I’ve compiled a general list of stuff to know about starting graduate school. It would be helpful to read (or re-read) this chapter immediately before starting your program.
Getting to Know Your Program
There will likely be a whole host of gatherings, orientations, and some intro courses in which you will get to know your cohort and your professors. The social dimensions of graduate school are far more important than in your undergraduate work. Your cohort will help you succeed and will also help you to generate pathways after graduation. If someone you know ends up in a nice industry position after they graduate, that’s a potential way in for you later. The professors that you meet at the beginning of a program might end up being on your thesis committee or writing you a letter of recommendation later. Try to get to know people early on, and treat these relationships as professional first. I made life long friends in both my MA and PhD program (among both students and faculty), so try and ease into those social dimensions early.
Your first semester of graduate school will be quite hard. Graduate courses run on an entirely different wavelength than undergraduate courses. The reading expectations will be greater and the time you have to complete the readings will be shorter. In many cases (especially in the humanities), you’ll be doing a lot of writing, much more than you did as an undergraduate. Pay very close attention to your syllabi. Most graduate programs have a philosophy, a general approach to how they do graduate education. This often isn’t explicitly outlined anywhere, but the syllabi are your way into understanding that. In my MA program (literature study), we read one novel and a few critical articles in each class every week in addition to having some kind of writing due. That pattern was reproduced in every course that I took over my two years there. My PhD program often required 2-5 articles per class with some polished writing due before. Again, this was replicated across most of the program.
Reading the Handbook
Read the program handbook, the graduate school policies/guidelines, or both quite early in your program. It’s important to know those rules. They are often written in response to catastrophes that happened to a student in the program, so, in a way, it’s a helpful list of things to avoid. Many students think their professors will steer them in the right direction, but these policies frequently change, so it’s a good idea to read up on them yourself. You will need to act as your own advocate in graduate school, and part of that advocacy involves knowing the rules of the game.
Grades Don’t Matter, But They Also Do
Every graduate program has standards for acceptable GPA. Every program that I’ve seen has required a 3.0 to remain in graduate school. Anything less than a 3.0 means the student is on probation and must pull that GPA back to a 3.0 within a semester. This 3.0 threshold means you effectively have 3 grades in your graduate courses. The “A” continues to function as an “A.” The “B” now functions as a “C,” meaning you barely passed the course if you got a “B.” A “C” in graduate school is the equivalent of an “F.” Professors have different ideas about how this plays out. The majority of professors I’ve had simply gave everyone A’s. This wasn’t to be easy, but the assumption was that a student got into the program, so now is the time to understand strengths and weaknesses without being overly penalized in the process. I’ve had other professors that issued whatever grades they wanted throughout the semester while also issuing everyone A’s at the end of a semester. For instance, I minored in linguistics during my PhD program. I absolutely love linguistics and find it fascinating, but I suck at doing linguistics work. I earned straight C’s through the course, but the professor gave me an A. Confusing right?
The stakes are a bit different from undergrad work. As a graduate student, you won’t be missing a single meeting of a class unless it’s a dire emergency, and you should be doing all of the work in the class. The effort should be clear. Ultimately, your GPA isn’t really that important anymore. You should strive to learn as much as possible from your coursework and to work as hard as you can while staying mentally and physically healthy. It is important to be aware that if you are earning B’s in a class then there is a problem and you should be communicating with your professor about it. If they are giving you B’s on an assignment, it’s likely to try and prod you in a different direction.
On Bare Minimums
Graduate school should be seen as a place to develop yourself. It’s an environment in which you can grow, but you will need to become an advocate for your learning in order to do well in graduate school. Your course assignments and reading list are the absolute bare minimum of work you should be doing. Courses and reading lists should be seen as a kind of scaffolding upon which you begin building your own ideas and interests. Yes, coursework is grueling, but you should keep an eye on what interests you. Read scholarship related to your own interests. Track down your professors and have conversations with them. Schedule appointments so that you can discuss your career goals. Ask them for important books to read. Ask them what conferences you should attend. I’ve seen far too many students that are content with earning a 4.0 in graduate school. That’s only part of it. You will need to be an active student to get the most out of this process.
Keeping Up with Reading
During one week of my PhD program, I was assigned 2300 pages of reading. I do not believe it’s humanly possible for anyone to read 2300 pages of academic prose in one week. I had one professor that routinely assigned us 500-1000 pages of reading per week. Most new students despair when they see these numbers, but it’s important to note that no one is able to keep pace with this. In most courses, your professors are trying to expose you the maximum amount of content possible. Don’t try to read it all. You will need to become an efficient skimmer in graduate school (and beyond). Use topic sentences to guide your reading and zoom in on areas that really interest you. I would “read” 20-30 articles a week in my PhD program. Of that 20-30, I would estimate that 5 really caught my attention, so I would read those 5 rather closely and then skim the remainder. If you are in a standard course, say a T/TR, then you will have about an hour and twenty minutes to discuss all this stuff as a class. The course discussion will only be able to cover a small amount of what was in the reading. I always recommend that students know one thing really well. Be prepared to discuss one article thoroughly, for instance. That’s a better strategy than being able to poorly or inaccurately discuss 5 articles. Gravitate towards the things that interest you. Those will be the articles/books/topics that you will likely cover in your thesis and/or during your comprehensive exams.
Comprehensive Exams
Comprehensive exams suck, but everyone has to do them. At some point in your program (second year for MA, third/fourth year for PhD), you will take comps (these are also called quals, short for qualifying exams). As stated above, you’ll have 3 distinct phases in a graduate program, and comps are the middle of path. Comps tend to scare students because they are quite scary. It’s important to keep an eye on them because they will appear out of nowhere. Many comps require students to submit reading lists, or design their own exam. Regardless of the specific model of the exam, it’s important for you to start collecting stuff. Develop some form of organization for your readings. During my PhD, I indexed all of the reading I did into Zotero so that I could immediately find old stuff that I read in courses. Regardless of your field, you will need to cite things in your comps, so start organizing at the beginning of your program. I, like many students, didn’t keep track of stuff during my MA, so I had to basically start from zero when prepping for comps. I was much more organized during my PhD, so the process of preparing was a bit easier.
Taking Good Notes
It is imperative that you discover and implement a good note-taking solution early in your career. If you take physical notes, try and get some decent quality notebooks and use an indexing system. I discovered Bullet Journaling during my PhD program and I still use it. It helped me organize physical notebooks by section, which made studying for comps much easier. Programs like Evernote are also very useful. Take copious notes in your courses. If they are well organized, then those notes will become useful during your comps and your thesis/diss phase.
The Tools of the Trade
Please don’t buy a Macbook Pro or an Ipad pro for graduate studies unless you absolutely need some piece of software that only runs on Mac (which is a possibility in some cases, but rare). Most students dramatically overspend when it comes to getting their tools for school. They also make choices that will sabotage their efforts in the future. Most universities run on Microsoft, and Microsoft Office specifically. Most of your time as a student will be spent reading and writing, so you need a reliable machine that can produce documents that are easily readable by your university. For this reason, I always recommend people buy a Windows laptop.
If you write a thesis (which you absolutely should), you will be sending drafts to members of your thesis committee and graduate school. I saw far, far too many people struggling with document format for their thesis work because they were using Apple machines. The Mac version of Office is fine, but presents some compatibility issues with several versions of word. When I was writing my dissertation, my school was using an outdated version of MS Office. I ended up finding a used copy to install on my computer, and it cut down tremendously on the format inconsistencies that pop up between versions of Office. This might sound unusual or strange, but graduate schools have a set format for how theses and dissertations should look. It took me upwards of a month of back and forth exchanges with my graduate school to get my dissertation formatted correctly (and I was using the same version of Word!). When I tell students to get a windows machine, they think I mean a Surface Pro. I do not, though a machine with a pen input can help you with annotating PDFs for research. This isn’t a necessity, especially if you are on a budget.
Get a bibliography manager on day 1. Zotero and Mendeley are both functional and free, and can help you organize and catalog your research. They can generate reference lists for your course papers, but can also help you keep track of stuff you have read.
Cloud Storage and Physical Backups
This is a short, but absolutely vital section of this book. Read this section, re-read it, and then think about it. You need to back up your work in multiple places. I lost about 30 pages of my thesis due to a hard drive failure. I can’t tell you how many academics have run into this problem. You need a cloud-based solution for your writing. Google Drive, iCloud, or Drop Box are all fine, as are many other versions of cloud-based storage. Whatever you choose is largely a matter of personal preference, but you need one of these to keep your work backed up. I’ve seen hard drive failures result in delayed graduations. That’s a worst-case scenario, so avoid it. In addition to cloud storage, I also use a physical, external hard drive to back up key files on my computer. For me, this is an indestructible, waterproof flash drive. I only do physical backups once per semester, but that can save quite a bit of headaches. You can never be too careful with your intellectual output during school.
Using Listservs
Every field has a listserv (a mailing list done through email). Your department probably has a listserv, and your program might even have a listserv. You need to be on those lists. Spend some time in a search engine trying to find the lists for your field or ask a professor about them. They are typically very easy to join, and you will receive all emails from the list in your inbox. People advertise jobs, programs, journal special issues, books, conferences, and events on listservs. All of that will magically appear in your inbox once subscribed. People also ask questions and argue on lists. Reading the lists in your field will help you understand contemporary debates while also cluing you in on important happenings. I’ve encountered a lot of students that tend to ignore the lists because it’s too much happening. There is usually a lot happening at a given moment, but there are ways to control the tide of that information. I have a filter set up on my gmail that sends all of my listserv messages to a specific folder. I can then browse all of the list messages at my leisure. I usually read them in the morning over a cup of coffee. It’s a good habit to get into. Professors are usually the people posting to those lists, so you get to observe how professionals are communicating.
Conferencing
Master’s students should try to conference at least once, perhaps at the end of your first year or beginning of your second year. PhD students should try to conference at least once a year, but probably not more than twice (your advisor can help with the specific amount). Faculty attend conferences. We are expected to conference in order to keep abreast of developments in the field. We also conference to meet other people investigating similar problems or teaching the same subjects. We get to know people that are going to these conferences, and it is part of the way we come to understand our field. The important thing to do at the beginning of your program is to keep an eye out for conferencing opportunities, both on the listservs and through your department.
Publishing
One of the most popular questions I hear from students is “what advice do you have for a new graduate student?” The answer isn’t something most people want to hear when they start school: publish. You may have heard the term “publish or perish” thrown around to refer to the state of contemporary faculty work. For professors working in research jobs, this is law. Those professors are expected to churn out journal articles and books at a breakneck pace in order to earn tenure. Publication creep, as it’s called, has started to encroach on all areas of academia. Traditionally, teaching jobs did not require professors to publish, and would often count a few presentations at conferences as a measure of one’s engagement in the field. This is still true for many teaching jobs, particularly those at CCs (but there are certainly CCs that have research as a part of their promotion rubrics).
Despite publications not being a hard and fast requirement for most jobs, many of the candidates that are submitting applications for positions will be quite qualified and accomplished. I’ve been on search committees for non-tenure track jobs and have seen a decent number of well-published candidates. Publications are the gold standard for academic achievement. They are portable to all institution types and job types. Everyone understands what a peer-reviewed article means. This portability often doesn’t apply to teaching. You may be applying to teach in a program so different from your graduate school that the experience simply doesn’t transfer. A decent publication, however, will always transfer. The growth in prominence of HR on most campuses has led to a desire for more objective measures in the hiring process. Publications that are peer-reviewed provide a nice, neat standard on which candidates can be judged.
Publications have been weaponized by really good graduate programs. Top programs are supplying students with several decent publications and well-formed research agendas fresh out of graduate school. During the 1980s and before, it was enough that a person had a halfway decent dissertation. PhDs were often hired on their potential and their fit with a program. It was assumed that the publications would get sorted out later. That’s no longer the case.
It’s never too early to begin thinking about publishing. Once you have a semester or two under your belt, begin investigating journals in your field. Ask your professors about potential places to submit work. There are also publication guides out there. In particular, I recommend Laura Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks. It will walk you through the entire publication process with a set of easy steps to complete. It’s an expensive book, but it’s possible to find second hand copies or request one through inter-library loan. It’s been an instrumental book for my career, and I reference it often.
Building in an Escape Hatch
If you haven’t heard how bad the academic job market is, you haven’t been listening very well. Students often equip their blinders during school and throw themselves at the familiar: reading and writing. For a master’s degree, the end will suddenly pop up. For a PhD, many students surface for air after coursework and are staring down a dissertation. It can be too easy to bury your head in the sand and focus on school. I caution students against this approach. You should be cultivating multiple, alternative plans for work during school. A colleague once provided me with my favorite explanation of this: college athletes understand that they aren’t going to go pro because less than 1% of athletes do. They go to college on scholarship and play for the love of the game. Academia works in the same way. Don’t go to school assuming you will be a professor. Go to school to learn things. I tell my own students to cultivate 3 plans while in grad school, a plan A, B, and C, with D being professor.
When doing coursework and readings, connect that to other areas you are interested in. Broaden your skill set. Most professors in graduate schools are willing to allow latitude so a student can achieve their goals. Ask a professor if you can write a write a shorter paper and build a website instead of a traditional research paper. Learn some code and build a modest, web-based project during one of your classes.
The best way to do this is to figure out two or three jobs you would be interested in doing, and then reverse engineer them. Figure out what’s on applications for those jobs, and then keep a list of those proficiencies. Work them into your projects as often as possible.
One aspect job market rarely gets mentioned, and it should be mentioned more. Most graduate students don’t get professorships, but end up employed and happy (mostly). There’s a shitty meme that describes all English graduate students as baristas. That’s not accurate, and who cares if it is? If a person wants to get an MA in linguistics and then work their way up in a company, why should we critique that path? Most of the graduate students I knew are not in academia, and are doing fine. They are in careers too diverse to list here. Many of them started to cultivate those options in graduate school by learning editing, web design, project management, and research. Not being a professor isn’t the end of the world, and I know many people who are far happier outside of academia. The keys are preparation and vigilance.
Becoming Your Own Advocate
I think this section is the most important section of text in this entire book. Highlight it, print it, and tape it to your refrigerator. To be successful in graduate school, you must learn to advocate for yourself. During undergraduate study, most students are holding on for dear life and working at the direction of advisors and and course plans. There’s a kind of pathway laid out there, and the presumption is that all one must do to succeed is survive. That’s mostly true, but it’s very different in graduate school.
You will have an advisor and a program of study during school, but that’s the bare minimum. Most programs want and expect you to ask for more, but many students don’t. In one of my courses during my PhD, I wanted to undertake an extremely unconventional project rather than a traditional seminar paper. My professor was less than enthused when I asked them about it, and suggested I simply pursue the standard seminar paper. I thought about it, and then prepared an abstract, outline, and bibliography of the project before submitting it to the professor and setting up a meeting about it. I connected the project to a potential job I was interested in doing if academia didn’t work, and I made a strong case for how it fit with the work of the course and my potential dissertation topic. Without a single word of objection, the professor said “go for it! I just wanted to see you argue your case and not give up. Whatever job you end up in, you’ll have to do this constantly. You won’t have an advisor there to advocate for you behind the scenes, so get used to it.” That professor was absolutely right, and I wouldn’t have finished my PhD if I didn’t hear that advice during my coursework. It helped me argue for course substitutions, independent studies, and pretty much every aspect of my dissertation.
Passively working your way through a program is possible, but know that you will be your strongest advocate. To be clear, I don’t mean to suggest that you should constantly be fighting with your professors about every detail in your program or every less than stellar course grade. What I suggest is that you not sweat the small stuff, but argue thoughtfully and reasonably for the things that are important using the tools of the trade: writing and research.
