposter syndrome. Keith Olbermann has that, and look where it got him.
ReplyDeleteI've posted a few questions to CMers, before so my name might ring a bell. I'm a first year PhD student. I hate to jack the thread (if anyone is even reading the comments?), but is grad school supposed to be similar to hazing? I swear my department is trying to weed out those who can't swim (figuratively speaking). I'm doing my best to "swim," but this is kicking my @ss. Mad Dreamer, be prepared to be hazed! Seriously. The swimmers in my cohort are convinced that our department is just weeding out those who are drowning, but, in this not so nice process, we are all finding ourselves saying "I hate school." CMers is this normal?
ReplyDeleteAtua: You might get that posted atop a new thread...
ReplyDeleteNo, it's not supposed to be hazing. Some schools might do it that way. It doesn't mean they are doing it right. Seriously, weeding shouldn't be happening at the PhD level. The dissertation is self-weeding.
At the same time, don't ignore departmental politics. Be aware of what's going on. If you have a grad student governmental body, make a point to go to a few meetings if they prove to be useful.
ReplyDeleteWe had a situation in my MA program where there were very serious misconduct allegations the administration bungled spectacularly. So policing came down, in part, to grad students spreading the word about Prof to Avoid at meetings.
Also, develop a variant of what I call "Grad Student Chow," fast, easy food that doesn't come out of box or bag and can be modified endlessly. In my case, it's eggs scrambled with shredded hash browns and whatever vegetables are going bad in the fridge. Meat optional for non-vegetarians.
Since there's no way I'll be able to reply to all of you individually, I'll just post this here at the end. Thank you all so much. My fiancee and I both appreciate the wealth of advice and will aim to make the most of it.
ReplyDeleteYou guys and gals are seriously amazing.