57 Ways to Screw Up in Grad School: Perverse Professional Lessons for Graduate Students 9780226281063

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57 WAYS TO SCREW UP I N G R A D S C H O OL

C HI C A G O G U I D E S T O A C A D E M I C LIFE

A Student’s Guide to Law School Andrew B. Ayers The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science Victor A. Bloomfield and Esam El-Fakahany The Chicago Handbook for Teachers, Second Edition Alan Brinkley, Esam El-Fakahany, Betty Dessants, Michael Flamm, Charles B. Forcey Jr., Matthew L. Ouellett, and Eric Rothschild The Chicago Guide to Landing a Job in Academic Biology C. Ray Chandler, Lorne M. Wolfe, and Daniel E. L. Promislow Behind the Academic Curtain Frank F. Furstenberg The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career John A. Goldsmith, John Komlos, and Penny Schine Gold How to Succeed in College (While Really Trying) Jon B. Gould How to Study Arthur W. Kornhauser Doing Honest Work in College Charles Lipson Succeeding as an International Student in the United States and Canada Charles Lipson The Thinking Student’s Guide to College Andrew Roberts The Graduate Advisor Handbook Bruce M. Shore

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WAY S T O S C R E W UP I N G R A D S C H OOL Perverse Professional Lessons for Graduate Students

KEVIN D. HAGGERTY AND AARON DOYLE

THE UNIVE RS IT Y OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO A ND LONDON

Kevin D. Haggerty is a Killam Research Laureate and professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Alberta. He is also editor of the Canadian Journal of Sociology. Haggerty’s most recent book is Transparent Lives.

aaron Doyle is associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. His most recent book is Eyes Everywhere. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-28087-5 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-28090-5 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-28106-3 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226281063.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Haggerty, Kevin D., author. 57 ways to screw up in grad school: perverse professional lessons for graduate students / Kevin D. Haggerty and Aaron Doyle. pages; cm. — (Chicago guides to academic life) Includes index. ISBN 978-0-226-28087-5 (cloth: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-28090-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-28106-3 (e-book) 1. Graduate students— Conduct of life. 2. Universities and colleges— Graduate work. I. Doyle, Aaron, author. II. Title. III. Title: Fifty-seven ways to screw up in grad school. IV. Series: Chicago guides to academic life. LB2371.H34 2015 378.1'55—dc23 2015002171 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/ NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Richard V. Ericson

CONTENTS

AN INTRODUCTION TO SCREWING UP Who Are I? 7 Gendered Pronouns 8 Thesis vs. Dissertation? 8

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THE SCREW- UPS STARTING OUT 11 1 Do Not Think about Why You Are Applying 14 2 Ignore the Market 19 3 Stay at the Same University 22 4 Follow the Money Blindly 24 5 Do an Unfunded PhD 29 6 Do an Interdisciplinary PhD 30 7 Believe Advertised Completion Times 33 8 Ignore the Information the University Provides You 9 Expect the Money to Take Care of Itself 35

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SUPERVISORS 41 10 Go It Alone and Stay Quiet 42 11 Choose the Coolest Supervisor 45 12 Have Co-Supervisors 48 13 Do Not Clarify Your Supervisor’s (or Your Own) Expectations 50 14 Avoid Your Supervisor and Committee 51 15 Stay in a Bad Relationship 53 16 Expect People to Hold Your Hand 55

MANAGING YOUR PROGRAM 57 17 Concentrate Only on Your Thesis 58 18 Expect to Write the Perfect Comprehensive Exam 61 19 Select a Topic for Entirely Strategic Reasons 63 20 Do Not Teach, or Teach a Ton of Courses 65 21 Do Not Seek Teaching Instruction 68 22 Move Away from the University Before Finishing Your Degree 70 23 Postpone Those Tedious Approval Processes 72 24 Organize Everything Only in Your Head 75 25 Do Not Attend Conferences, or Attend Droves of Conferences 78 YOUR 26 27 28 29

WORK AND SOCIAL LIFE 81 Concentrate Solely on School 82 Expect Friends and Family to Understand Socialize Only with Your Clique 85 Get a Job! 87

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WRITING 89 30 Write Only Your PhD Thesis 90 31 Postpone Publishing 93 32 Cover Everything 96 33 Do Not Position Yourself 98 34 Write Only to Deadlines 100 35 Abuse Your Audience 103 YOUR 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

ATTITUDE AND ACTIONS 109 Expect to Be Judged Only on Your Work 110 Have a Thin Skin 113 Be Inconsiderate 116 Become “That” Student 119 Never Compromise 121 Gossip 123 Say Whatever Pops into Your Head on Social Media

DELICATE MATTERS 127 43 Assume That the University Is More Inclusive Than Other Institutions 128 44 Rush into a Legal Battle 132 45 Get Romantically Involved with Faculty 135 46 Cheat and Plagiarize 137

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AM I 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

DONE YET?: ON FINISHING 141 Skip Job Talks 142 Expect to Land a Job in a Specific University 146 Expect People to Hire You to Teach Your Thesis 148 Turn Down Opportunities to Participate in Job Searches 150 Neglect Other People’s Theses 151 Get an Unknown External Examiner 152 Do Not Understand the Endgame 155 Be Blasé about Your Defense 160 Do Not Plan for Your Job Interview 164 Persevere at All Costs 168 Consider a Non-Academic Career a Form of Failure 170

FINAL THOUGHTS

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APPENDIX: A SKETCH OF GRAD SCHOOL The Thesis 178 The Program 180 Your Department 181 The People 182 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INDEX

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A N I N T R O D U C T I ON TO SCREWING UP

Liam faced a problem familiar to many master’s students. He had spent months looking for people to interview for his thesis— a study of the experiences of recent Egyptian immigrants to Chicago. It was becoming increasingly clear, however, that he was not going to find enough of them to finish his research on time. What was he going to do? He planned to start his PhD in the fall. After many days of agonizing, he hit on a desperate answer. Ingeniously, he decided to approach individuals who knew Egyptians— but who were not themselves Egyptian— and ask them to describe growing up in Egypt, immigrating to America from Egypt, and so on, by pretending to be Egyptian. We do not know exactly what was going through his head. The world will never know how he pitched this to them, or what the interviewees thought about it all: “You are doing research on how well people can fake being Egyptian? Okay. Sounds worthwhile to me. Did you get a grant for this?” We will never know if at some level Liam convinced himself that his approach was legitimate. Liam committed academic fraud and got busted. But his problems did not stop there. A graduate chair learned about Liam’s innovative approach to data collection while she was evaluating Liam’s PhD application. Liam’s file had been near the top of the

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admissions list. But now he had screwed that up in a way that would become local legend. As they finish their undergraduate degrees, some students think about going on to grad school. You might have always known that a master’s or PhD was in your future, or a friendly professor might have encouraged you to think about it. Or maybe you just have a deep commitment to prolonging your impoverished, three a.m. Cup-of-Noodles-eating, term-paper-procrastinating, angst-laden student years well into your thirties and beyond. For a number of reasons, more people than ever are going to grad school. This can be an excellent choice, as careers in higher education and related areas can be personally rewarding. It can also be a great opportunity to mess up your life, if done for the wrong reasons or done badly. Few screw-ups will approach the magnitude of Liam’s fake Egyptian interviews. But there will be many chances to foul things up, sometimes in serious ways. For anyone, the prospect of grad school can be daunting, as it involves committing many years to a strange new stage of education, with no guarantee you will find a job after you graduate. Given the stakes involved, one peculiar aspect of grad school is the number of students who seem indifferent to its pitfalls. Year after year many run headlong, like lemmings, into the same blunders as their predecessors. Yet a good share of these people ignore or are even hostile toward the advice that might help them avoid screwing up. Having repeatedly witnessed this process, we have concluded that a small group of students actually want to screw up. We do not know why. Maybe they are masochists or fear success. Maybe they say to themselves, “A good day is a day where I move one step closer to crushing my dreams.” Maybe they are working out deeprooted psychological issues. Whatever the reason, our heart goes out to them. Indeed, this book will help them. It sets out a course of action that will ensure they blunder through grad school in a spectacularly disastrous fashion.

2 / AN INTRODUCTION TO SCREWING UP

Graduate school usually involves completing a master’s degree or a PhD (also known as a doctorate). Such degrees exist, with different names, in the natural and applied sciences, humanities, social sciences, and education. A master’s degree works out well for most people who start one; a PhD is a more risky undertaking. With a master’s, you can expect to finish in a reasonable amount of time and be in a better place than where you started. If you cannot complete it, you will have endured only a couple of years of suffering. But a PhD is a much greater investment. Botching it up can cost you most or all of a decade of your prime years— and can inflict grievous and irreparable damage on your career prospects, lifelong finances, key relationships, and self-respect. People seek out graduate degrees for many reasons, not all of them good ones. For most students, grad school is a steppingstone to a career. With the PhD, that career is often in the university or college system, or sometimes in related fields. So, “screwing up” means not only making mistakes that mess up your grad school experience but also committing blunders that limit your chances of landing a good job or having a rewarding career afterward. The screw-ups we identify are of varying degrees. Some will undermine or even cut short your graduate education, while others involve less serious matters that will simply make your grad school days less rewarding and more unpleasant than they need to be. Many students experience culture shock when they start grad school because it is so different from their undergraduate years. The shift is as big as the one from high school to university. Most parents did not attend grad school, so students cannot often ask their families for much guidance. Ideally, grad school should involve a lot of one-on-one mentoring: a professor, normally the student’s thesis supervisor, closely guides the student, allowing that student to absorb the finer points of what grad school is all about, and especially about how success in grad school is about a lot more than just completing the official requirements. Sometimes that mentoring

AN INTRODUCTION TO SCREWING UP

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actually happens. Unfortunately, not all professors have the time or dedication to give their protégés all the supervision they need. Also, depending on how things work in a particular grad program, the student who enters grad school may not immediately link up with a supervisor or temporary advisor, and may not have much guidance early on. In some programs, especially master’s degrees, it is normal for many students not to have found a supervisor for months, and perhaps not until the second year of the master’s. Such students are not taught enough about how grad school works until they are far along in their degrees. And some students never receive that kind of support at all. Graduate education need not be a mystery. There are no dark secrets, and those who do reveal insider knowledge will not be shunned or cast out. The problem is that few people have gone to the trouble of spelling out and writing down the informal practices and rituals of grad school. The reason is simple. What wins the most brownie points and advances a university career the most is doing research, getting grants, and writing scholarly books or journal articles. It is not mentoring students or publishing guidance books for the next generation of scholars. Indeed, some academics frown on such writing, seeing it as a waste of valuable research time. Things are starting to change, however, with an increasing number of books and blogs designed to help grad students. These resources can be helpful, but many of them tend to focus narrowly on a few big moments in a graduate student’s career— the thesis defense or first job interview, for example. Such moments are important rites of passage, and they certainly mark points where you can screw up in ways that can become legendary. But you will reach them only after negotiating many other potential pitfalls that await you in grad school. In this book we provide unflinching advice about how to screw up in grad school. One key audience is those students who are contemplating— no matter how remotely— a career in higher

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education as instructors, researchers, or professors and who are thinking about whether and how to do a master’s or PhD to get there. Our suggestions are also relevant to those who wish to attend grad school for personal fulfillment or to gain skills and credentials to help them advance in non-academic careers. While the university is its own world, much of what goes on inside is common to any organization. Thus, a good part of this book is actually relevant to people who might want to screw up in almost any kind of workplace— which is why we characterize what follows as “perverse professional lessons.” In writing this book, we have been pushed by a desire to see grad students succeed— to help them have happy endings and rewarding careers. Having made it through grad school, shared a tiny office during our PhD years, and resolved many a mini-crisis over a beer or three, we have thought and talked about grad school survival skills for a long time. We have both published on different aspects of university life and supervised large numbers of master’s and PhD students, some of whom have won prestigious awards for their scholarship and some of whom are now professors. Each of us has also been the graduate chair of our respective master’s and PhD programs, responsible for all the grad students in the department (which can amount to a hundred or more people) and having to decide which students to admit and who should receive a scholarship, among other things. Each of us has won awards not only for teaching and research but also for graduate student mentoring as well. Along the way we have seen many screw-ups, and we have committed more than a few of our own. Based on this experience, we will soon begin describing in detail the many ways in which to screw up. The litany of foul-ups that follow are organized by theme, tracking the grad school experience from beginning to end, starting with contemplating the decision to start a master’s degree and choosing a discipline, university, and program, and concluding with the process of finishing the PhD and hunting for

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a job or postdoctoral fellowship. Whether you read the book from start to finish or dip into it randomly, please read it all. Sometimes important lessons appear in unexpected places. We shared drafts of this book with colleagues in different departments and universities and with many current and former graduate students. Those people were generous with their comments and ideas, helping us refine our portrait of grad school. We interviewed people across our respective campuses who have ties with graduate education, including associate deans, the directors of research ethics, ombudspersons, professional development officers, and staff in the Financial Aid Offices, International Student Centres, and Writing Centres, as well as the people responsible for student discipline. We frequently refer to their experiences and suggestions while taking care to avoid giving away their identity. If you are into self-abuse, rest assured that following our 57step program will result in a dreadful grad school experience. We obviously also hope to guide those who want to do well. Despite our focus on screwing up, we want to emphasize that grad school is not designed to ensure failure. Faculty and staff (mostly) do not conspire to find sensational new ways for you to crash and burn. Most of the people you meet actually have your best interests at heart. At the same time, they want you to be the best scholar possible, partly because someday you are going to represent them. We know that in focusing on screw-ups we could lead some people to conclude that grad school and the academy are treacherous places. But the university is no more perilous than any other workplace. Indeed, we actually like working here. We have each had tremendously fulfilling academic careers, and we believe that many different students with the right mix of personal and professional skills can excel here. We really do not want to scare you off. Okay, maybe we want to scare you a little bit, but just to help you understand grad school and the wider university. Both of us had the same PhD supervisor: the late Richard V. Ericson. We each met Richard at the Centre of Criminology at the Uni-

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versity of Toronto, where he supervised Aaron’s master’s degree and oversaw a large research project that Kevin worked on. In 1993 we followed him to the University of British Columbia, where he supervised our PhDs in sociology. A remarkable scholar and supervisor, Richard launched our careers and provided a model of scholarly integrity and hands-on mentoring. We still regularly draw upon his guidance, and writing this book is our attempt to pay it forward. Readers who are unfamiliar with the basics of graduate school might want to begin with the appendix at the end of the book, which provides an overview of the people and processes in grad school. It will set the stage to help you better appreciate the 57 ways to screw up your graduate education. WHO ARE I?

The question “Who are I?” combines the singular and plural, making a grammatical mess. But the combination nicely describes our book. Written by two people, it offers a single vision of graduate education. While writing the book, however, we discovered a tricky stylistic issue. We wanted our text to be punchy, easy to read, and written in the active voice. We also wanted it to draw on many of our own experiences, some of which come from Kevin’s life, others from Aaron’s, and still others from both. Given those ambitions, how were we to identify ourselves in the book? First we tried identifying each anecdote with a specific author, but we ended up with clumsy sentences like this: “It was probably the wisest choice I (Doyle) made in my career.” Next we tried referring generically to one of us—“It was probably the wisest choice one of the authors made in his career”— but this was tortuous to read over many pages. Then we thought about using “we” throughout—“It was probably the wisest choice we made in our career”— but this came off as confusing and pretentious. We therefore decided to write the substantive sections of the book in the first person, using “I,” “me,” and “my” throughout. So,

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although there are two of us, we write sentences that read, “It was probably the wisest choice I made in my career.” This is ultimately a grammatical compromise in a situation where the English language provides no ideal alternatives. Besides making the book more readable, use of the first person provided another important benefit. Many of the stories we tell in this book are taken from our experiences as graduate students, mentors, and graduate chairs. Not wanting to embarrass anyone, we do not personally identify the people involved in those anecdotes. Everyone’s name has been changed and some details slightly altered to ensure anonymity. Using the first person helped in this regard, because readers would not be able to tell if they were reading about Kevin’s or Aaron’s experiences, thus giving our friends and colleagues greater privacy. GENDERED PRONOUNS

To increase the readability of this book, we consistently refer to some categories of people as “she” and some as “he.” The people referred to as “she” include the supervisor, the dean, the university president, the external examiner, and random graduate students. The people referred to as “he” include the department chair, associate chairs, ombudspersons, administrative staff, and random faculty members. These attributions are arbitrary. THESIS VS. DISSERTATION?

While some people believe that master’s students write a thesis and PhD students write a dissertation, this terminology is highly variable across universities and sometimes even within departments. To avoid repeatedly saying “thesis or dissertation,” we consistently use “thesis” to refer to both.

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STARTING OUT

Applying to graduate school can be an exciting process. It also involves a big time commitment, especially if you do it the right way. To avoid pitfalls in the early stages of your degree— some of which could haunt you for years to come— you will have a lot of work to do, and many decisions to make, long before you arrive on campus. Think carefully about why you want to go to graduate school, and what you would like to get out of the experience, both immediately and in the long term. You also need to reflect on what type of career you want and how a graduate education will advance your ultimate goals. Do some research into what graduate school is (and is not), how it works, and the career prospects in your chosen field. If you are reading this book prior to applying, kudos to you, but also be sure to talk to friends, instructors, and supervisors to get a larger appreciation for graduate education and the life of an academic, researcher, or any other occupation you might pursue after your degree. It is good to contact the graduate chairs of the programs you are applying to (that is, the professors who are in charge of those programs) while you are considering applying or in the process of applying. Talk to current graduate students if you can, especially students in the graduate programs that interest

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you. You can often arrange this with the graduate chairs of those programs. It is good if you can talk to students who have had both great and less-than-great experiences in grad school. If grad school seems a good fit for you, you will have to apply to be admitted. This is a time-consuming process, so give it the attention it deserves. It is not simply a case of filling out forms and requesting transcripts. Beyond getting you into the program of your choice, the application is your first opportunity to impress (or depress) a group of academics with your intellect and dedication (or lack of same). Think about what kind of first impression you want to make. A strong application can also help you get the best possible funding. You will usually need to write a statement of interest or statement of research plan. This is something you should put a lot of work and thought into. You should get feedback on drafts from professors and current graduate students. As grad chair of our master’s and PhD program, I offer to give applicants feedback on drafts. The admissions committee at the program you are applying to will read your statement carefully. An ideal statement will contain a detailed account of your research plans, including showing some knowledge of the research literature your project would be based in, and, depending on the discipline, some talk about research methods. A bad statement may contain few specifics on proposed research, and instead contain vague generalities, such as that you “love learning.” Be aware that in the end writing the statement is just an exercise: you are not required to do the exact project you propose. Committee members want to see whether you have some idea what a graduate research project would look like. They are also looking for a fit between your interests and their program, and a sense that their faculty will be able to support your research. Find out if there are scholarships you should be applying for to help fund your graduate school efforts. Sometimes the deadlines for these scholarship applications are months before the deadline for graduate school applications.

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You will need letters of reference from professors who have worked with you recently. Do not shy away from asking for such letters: it is the job of professors to give them. Do give them plenty of notice! A great screw-up is to ask a professor for a letter of reference on short notice, as they will be more tempted to dash off something brief that will come off as less than enthusiastic. Another error is to ask a professor for a reference when you are not certain what kind of reference they will write you. Be direct and ask, “Based on my previous work with you, are you comfortable writing me a strong reference for graduate school?” Find out if there are any exams you need to complete as part of the application process, such as the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE), which is a standardized test that is an admissions requirement for many American programs, and find out what you might need to do to prepare for these tests. Again, this part of the process may require quite a bit of lead time. You face some life-altering choices about where to apply, and, if you are accepted, which school to attend. You could face decisions about what degree program you want to pursue, how much and what type of funding you will receive, and who will be your supervisor. Such choices will shape the structure of your higher education, financial status, and long-term career prospects. Some choices may put you on an irrevocable road toward screwing up. Take your time with these choices and talk them over at length with people whose advice you value. Different graduate programs make their admission decisions at different times. Clarify with the schools in question when you must respond to their offers. If one program is awaiting your decision, that school may be willing to give you an extension if you are still awaiting an offer from another program. Even from the earliest stages, you will have ample opportunities to make poor decisions that will reverberate for years. With some foresight, planning, and honest reflection about your ambitions, however, you have the chance to maximize your opportunities.

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1 DO NOT THINK ABOUT WHY YOU ARE APPLYING

Grad school can be a great place to hang out with smart people and pursue fascinating intellectual projects. Further Schooling can also provide a seductively easy answer to the dreaded question, “Now what are you going to do?” that goes hand in hand with the end of your degree. People go to grad school for both obvious and idiosyncratic reasons. My professional musician friend John, for example, started a master’s degree in business simply because he could not think of what else to do after he developed extreme tendonitis that prohibited him from playing guitar. Others may apply simply because a partner is applying to the same school. And while some excellent scholars put little thought into their decision to pursue a higher degree, it is still crazy to enter a period of extended study without seriously contemplating whether it is right for you and what you hope to gain from the experience. Amazingly, some students give their decision to go to grad school less sustained thought than they dedicate to their vacation planning. The implications of going to grad school differ depending on whether you are seeking a PhD or a master’s and, if the latter, what type of master’s you are after. The risk with a master’s degree is nowhere near as high as with a PhD. Master’s programs are typically much briefer and have a much higher completion rate. Master’s students have more freedom to use grad school as an opportunity both to explore whether an academic career might be right for them and to acquire a credential while postponing the job search for a year or two. A master’s degree always looks good on your résumé and, depending on the field, can expand your employment options considerably without pigeonholing you as an expert in a specialized field.

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For PhD students, grad school represents a considerable personal, professional, and financial investment, and the possibility of having what has thus far been a stellar academic career culminate in a costly and soul-sucking personal defeat. If, instead of working on a PhD, you spent those four or more years working full-time at a job, for example, you would likely have saved some money (rather than gone into debt), gained valuable work experience, and moved up the ranks in your organization. So pursuing a PhD has notable career costs. Not only is it a much greater time commitment than a master’s, there is a considerably higher risk of dropping out, and it requires you to become an expert in an area, thus putting all your eggs in one small professional basket, perhaps the wrong one. Sometimes a PhD can actually narrow your job options. Most basically, think about seeking a PhD if you want a career in research or university teaching or affiliated areas, and you think you have a realistic shot at such a position. A PhD is the highest academic credential, and while many PhD graduates go on to other interesting jobs outside the university, it is in the university where the PhD is both required and valued, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. That said, for an academic career, the PhD is the minimal requirement, and you will have to do a lot of other things besides graduating, most notably publishing your research, to make yourself competitive for positions as a tenure-track professor. A major theme of this book is that to succeed in grad school, you need to do a lot more than just complete the official requirements for your degree. Some of the attractive features of such tenure-track academic jobs are that (at least in broad terms) you are your own boss, responsible for setting your own career path and managing long-term projects that you design in an intellectually stimulating world. You have a lot of freedom as a tenured or tenure-track professor. Teaching a new generation of students can be highly fulfilling. Academic jobs also have the prospect of considerable travel and come with a certain level of prestige associated with being a “doctor” (even if you always

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have to explain you are not “that kind” of doctor). Academic salaries in developed countries are generally good, although as I note elsewhere, the job market in some disciplines is declining sharply. A much less desirable place to wind up is in a supposedly temporary position as an adjunct professor or contract instructor. Such positions are occupied by senior PhD students teaching courses in the final years of their degree or people who have already completed their PhDs and are teaching one or more undergraduate courses per term on a contract basis. This can provide valuable and marketable teaching experience, but is best done in small doses. Today’s university depends heavily on such instructors, partly because they are a cheap and flexible labor force. In some departments, adjuncts (also called sessional instructors) teach 70 percent or more of all undergrad students. Despite their central importance, these people have poor job security and few benefits and are not well paid, even though efforts to unionize these jobs may improve conditions somewhat. The adjunct or sessional labor force also unfairly features a disproportionate number of female academics. In the short term, graduate students and recent postgrads can gain valuable experience in such positions, but too many end up on the adjunct treadmill for extended periods of time rather than finding much more attractive tenure-track professorial jobs. Following the advice in this book should help PhD students avoid the adjunct/sessional trap. In short, then, pursuing a PhD can potentially be a great way to screw up your life. While there may be sound reasons for getting a PhD, it also might not be right for you. Most conspicuously, do not pursue a PhD because you do not know what else to do. This can be a catastrophic blunder. A PhD is not a way to postpone a career decision; it is a career decision, and one best made by thoroughly weighing the pros and cons before you apply for admission. Do not seek a PhD to please other people. Your parents’ hopes, for example, should figure minimally in your plans to become an academic. I recently had a long talk with a PhD student who had decided that he was not going to finish his thesis and that he was

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better suited to the new job he had found in government than he was to the academic life. He estimated that he would have dropped out of the PhD two or three years earlier if not for the fear of disappointing his parents. Likewise, do not pursue a PhD because your current professors praise you. Such encouragement is nice and worth bearing in mind. The job market, however, has changed dramatically since many professors completed their PhDs, and they may have little idea about the rigors and risks of embarking on an academic career path today. Consequently, you need to contemplate a wider set of factors beyond the fact someone you respect said you should go to grad school. Do not seek a PhD just because you can, or because you think it makes you sound smart, or because it gives you a good short-term, impressive-sounding answer when people ask what you are up to. While you might be attracted to the professional freedom enjoyed by academics, the flip side is that you need to be a selfstarter. Being brilliant is obviously a great scholarly asset, but academics are rarely geniuses, and I certainly know a number of brilliant people who have foundered in grad school; successful academics are certainly smart, but they are also focused and selfdisciplined. If you lack discipline and determination, you might be heading toward problems in grad school. Also think twice about an academic career if you need regular praise. Most grad students were strong undergrads who were used to receiving positive feedback regularly. Now the feedback is more mixed and comes less often. Sometimes the rewards can be huge— winning a lucrative fellowship or publishing in a respected journal. However, you will need to stay motivated in an environment where much of the feedback on your research projects will be received years into the future. On a day-to-day basis, you also have to regularly deal with rejection in the form of unsuccessful grant applications and declined journal submissions. You will get feedback from your students in teaching evaluations, which can be extremely gratifying, but they also can sometimes be an exas-

STARTING OUT / 17

perating audience. If you need steady affirmation you could find yourself in a tough situation. You will also need to be able to work in a competitive environment. I am constantly baffled by graduate students who say they resent being evaluated or being compared to one another. If you hate being judged, you are in the wrong institution. In the contemporary university system, almost everything (universities, departments, research grants, journals, conferences, academic presses, courses you teach . . .) is evaluated and, increasingly, ranked, often using assorted metrics. How you and the units you are affiliated with perform on these rankings will have real consequences for your professional life. If such evaluation and competitiveness is upsetting to you, you probably should rethink your decision to pursue an academic job. Being a well-rounded person is also a strong asset. People with a wide range of personalities have enjoyable academic careers, but it helps if you can draw upon diverse skill sets and personality traits. Doing research, for example, involves an extended, and sometimes lonely, focus on a single task. Teaching, in contrast, requires greater people skills and the ability to be the center of attention, something that might not mesh with the solitude of the archive or concentrated routine of the lab. Administration has its own interpersonal and leadership skill sets that (a subset of) academics are expected to master, often with minimal training. It is rare to find a single person who has the personality profile to excel in all of these areas, but you will be expected to competently perform fairly disparate tasks. Avoid grad school if you have personality traits hindering you from performing your main academic tasks. Nobody would recommend that you become a lifeguard if you fear the water, and the same applies to anxieties that stand in the way of academic duties. I know one student, for example, who absolutely detested writing, to the point that she saw it as a form of torture. Another student in the fifth year of his PhD observed that he hated being alone with his books and computer. Yet this is how graduate students and pro-

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fessors spend much of their time, and, honestly, it was a bit late in the day to be figuring that out! Another colleague discovered that he is terrified of teaching and suffered anxiety attacks in the classroom. He is now looking for work in another profession. All of these people are smart, serious individuals, but, given their personal characteristics, they probably should never have started a PhD. Not that you can always tell in advance, of course: I am a relatively shy person, and when I was a grad student, I was not sure that I would be able to handle being center stage as a university teacher. But, when I tried it, I found that I loved it. These are just a few of the reasons why it might not be in your best interests to pursue a PhD. Most fundamentally, when considering this prospect, remember that a PhD is training for a career in research or teaching or both, often (but not always) within the university. If you have the right mix of career ambitions and personality traits, an academic career can be an outstanding choice. Early on you should learn as much as possible about what an academic career involves so that you can decide whether it will meet your goals and mesh with your personality. You should also research what non-academic careers your degree may lead to. Find out what paths graduates of the program you are interested in have followed.

2 IGNORE THE MARKET

One feature of graduate degrees that makes them different from undergraduate degrees is their connection to potential jobs— a difference so significant that I have singled it out as something you need to dwell on when considering graduate school.

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For the longest time, university officials were uncomfortable talking about any connection between degrees and jobs. Their position was that the university does not provide job training— which was seen to be the role of technical trade schools or specialized colleges. Instead, people go to university to become knowledgeable and well-rounded citizens. The fact that getting a degree could help you land a job was an added bonus. You can still see remnants of this mind-set in relation to the undergraduate degree, which, with some important exceptions, is typically not presented as training for one type of job but is instead justified as a way to give students a general advanced education that can make them marketable across a range of occupations. The situation is different with graduate degrees: the PhD in particular is recognized as training for a narrow range of highly specialized jobs in the university and related fields. Master’s degrees sit in the middle, between a more generalist advanced education and specialized training. But no matter what degree you are thinking about, you should investigate the market you may be entering. The fact that universities and colleges are spread across the land makes it easy to think there will be plenty of jobs when you are done. The reality is that the university’s job profile is changing rapidly. The fact that departments and even entire disciplines exist today does not mean that they will in the future. One key driver of these changes has been the greater emphasis on a financial “bottom-line” orientation in universities, a way of thinking that is sometimes called neoliberalism. Where administrators once justified the existence of departments (and entire fields) in terms of their intellectual merit, their contributions to pure knowledge, or their broader social significance, university officials are now increasingly required to talk about how programs will result in jobs, produce marketable commodities, result in partnerships with industry, or contribute to the overall fiscal well-being of the nation. Although many people who work in the university find this an alien, misguided, and offensive way to think

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about the full range of benefits of research and advanced education, it appears this approach is here to stay. Regardless of what you may feel about the business mind-set, you must also accept the fact that students must think about how they will pay the bills after they graduate. This way of thinking extends to academic budgets as well. University presidents, deans, and even department chairs must now go begging to private donors for more of their operating funds. In practice, it is much easier to get donations for some disciplines (medicine and engineering) than others (classics and linguistics), worsening the financial tensions around campus. The upshot is that the humanities, social sciences, and even basic sciences are under stress, and their place on campus might be completely unrecognizable in twenty years. Fields that were once the absolute heart of the university—such as philosophy, classics, and English— are now regularly under threat. While there will undoubtedly be academic jobs into the future, the field is being restructured in unpredictable ways. You need to think about whether you will be able to land a job in your area when you graduate, whether in the university, the private sector, government, nongovernmental organizations, or industry. And do not believe the common story that the academic job market will soon expand because the existing group of professors is set to retire and will have to be replaced. I have heard such talk for more than twenty years and seen few signs of growth in the academic job market (rather, just the opposite has happened). Moreover, just because the university has to rejuvenate itself with new academic blood does not mean your particular discipline will be revitalized. At the same time, the gloom and doom can be overstated. In my department of sociology, around half of the PhD students who have graduated in the past decade have landed tenure-track professor jobs, in a field not noted for its appeal to a financial bottomline approach.

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One possible source of information about these issues is the career counseling center at your university. Set up a meeting with someone there and have a frank talk about the job prospects in your discipline. Be aware, though, that the center may or may not be focused on jobs for graduate students. Another route is to find out what former students have done after graduation by talking to the graduate chair or other professors of the program that interests you. How many students have gone on to academic and nonacademic careers, and where have they landed? You can ask to be put in contact with former students and get their take on the value of the degree. Whether to go to graduate school is one of the biggest decisions of your life, and you need to research it thoroughly. Above all, do not assume that the issue of getting a job will take care of itself once you graduate.

3 STAY AT THE SAME UNIVERSITY

The university is increasingly cosmopolitan, with students coming from different cities or even distant continents. But students may also be pulled in the other direction, choosing the local university because they want to enjoy the comforts of home. It can be tempting to obtain all three of your degrees (undergraduate, master’s, and PhD) at the same university: you have already established personal and professional friendships there, you know the routines of the university, you have a solid working relationship with faculty, and you even have a potential PhD supervisor lined up who will incorporate you into an existing research project. This makes it enticing to stay in the same place, but doing so is probably a mistake.

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Friends and colleagues often tell students to obtain their degrees at different universities, but seldom explain why. One reason is that departments have different strengths. Going to a different university or country exposes you to different perspectives. If you complete both your undergraduate and master’s at one location, some say that you have probably gotten everything you can from the kind of scholarship and research practiced in that department. (Whether this is true is a different matter.) Going somewhere else for your PhD shows that you have expanded your intellectual horizons. In contrast, others will see the fact that you did all of your degrees at the same place as an indication that you lack scholarly breadth and independence, and you were not wise or committed enough to follow this standard advice about studying elsewhere. I have been on hiring committees that ruled out otherwise intriguing job applicants largely because they received all their degrees at the same university. Unless you are part of a fast-track program that converts your master’s into a PhD, if you complete your master’s in the same place as your bachelor’s, you may be committing yourself to moving elsewhere to get a doctorate. While it is tempting either to stay in your home city to get a graduate degree or to move to a desirable location (such as New York City, somewhere close to a surf beach, or whatever works for you), you must carefully weigh academic questions like the reputation of the graduate program, the funding offered, and especially the potential to work with a desirable supervisor, as well as non-academic questions like the cost of living. Other important factors, however, can create exceptions to the rule about attending other universities. For example, you might stay at the same university but transfer to a lab doing different research. Alternately, maybe only one lab in the world has the expertise and equipment required to conduct your research. The same applies with supervisors: you may be working with the best person on leading-edge research in your area. In those cases it might make sense to stay where you are.

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So rather than simply following the rule about going to different universities, you might have to carefully weigh the pros and cons of staying at one university versus moving elsewhere. Some people have certainly landed faculty positions despite the fact they received all their degrees from the same university. Indeed, I have a colleague in exactly this situation, although he had the advantage of having received all his degrees at Cambridge, one of the top universities in the world. So while it might work out in the end, getting all your degrees at the same place is still frowned upon and can work against you. Note that this rule generally applies only to PhD students. While it might still be advisable to get your master’s somewhere other than where you did your undergraduate studies, it would not be held against you if you obtain both degrees at the same university. Just remember that you might face questions if you continue on to a PhD at the same institution.

4 FOLLOW THE MONEY BLINDLY

The choice of a graduate program and university to complete your master’s and, even more so, your PhD is a major life decision. Target three to five graduate programs as your short list of options and apply to all of them, partly because you may not get accepted into any one particular program. Also, graduate admission commonly involves an offer of funding, normally a combination of scholarships and teaching or research assistant (RA) work, and the offers you get from different institutions may vary dramatically.

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Deciding where to apply and putting together your application will involve a lot of work, both in investigating different programs and narrowing them down, and in crafting applications individually targeted at particular programs. If you get multiple offers, you need to gather lots of information, thoroughly investigate your choices, and get plenty of advice from multiple sources before finalizing your decision. Tailor your master’s and PhD applications so they fit the particular places you are applying to. Admissions committees are looking for a fit between your research interests and those of the department you are applying to—in other words, ensuring they have the capacity to support your research. You need to show you are a good fit and are therefore making a well-thought-out choice to target the particular department. My graduate program recently received an application in which the student accidentally referred to another institution and department throughout as the place she was keen to study. The student later realized her error and sent a corrected but almost identical statement— she had only changed the name of the university and program. Our admissions committee was not impressed. Clearly she had given little thought to whether she belonged in our department, and that was one important reason we declined her application. In your statement or letter of application, you should identify a potential supervisor or possibly several choices, along with potential committee members. Talk to your current supervisor or instructors about people you might work with at another university. More proactive students will contact potential supervisors informally in advance, normally by e-mail, to gauge their interest. Depending on the discipline and university, it may be essential for PhD applicants to have lined up a potential supervisor if they hope to have any chance of admission. You should inquire about the importance of finding a supervisor in advance, perhaps by contacting the graduate chair of the program you are applying to. If someone has agreed to supervise you, mention

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this in your application. Consider talking to potential supervisors on the phone or meeting with them, if convenient. Some professors will formally interview potential students and even ask them to complete tests before the application process commences. But do not be discouraged if they do not reply to your initial e-mail. Some professors are so swamped by such inquiries that they prefer to let the graduate admissions committee sort the applications. Another solid option is to consult with your current professors. They can tell you about how these things are done in your field. Many professors are more responsive to an e-mail from a professor saying they have a great potential grad student than they are to an e-mail or cold call from the student herself. Sometimes a faculty member may agree to supervise you in advance of your application. This arrangement definitely strengthens your chances of being accepted. In a best-case scenario, that faculty member may even be able to promise you work as an RA if you join that program. This can be a great opportunity both in terms of financial support and in terms of professional development, but it can also have a downside. If your advisor is funding your work, you will probably be obligated to focus on a particular project, perhaps within a narrow framework. Although the funding and technical training are great, you may have a hard time establishing that you are an independent researcher when job hunting. You need to evaluate carefully the consequences that various forms of funding will have on your future marketability. That said, I worked as an RA with my supervisor, and the coauthored publications that resulted were important in helping me get a job. Faculty may understandably be reluctant to commit until they get to know you, and, if so, it is fine in your application to simply say you have discussed the possibility of supervision with a faculty member. Be careful to ensure any potential faculty you might want to work with will actually be available— the list of graduate faculty on a program’s website may not be current. For example,

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my graduate program recently received a PhD application from a student who based her statement on the possibility of working with a particular faculty member. The problem was that the faculty member she identified was about to move to another university. We were not able to identify a fit between the student’s interests and our remaining faculty, and this was a key factor in declining her application. Most departments have a strong bias against hiring their own graduate students, at least when the students have just completed their PhD (it is more common for such graduates to be hired back if they get a tenure-track job at another university and work there for a year or two). So if your dream job is to work as a professor in a specific institution, do not get your PhD there. Even this rule has to be qualified, though, as some elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge tend to prefer students who come from those schools. I should also point out that it is unwise to plan on getting a job in one particular institution anyway— odds are long that a job in your specialty will open up at that place at the exact moment you are on the job market, and that you would be the one chosen. Instead, a key part of following the career path of an academic means accepting that you will have to cast a wide net geographically when job hunting, and you (and loved ones) need to be prepared to move where the job is. Do not think that you are a “special case” and that this does not apply to you. Ideally, you may get multiple attractive offers of master’s or PhD admission and be in the desirable position of having to make a choice. If so, inform the graduate chairs of the offers you received, especially if they are being outbid by another program. In some cases the graduate chair may be able to raise his offer to compete with a higher offer from elsewhere. This may or may not be possible, so ask, but it is best not to push too hard. To thoroughly investigate their choices, students sometimes visit the institutions whose offers they are considering. Some departments might even have money set aside to help fund such visits, so do not be afraid to

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ask about this. You can also ask to be put in touch with faculty and current and former students and talk to them about their experiences. You have to weigh the different components of each situation according to your needs— the location, the funding, the merits and reputation of the program, and who might supervise you. For example, depending on your financial circumstances, you may not be able to afford to go to your first choice if you are offered much more funding elsewhere. That said, the quality and reputation of the graduate program, and especially the quality of the supervisor, may be more important than funding. I received three PhD offers and ultimately chose the one with the least funding but the best supervisor. This meant declining a prestigious and lucrative entrance scholarship from a rival institution. It was probably the wisest choice I made in my career. I struggled financially in the early years of my PhD, but the opportunity to work with a worldclass supervisor and mentor in my field, and to become involved in his research and coauthor numerous publications with him, eventually far outweighed the financial hit I took. Also consider the prestige of the universities and departments you are considering. Reputation matters in academic life, and prominent universities provide you with immediate legitimation and elevate your status above other students graduating from lesser-known universities, although a particular department’s reputation as strong or weak may be more important than that of the university in question. Lesser-known universities and colleges can produce excellent academics, but the career path can be smoother for students graduating from top-tier universities. Again, this should not be the exclusive deciding factor, but something to keep in the mix when contemplating your options. In short, be prepared to commit a lot of time and thought to deciding where to apply for your graduate degrees and to weighing your options.

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5 DO AN UNFUNDED PHD

If you receive an offer for a PhD that does not include a funding arrangement, you should politely walk away. If the funding arrangement is vague, you should clarify it as much as possible to make sure it has substance. While many master’s students are unfunded, the normal practice is for PhD students to be supported through some combination of scholarships, teaching, or from their supervisor’s individual research grants. An offer of admission without an explicit financial package can be interpreted several different ways, but none are encouraging. Most obviously, a lack of funding signals that the department is not committed to you. From their perspective, admitting you unfunded can have the advantage of keeping their enrollment numbers up, but it is a low-risk gamble on a student they are probably unsure they want to admit in the first place. You do not want to walk into a situation where you are viewed in that light. A complete lack of funding can also be a sign of problems or even crisis in your department, university, or discipline. If you enter a program or institution that cannot fund students working on their highest degree, those financial limitations will dog your time through graduate school and even into your future job. Beyond what the lack of funding might say about the status of your field or how the admissions committee is viewing you, an unfunded PhD will require you to support yourself while completing your courses and research and writing your thesis. This precarious money situation is relentlessly demanding, and it can seriously delay your time to completion or even make it impossible to complete your degree.

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In short, no funding is usually a remarkably bad sign. If you receive an offer that is not supported by funds, look elsewhere. If the only offers you receive are for unfunded PhDs, you should rethink your career aspirations.

6 DO AN INTERDISCIPLINARY PHD

Looking for a great way to fall through the cracks? Do an interdisciplinary PhD. This is likely a provocative statement given the considerable support (or at least lip service) given in the modern university to interdisciplinarity, that is, doing academic work that crosses two or more disciplines, such as a PhD that combines sociology, history, and film studies. Any controversy evaporates, however, once you recognize the crucial distinction between an interdisciplinary PhD as an intellectual orientation— such as a doctorate in sociology that is influenced by history and film studies— and an interdisciplinary PhD that has no official home discipline— a degree in something like “interdisciplinary studies.” Historically, academic thought has been assigned to distinct intellectual realms, such as the natural and social sciences. Over time the expertise developed in these domains was further separated into the academic disciplines we recognize today, such as philosophy, geography, economics, history, and forestry. An academic will claim expertise in one or sometimes two such areas. Beyond being a way to categorize scholarship and research, disciplines are also the university’s key administrative units. Departments are organized around disciplines (obstetrics, music, archaeology). Consequently, funds also tend to go toward disciplines.

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When a faculty member is hired, he is typically hired into a department identified with a discipline. As a graduate student you are also normally aligned with a department. The past few decades have seen the rise of an interdisciplinary mind-set that considers these intellectual divisions random and counterproductive. The world does not come chopped up into separate intellectual spheres, the argument goes. To develop a full understanding of anything you study, it is best to garner insights from different fields. A student working in rehabilitation medicine could benefit from developments in the field of social work. Likewise, computer scientists have much to learn about game playing from psychology and philosophy, and so on. As an intellectual project, interdisciplinarity is eager to break down the barriers that needlessly split up knowledge. Although it can be challenging to do so in practice— and too many students rally to the banner of interdisciplinarity before they grasp the rich diversity contained in their own disciplines— the desire to think across disciplines is admirable and often productive. The appeal of this broad-minded view has led some universities to grant interdisciplinary degrees. Students in these programs have no formal departmental home (or a nominal home in one department) and are identified as “interdisciplinary students.” They have more scope to take courses across several disciplines and greater flexibility in putting together a supervisory committee. When their degree is completed, they can say they majored in “interdisciplinary studies” or that they have an “interdisciplinary PhD.” The problem with all this is that not aligning yourself with a recognizable academic field means you can be repeatedly overlooked. No department feels that it “owns” interdisciplinary students; you are not fully “theirs.” This is important because departments decide who gets funding, assign teaching jobs, and play a key role in recommending students for awards. Departments typically look to reward their own students first. Thus, interdisciplinary students risk falling through the organizational cracks.

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This problem also extends to the job market. Academic positions are usually part of a department, and faculty members in that department are looking for someone working within their disciplinary tradition, broadly defined. This can make it easy for hiring committees to dismiss applicants with an interdisciplinary PhD. One of my friends who obtained an interdisciplinary degree ran into this head-on when he applied for a job in a political science department. His supervisor phoned the chair of that department to inquire about his student’s chances. The chair bluntly explained: “This is a political science department. The job ad said political science, not interdisciplinary.” Comparable difficulties can face interdisciplinary students when submitting articles to journals. Editors and reviewers try to assess whether a paper makes a contribution to their particular field, so articles not firmly situated in any specific discipline can be at a disadvantage. That is not to say that departments do not hire across disciplines. Many people with degrees in political science, for example, are hired into sociology departments, or people with degrees in gender studies find positions in many different units. Academics with interdisciplinary degrees have also found jobs within departments, but such a strategy carries real risks. Thankfully, you can get the intellectual benefits of interdisciplinary studies without having that as your formal degree. Departments now routinely allow students to take courses in other disciplines. You can also have people from other departments on your supervisory committee, or seek out their advice on a more informal basis. Most important, nothing is stopping you from reading widely in other fields or collaborating with people from different scholarly backgrounds. As a final note, difficulties with interdisciplinary degrees are not as big for students at the undergraduate level or who are doing their course-based master’s. For them, having an interdisciplinary degree might still be interpreted as a sign of scholarly breadth and intellectual curiosity.

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7 BELIEVE ADVERTISED COMPLETION TIMES

When starting your degree or contemplating admission offers, you will want to know how long you will be in graduate school. This knowledge is particularly important in managing your finances. So it would be nice if you were given reliable information about completion times. Frustratingly, it can be hard to pin down exactly how long it will take to complete your degree. Universities are under pressure to speed up the time it takes their students to complete graduate degrees. Consequently, departments sometimes publicize their students’ average time to completion, and these numbers can vary significantly from university to university and department to department. That said, such numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt. So, for example, statements that read “We expect our PhD students to finish in four years” tell you nothing about how long it actually takes to complete the degree. Also, departments have not been particularly great at maintaining accurate data on times to completion, and there can be serious questions about how such numbers are calculated. For example, some students will change their status from “full-time” to “parttime,” something that extends completion times. Students who have been in the PhD for a long time may, if their funding runs out, formally withdraw from the program so that they no longer have to pay fees. Such students will then be doing their PhD off the books, continuing to work on their thesis and then applying for readmission (and pay a readmission fee) when they are almost done. Those “off the books” students are left out of their department’s time-to-completion calculations (because they are not registered students), making the department’s numbers look a lot better.

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The point is you should be wary about accepting completion times at face value. Make some informal inquiries on your own about how long you will likely be in graduate school. The best sources for this information are faculty members and existing students, who will have a better sense of the real timelines. Also remember that those times to completion are averages. It may take you longer or shorter than average to finish your degree, depending on a series of things like the type of research you are conducting, the quality of supervision you receive, your funding arrangements, any life events you might encounter— such as illness or a change in relationship status— and how motivated you are to finish quickly.

8 IGNORE THE INFORMATION THE UNIVERSITY PROVIDES YOU

When you start grad school, the university will flood you with information, outlining services on campus and your obligations as a graduate student. It will include the code of student conduct, a list of services your student association provides, and information about human resources, disability services, the human rights office, the writing center, and so on, almost all of which will be available online. You will get bombarded with this information as you prepare to start your degree— not the best time for it, given the many other high-priority administrative and personal matters you will also be facing. Most students end up ignoring a lot of this information. Doing so is not likely to cause you any immediate problems, but not familiarizing yourself with the services available to you— and

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your obligations as a graduate student— can come back to bite you in a big way. Claiming you were not aware of the rules will typically not work in your favor. In preparing this book, I interviewed several people who have administrative positions across campus, including disciplinary officers, associate chairs, the head of research ethics, and people who work in financial services, writing services, and international student services. Over and over again, they repeated that students who found themselves in trouble (of various sorts) routinely did not know the rules and what was required (or forbidden), did not follow easily available advice, and did not take advantage of existing services, often because they did not know those services existed. If you are smart and motivated enough to read this book, be sure to also take advantage of the information provided by your university. Visit the web pages and attend some of the many workshops open to you. Doing so could save you monstrous headaches down the road. You might also discover that other graduate students will seek you out as a source of valuable information.

9 EXPECT THE MONEY TO TAKE CARE OF ITSELF

We all encounter romantic or humorous images of the povertystricken graduate student laboring to finish his thesis while trying to make ends meet. Such depictions are unfortunate, as the reality of being unable to pay rent or having to get groceries from the campus food bank is not actually all that charming or funny— and more likely to happen than you might think. To avoid financial troubles, you need to carefully manage your resources from the

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start. Do not assume that you will be taken care of financially simply because you have been admitted to a degree program. After you are admitted, your department will send you some correspondence that sets out the financial terms of your acceptance. In some cases, such as master’s programs in certain disciplines or at certain universities, you might not receive any funding. For a PhD, the department typically details a minimum dollar amount you will receive over a set period of time (say three or four years) and the form those funds will take— grant, scholarship, teaching assistantship, and so on. This letter formalizes your funding and thus is part of a contract between you and the university. Keep a signed copy in a safe place in case of some future disagreement about what you were promised. Implicitly, these letters mean you are not automatically entitled to additional funds from the department or university. Do not put any faith in vague assurances that your supervisor or the department will try to find additional funds to help you out. As I discuss below, there might be more money available, but it is not something you can count on. This is a vital point to appreciate, because funding offers typically cover only the first few years of the degree, often leaving students scrambling for money to cover their remaining time in grad school should their funding expire before they are finished— which happens regularly. Funding letters can also sometimes include conditions you might have to meet to keep your funding, such as applying for certain grants or meeting specified performance expectations. Part of your financial planning should involve applying for grants and scholarships. These might be offered by your department, university, or by national or even international funding agencies. Make it your business to learn about such possibilities, something that can entail regular meetings with the graduate chair’s assistant or with the unit responsible for awards and scholarships at your university. Subscribe to mailing lists designed to keep students aware of funding opportunities.

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Some grad students never apply for scholarships because they are busy, do not believe they will be successful, or fear rejection. It is nonetheless important to find the time to apply, even if you consider it a long shot. Grant writing will be part of your future job description, and the sooner you start to develop that skill set, the better. It also becomes easier the more you do it. If the application requires a statement describing your proposed research, you will have to put in a lot of work to make it competitive, but that effort will also pay off in terms of pushing you to explain why your research is interesting and important. Even long shots are still a shot. Last year, for example, my department managed the initial application process for a prestigious (and lucrative) national scholarship competition. To my surprise, only one student from my department applied. The committee thought it a weak application, but since it was the only one, we forwarded it on to the national organization. Several months later we were thrilled to learn that the student won the scholarship. The lesson here is to keep applying for grants and scholarships. If you are not successful, the application process still helps you refine your grant-writing skills. If you are successful, grants and scholarships are a feather in your cap, a line on your curriculum vitae (CV), a reputation builder, and dollars in your pocket. Winning one scholarship can also lead to winning another, as success breeds success. You can also seek out additional work as an RA. Faculty members sometimes have independent grants to fund their research projects. Ask around about whether your department (or closely affiliated departments) has any individuals who need an RA. You might also teach, either at your home university or at nearby universities and colleges. Such positions can provide an income, but they are not something you can count on. Contract teaching tends to be poorly paid and time-consuming, especially for a new teacher, and can dramatically slow your progress through your degree. So, you might teach courses for financial reasons, but be careful about your time commitments.

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If money is particularly tight, you might have to do some work outside the university, draw on personal savings, or borrow money. None of these situations are ideal, but I particularly caution you about the dangers of two suspiciously easy sources of money: student loans and lines of credit. Remember that banks are not your friends. They do not exist to solve your financial difficulties, but to profit from you. The interest rates they charge on lines of credit can mean that over an extended period you will pay many times the initial price of any purchase. Do not get sucked into believing you need to live the life of a professional before you have a professional’s salary. Financial difficulties can be compounded for international students who might not be eligible for national scholarship competitions and might be paying bigger fees. Such students often find themselves trying to support an entire family on a funding package geared toward the expenses of a single person. International students can be bound by visa rules preventing them from working off campus or restricting the type and amount of work they can do. These are important issues to check out when applying to schools located in different countries. Most students will have to think more concretely about financial management than they have done in the past, which is not necessarily a bad thing. If you are in grad school, you are probably at least in your twenties or thirties. Chances are you have postponed serious financial planning long enough, and it is time to think about what you want out of life beyond a degree and a job, and how you are going to afford it. So, for example, would you like to graduate debt-free? Buy a house within five years of graduating? Start a family? All those goals obviously have financial implications. You might quickly discover you do not have the same resources as your friends who are fully employed. Rather than ignore these financial realities, you are better off embracing the lifestyle of the frugal graduate student. A regime of “voluntary simplicity” has its virtues. Figure out your existing costs and how they can

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be reduced. In my case, I worked out how much I could save in gas, parking, insurance, and maintenance by not owning a car. The day after I arrived in Vancouver to start my PhD, I bought a reasonably priced bicycle. During my entire time in grad school, that was essentially my only transportation cost. I rode the bike everywhere, and it provided a chance to unwind and get rid of stress, to exercise, and to explore a beautiful city (often bathed in rain!). Cutting costs can be especially tough for individuals who are returning to school after having a job, as they have become accustomed to living with perks that after a while start to feel like necessities. Live like a graduate student today, so you do not need to live like one for years to come. In your calculations, be sure to set aside money to cover emergency or unexpected expenses. I did not know, for example, that my scholarship counted as taxable income (a rule that has subsequently been changed in Canada), meaning that, at the end of my first year in the PhD, I had to scramble to come up with thousands of dollars to pay taxes (thanks again to the bank of Mom and Dad!). You are not the first graduate student who will have to do some financial planning. Services are available to you on campus, such as the financial assistance office, which can advise you on initiatives to help you cut costs and may even provide emergency loans. The city where you are located might also have resources you can tap into. Spend a bit of time early in your degree learning about these services. Also, if you are struggling financially, be sure to let people know you need money. As few grad students are rich, it might be good to briefly point out any particular factor that makes your situation worse than average, if you do not mind sharing that knowledge. It is possible your supervisor, graduate chair, or other individuals might be able to point you toward other funding sources. The people around you cannot help if they do not know you have a problem.

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SUPERVISORS

By far one of the biggest decisions you will make in grad school is your choice of supervisor. It is so monumental that many students go to a specific university just to work with a particular professor, even if they are offered more funding elsewhere. Your supervisor will be the key person in your graduate education, helping structure your progress in grad school while also shaping your prospects both within the program and beyond. Give some thought to what you want from a supervisor, beyond a glowing letter of recommendation once you complete your degree. Not every professor is a good supervisor. The world leader in a particular research field might be an indifferent or even incompetent supervisor. Consider whether you envision an intimate mentor–mentee situation or prefer a more hands-off arrangement. Itemize all the attributes you are looking for in an ideal supervisor, but do not be surprised if you cannot find someone who has all of these. Instead of holding out for the perfect person, weigh the assorted pros and cons of your supervisory options. You must actively work at the supervisor relationship, or it risks falling apart. Some students find it strange that they need to play a role in managing this relationship, thinking that the title of “supervisor” implies their role is to stand idly by waiting for

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sound guidance. Your supervisor will sometimes volunteer tidbits of career wisdom, but on a more routine basis it is your job to seek guidance on a wide range of issues. Expect to make regular contact with both your supervisor and your wider committee. Communication is key, so ask questions and schedule meetings. You are ultimately responsible for making the relationship work, so do not assume that you will receive the guidance you need without some effort on your part. A good supervisor has a tremendous amount to offer to dedicated and motivated graduate students, and a bad one can wreck your graduate school experience, so choose wisely and manage the relationship well.

10 GO IT ALONE AND STAY QUIET

In one of the first seminar courses I taught, I compiled a package of photocopied articles for the students to read. One of the photocopies turned out to be a complete mess: pages were not numbered, some pages were missing, and paragraphs were in the wrong order. The article was unreadable. I only discovered my mistake the morning of the class. Curious about their reaction, I asked the students to discuss that paper’s main arguments. After an awkward moment, some of the braver souls valiantly struggled to provide an interpretation. I quickly intervened, kindly informing them of my screw-up. Relieved, they laughed and admitted they thought something might be wrong. I asked why they did not bring this to my attention prior to class,

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and the ensuing discussion was one of the most honest moments I have experienced in a graduate course. Those students— a particularly candid and thoughtful group— said they did not want to point out the mistake because they were unsure it actually was a mistake. Much of what they were reading was entirely new to them, and on first exposure many of those works appeared unintelligible. So, the messed-up reading was an extreme example of the familiar experience of having to read works they could not (initially) make sense of. More tellingly, they did not want to risk revealing their own ignorance— the problem might actually lay in their embarrassingly limited abilities to understand complicated scholarly works. As such, they were embracing the old adage that it is better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. The class talked about this fear of revealing ignorance. And while no one anywhere enjoys looking foolish, the anxiety about appearances is heightened in grad school. It seems particularly pronounced among first-year students, who are surrounded by professors— and perhaps fellow students— who have detailed knowledge of fields previously unknown to them. No one wants to appear less competent or intelligent than such striking individuals (although first-year master’s students may not realize that some of their seminar classmates are PhD students and that no one expects the new master’s students to be at a PhD level yet). The understandable temptation is therefore to go quiet and not ask questions. And this is fine— to a point. It is probably wise to not ask about things you could easily figure out for yourself, such as the assigned readings for the week. A lot of information about your department and faculty will be on the university website, for example. But if silence becomes your general strategy because you think you can figure out grad school on your own, you risk entering a mist of misunderstandings and avoidable mistakes.

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Most routines and rituals of grad school will be new to you, as they were new to almost everyone who came before you. As a new graduate student, you go through a kind of culture shock, similar to the transition you experienced from high school to university. You are in a new world with new rules, likely moving from big, often anonymous undergraduate classes into a program small enough that you will get to know everyone in your year very well and where your professors will know your name. Nobody was born knowing how to put together an application package, supervise a seminar, or assemble a thesis committee. To some extent you can learn by paying careful attention and seeking guidance from books such as this one. But those approaches will only get you so far, because they cannot address what is unique to your situation. To survive and thrive, you have to accept the fact that you will need the help of other people, so start asking questions. Most people will like helping you. Become familiar with your department and the resources available to you. Identify people who can help you. The graduate chair is the obvious person to start with. His job is to guide you, so take advantage of that resource. Other important sources of information will be the instructors of any classes you take. You are enrolled in those courses to learn, not because you are already an expert in the field. You are expected not to know things. The chair of the department is also available to help you if you have particularly serious problems. The people working in the financial assistance office can be a great source of advice on monetary matters. Services are also available to help you deal with any physical or mental health issues that might arise. Save the contact details of all such people and do not be shy about asking them questions. Also be smart about directing your questions to the right people. Do not ask a professor about how to calculate fees, and do not ask an administrative assistant about a scholarly matter requiring knowledge of the discipline. Particularly important is your supervisor, who is a key figure in steering you through grad school. I frequently refer to your super-

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visor because she is the person you should be consulting regularly for advice on moving forward with your degree. Unfortunately, grad students can be anxious about asking their supervisor too many questions, again for fear of looking stupid or because they do not want to be a pest. Remember, however, supervisors realize that you cannot know everything in advance. They signed on to help you when they agreed to supervise your project. If you are still concerned about pestering them, one strategy is to present them with several questions at a time, rather than firing off an e-mail each time a new issue arises. Your questions can be easier to address in one sitting. Finally, take advantage of the knowledge of other grad students. No student understands everything about grad school, and at the outset almost everyone will be as anxious as you are. Ask how everyone is coping. Consult second-year students, who have survived their first year. Having gone through many of the processes you are currently experiencing provides them with plenty of concrete advice they are usually happy to share.

11 CHOOSE THE COOLEST SUPERVISOR

Several years ago I pulled aside a graduate student and advised her to find a different PhD supervisor. I delicately, but clearly, pointed out that her current supervisor had a record of relating poorly to others and was seen as a source of extreme irritation by many departmental colleagues. The student was torn. Despite these concerns, her supervisor was also charismatic, had published in prominent venues, and had research interests that were reason-

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ably close to those of the student. So she rolled the dice and maintained the relationship. Three years later the student sat in my office completely distraught. Her supervisor would not respond to e-mails and phone calls and was taking forever to comment on drafts of her thesis chapters. In essence, her supervisor failed her as a mentor, her degree was in crisis, and she needed to find a new supervisor quickly. Screwing up your choice of supervisor is one of the biggest missteps you can make in grad school. It is also easy to do. If you choose a supervisor because of one overriding factor, such as a desire for someone who is personable, or is not intimidating, or has a big name, you risk choosing poorly. Your supervisor is expected to take you under her wing and guide you through grad school and, with luck, help launch your career. The academic community often judges students and junior faculty in light of their supervisor’s reputation. It may take years for you to build an independent profile, and some individuals will always consider you part of a lineage traced back to your supervisor. Choosing a mentor is arguably the most important decision you will make in grad school, probably even more important than the topic you study. So choose carefully, and do not let any one factor sway your decision too much. Inquire about whether others recognize your potential supervisor as a solid choice. Do her students finish their degrees, and in a reasonable time? Does she publish work of high quality in prominent venues? Does she have a record of getting her students published? Does she coauthor articles with her students? Is the supervisor too overwhelmed with other commitments to provide you the type of attention you need? Has she secured research grants? What kinds of jobs did her previous students obtain? Is the supervisor immersed in her academic community? Also consider the personality of a potential supervisor. Like any other institution, the university has its share of unpleasant and unstable people, so get a sense of her as a person. Do colleagues

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find her easy to work with? This question is important, since your supervisor will need to manage relations with the rest of your committee. Consult widely. No single factor should carry the day, so weigh as many factors as possible before you tie your professional life so closely to one person. This is true for master’s students as well, but the stakes are higher for PhD students, whose choice of supervisor will produce untold consequences later on. The availability of an appropriate supervisor should definitely affect your decision about which PhD program to attend. The most focused PhD students tend to enroll in a specific degree program especially to work with a particular professor. That is an excellent approach, since it recognizes how your supervisor is key to the grad school experience, but it still requires you to do your homework. The choice of supervisor can be a particularly difficult one if you are applying for a PhD at a university away from home. I have a friend who moved thousands of miles to work with two prominent theorists housed in the same department. When he arrived, he discovered that they were not on speaking terms. So, at a minimum, if you are going somewhere to work with a particular supervisor, contact her in advance to make sure she will be around. Also ensure she is accepting new grad students— sometimes soughtafter professors limit the number of students they supervise so as to not overextend themselves. If the person you have your sights set on is known as a good supervisor, there are likely other students seeking to work with her. If you are going to a university mainly to work with that person, make sure she will actually work with you. Admittedly, deciding on a supervisor from afar can mean you only have limited information to work with in making that decision. You might be able to ascertain someone’s research profile, but have more difficulty assessing a range of interpersonal factors. Again, this means you should consult widely to gain a detailed and nuanced sense of this individual as a scholar, supervisor, and per-

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son. This process should include gathering information from the professors in your undergraduate program. Occasionally departments assign incoming students a supervisor. Check with the graduate chair about the status of such assignments. Sometimes the person you are assigned to is expected to supervise your degree. Other times, as in my department, it is more of a temporary arrangement, where the faculty member is a kind of primary contact until you choose your own supervisor. The temporary supervisor could become your permanent one, but not necessarily.

12 HAVE CO-SUPERVISORS

Finding a supervisor can be a difficult process and involve agonizing choices. You may feel unable to choose between two people, and consider a co-supervisor arrangement as a way to resolve the dilemma, thinking it can give you the best of both worlds. I caution you against having co-supervisors. Sometimes co-supervision is necessary. For example, you may want an excellent junior faculty member as your supervisor, but your institution may not allow faculty to supervise on their own until they have tenure, although the senior faculty member may in practice remain in the background. Co-supervision can also help if one of the two supervisors becomes unavailable at some point during your degree, perhaps for medical reasons or because she is on sabbatical. While co-supervisory arrangements sometimes work, in general they should be avoided. One problem is that they diffuse respon-

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sibility for you between two faculty members, so neither professor may take charge at key moments. To put it in a nutshell: if you have two supervisors, you do not have one. Co-supervisors can also make your program unwieldy, unnecessarily murky, and complicated. Your supervisor should take the lead in helping you direct your project and manage your committee, and she should act as decision maker if your committee disagrees on some point. With co-supervisors you can get mixed messages. While professors normally do not co-supervise with each other unless they have a good working relationship, conflicts might emerge anyway, either over the direction of your project or as a result of some problem or tension surfacing between them unrelated to you. Some faculty will actively avoid co-supervision arrangements, preferring to take the lead as sole supervisor. If you are working in the laboratory sciences, you can also run into further difficulties in scheduling resources for two labs. Scheduling meetings with co-supervisors is more complicated than scheduling meetings with only one supervisor. First, there is the difficulty of scheduling meetings with busy professors, a significant factor that you should not underestimate. Meeting individually with each co-supervisor also creates problems in trying to keep everyone on the same page. Some professors like to meet with all their graduate students collectively. Having co-supervisors again complicates this. When you have a single supervisor, you can often have important discussions about your work that occur spontaneously when you bump into each other. With co-supervisors, it can be challenging to keep the second person in the loop. A further challenge with co-supervisors is that you have to wait for the approval of both co-supervisors to move forward at each stage. As supervisor, I read drafts of comprehensive papers and thesis drafts, the student revises them, and I decide when they are ready to go to the rest of the committee. If the student needs to get their work reviewed and approved by two supervisors, turnaround time may be lengthened at each stage, and the process gets bogged down.

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In short, co-supervision has multiple pitfalls. Tough as it may be, choose one supervisor. The other person can still contribute by serving as a member of your committee.

13 DO NOT CLARIFY YOUR SUPERVISOR’S (OR YOUR OWN) EXPECTATIONS

Like any complex and important relationship, the situation between you and your supervisor can be highly personal and idiosyncratic, which produces endless possibilities for tensions and misunderstandings. This is particularly the case if your supervisor is also your employer who is paying your scholarships out of her research grant. In such situations, students tend to see their funding package as a scholarship that allows them to pay their bills. Your supervisor, who runs the lab or research project, is more inclined to see such arrangements as a kind of employment contract, where grad students are paid workers on collaborative projects. Problems can also arise, for example, when your supervisor assumes that you will work a set number of hours per week on her projects, or be in the lab every day, but does not make those expectations clear to you. Rather than let misunderstandings fester until they come to an ugly head, discuss expectations with your supervisor at the earliest stages of your degree. In those discussions be sure to explicitly ask what your supervisor expects from you. Address key potential sources of conflict, particularly any issues about funding or about how your contributions to collaborative projects will be recognized, say, in coauthorship. If you work in areas where intellectual property is a potential issue, you should clarify who owns or co-owns the products of the

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research in which you are involved. It is wise to get such understandings in writing, in case any confusion arises later. Such conflicts can happen in almost any field: over the ownership of data, of computer programs, of psychological counseling interventions, and of coauthored manuscripts. One associate dean I interviewed for this book recalled a student and supervisor becoming so caught up in a fight over who owned a collection of insects that she had to walk across campus to personally retrieve the bugs. Likewise, think about what you want from a mentor, and spell out for her what you are hoping for from your relationship. How much help and what kind of help can you expect from your supervisor as your degree progresses? Do you share the same assumptions about your time to completion? How often will you meet? How have previous supervisory relationships worked? If your prospective supervisor is not willing or able to provide you with what you need, better to find that out at the earliest stage possible. Your supervisory needs and expectations will probably evolve as you progress through your degree, so do not be afraid to revisit these issues with your supervisor. Such frank discussions are vital for all parties, but they are particularly important for students who come from different cultures, where there can be starkly different traditions of mentor-student relationships.

14 AVOID YOUR SUPERVISOR AND COMMITTEE

If you find yourself avoiding your supervisor or committee members at any point in your degree, or not answering their commu-

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nications promptly, something has gone seriously off the rails. Both regular formal appointments or meetings with your supervisor and committee members and informal opportunities to chat with them are important to your progress and to your growth as a scholar and researcher. You will likely see your supervisor more often than the rest of your committee. I recommend meetings with your supervisor at least once a month, and more often at critical periods in your degree, such as around the time you finalize your thesis proposal or enter the home stretch with the thesis itself. Your whole committee will likely meet relatively infrequently, so it is good to keep your committee members in the loop about your progress; this can often be accomplished through periodic e-mail updates, Skype meetings, or brief hallway chats. If you bump into your supervisor and chat for five or ten minutes off the cuff, you may be surprised at how much can be accomplished in such a brief impromptu talk. Sometimes students are intimidated by their supervisor and committee members. It is important for you to get comfortable chatting casually with them, so the more time you spend around them in different contexts, the better. You will learn a tremendous amount through informal conversations with your supervisor, so be certain to take advantage of any such opportunities. It is not unknown for graduate students struggling with deadlines to start avoiding such contact and even to joke about how they are ducking their supervisor or committee. The situation can become compounded with a busy supervisor and committee members, who may be happy to let your program slide as they attend to what may seem more pressing matters. This kind of “mutual invisibility pact” is dysfunctional and will only harm your work and your progress. It is your responsibility to keep your work moving ahead, and this includes maintaining regular contact with your supervisor and committee. If you are struggling, talk with your supervisor and committee members about both the content and the progress of your work. This is a time you want to be

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talking with them more, not less. Produce an agenda of items you want to discuss at the meetings. Afterward send an e-mail to all the participants, outlining what you discussed and any decisions reached. Doing this will optimize your time with your committee, help ensure continuity in your discussions and expectations, and reduce chances for misunderstandings. This process might be just what you need to help you through your difficulties. For busy faculty, an electronic record of your discussions that can be referred to later is a helpful reminder of where you left things. Some students who find themselves struggling commit even worse screw-ups, for example, ignoring e-mails from their supervisor or committee members or not responding to them for a long time, or not showing up for scheduled meetings or backing out on such meetings at the last minute. Any of these are bad mistakes. You are only postponing or avoiding challenges. This stuff makes you look bad in front of people whom you may soon ask to write letters of reference. You may even give your supervisor and committee members reason to consider ending the working relationship. If you are struggling, it is better to admit this, and you may well get valuable support and guidance. Even if you are sailing along, regular contact is important and may enrich your work further in unforeseen ways.

15 STAY IN A BAD RELATIONSHIP

For any number of personal or professional reasons, the relationship between student and supervisor can become dysfunctional or break down entirely. If you suspect you are approaching this point, understand that changing supervisors can be a high-risk prospect.

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When contemplating a change in supervisors, you need to weigh a series of complicated factors, including your interests, what stage you are at in your degree program, and how tightly you are tied to your supervisor’s program of research. Sometimes a change might be the right move, but it might also be that the best you can hope for is to salvage what you can from the current situation. The risks of dropping a supervisor are particularly acute in the laboratory sciences. If your supervisor recruited you to work on a specific project and paid your funding out of her grants, she might be angry and disappointed in your decision. If you are late in your degree, and your research involves equipment or data that is effectively her property, the prospect of changing supervisors is particularly risky, and you could find that you must change research areas entirely. Likewise, if your funding is tied to your current supervisor’s research project, you have to contemplate what will happen to you financially if you change supervisors. As a last resort, you might be asked to leave the program if you break with your supervisor and cannot find a replacement. So be careful about making a split. However, if your research interests evolve more in the direction of those of another faculty member— who would be an appropriate supervisor and who can offer you adequate funding— making a switch might be the right choice. In the humanities and social sciences, changing supervisors can still be a delicate process, but the stakes are not as high as in the natural sciences. You might find that you end up working with someone who is not clearly an expert in your area— which can make for difficulties when it comes time for her to write letters supporting your job search— but at a minimum you can usually find someone who will be willing to step in and supervise your project, provided you have a good rapport with the department and have not tainted your reputation. If you do make a break, be careful about bad-mouthing your previous supervisor, or people in your department may come to see you as difficult or negative.

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16 EXPECT PEOPLE TO HOLD YOUR HAND

This year it dawned upon Gerard— a senior PhD student from my department primed to enter the job market— that he had to complete a second-language requirement. This was apparently news to him, despite the fact this rule had been in place for all six years he had been in the program, and most students complete it in their first two years of their degree. He feared that because he had overlooked this point, he might have to delay graduating for up to a year so that he could fulfill what is normally a rather straightforward task. As a grad student, you need to take charge of your own program. While you should seek guidance from your supervisor and from the graduate chair or her assistant, you are the person who ultimately organizes your degree. Nobody— and certainly not your supervisor— will pull you aside to remind you, for example, that you must take a certain course or fill out a form by a specific date. Some programs are complicated— and some obligations cannot be fulfilled until others are completed— so you need to keep on top of all these things. You are also personally responsible for developing your own intellectual path. As a grad student, you are a budding researcher, scholar, and professional. This means you need to start to pursue your own research interests and develop your own professional practices. Do not expect your supervisor, or anyone else, to hold your hand and tell you what books to read, journals to subscribe to, future research projects to pursue, research collaborations to explore, conferences to attend, grants to apply for, and so on. Other people will volunteer some guidance on these issues, but such suggestions only represent part of what you need in terms of

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your personal professional practices, the bulk of which you need to work out on your own. This level of personal responsibility over your scholarly development might be unfamiliar if you come from a culture where taking initiative risks offending your supervisor, the “great scholar” who occasionally might deign to offer you snippets of guidance about your career. You might also be a bit more constrained if you are in a discipline where your thesis is an offshoot of your supervisor’s data set or one component of a long series of experiments that a larger lab is conducting. In those situations, you might have less scope to carve out your own distinctive research niche, at least initially. Nonetheless, you still need to generate the other pieces of your intellectual and professional profile. Seek guidance about your degree program and your scholarly development, but do not wait around expecting other people to tell you what to do next.

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M AN A G I N G Y O U R P R OG R A M

Graduate programs present a number of hurdles you must clear. Depending on your degree and program, these might include getting ethics clearance for your research, passing a candidacy defense, or taking comprehensive exams. While practice might not make perfect, it can certainly make tasks easier and less stressful. Graduate students are often asked to tackle activities they have never done previously. To compensate for your lack of experience, you need to do your own research into your formal degree requirements and the best way to meet them. The resources at your disposal include not only your supervisor but also a range of other individuals such as professors, graduate students, and administrative assistants. Books and blogs can also provide insight. Be sure to explore all these resources and plan a course of action rather than heedlessly throwing yourself at the tasks you must complete. While your formal degree expectations are explicitly laid out, you will still find that there are a number of other activities you undoubtedly should be doing, notwithstanding the fact they are not officially required. This is a key fact about graduate school: the most important stuff, the activities and achievements that will make the difference in whether you end up where you want

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to be afterward, is extra, beyond just completing your degree. For example, you can obtain a PhD without having done any publishing or teaching, but you are shortsighted if you do not recognize the need to teach at least a little— and, more important, to publish— if you wish to have any chance at all of getting an academic job. Identify early on what you would like or need to achieve in your program beyond completing the formal requirements, and make them happen. Universities present numerous chances for grad students to get involved in professional training, committee work, and the like. Think about the types of activities you want to participate in, both for personal satisfaction and as a way to advance your career. These will round out your CV and, as a PhD student, make you more desirable to an eventual hiring committee. This is your degree, and you will get out of it what you put into it. Energetic students who have a sense of where they want to go have a better chance of taking the steps to actually get there.

17 CONCENTRATE ONLY ON YOUR THESIS

It is easy to assume that grad school is mainly the place you go to write a thesis. This focus on completing your thesis (in reasonable time) can foster the mistaken belief that it is the only consequential component of grad school. Such an attitude, paradoxically, can be a way to screw up. In grad school, you learn to become a researcher and academic. Those roles involve considerably more than simply carrying out a

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large research project. Professors also teach, edit journals, attend conferences, review manuscripts, mentor students, organize workshops, and administer different aspects of the department and university, among many other things. Graduate school slowly exposes you to the nuances of these tasks. While your overriding priorities are to publish, make progress on your thesis, and otherwise build up your CV, you typically still have enough hours in your day to get involved in other projects. Not doing so is a screw-up because it essentially means you are missing opportunities to become a well-rounded academic. This greater exposure to different activities helps you distinguish yourself in the job market, for the number and range of impressive academic ventures that you have been involved in demonstrates that you can do the job. Master’s students may not understand how the new world of graduate school is different from their undergrad experience, and why it is important now to spend time in the department outside of class time, to get to know their new grad school colleagues, and to participate in departmental events. One appealing aspect of the academic apprenticeship model is the diversity of activities that you can participate in. You might find out, for example, that your department is revamping the graduate curriculum or hosting a conference. If possible, get involved. You can make new friends and learn a lot, and such experiences can have all kinds of unanticipated benefits, in terms of new connections and opportunities. Join existing initiatives, but also do not be afraid to take a few risks and propose your own ventures. Some grad students have held conferences, created a think tank, hosted guest speakers, started a themed blog, established a student’s association, run a teaching symposium, and produced a journal. These activities can consume a lot of time, so do not personally undertake all such ventures, but if you think it would be worthwhile to establish some-

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thing new, do not be shy about proposing the idea. As you proceed in the academy, you will increasingly be involved in such endeavors, and it can help to learn the ins and outs at an early stage. The fact you have never done such things before and are not sure where to start is to be expected. You are challenging yourself and learning new skills. Ask around for guidance, and you will likely receive support and advice from students, faculty, and administrators. Such activities can be both stimulating and personally rewarding. They can also establish your reputation as a go-getter and result in strong letters of reference that can translate into scholarships or job offers. Many programs have graduate student associations, and you should find a way to contribute to yours. Such groups provide opportunities for you to fix problems or shape the future of your program. They are also a way to make friends, something that can be key, given that so many grad students are new to the city where they are studying. In smaller programs it can be hard to develop a sense of community. This isolation is compounded as you move through your degree from course work to the solo projects of comprehensive exams and your thesis, and as colleagues depart to take jobs, conduct research, or lock themselves away for that final writing push. Student associations introduce you to people who share similar experiences and help you avoid unhealthy seclusion. Once you graduate, you will find these individuals become your professional colleagues, and you will call upon one another for years to come. While it can be rewarding to get involved in departmental life, remember that such activities also provide infinite opportunities for diversion and can become forms of procrastination. Do not become a dabbler who uses your many commitments to avoid your main job, which is still to write and make progress on the thesis. Divide up your time wisely, but leave space for academic activities other than your thesis.

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18 EXPECT TO WRITE THE PERFECT COMPREHENSIVE EXAM

Comprehensive exams do not have to be scary, but they can become the stuff of nightmares if you let them. The majority of North American doctoral programs include preliminary or comprehensive exams (also known as comps or candidacy exams) as part of their degree requirements. These are normally completed between your course work and thesis; they can take many different forms, depending on the particular PhD program, but usually involve some kind of written paper or test or oral examination, or both. You might have to do a comp in two or three fields of specialization you will choose in consultation with your supervisor and committee. For example, my department requires that students complete two comps. Each usually involves completing a written paper in a particular field of specialization. Once your committee members have read and assessed the paper, they schedule an oral defense. The defense is normally about an hour long. Sit-down or take-home exams in fields of specialization are also common in other departments, sometimes (but not always) also followed by an oral defense. As part of the comp process, you often have to demonstrate mastery of a particular body of literature, with the specific works either designated by the department or negotiated with your committee. Sometimes the department will have a fixed deadline for completing the comps. For example, a particular week may be designated in advance for you to complete written and oral exams in chosen fields. In other cases, you move at your own speed, and deadlines are agreed on between you, supervisor, and committee.

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Sometimes PhD students run into difficulty at the comp stage, particularly if the comp lacks a fixed deadline. Part of the problem is that graduate students tend to be perfectionists, and without the structure of firm deadlines, the comps process can balloon to an unholy length, since there is always one more book or article to read or one more theoretical position to incorporate into a paper. PhD students, by that point in their academic careers, have often spent a lifetime excelling academically, and they can become emotionally invested in performing in a stellar fashion. When it comes to the comps, however, “good enough” in the time allotted may make a lot more sense, with energies being better spent securing fellowships and publishing articles. Comp performance matters little down the road in pragmatic terms. Woody Allen once said that 80 percent of life is just showing up. Comps are part of the 80 percent. Most important is to do as Woody says: show up. Do not disappear for a year to work on your comps— this can be a setback you will have difficulty recovering from. Agree on a timeline with your committee members, and set down those expectations in writing. Do the best job possible in that timeline, and move on. Recognize also that while comprehensive exams may appear to be a burden, in fact they are a rare privilege. They give you a remarkable opportunity to read and reflect on your field. As your academic career unfolds, it will become progressively harder to find time to read new works. So take full advantage of this time. It will form you as an academic and a researcher. Dreading the imagined horrific interrogation can also fuel excessive perfectionism. This can be compounded if your supervisor gives you little or no guidance about what you are expected to know. So, for example, the supervisor of one of my colleagues in the natural sciences told her to “know biology” for her comp, an expectation that was so vague it gave her no meaningful direction about how to proceed. Despite the occasional horror stories about hostile exams, most comp defenses are gentle and benign if you have prepared adequately.

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As you complete your course work, you may seek to restore a bit of work-life balance and have trouble getting in gear again. You may also feel a sense of ennui, given the solitary nature of preparing for your comps, and this can also contribute to foundering. Your supervisor (and to a lesser extent your committee) may impose structure and firm deadlines on you, but this is a matter of their individual style. Some supervisors, especially busy ones, may be content with a hands-off approach: being preoccupied with other matters, they may be happy to wait for you to come to them. This can also make it easy to procrastinate or be a perfectionist. Work with your supervisor and committee to establish firm deadlines to help you rein in both perfectionism and procrastination. The key with comps is to get them done and out of the way.

19 SELECT A TOPIC FOR ENTIRELY STRATEGIC REASONS

Grad students often make conference presentations that I find, to be frank, boring. When I ask these students how they came to focus on their topic, some tell me that their PhD supervisor handed them a data set to analyze. Others say they believe this type of work is likely to be published in respected journals, or that funding agencies look favorably on their topic or methodology. Those are reasonable things to take into account. But if you want to have a tedious career, make sure that those are the only factors informing your choice of thesis topic (which can also be closely tied to your choice of supervisor). Otherwise, find a topic to write about that you find intrinsically interesting or ideally fascinating.

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While a professor’s salary may never compensate for the number of years you spend in school, an academic career does have some remarkable benefits. One great advantage, and something that distinguishes professors from almost all other occupations, is the ability to choose the projects you work on. This is a blessing, so take advantage of it. Life is so much easier if, when you roll out of bed, you look forward to working on something you find exciting. Do not ignore the more fundamental considerations (for example, are there any jobs at all for Shakespeare specialists?) but do not be afraid to pursue your passion. This is not to say that you should study a sensationalist topic such as cross-dressing terrorists. Maybe you are enthusiastic about something more mundane, such as climactic changes in the arctic fox’s habitat. If you are passionate about that issue, you will have an exponentially greater chance of having your enthusiasm radiate through all aspects of your research, in the process inspiring colleagues and turning students on to the topic. In some disciplines, your passion may be tied to research projects aimed at making the world a better place in different ways. If your research has some kind of clearly identifiable social value, it not only speaks well of your work but can be a huge motivator for you. Writing a thesis is a long and challenging task during the best of times, and it will be so much easier if you find your topic engaging. On several occasions, I have pointed out to students that, although they were talking about writing on one topic, their real passion seemed to be something else, and I have encouraged them to switch. For example, I pushed a student who was heavily involved in mixed martial arts to switch his sociology doctoral thesis to a study of that sport. As this example suggests, the topic you are passionate about may be one in which you are already personally invested in and knowledgeable about, which can inform your research in valuable ways. As far as your early career goes, your thesis is not merely something you write, but it becomes part of your identity. For years some people will know you as the person who wrote her thesis on nuclear nonproliferation or the air-speed velocity of the European

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swallow. Your early publications will likely be in this area, and you will undoubtedly make a presentation before a hiring committee (also known as a job talk) on some aspect of your thesis. Your topic will also help people identify what subdiscipline you work in and what niche you might fill in a department. As your publications reach an audience— which can take years— you will be invited to revisit the topic at conferences or in invited publications. So, you had better hope that as you complete your thesis, you do not discover that you can no longer stomach your topic. Humans have the delightful ability to develop an interest in issues that initially appear dreadfully dull. If you are fortunate, a topic that at first seems dry might grow on you. But why take that risk? Start with a piece of research that grabs you and that is important enough that you can sell others on its significance.

20 DO NOT TEACH, OR TEACH A TON OF COURSES

A huge part of your working life as a future academic will be teaching. What gets you a job will in large part be your research, and in particular your publication record, but you need to think carefully about how you will present yourself as a future university teacher when job hunting. How will you manage the challenge of your early teaching experiences, which can be exciting and rewarding but sometimes nerve-racking and draining, not to mention time-consuming? I was recently on a hiring committee. We interviewed a strong candidate who had completed her PhD with an outstanding publication record. But she had no university teaching experience or training, and barely mentioned teaching in her application. When

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asked about her plans to teach, the interviewee simply referred to her expertise in certain fields as areas she could teach in. She evidently had given no thought to the process of teaching and how she would approach it in the classroom. It was a big strike against her, and we offered someone else the job. While I should be careful not to overstate the importance of teaching in landing a tenure-track job— research is far and away more important— hiring committees certainly think about teaching. It will give your chances a boost if you have evidence that you have prepared yourself to be a university teacher, and, if you have taught a course or two, that your initial experience in the classroom has gone well and that you have positive evaluations and student comments to include with a job application. Teaching during graduate school gives you the chance to find out whether you honestly like doing something you will be expected to do for the rest of your career. Teaching and connecting with students can be one of the most intrinsically rewarding parts of your job; conversely, if the class is going poorly, it can drag you down emotionally and undermine other aspects of your work. While some undergrads may appear disaffected, entitled, or manipulative, many are enthusiastic, idealistic, and keen to learn, and your experience as a university teacher will be better if you think of students that way rather than joining in the culture of complaint about students that too often emerges among more jaded faculty. Teaching your first courses is time-consuming: it can be a struggle to learn new skills and a shock to discover how long it takes to prepare for hours of in-class time. Your first course will be the hardest, and ideally you will have that experience before you start a tenure-track job. Asking a more experienced and well-regarded teacher to observe your class is a great way to learn while teaching your first course. You can also elicit informal feedback from the students and tweak your teaching as you go, rather than waiting for the formal evaluations after the course is complete, when it is too late to make changes. A good way to elicit detailed, balanced feedback is to ask the students to

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name two things they like and suggest two others they would change. If you do this in the middle of term, you will have the opportunity to discuss the results of this feedback with the students and highlight any changes you are making as a response. Some graduate students worry that such informal evaluations look unprofessional; on the contrary, the undergrads in your class will likely react positively to them, as you are showing you care about the course and their experience. While getting your first course under your belt is good, too much time spent teaching as a graduate student can have negative effects. A CV featuring a lengthy completion time, lots of courses taught on contract, and minimal publications will hurt your chances of getting a tenure-track job, although it is definitely still possible. Short-term contract teaching is poorly paid, especially relative to the amount of time and effort it takes. Students who fall into the trap of doing too much teaching to pay the bills while they are trying to finish their thesis often end up on a treadmill where they are barely moving forward and take years more to finish, let alone having time to do the requisite publishing needed to get a tenure-track job. Even after they finish, they may find themselves stuck on the sessional or adjunct track, having developed a profile that best fits that role. Departments can find themselves in a conflict of interest in this respect, since they are expected to graduate PhD students quickly but also often need them to teach large classes, which can slow the doctoral students’ progress through their degree. My advice is to get some teaching experience as a graduate student but not too much. I tell my PhD students to teach a maximum of two single-term courses during their PhDs. One professor who read a draft of this book strongly disagreed, arguing that lots of diverse teaching experience makes one appealing to hiring committees. Although I love to teach and love to see PhD students enthusiastic about teaching, publishing is more important for the academic job market. If you find that you love to teach, consider focusing your job search later at smaller, more teaching-intensive universities or colleges that offer full-time, permanent teaching-only positions.

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Also, note that some universities have recently introduced a stream of teaching-first and teaching-only tenure-track positions.

21 DO NOT SEEK TEACHING INSTRUCTION

In the fourth year of his PhD, Andre was finally going to get a chance to teach a third-year undergraduate course in his specialty— and he was terrified. What if he ran out of things to say in class? What if he did not cover some important material? What if a student asked him a question he could not answer? Andre’s solution was to pour every waking minute into writing out word for word the lectures he would deliver, plus massively long cheat sheets about possible questions he might have to answer. Work on his thesis came to a standstill, as did his personal life. The course began and Andre spent each week in class filling the time nervously reading from his notes. When he did look up from them, he could not help but notice that the students looked bored and distracted. Attendance began to dwindle, and students would leave early. But at least he knew he was covering the material, and no one had tripped him up on a question yet. But during the break in the middle of class one week, he overheard one of his students tell someone on his cell phone that the class was so boring, it made standing in line for three hours exciting by comparison. Andre had committed a classic “graduate student as new teacher” screw-up: teaching in defensive mode, where all the new teacher cares about is making sure the “right” content is covered, while not giving any thought to whether the students are actually engaged by the course material. This and many other new teacher screw-ups can be avoided with a little training on how to teach.

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Take any kind of training you can get in university teaching, preferably before you teach your first course. With luck, your university will have a teaching center that offers such classes. Some academic departments are now also starting to provide such training to their PhD students. I was teaching my first course when I was hired for a tenure-track job, but I had also taken a certificate program in university teaching, which helped immensely both in having a positive teaching experience right from the beginning and in being able to “talk the talk” about teaching in my job interview. Having done some training looks great to a hiring committee and should make your initial teaching experiences more positive, not only in terms of the student response, but also in terms of time management. New university teachers without training spend way too much time writing out lecture notes verbatim. Taking such training should help make your class more interactive and spontaneous, leaving space for discussion and incorporating a range of activities besides lecturing, which will make the class more engaging for both you and the students and will cut down on your preparation time. Many candidates for university jobs now include detailed teaching dossiers with their applications, often dozens of pages long with statements about their teaching philosophy. If your university offers workshops on how to prepare such dossiers and philosophy statements, you should take one, preferably before you start teaching. You should begin accumulating material for your teaching dossier early on, rather than trying to pull it all together at the last minute as you apply for your first job. Even as a teaching assistant (TA) you can record the training you have done, and save positive comments from students about your work. Record keeping becomes an important skill for academics, who usually prepare an annual report on everything they did during the past year. Get in the habit of keeping a record of what courses you taught and how many students were in each course, and always have an up-to-date CV.

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Ideally, working as a TA can serve as a form of teaching apprenticeship and allow you to develop your skills. Seek feedback from the faculty member you are acting as a TA for, preferably in writing so that you can include it in your teaching dossier. Giving a guest lecture can provide valuable teaching experience, but many graduate students approach this solely as an exercise in delivering the right content, without thinking about how to deliver it in an engaging way. Get advice from faculty who are well-regarded teachers about the process of guest lecturing, both before and after you do it, and get written feedback from the faculty member for whom you are lecturing, which you can also include in your teaching dossier. Think about whether you are pitching the material at the right level, keeping it simple and clear, and making it interactive, and whether you are avoiding only lecturing for the whole time. Mix in video clips and activities for the students. Ask the students for anonymous feedback in writing at the end of your guest lecture, both so that you can learn what worked and what did not and so that you will have comments to include in your teaching dossier. So teach, but not too much; grab any opportunity for teacher training you see and keep a record of your training.

22 MOVE AWAY FROM THE UNIVERSITY BEFORE FINISHING YOUR DEGREE

Students typically do their graduate degrees in another town or city from where they were raised or have been living, and it is stressful to leave family, friends, and sometimes even spouses behind. Without established support networks, grad school can be isolating.

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Most PhD programs require you to reside in the city where the university is located for at least one or two years. Once this period is over you can move away if you want or if you need to do so to conduct your fieldwork. The information technologies that allow us to work and socialize remotely can make this an appealing prospect if you are pining for the comforts of home. It can also make finishing your degree difficult, since moving away will impede your progress in several ways. Most immediately, being physically distant reduces your work discipline. When far away from your university, other activities seem more urgent than your degree requirements. It becomes ever harder to maintain your primary identity of “graduate student,” with all of its attendant regimes and routines. Distance reduces the chances to regularly (or inadvertently) meet with your supervisor. While part of you might love the idea of not bumping into her in the halls or the supermarket, regularly meeting your supervisor is highly correlated with success in grad school. This becomes more difficult if you are in another city. Being away also risks making you the forgotten person. “Out of sight, out of mind” is as true in grad school as anywhere else. If you are not regularly around the department you can be overlooked when it comes time to allot grants or awards. Even if you do maintain contact with your supervisor, you are almost certainly missing out on opportunities to impress a broader network of people in the department who are responsible for allocating awards and who might be asked to speak to your abilities at some point in the future. Distance also makes it difficult to benefit from the intermittent research work that faculty need grad students to complete— which can sometimes result in coauthored publications. Even if you are considered for such work, the fact that you are far away can make it impossible to complete the research tasks. The same holds true for teaching. I once had a graduate student, for example, who wanted to move home to reconnect with his fam-

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ily. I advised him that doing so would make it difficult or impossible for me to offer him research funding, and he confidently said he would make some money teaching. Unfortunately, he did not realize that many departments use teaching assignments as a kind of semi-award or extra funding for their senior PhD students. He quickly discovered that the contract instructor positions at other universities were almost exclusively assigned to students enrolled in those local departments. Students who leave town are missing the crucial point that grad school is not just about writing your thesis; it entails a much larger process of professional socialization. You make the transition from graduate student to junior faculty member partly through emulation. Being regularly around a department allows you to watch and learn the myriad nuances of university life. Moving away separates you from potential role models and puts you at a disadvantage compared to students who stayed around to soak up the university’s social routines and cultural habits. While some students might have to leave the university to conduct fieldwork, it is still wise to return to your university to analyze your data and write your thesis. Try not to leave before a sizable chunk of your thesis is actually written.

23 POSTPONE THOSE TEDIOUS APPROVAL PROCESSES

Assuming you have published a reasonable amount of work while in grad school, you will want to finish your degree quickly. Completing in good time can be taken as a sign that you are a focused scholar. More concretely, it can also improve your financial situa-

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tion: the longer you take to complete your degree, the more likely you are to run out of money and increase your debt load. Given this emphasis on speed, you should be attuned to some of the factors that can decelerate your movement through your degree. Two of the most conspicuous brakes on progress involve research ethics and research access. In almost any university, a research ethics board must now vet your proposed research before you can begin to collect data. Research ethics boards try to ensure that your research will not harm research participants, both human and animal. This includes situations with an unambiguous risk of harm, such as drug trials, but also more tame activities such as interviews with competent adults or even observational research where the people being studied would never know they are being watched. Research ethics procedures have prompted greater reflection on the risks of academic research, but they come at the cost of an ethics bureaucracy that is ill suited to certain types of research and that can produce time-consuming delays. The fact that some boards meet only intermittently over the summer— a time when many grad students want to start their research— can further bog down the process. If your research is seen as being more than minimally risky, expect that your proposal will receive extra attention. Factors that might flag your project for added scrutiny include research that poses some risk of harm (whether physical, financial, or psychological) or research on vulnerable groups (such as children, people with developmental disabilities, or people who have been previously harmed or victimized). Research involving animals or hazardous materials also will receive extra attention. These situations can involve a lot of back-and-forth communications with the ethics board before your research can proceed. The process of applying for ethical clearance has become steadily more complex and cumbersome. Application forms can be formal, alienating, and elaborate. Given all of these factors, it is understandable if you are inclined to postpone dealing with the process as long

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as possible. But resist that temptation. Bite the bullet and throw yourself into applying as early as possible. In fact, you can— and often should— submit your ethics application before your committee signs off on all the final nuances of your project. While the ethics process can be frustrating, the fact that it is entirely pragmatic produces some unanticipated benefits. Approach it as a learning experience, and you will see the positive side of having to be specific about particular aspects of your research. The board will want to know who or what you will be studying, your sample size, how you will solicit participants, what data you will be collecting, how you will collect it, where the data will be stored, your timeline, any risks that your work might pose, and so on. You are going to have to deal with these concrete matters anyway, so at a minimum the ethics process prompts you to outline the specifics of your study. Your project can also be delayed by the process of gaining access to the organization, materials, or people you want to study. Maybe you want to interview bartenders, measure athletes’ heart rates after exercise, get your hands on some old files, or do a survey. Each of these will involve an often delicate and sometimes prolonged period of negotiating access. This routinely takes longer than you expect, so, again, start the process early. Be cognizant that some phenomena are easier to study than others. It is hard to get permission to interview incarcerated prisoners, for example. Your ambitious plans to study people involved in organized crime might never get off the ground. Research that aims to study children in elementary school classrooms must deal with the fact that in some North American jurisdictions there is more than a yearlong wait to do such research. If you want to work with animal specimens, you might have to obtain special permission, and if those samples are being transported internationally, they may get stuck at the border. If you need to use special equipment— say, an accelerator in California or Saskatchewan— you may have to wait months to obtain access. So be strategic about your research sites and be realistic about the timelines you will be working with.

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Researchers are sometimes fortunate in the kinds of access they can secure— but be ready to go to plan B before too long if your original ambitions are unobtainable. Sometimes the organization you want to study will have its own research protocols, which can complicate the picture. One of my students, for example, wanted to interview police officers. The university ethics process mandated that nobody in the police organization could know the identity of the officers the student was interviewing. The police research protocols, in contrast, insisted that their research facilitation office send out the solicitation to potential interviewees, which meant that they would potentially know which officers were being interviewed. Months went by as my student tried to find a compromise. Just because an organization has approved your study does not mean research participants will flock to your door (remember Liam). Organizations cannot compel people to participate in research, so you will have to find ways to recruit participants. You may also need funds to compensate participants for their time. Lots of graduate students’ theses contain a methods section describing how weeks and months slipped away as they waited in vain for individuals to respond to their posters asking for research participants. If you are a master’s student, this warning is particularly important: your program of study is shorter, so delays will feel more acute.

24 ORGANIZE EVERYTHING ONLY IN YOUR HEAD

Some grad students believe they are embarking on a life of the mind. As they see it, this involves extended periods spent huddled

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in coffee shops debating life’s great questions. Such an intellectualist orientation is certainly enjoyable, and exceptionally smart students have an undeniable advantage in graduate education. But do not inflate the importance of being brilliant. Self-discipline is most important. The road through grad school is strewn with unfinished theses by brainy but disorganized and distractible individuals. Completing a graduate degree might appear to be a big job, but in fact it consists of a million small chores. To tie together the innumerable threads that will comprise your thesis, you need the discipline to slog your way though a multi-year endeavor. You also need to develop some systems. Trying to manage all your responsibilities in your head will increase the chance that you will lose track of vital obligations and make you feel like your life is out of control. Successful grad students develop systems to organize their professional responsibilities. The starting point is that the only worthwhile systems are those you will actually use. No use buying elaborate personal organizing software if you know you will never open the program. Figure out what systems work for you and be sure to use them. As you move through grad school, the demands on your time will increase, so you must be able to keep track of appointments and other responsibilities, often many months or even years into the future. Consequently, one of the most vital systems to maintain is a calendar. Another system you will undoubtedly need is some kind of to-do list. This can be a rudimentary pen-and-paper inventory of tasks you want to deal with immediately, or more elaborate computer programs that break down your life into longterm goals with attendant undertakings. The best to-do lists work in concert with your calendar, allowing you to set dates establishing when you want to accomplish specified jobs. Develop a system to manage your e-mail. While there are many forms of electronic media, e-mail remains the primary means of

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professional communication, and it can come in torrents. I can receive over one hundred e-mails a day dealing with academic matters. If you do not have a strategy to manage this correspondence, it can overwhelm you. Some faculty members I know, for example, only read and respond to their messages at certain times of the day to ensure that their other work is not constantly interrupted. To make sure messages do not accumulate and get forgotten, you will need a means to flag important messages for follow-up and store those to be saved for future reference. You will likely want to use a system to organize your reference material. In recent years, proprietary and open-access programs have become available to manage your readings, retain electronic copies of files, and record your personal notes. Some allow you to automatically insert formatted citations into your writing and to create formatted bibliographies. Most university libraries now offer sessions on how to use such tools. And finally, if you really want to screw up, do not regularly back up your work and store copies in different locations, or in the cloud. Do I really have to caution you about backing up? Unfortunately, yes. Unrecoverable crashes happen and computers get stolen, and these disasters tend to happen to students who have been lax about backing up. If you thought losing an undergraduate term paper was a catastrophe, wait until you lose all your primary data or a major chunk of your thesis. Consider yourself warned. It will happen, to you. Yes, you. Those are the basic organizational systems, but you can use many other routines and practices to better organize your life. I know of one student, for example, who registered with an online writing service that e-mails her pictures of kittens as her reward for writing her desired number of words per day on her thesis. Find the systems that work for you. Far from posing a burden, they might bring some pleasure (or relief) in helping you get your life in order.

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25 DO NOT ATTEND CONFERENCES, OR ATTEND DROVES OF CONFERENCES

Academic conferences are curious beasts. Justified as a forum for intellectual exchange, conferences can be exceedingly poor venues for serious scholarly debate. Presentation times are too brief to even begin to flesh out an argument, and “themed” panels often appear to have been thrown together haphazardly. Audiences are usually small, a problem that can be acute for grad students who face dishearteningly empty rooms. A friend of mine, for example, flew from coast to coast at considerable personal expense to make his first conference presentation. He discovered upon arrival that the conference program contained a typo about the time of his session, resulting in an audience of exactly zero people. Despite these limitations, conferences serve many valuable purposes. So plan to attend, but understand their true worth. For grad students, conferences help provide motivation to write. If you cannot find an interesting or relevant panel at an established conference, talk to your supervisor or other grad students about proposing your own session. Once you have registered, start writing a paper, not a conference presentation. The distinction is important. Practiced lecturers can fill their allotted time speaking from the briefest of notes, whereas you want to produce something approximating the first draft of a paper. As a graduate student with less experience giving conference presentations, you want to have a fully written script you can rely on, rather than speaking off the cuff. If you have a written version of the paper, after the event you can also incorporate any comments you might receive and revise the paper with an eye toward submitting it for publication or using it as a chapter in your thesis. Doing so will

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also help cure the indeterminate nature of the writing and revising process, which can seem to go on forever. Committing to a conference paper on a specific date is a time-honored way of bringing closure to a specific piece of writing. Go to conferences with an eye to introducing yourself and your research to the wider academic community. Making an oral presentation serves that purpose, but so does creating a poster. Many conferences have areas specifically dedicated for poster presentations, which academics use to succinctly publicize their research to any curious attendees who might wander past. A more established tradition in the natural and applied sciences, posters are now making inroads into some humanities and social sciences events. Some even have prizes for the best poster. Conferences are a valuable forum for networking, a practice that has been tainted by the crass way it is often performed in industry and government. In the academy, where only a small group of people might be working in your research area, networking amounts to meeting and sharing ideas and plans with people in your scholarly community. Even well-known scholars can enjoy meeting a junior colleague who has comparable interests and shares personal connections. Briefly introducing yourself, politely and with genuine interest, can pay dividends. An editor might need a contributor to a book or want someone to write a book review. If the two of you have met, you have a greater chance of being called upon. Such encounters also provide you with the enviable ability to write that e-mail that begins, “You may not remember me, but we met at the conference in Minnesota two years ago . . .” A host of subsidiary benefits come from attending conferences. In rapidly changing fields such as computer science, for example, you go to conferences to learn about cutting-edge developments, since formal publications in those fields tend to lag behind technological advances. Doing a presentation can make your research more real to you, allowing you to recognize that you are becoming an expert in the

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field. Conferences get you out of your solitary bubble, providing an opportunity to meet a wider group of scholars and colleagues. Moreover, conferences provide a good amount of the shared cultural repertoire of an academic community, and are a recurrent source of anecdotes and occasional moments of intrigue. Conferences represent another activity where moderation is best. While not going to conferences is a mistake, so, too, is going to too many conferences. Search committee members cock an eyebrow when a graduate student’s CV contains an extensive list of conference presentations but no publications. The question of how many conference presentations are too many is relative. If your CV lists lots of publications as well as lots of conference presentations, there will be no issue. But if you have a page filled with conference presentations and few or no publications, people will suspect that you have become a conference gadfly. If your research is funded by a grant, you typically will have to demonstrate you can convert a conference paper into a publication or other “deliverable.”

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Y OU R W O R K A N D S O C I AL L I F E

It can be hard for professors to balance their work and home life. What makes it difficult is that they have a profession, not a job. People with a job have no formal obligations to their employer when not on the clock. Professionals have no clock. This can be liberating, but sometimes professional expectations can appear almost limitless, prompting people to work during times better spent with family or friends or on extracurricular activities. Information technology makes it harder for academics to find a moment where they are truly “off the job.” Graduate students are budding professionals and face similar demands on their time. Your studies need not dominate your life. Many professors and graduate students have fulfilling personal lives, strong relationships, and interesting hobbies. For these things to happen, you need to limit the amount of time you dedicate to your schooling. When asked what the university expects of junior colleagues, I glibly say they need to “do more, and do it better.” Setting your own boundaries in such a setting can be tough, but if you do not make time for yourself, nobody else will do it for you. As alien as these new professional obligations might initially appear to you, they will be even stranger to the other people in

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your life. Inform your family and friends of your new professional expectations, and find out what they need from you in terms of personal and family commitments.

26 CONCENTRATE SOLELY ON SCHOOL

A friend of mine gained forty pounds during grad school through a combination of cafeteria food and a sedentary lifestyle. His expanding waistline was a signal that he was fulfilling the classic graduate student screw-up of neglecting non-academic things in his life, including exercise. You cannot do a grad degree through a furious burst of energy. Grad school is better seen as a long-distance backpacking trek. On your trek you establish work routines you will likely use throughout your career. Do not skimp on other important parts of your life. It might seem hard to incorporate other activities into your busy schedule, but there is lots of evidence that people with wellrounded personal lives can excel in grad school. One of my best students did a remarkable amount of research, teaching, and writing while completing his PhD. He also learned to salsa dance, was heavily involved in his church and community organizations, and watched hours of soccer every Sunday evening. Get some exercise. Beyond the immediate health benefits, improved fitness gives you more energy and focus to dedicate to other projects, including your degree. Exercise also helps you unwind and sleep well. During my PhD I regularly organized a softball team and played volleyball with other students and profes-

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sors, which was also a great way to socialize. Nonetheless, by the end of my degree I found that I, too, was putting on weight, so I started to run, which was a fantastic way to clear my head and get rid of stress. The easiest people to ignore are your loved ones. They deserve more than the clichéd acknowledgment at the front of your thesis in which you apologize for neglecting them during your degree. Grad school can stress families and relationships. Set aside time to be together. Have a family movie night or a regular dinner date with your partner. Take vacations. You may not have the budget for something extended or extravagant, but a local campground or other economical locations can provide a refreshing and reinvigorating break. Do not bring your work along. Typically you will not do the work anyway, and if you do work, you are defeating the purpose of a holiday. Socialize with your fellow graduate students. It is a great way to recognize that you are all in the same boat. It also allows you to develop a wider and deeper sense of academic life while forming friendships, some of which could last your entire life. Finding balance in your life is important for its own sake, but will also help you avoid burnout over the long haul of grad school.

27 EXPECT FRIENDS AND FAMILY TO UNDERSTAND

I was over the moon when I won my doctoral scholarship. Eager to share the good news, I phoned my parents. My mom listened closely to the details and said, “That’s not enough money to live

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off of. Can you get two?” Deflated, I had to tell her no, that was not possible. My mom’s reaction was not atypical: most people outside of your academic colleagues will have a hard time relating to your grad school experiences. Do not expect friends or family to necessarily understand or appreciate this lifestyle. One particularly difficult aspect of this situation concerns time management. To an outsider, a grad student’s schedule looks tantalizingly open. It can contain huge slots where you appear to be doing nothing. Those people might encourage you to socialize more or take on more household tasks to fill the time. Maintaining self-discipline is hard enough at the best of times without these tempting invitations to postpone or forgo your schoolwork. You will likely have to tell friends and family that although you might not have a formal workday, you are “on the clock” and have to use your time to complete a long list of tasks. Grad school changes you, something that tends to happen when you work within any distinctive occupational culture. With its own rituals, symbolic moments, arcane language, and annual rhythms, a graduate student’s life is not necessarily familiar— or particularly interesting— to people working outside the academy. It might be frustrating to find that your old friends are not fascinated by Professor Young’s quirky clothing or your frustrations with the library system. You might become annoyed when non-academic friends show little interest in your grad school life beyond inquiring how your thesis is going. And even that question is usually asked only out of politeness rather than out of an honest interest in hearing about your research on zeolite molecular sieves. Of course, you want to maintain your old friends and personal networks, but do not expect those individuals to identify with your grad school experiences. Cultivate a group of sympathetic academic friends and colleagues with whom you can talk about your grad school exploits.

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28 SOCIALIZE ONLY WITH YOUR CLIQUE

My campus has labs populated only by Iranian graduate students. Others consist entirely of students from China. These students work together, eat lunch together, and go out on weekends as a group. Essentially they know almost no one else in the city or university. Hanging out exclusively in such a narrow group is a great way to screw up. It isolates you from the larger university, limits your opportunities, and restricts the size and diversity of your professional network. I certainly do not place responsibility for this solely on the international students: grad students who are studying in their country of origin can sometimes present themselves as an exclusive, dominant clique that is not particularly welcoming; such students can thus also miss out on opportunities to expand their friendships and horizons. More generally, graduate school can have a lot of cliques. People tend to hang out together according to their cohort, and sometimes according to their lab, nationality, or political leanings. Resist the temptation to interact only with “your” people, and try to engage with a broader range of students, faculty, and support staff. This advice is particularly important if you are an international student studying in an unfamiliar culture and perhaps uncomfortable speaking in the local language. A natural temptation is to hang out primarily (or exclusively) with others from your home country. While this is entirely understandable, it also limits your opportunities to integrate into the local academic culture and reduces the benefits of doing your degree in another country. Students working in any field can find it difficult to integrate into the local culture, but this is particularly so for students in a small lab, who are especially prone to isolation. If your lab is made

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up primarily or entirely of individuals from another country, it is all the more difficult to network more broadly or to make friends with individuals from your host country— a common lament of international grad students. The related difficulty here is that interacting only with people from your home country can curtail your ability to become fluent in the local language, which I will refer to as English, but it could be a different language depending on where you are studying. It is worth noting that English has become the dominant international language academically, as in other fields. Regardless of how one feels about the global politics of language, it is a huge academic advantage for international students to be fluent in English, and grad students who are able to move back and forth between academic reading and writing in English and other languages are in a strong position. Writing a thesis is, in part, a demonstration of your fluency in English. If you socialize only in the (non-English) language of your home country, you reduce your opportunities to truly master English. One person I interviewed for this book, for example, mentioned a departmental colleague who did an informal survey of her international grad students and discovered that they were exposed to English for only five minutes a day. Such students cannot realistically expect to develop proficiency in English. This can lead to serious problems writing their thesis and a temptation to hire others to write on their behalf, violating the rules of graduate education. As hard as it might be at first, try to follow the example of my student Camila. When she arrived in North America from her native Portugal, I pointed out the Portuguese student association to her. Her response was, “I didn’t come here to hang out with Portuguese people.” The person who runs the international student center on my campus joked that the best way to become fluent is to become romantically involved with a native English speaker— although she did not want to make that a formal recommendation! Live in the

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local language. Talk with English speakers. Use English-language media (television, radio, Internet). Be active on English-language social media. These steps will improve your language skills, making it easier to write your thesis and allowing you to better take advantage of the personal and professional opportunities your host university and country present to you. All graduate students should try to cut across the various cliques of graduate school. Introduce yourself to other students. Go to events you might not otherwise attend. You will broaden your horizons, improve your graduate school experience, and expand your network of friends and professional colleagues.

29 GET A JOB!

When Kenko was doing his PhD, he worked extended hours as a sushi chef. His supervisor was not thrilled to learn how much time his protégé was spending chopping fish, so he found some research work on campus that allowed Kenko to lay down his knife and pick up some books. If you want to really screw up, just follow Kenko’s example. Keep adding more and more non-school things to your plate. You will create stress, delay your time through your degree, and reduce the number of school-related projects you can take on. If you want to do well, be aware of the number and scope of personal and family projects you can reasonably handle, and take steps to manage those time commitments. If you are enrolled as a full-time graduate student, recognize that school really is a full-time undertaking. Again, this is one of

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those areas where moderation is best. As already noted, it is not smart to focus only on your schooling. But do not take on extra family and life activities beyond what you can reasonably manage. There are many things you can do that will take you away from your research, but determining how much is too much will be different for every individual. Having a full-time job is perhaps the most obvious distraction. Financial realities can force some graduate students to work fulltime while trying to complete their degree. This might involve changing status from full-time to part-time student. Occasionally there are remarkable students who successfully manage this situation, but what usually happens is that job demands take priority and the student’s degree languishes. There are, however, several nuances to contemplate here. The dangers of holding a non-academic job are considerably more pronounced for PhD students. Master’s students, particularly if they are not writing a thesis, will have much more flexibility about paid work, and some master’s programs are explicitly designed to be done parttime so that students can retain their jobs while in school. Also, if a university job is not the goal after graduating, it can make sense to get a foot in the door of a prospective non-academic employer. That said, the terms of a prestigious scholarship or supervisor’s research grant may prohibit such work, and if you are found out, the results can be financially, professionally, and personally costly. Try to commit your energies to your research and ensure that you have the widest range of opportunities available to you after graduation. While it may be difficult to turn down work in the short term, the best financial move is nearly always to bite the bullet and finish your degree quickly. I am sensitive to the complicated realities of students’ lives, so I would not say never get a job. Instead, if you are going to follow any path that is going to consume a lot of time, be fully aware of how that will affect your progress. Where possible, take steps to mitigate the prospect that your research and education will significantly suffer as a result.

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WRITING

Academics do a lot of writing. Beyond writing up research findings into articles for publication, academics also write letters of reference, grant proposals, award nominations, and many other things. Even so, we too often neglect the labor and craft of scholarly writing. To finish your degree in good time and grow as a scholar and researcher, you must develop a productive and healthy writing regime. This should involve writing your thesis as well as subsidiary projects. Postponing such writing until immediately before a deadline will work for a while, but is also stressful and ultimately not as productive or sustainable as a more structured writing regime. Authors have strikingly different writing practices. Create a routine that works for you and stick to it. Try not to let other things get in the way of your writing. Beyond being hard work, writing is also a craft. If you treat your writing skills as an afterthought, you risk alienating or even angering your readers as they struggle to decipher what you are trying to say. You are now working at the highest scholarly level. Readers should not pull out their hair as they try to understand your point. You do not have to aspire to be a poet, but you should continually aim to improve your written work. Thankfully, there

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are numerous books, magazines, writing groups, online services, and support centers available to help you.

30 WRITE ONLY YOUR PHD THESIS

“Write something beyond my PhD thesis? Are you nuts? The thesis is a crazy amount of work already. There is no way I could possible take on other projects.” Although they are too polite to say such things to my face, several of my PhD students have clearly felt this way when I have stressed the importance of writing works besides their thesis. Publishing is less important for a student seeking a master’s degree. For a PhD student, however, the greatest way to stall a promising academic career is not to write anything beyond the thesis. Speeding through your degree focusing exclusively on your PhD thesis can give you a fast completion time, but it may also ensure that you will be passed over for academic jobs. Not long ago, you could compete for a tenure-track job with only a PhD. The hiring decision might have hinged on the quality of your research presentation, how you performed in the job interview, the quality of your research, the prestige of the university granting your PhD, the standing of your supervisor, and the strength of your letters of recommendation. You were not, however, expected to have published much beyond the thesis itself. It was good to have published works before graduation, but it was not necessarily the norm. That model has changed. Today, PhD students who do not write anything beyond their thesis minimize their competitiveness in

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the academic job market. I have known dozens of PhD students who have gone on to jobs as professors, and I cannot name a single one who was hired without publications, except those who were hired for teaching-only positions. If you want a career in research or at the university, use your time in grad school to write and publish works over and above your thesis. Many students expect to work up parts of their thesis as journal submissions. Definitely do this. The problem, however, is that you likely will not produce clean thesis chapters until comparatively late in your PhD program. Consequently, when applying for jobs you might have only a piece or two in submission (that is, under consideration by a journal and not yet accepted or published). That is somewhat better than nothing, but it likely will not get you any interviews. You can do much better with a bit of planning. Immediately start thinking about writing works other than your thesis. You could start small. If you are in the humanities or social sciences, book reviews can be a useful initiation into academic publishing. Such reviews may not be particularly prestigious, but they can be done quickly and give you confidence in your abilities as an author. Ask around about opportunities to review books. Your department might even house a journal looking for someone to review books in your area. Talk to your instructors and supervisor about publishing opportunities. Maybe you can transform one of your term papers into a journal submission. This is a ready source of potential publication opportunities, although it is harder to do in the natural sciences, where you typically need primary data to get published. Such discussions can lead to opportunities to coauthor with your supervisor or other individuals. Coauthoring builds on a faculty member’s knowledge of the ins and outs of academic publishing and is an excellent way to start publishing. In fact, in the

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natural sciences, students almost always list their supervisor as a coauthor, given that they are often publishing works derived from her larger research project. Grad students, however, sometimes worry they will not receive enough credit for their contributions to a publication. While disagreements about authorship can arise, my experience is that faculty members— particularly senior established figures— tend to be generous about coauthorship. Ask fellow grad students about which professors have a track record of equitable coauthorship, and explore any available opportunities. Subscribe to the mailing lists for your discipline. Almost all subdisciplines have an electronic mailing list or a presence on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter that professors use to keep abreast of new developments in their areas of expertise. These are a great way to learn about publishing opportunities, since journals routinely post calls for papers for special issues. How many publications do you need to land a job or be noticed by a PhD admissions committee or award committee? Unfortunately, there is no straightforward answer. Evaluating an academic’s publication profile will involve considerations such as the number of publications, their topics, the discipline-specific way in which different venues are valued (books vs. articles vs. book chapters), the page length of the contributions, single or coauthorship, how many coauthors, the academic prestige of the coauthors, and so on. Moreover, the “right” number of publications varies considerably by discipline. For example, in sociology, publishing three articles or book chapters, with you as the sole or first author of at least one or two of them, would be enough to make you viable for a tenure-track job interview. The best way to get concrete guidance on this issue is to talk with your supervisor about publication expectations in your field. Take a copy of your CV to that discussion so that you can talk about the specifics of your case. She should be able to tell you how you are doing and how you can improve.

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31 POSTPONE PUBLISHING

If you procrastinate when it comes to publishing your work, your CV will have fewer publications than that of your competition. Can you think of a better way to reduce your chances of success? Everything about publishing takes longer than you anticipate. I once had a paper accepted in an edited collection that was delayed at each step in the process due to problems with contributors, glitches at the press, and the fact the editor became ill and had to temporarily set the project aside. When her health improved, all the papers had to be updated. It took five years for the finished paper to be published. While five years is exceptional, do not be surprised if it takes a year or more for an accepted paper to appear in print. Writing is itself often a slow process. Once you complete your paper and submit it to a journal, months can pass before the editor sends you the peer reviews. If you are lucky and the reviews are favorable, expect to be asked to make another round of revisions (either major or minor)— typically referred to as a “revise and resubmit.” In this situation, the editor provides you with the anonymous reviews and informs you that she will reconsider your paper after you make the reviewers’ suggested changes. Reviewers often provide extensive and sometimes contradictory recommendations; ideally the editor will point out which revisions are crucial, but that does not always happen. As a result, “revise and resubmits” can be particularly confusing. If you are in this situation, ask a more senior scholar for advice on how to interpret the reviewers’ suggestions. Make as many of the revisions as appropriate (and possible) and resubmit the paper— usually by a specified date. Also provide a brief document that summarizes your

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revisions, itemizing how you have responded to each point made by the reviewers. You do not need to adopt all suggested changes, but you probably need to adopt many of them. If you decide not to follow a particular suggestion, indicate this and explain why, respectfully and diplomatically. The editor might then make a final decision on whether to publish your resubmitted paper. Alternatively, she could send it out for another round of reviews, again prolonging the process. If your revised piece is accepted, it is copyedited and added to the publication queue. Depending on the journal’s backlog of accepted articles, it might not appear in print for a year or more after acceptance. All of this will take much longer if you are dealing with a book manuscript. As you can see, publishing takes considerable time, which is why it is important to begin the process long before you hit the job market. Given such timelines, you might not want to aim for the absolute top journals. Only a fraction of the papers submitted to leading journals are accepted for publication. You therefore risk tying your paper up in a lengthy review process, only to have it rejected. Get concrete advice from your supervisor or other senior colleagues about where to submit each manuscript. They should be able to tell you what journal might be appropriate, bearing in mind the topic of the paper, its quality, the number and type of publications on your current CV, when you want to be on the job market, and so on. Be persistent. Too many graduate students send a manuscript out for publication once and give up if it is not accepted. They do not understand that senior academics routinely submit articles to several different outlets (in succession, not at the same time, which is wrong and can get you into trouble) before they are accepted. As soon as I submit an article, I decide where to submit it next should it be rejected. This reduces the sting when the editor declines the piece, as I have already developed my backup plan.

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List on your CV any pieces you have written but not yet published. Identify those that are in submission, have received a revise and resubmit, or are forthcoming (that is, an editor has formally accepted the final version and you are awaiting publication). But be careful not to pad your CV. Listing works you are currently writing (or hope to write) will annoy the people reading your file. Committees are also suspicious of lengthy lists of works in progress. Do not worry if your early publishing efforts are on topics that are not directly relevant to your current scholarship. People recognize that as you go through grad school your interests might evolve, and this can be reflected in your publication profile. Moreover, this diversity can sometimes work to your advantage. Academics often develop more than one area of expertise. A hiring committee might like your secondary specialization, as it suggests that you could also contribute to other areas in the department. The goal is to show that you can produce a stream of original scholarship over time. Certainly, if you publish on wildly unrelated topics (Byron’s poetry and developments in thermal imaging technologies, to take an extreme example) you might be seen as an unfocused dilettante. If so, develop a coherent story about how your publications are related substantively, theoretically, or in terms of your personal biography. Smart hiring committees recognize how desirable it is to have a candidate who has an early record of publishing— notwithstanding the fact those publications vary in focus— because patterns of publication success tend to continue. And while I have stressed the relationship between publications and jobs, publications are also routinely a key factor that separates winners in competitions for grants and scholarships, and sometimes in applications for PhD admission, although in my field it is relatively rare that students applying for a PhD have publications.

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While this may vary somewhat depending on your field, Master’s students in general have much lower pressures to publish compared to PhD students. Master’s students will often finish their degree without any publications, or perhaps might be listed as the fourteenth author of a paper written primarily by other people working on a large collaborative research project. If you are a master’s student, you should start to think seriously about the publication process— especially if you are planning to continue on to a PhD— and get advice about what the expectations are in your field. But do not get anxious if you do not publish for a little while.

32 COVER EVERYTHING

Students eager to screw up should remember that their thesis is their defining personal and professional achievement. The thesis is everything. Therefore it should contain everything. Approach your topic from every conceivable angle. Use a diverse set of methodologies. Explore the topic from every theoretical framework conceivable. Aim to produce an analysis that spans the full sweep of human history. This will ensure that in thirty years you will be asking whether you are eligible for pension benefits as a graduate student. While working on my master’s degree, I bumped into one of my professors and summarized my thesis topic for him. I was doing research on the sex trade, so I detailed how I expected to conduct a feminist analysis of prostitution in Toronto. It would address economic issues and incorporate recent theoretical work on ethnic-

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ity and identity. My methodology involved an ambitious plan for a lengthy period of firsthand observation in the field, combined with dozens of interviews with female street prostitutes, police, politicians, and local activists. When I stopped talking, he smiled wryly and said, “Well, you certainly have your work cut out for you.” As we parted, I thought to myself, He’s right. This is insane. I will never be able to do all of this. The project was massive, unfocused, and had to be radically reduced in scope and ambition or I would never finish. I slept horribly that night, but my fear motivated me to transform my thesis into something more feasible. Both master’s and PhD students tend to set overly ambitious parameters for their research, mistakenly thinking their thesis has to be a monumental contribution to knowledge. The thesis is the focal point of a graduate degree. As a result, it has tremendous symbolic weight, making it tempting to try to cover more than necessary, and to do so from all angles. This is a particular danger for master’s students, who are expected to make a much more modest contribution to knowledge but are still tempted to use the thesis to demonstrate everything they know about a topic. Be cautious that you do not try to accomplish too much. If you think you must address everything in your thesis, you risk producing a needlessly long, rambling piece of work. Some universities try to curtail this impulse by imposing strict word limits on thesis. Still, I have seen 250-page master’s theses and a PhD thesis that at more than 700 pages could only be bound as two separate volumes. Such massive tomes might impress or intimidate junior grad students, but faculty members see them as a disaster. Lengthy theses almost always represent some combination of an unfocused student and a supervisor who could not (or did not try to) convince the student to narrow the scope of her project. The history of conflict in the Middle East, for example, is not a PhD thesis; it is several lifetimes’ work. Alternatively, a study of the political implications of chariot warfare in Mesopotamia is still a large project, but it is a more focused and manageable PhD

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thesis. A master’s thesis might explore a narrower slice, such as a particular attribute of warfare during a specific time period. Jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie famously said that it took his whole life to learn what not to play. The same is true for designing and writing academic works. You need to identify what not to cover in your research, and to remove tangents peripheral to your analysis or argument. Such focusing is an ongoing process. It should start at the outset as you establish the limits of your thesis. Throughout the research and writing process, you should be saying to yourself: “This is interesting, but is it central to my project?” As you come close to having a complete draft, you will also have to decide whether everything you have written hangs together as a coherent piece of research. You might have to cut major sections or even chapters. This will hurt. I cut many pages of material in the final stages of writing my master’s thesis, including a number of chunks I loved but did not quite fit with my final structure and arguments. A thesis, like any written work, is always stronger when you omit unnecessary sections. Simply place those parts in a separate file and work them up later for a submission to a journal.

33 DO NOT POSITION YOURSELF

Graduate school exposes students to new ideas, methodologies, and theories. Some students become increasingly confident in what they know. Other students, however, become fearful that their work might be criticized by people coming from other perspectives. Such students fixate on the limits of their research, waffle, and do not strongly align themselves to a specific intellectual tradition.

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No research is ever methodologically perfect, and grad students in particular have limited research experience, time, and resources to conduct research. Sample sizes could always have been larger, timelines could have been longer, and comparison groups could have been more exact. Your archival sources will contain agonizing omissions, and your statistical data will gloss over the lived realities of your research participants. Your case study may be only generalizable in a limited way to other contexts. The technology available at your university might limit the type of research you can conduct. Such are the realities of conducting research. Rather than being a pristine exercise in creating knowledge, research can be messy. Experienced researchers understand that real research seldom follows the orderly processes outlined in methods textbooks and instead involves improvisation and making the best of things when challenges arise. You will need to compromise idealized goals in light of the pragmatic need to do the best you can with the resources and time frame available. Do not let this torment you. Accept that your study was not perfect, but defend what you have done and the conclusions you can reasonably draw from your research. A variation of this dynamic concerns your choice of theoretical framework. This can induce more than a little anxiety in the humanities and social sciences, which have an enormous number of theoretical traditions, each of which has at least some adherents. But remember that all approaches have been criticized for their assorted limitations. So choose a theoretical framework and defend it as best you can. One temptation is to delve ever deeper into the literature in hopes of developing a more thorough understanding of the intellectual lineages informing your approach. For grad students who must get on with the practical work of collecting data, this can be a distraction from the main task. Even philosophers and social theorists eventually need to build on a foundation to make an original argument.

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It is easy to identify students who cannot commit to an intellectual tradition. Their writing tends to summarize many theoretical positions without explicitly aligning with any particular approach. It can take forever for such students to develop a forceful assertion along these lines: “I am using this approach, notwithstanding the fact that it has certain limitations (itemize A, B, and C), but it is still strong in certain areas (itemize X, Y, and Z) and provides the most (accurate, novel, pertinent, politically useful) way to study my topic.” Whatever approach you take to your research will not be perfect. You must nonetheless align yourself with and defend your choice of topic, theory, and methodological strategy.

34 WRITE ONLY TO DEADLINES

As you go through grad school, your writing regime will— or should— change. Undergrad students usually write to deadlines. They learn approximately how long it takes to compose a respectable term paper in a frenzied push immediately before the due date. It is a process involving isolation, caffeine, and late nights. Use this as your approach to writing if you want to publish only intermittently and live with constant angst. When you complete your course work, you will be in an unfamiliar world with few firm deadlines to direct your writing schedule. This has both benefits and risks. The advantages are that you might have considerable flexibility in how you organize your work and home life. People uncomfortable with conventional work routines love this. It can also be attractive to parents of young children who have to accommodate complex schedules.

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Many grad students, however, struggle with the lack of structure once they finish their course work. One problem is that it becomes easy to procrastinate and let your writing slide. You can always postpone working on that paper for another day. After all, it has no firm deadline and you must prepare a lecture before today’s class, submit this application, respond to all of these e-mails, or deal with any number of other tasks that are more pressing and pleasurable than pounding out pages. Letting other responsibilities come before your writing is probably the most common barrier to writing a lot. Manage this situation by establishing your own deadlines. You might commit to writing a conference paper or agree to produce a chapter for an edited book, each of which would have explicit due dates. When done diligently, this helps bring open-ended writing projects to a close. Unfortunately, many academics develop a curious psychological affliction that leads them to interpret “firm” as “negotiable.” Some academics regularly miss “firm” target dates, further dragging out their writing. Doing so will make you unpopular with those who do meet the deadline only to find their work delayed as they wait for you to submit your overdue contribution. Self-imposed deadlines thus might not resolve the problem. Academics who work this way often still find themselves composing their pieces in the weeks, days, or hours before— or past— the due date. It is a writing routine that does not maximize your writing potential, and it places you under constant pressure. Productive and relaxed academics, in contrast, develop the self-discipline to write even without immediate deadlines. Follow the strategy of professional authors. They have a daily writing schedule and stick to it. Writing is not some peripheral activity they hope to squeeze in around other priorities; it is their job, and they do it faithfully every day. Adopt the same attitude. Look at your schedule and find time to write every day. If there are no available slots, you might have to drop some activities or wake up earlier to make the time. This does not have to be a massive

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commitment— anywhere from thirty minutes to three hours, depending on your timetable, looming deadlines, and ability to focus. What is vital is that you write during those periods. Your writing time is gold. Your closest colleagues, friends, and family members will find ingenious ways to steal this treasure through well-intentioned requests for advice, guest lecture opportunities, e-mails from students, committee responsibilities, social events, and so on. What is particularly maddening is how the same people in the university who ask you to take on extra tasks will often be the ones who also chide you for not publishing more. Be firm about protecting your writing time. If you are looking for guidance about developing such a regime, I recommend following the advice Paul Silvia sets out in his wonderful little book How to Write a Lot. You will write more and worry less. Do not think about your writing as art. Like any craft, it has its own forms of creativity, but that can only emerge through doing the work. Think of it as digging a ditch. Digging ditches is not romantic; it is a demanding slog. But if you dig each day for one hour, at the end of each week, the ditch will be deeper and the edges will be more defined. The same is true for writing. Put the time in regularly; what you write will naturally become a bit larger and better defined. Once you have set aside your writing time, use it productively. Most important, do what works for you. I have successful colleagues who write only in the evening, and others who do their best work in a crowded café. Whatever situations help you write, that is where and when you should write. That said, do not put off today’s writing because your preferred writing context is not available. Just write. I recommend writing first thing in the morning. Writing early allows you to start anew with a mind that is not yet cluttered by the disruptions and distractions that will pop up during the day. It also provides the wonderful psychological advantage of knowing that by mid-morning you have already accomplished your main

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academic task. You can treat whatever else you accomplish during the rest of the day as a bonus. Other writing tips include turning off your telephone and not reading your e-mail, texts, or even newspapers before your daily writing is complete, as these easily become distractions. E-mail in particular is dangerous in the way it draws you in to a series of mini-dramas you almost certainly could have put on hold for a couple of hours. Also, stay in your chair during your writing time. Even if this means you are simply staring at the screen, moving paragraphs around, or running yet another spell-check, your mind is churning away in the background; words and ideas will come if you keep your bum in your seat. In my case, I write in thirtyminute chunks during which I do not leave my desk. When each timed segment is done, I wander around my office for a few minutes, then return for my next block of writing. Any academic will confirm that such techniques will immediately improve your writing output. The wonder is why, in an institution where writing is so prized, more people do not embrace these routines.

35 ABUSE YOUR AUDIENCE

Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. Flannery O’Connor

You are a budding academic, so you need to write like an academic. This means you need to produce long convoluted sentences writ-

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ten in the passive voice, riddled with discipline-specific jargon, and exotic words. Writing like that will certainly demonstrate your academic pedigree, yes? Actually, it will not. It will alienate your audience, turn off editors, and annoy your supervisor. When grad students aim to “write like an academic,” it too often translates into producing turgid, tortured prose. Some students actually become worse writers in grad school. Writing will be a major part of your job. Strong writing improves your published works immeasurably, producing greater success in grant applications, letters of reference for students, and journal submissions. Good writing can even improve your teaching, which also involves expressing yourself in clear, straightforward, and engaging ways. If you want to torment your readers, treat writing like riding a bicycle— a skill you cannot forget but have not practiced seriously since freshman year. The best students, in contrast, approach writing like karate or tap dancing— as a form of artistry that declines if not constantly practiced. Writing is like playing guitar; it can only improve through consistent, concerted effort. One secret of grad school is that strong writers can do extremely well even if they are not the brightest people in the room. All grad students are smart and can do research of good quality, but if you cannot write in a clear and persuasive manner, everything about grad school becomes harder. As a journal editor, I receive a regular stream of submissions that are so poorly written, I wonder why the writers wish to torture their audience. Poor writing annoys anonymous reviewers, and a bad review immediately puts your work at a disadvantage. Authors who appear careless in preparing a manuscript— where numbers do not add up and ideas are presented in a scattershot manner— are particularly frustrating. Editors devote an enormous amount of time and energy revising poor writing. They are not eager to invite weak authors to

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participate in future writing projects. On the positive side, editors actively pursue strong writers. If you are fortunate enough to become an excellent writer, establishing a reputation for powerful prose and masterful metaphors, people will read your work irrespective of the topic. Grad school contains innumerable varieties of poor writing, but for the sake of convenience I will place them into two broad categories. The first, which is particularly apparent in the natural sciences, involves an effort to strip away any semblance of humanity, as though a machine composed the article. Such writing has its roots in the scientific quest for objectivity, which in terms of writing means trying to eliminate any hint of the people and places that shaped the research. Scientists write in such a way as to make it appear as though the data and the research speak for themselves. Interestingly, things are beginning to change here. (Premier scientific journals such as Nature and Science are completely open, for example, to submissions written in the first person, so do not let people tell you scientists cannot say “I” in their writing.) Still, the dominant tradition of science writing makes for some dreadfully dull reading, and grad students in the natural sciences who try to insert a distinctive voice in their work risk being accused of not writing as a scientist. As I discuss below, however, you can still strive toward greater clarity and precision in your writing. You can also avoid the passive voice, which takes the life out of your sentences. (Thus, say “The student defended her thesis,” not “The thesis was defended.”) The second category of poor writing, which is more characteristic of the humanities and social sciences, reveals just the opposite problem: needlessly muddy formulations, incomprehensible arguments, and overblown terminology. I wonder if these writers aspire to be researchers or avant-garde novelists. This weakness can be attributed partly to the considerable amount of theory now taught in grad school. It can take years for students to realize that

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grappling with weighty ideas does not require them to write like their theoretical gurus, many of whom are seen by clear-writing advocates as the worst offenders. In grad school, you are on the cusp of a vital transition in your relationship with your readers. Your professors will still read your papers and thesis chapters because they must, but you have a different audience when you begin publishing in journals. Academics have mountains of articles they want or need to read. If you write so poorly that readers struggle to understand your point, they will move on to something else. This is a disaster, for being unread means being irrelevant. While the academy often stresses the need to publish, the ultimate aim is to have your work read so that you can help shape the scholarly discussions in your field. This will not happen if people will not read or cannot understand your work. It is impossible to list here the many ways to improve your writing, but, at a minimum, share your work with authors you respect, whether peers or professors in your department. Do not be upset if they return your work all marked up. Copyediting is a gift, not a criticism. People who want to improve their writing are disappointed when someone who has agreed to edit their work returns it with little more than the perfunctory comment of, “yeah, I really liked it.” If someone is generous enough to seriously edit your work, remember that careful editing is a time-consuming job, so provide them with only small snippets of your writing. Several years ago I had a student who, although a solid writer, still had some peculiar writing habits, including a love of words pulled from the most remote corners of the thesaurus. As part of our regular routine, I asked him to send me two paragraphs of something he had recently written— on any topic— prior to our meetings. I then spent a few minutes commenting on his writing. This helped him correct some bad habits before he began writing his thesis. Even when comparatively small bits of writing are edited, it can be useful to discern the types of errors being identified—

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whether poor word choice, passive voice, needlessly long sentences, or vague phrasing— and work to improve those weaknesses. Such careful attention from friends and supervisors is not something you can rely on, so seek out other writing resources. Some time-honored strategies include joining (or establishing) a writing group, reading books on the topic, and simply paying attention to what you like and dislike about certain authors’ writing. Take some formal writing courses. University campuses have writing centers or freelance editors who will charge a small fee to read your works and give you guidance about how to improve. If you are an international student who is unsure about your English-language skills, such courses are essential. But no matter how good a writer you are, you can always become better. Get assistance early; if you ask for help just days before your term paper or thesis is due, the cursory guidance you receive will not be of much use. Your reader is your friend, and you want to help them understand what you are saying. You should therefore introduce concepts slowly and carefully, repeat key ideas, clarify how you are using specialized terminology, summarize and resummarize your argument, and provide an ongoing sense of how your analysis or argument will unfold from this point forward. Using flowcharts, graphs, and tables of key concepts can be a valuable way to show relationships, clarify concepts, and signal the direction of your argument. Hold your reader’s hand and carefully show them what you are doing. Tell them in the most basic way possible what your argument is and how it contributes to the field. When reading a thesis, I first skim the introduction in search of the paragraphs that say something like, “In this thesis I therefore will demonstrate . . .” or “Consequently, this thesis uses X data informed by Y theory to argue . . .” If I cannot find such statements, my mood immediately sours because I am going to have to put in extra work to simply figure out what the author is trying to accomplish. Or, even worse,

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I am going to have to deal with the fact that they actually might not have a point. Vow you will not write like a traditional academic: eliminate jargon, strive for clear and concise assertions, compose in the active voice, and be kind to your readers. Above all, continually strive to improve your writing.

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Y OU R A T T I T U D E A N D AC T I O N S

Thriving as a graduate student involves in part simply being considerate, pleasant, and responsible. That would seem so selfevident that it need not be dwelled upon. But, unfortunately, students (and professors) occasionally become so immersed in the job that they forget basic points about working in a complex organization and maintaining satisfying relationships. Being rude, insensitive, or annoying is a great way to hurt your reputation. That, in turn, will have numerous negative consequences as you progress through your degree and into the work world. Think about your actions. Could your behavior hurt or slight others? Have you recognized all the people who deserve recognition? Is it fair, appropriate, or wise to talk about colleagues behind their backs? You will be amazed by how far simply being a thoughtful person will go in advancing your career (or not sabotaging it). No graduate degree goes off without a hitch. All students encounter detours and roadblocks. Try to develop a constructive attitude toward such events. A large part of how you will be informally evaluated as a graduate student (and you will be informally evaluated) pertains to how you deal with such trials. A positive attitude, combined with a willingness to handle chal-

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lenges productively, will make your program easier. It will also demonstrate your suitability for the job. In contrast, constantly complaining will just give you high blood pressure and irritate your colleagues.

36 EXPECT TO BE JUDGED ONLY ON YOUR WORK

I sat fuming at my desk, wondering if my student Cassandra was disorganized or just inconsiderate. To make myself available for what Cassandra said was an urgent meeting, I had rearranged my schedule, canceled other appointments, and borrowed the car from my spouse to make a special trip to campus, something that required her to rework her own and our son’s schedule. After an hour I gave up and went home. Days later I learned that Cassandra did not meet me because she had resolved her problem herself, which was obviously a good thing. However, the fact she did not bother to inform me of this development or apologize for not canceling tainted her reputation— a classic graduate student screw-up. Graduate school can appear to be a uniquely task-focused place. You are expected to complete a series of concrete projects such as term papers, comprehensive examinations, and the thesis itself. You might assume that you will be assessed exclusively on how well you perform those tasks. And while being judged only on your work has a meritocratic appeal, it is not how the university— or any organization— works in practice. Merit matters enormously, but in grad school everyone knows who you are when evaluating

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your work. They assess your scholarship but also pay attention— sometimes considerable attention, and sometimes inordinate attention— to you as a person. All of this highlights the issue of reputation, and the many factors that go into establishing and assessing your professionalism. Partly this judgment involves consideration of you as a human being. Indeed, this is built into the academic system. Discussions of “collegiality” are a kind of code for how well you work and get along with other people. Professors are expected to specifically address such issues when writing reference letters, for example, and their peers will not soon forgive them if they glowingly recommend someone they know is intolerable. Be conscious of the many factors that shape how others view you. It is impossible to list all of the considerations here, but your parents’ advice about following the golden rule, that manners matter, and that you need to get along to get ahead applies as much in the university as it does in other realms of life. A classic way to stain your personal reputation is to be rude to support staff. The backbone of the university, these people perform innumerable tasks for faculty and students, often at the drop of a hat and with little complaint. Being insensitive toward them— forgetting they are people deserving of respect and consideration— is a surefire way to acquire a negative reputation. People also become annoyed if you are regularly late for meetings. I suspect one reason for the tardiness is that students perceive a certain casualness about scheduling in the university. While meetings often do not start on time, an informal, but strict, logic dictates who can and cannot be late. Basically, people higher up in the organization have more leeway to make people lower in the hierarchy wait; deans can make department chairs wait, while chairs can make faculty members wait, and faculty members can make students wait. Not that I am encour-

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aging such practices or saying they are fair, but any sociologist will tell you this is how it works in all Western bureaucratic organizations. Another blemish on your reputation can happen if you ignore your supervisor’s advice. In the year I was writing this book, for example, I told all nine of my PhD students to attend an upcoming job talk. Only one bothered to show up. Puzzled by their lack of attendance, I wondered if they were following my other advice. You do not want your supervisor asking such questions about you. Likewise, several years ago, a student named Omar asked his supervisor, Professor Singh, if he should include Professor Douglas on his PhD committee. On paper, this appeared to be an excellent idea, given Professor Douglas’s prestige. Nonetheless, Professor Singh said no. She learned a week later that Omar had, against her advice, gone ahead and invited Professor Douglas to join the committee. What Omar did not know, because this could not be said to a comparatively junior graduate student, was that Professor Douglas was a curmudgeonly and unpredictable obstructionist. Professor Singh withdrew from the committee, leaving Omar scrambling to find another supervisor. This is not to say that you must stifle your own personality or slavishly follow faculty members’ whims. Part of the appeal of university careers has often been their anti-establishment orientation. Universities have housed a procession of impressive individuals who, due to any number of personal peculiarities, would have withered in industry or government. Be yourself, but do not lose sight of the fact that universities are still highly traditional institutions. People will notice how you act. At the same time, you do not have to always be nice and do as you are told. Sometimes it is crucial to take a stand, hold your ground, and in the process risk coming across as abrasive or confrontational. Pick your battles wisely and do not give people reason to believe that you are always combative.

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37 HAVE A THIN SKIN

My student Tom was in a funk. After I asked him several times what was wrong, he confided that he was upset by the reviews he received on an article he submitted to a journal for publication consideration. The reviews were harsh, the paper was rejected, and Tom doubted whether he was cut out to be an academic. He then handed me a copy of the response he had written to the journal’s editor. Thank goodness he had not yet sent it off. Tom’s reply came across as both hurt and angry. He essentially accused the reviewers of being knownothings who were not up on the recent literature and of missing the point of his paper. He then questioned the editor’s competence for choosing such inept reviewers. After reading his letter, I explained to Tom why he needed to develop a thick skin about his professional work. Then I shredded his response to the editor. You are likely a high achiever who has accumulated a lifetime’s worth of academic success. You are accustomed to being among the best students and to being praised. The feedback you have received from high school and university teachers may have tended to emphasize the positive, sometimes to the point of sugarcoating. Things are different in the advanced stages of academia. Standards are higher and failure is common. To thrive and move forward, you must undertake projects that might fail. Your course work, PhD comprehensive exams, thesis, and conference papers will likely go well. But to have an academic career, you have to take on a range of other activities where failure is normal. Thankfully, much of the rejection in grad school allows you the option to improve your work and try again. This new uncertainty is part of your life now. You will be competing with other high-caliber students for scholarships and fel-

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lowships, the majority of which you will not win. You will also need to publish. A great deal of work will go into developing your articles, only to have many of them rejected. Once you enter the job market, you will put together lengthy job applications to apply for positions for which there may be dozens of applicants. Even if you make the short list, you are still competing with two or three other impressive candidates. Each of you will give the performance of your life in the job interview, but only one will get the job. In short, you need to get used to being excellent and yet not always succeeding. Everyone is in the same boat. It happens to senior professors all the time in the form of unsuccessful grant applications or rejected publications. In such situations, graduate students can become frustrated either by the absence of feedback, as in unsuccessful fellowship applications, or the tone of the feedback, as in rejected publications. Many fellowship competitions do not have formal mechanisms to let students know why their applications are unsuccessful. If you sought out comments from faculty and other students when developing your applications (something you should do), try to get further feedback from your graduate chair, supervisor, and other faculty on what you could do better next time. I did not win a fellowship in my first application as a PhD student, but I learned from my mistakes and won a good one in my second attempt. If you are unfamiliar with publishing and are used to receiving positive and diplomatically framed feedback, the peer-review process may shock you. Many peer reviews are blunt and have a uniformly negative tone. Do not let a round of negative reviews embitter or discourage you. You are being exposed for the first time to a different model of giving (and receiving) feedback, so do not take the abrupt, brusque tone of the reviews you have received as a sign you are an impostor and do not belong in academia. You are being initiated to a normal part of academic life. I have read terrible, dismissive anonymous reviews of journal articles submitted by world-renowned academics. There are innumerable sto-

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ries about highly influential publications that were rejected many times before finding a publisher. The best-selling book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected by 121 publishers. Talk about an author having persistence— and a thick skin! Reviewers may have a variety of perspectives. This makes them like the potential readers of your article. Take these different perspectives into consideration. Too often I hear graduate students, angry at the comments of a particular reviewer, say something like, “Reviewer two is a jerk, and I am not going to listen to anything he says.” Maybe reviewer two is a jerk, but if you dismiss his views out of hand, you can miss out on insights that will not only make your work better but also increase your chances of having it published. Put negative reviews aside for a few days, and come back to them with a fresh set of eyes. Share them with colleagues. This can be awkward and embarrassing, but more senior professors can identify the useful bits in reviews that otherwise feel like a personal assault. At all costs avoid Tom’s desire to complain to the editor. Editors sympathize with the people who took the time to voluntarily review manuscripts for their journal. They will likely see your complaints as unproductive grousing. Persevere and do not become discouraged as you learn to face this “new normal.” Becoming bitter about failure will cloud your judgment and take your focus off what you need to do better, and it can poison important relationships. In short, to move forward in graduate school and academia, you need to get used to putting your best effort into projects where the likelihood of success is uncertain. A key part of being an academic involves learning to persevere in the face of uncertainty, failure, and rejection. Maybe it will help you to recognize that for academics criticism can paradoxically be a form of praise. A certain level of critique is a subtle form of respect, suggesting your work is serious or important enough to warrant a response. Try to remember that when you are demoralized by a particularly harsh reviewer.

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38 BE INCONSIDERATE

A graduate student recently decided not to teach her scheduled undergraduate course. She had found a different source of revenue, so she did not need the money. Instead she wanted to focus on her thesis. Regrettably, the course was fully enrolled, and it started in two days. The professor responsible for course scheduling was irritated (to put it mildly) because he now had to scramble to find someone who could teach this highly specialized seminar on essentially no notice. The enrolled students faced the prospect of having their programs thrown into disarray if the course was canceled. Some might not be able to graduate on schedule. By withdrawing from her teaching assignment, this student demonstrated a simply fantastic way to screw up. Her desire to concentrate on her thesis was understandable. But she was also being inconsiderate, unnecessarily increasing other people’s workload and headaches. It is surprising how often otherwise smart grad students are inconsiderate. I recall, for example, a TA who took an unannounced vacation to Cancun during the term. This left a peeved professor having to mark more than two hundred term papers that the student was scheduled (and paid) to grade because she was inexplicably not there to do her job. She was lucky to still be enrolled in grad school when she returned from vacation. I have hired students to do relatively easy research tasks that they simply failed to do, meaning I lacked some of the data needed to advance a research project and write an article. The significance of reputation in the academy cannot be overstated. You can evaluate academics’ standing in several ways, such as number of publications, quality of the venues in which their

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work is published, awards, positions on prestigious commissions, or the value of their research grants. All these things shape their professional reputation, which is composed of their colleagues’ informal appraisal of countless acts performed over the years. At the end of the day, this reputation can be a professor’s most significant asset, because everything else is contingent on her standing in the community. Reputation gets professors invited to contribute to prestigious volumes and to evaluate funding proposals, and it gives their letters of reference added weight. Grad students are in the process of developing a professional reputation. When you are in a group of bright, capable students, having a reputation for being trustworthy, dependable, and committed helps you stand out. Good reputations are built up slowly and incrementally, but they can be tarnished in a heartbeat. One example of the importance of reputation concerns a junior colleague I know who several years ago submitted the same manuscript simultaneously to two different peer-reviewed journals. This is considered a serious breach of academic protocol. Anonymous review relies on scholars’ volunteering their time to evaluate manuscripts. Joint submission are prohibited because reviewers already have onerous time commitments, and the peer-review process would be overwhelmed if joint submissions were allowed. By happenstance her joint submission was discovered, and the editors of the respective journals reprimanded her. Her punishment was, in the first instance, not unduly severe. Word inevitably spread and other individuals, me included, learned about the breach of etiquette. Her reputation became tainted, which, in turn, has played a role in her not being invited to participate in a number of desirable ventures. This shunning was not vindictive. Instead, it occurred, for example, in situations where conference organizers or editors were compiling a list of potential contributors and shied away from her in favor of someone else. Cumulatively, such exclusions amounted to an excessive punishment of a comparatively junior scholar who, in her haste

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to publish, made a mistake she genuinely regrets. The point, however, concerns the importance and fragility of academic reputations and how blemishes tend to spread and compound themselves. Departments, instructors, and supervisors must make decisions about students all the time. Are they progressing adequately? Should they receive an award? Are they ready to start teaching? The result is that faculty and administrators regularly talk about grad students. If you take your professional work lightly, such people will undoubtedly hear about it. So if you are keen to do well, take your tasks seriously and do them to the best of your abilities. Such an approach will provide its own intrinsic rewards, but it can also yield more tangible benefits. The academy comprises a series of very small communities. The number of people who work in your area of specialization would likely not fill a bus, often not even a small bus. Administrators responsible for making decisions about hiring, promotion, and teaching frequently contact trusted colleagues who were in the candidate’s department, sometimes many years previously, to solicit their impressions. It goes smoothly for the candidate if the person being approached remembers being impressed by the student’s thoughtful input on a hiring committee. If all they can remember is some dramatic screw-up that instantly transformed the student’s reputation from “impressive” to “flake,” things will not go so well. That said, not all incidents where you increase someone’s workload or headaches will be seen as examples of your being inconsiderate. You or someone close to you might become ill, for example, meaning people around you have to step up to cover for you. Such situations are unavoidable parts of life. Also, you are not being inconsiderate when you make an honest mistake. But people judge mistakes differently when those errors appear to be the reasonable consequence of someone learning the ropes of a new profession as opposed to being the predictable result of a cavalier atti-

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tude about how your actions might harm or inconvenience other people.

39 BECOME “THAT” STUDENT

As you go through grad school, be careful about becoming “that” student— the one who talks only about course work and research. Not about how exciting everything is or how much you are learning, but about how disastrously busy you are and how overwhelmed you feel. If you make constant reference to working imposingly, impossibly long hours, you will soon find that your grad student peers will not want to have anything to do with you, which will make your time in grad school and beyond particularly difficult. “That” student is one of the most clichéd figures in grad school— someone who can also be found prominently among the ranks of junior professors. Such individuals cannot stop talking about how busy they are. Most obviously, they do so because they are busy and their workload is on their mind. Such talk allows people— often unconsciously— to display a professional persona, letting anyone who will listen know how dedicated they are. Such “busy talk” is also a habitual conversation starter, a way to forge solidarity out of shared suffering. Taken too far, however, such talk becomes off-putting. While it might be hard to fathom as you bear your heavy workload, most people in grad school are busy, and many are busier than you. They just do not make it the focus of all their conversations. So regularly referring to being overwhelmed is not likely to garner more than token sympathy. More important, after a certain point

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constant talk about work overload alienates you from your peers. Nobody wants to hang out with the person who never strays from the “I’m unbelievably busy” script. You might also decide to become the constant complainer. These people not only moan about how busy they are, but about an expanded— almost limitless— range of other grievances. Some of the most familiar include poor funding, administrative incompetence, limited job prospects, equity issues, boring or irrelevant courses, and inadequate supervision. Such issues can be vitally important, and when problems arise they should be addressed. Again, however, beyond a certain point this is not about the specifics of any individual grievance, but about becoming the person whose primary strategy of social interaction is to grouse. If you want students and faculty to shun you, become this person. It is also a great way to make yourself miserable, as complaining reinforces a foul disposition. The consequences of incessant complaint can be startlingly direct. I recall a junior faculty member who appeared to be going out of his way to be obnoxious. He made unreasonable requests, protested about trivial things, and insulted senior faculty behind their backs. Notwithstanding such traits, he was a wonderful classroom instructor. When his name was mentioned as a candidate for a teaching award, a faculty member who had been on the receiving end of his continual grumbling declared, “Given how he has been behaving, it will be a cold day in hell when I support his nomination for anything.” End of discussion. Be careful not to surround yourself with such people. Misery may love company, but exposing yourself to a regular stream of vitriol is a great way to unnecessarily sour your mood. Grad school is hard enough without the toxic personalities. The point is not to be a simpleton who sees only good in a world rife with problems. Instead, cultivate a balanced approach to unwelcome situations that does not alienate you from your peers and in the process make you needlessly bitter.

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40 NEVER COMPROMISE

I watched Elizabeth waste more than a year as she cycled through a series of supervisors. She constantly added and dropped supervisors because she insisted on using a particular strand of theorizing in her thesis. When a supervisor advised her that this was probably not the best way to approach the topic, Elizabeth dropped her and went in search of another mentor. Ultimately, Elizabeth was being unnecessarily intransigent. Including or not including that particular bit of theory would not have meaningfully changed her thesis. But by insisting that it be included against the wishes of her supervisors, she wasted a lot of time and alienated the people who were best positioned to help with her thesis. This is one small example of how you can screw up by being inflexible. You may expect that your thesis will be your crowning intellectual achievement. In fact, many different parties will influence its final shape. Do not be surprised if you have to compromise a bit on your initial vision to satisfy other people’s expectations. Students who resist this reality and rigidly refuse to follow any advice that might steer them in different directions are setting themselves up for frustration and even failure. To graduate, your supervisor and committee members must approve your initial research plan and sign off on the final thesis before you can schedule your defense. These people will not blithely embrace everything you are proposing or what you have written— and if they do, you have reason to suspect they did not give your work the attention it deserves. Instead, do not be surprised if they recommend other ways to approach your research and a different vision for the final product. At first, such suggestions can be disheartening, since you might feel that

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following their advice will compromise what you are trying to accomplish. Here again a moderate approach is usually wise. Be certain your project is truly yours: that you care about your research and believe in what you are writing. At the same time, take the advice of your committee members seriously. I recall one PhD student who was strongly advised to analyze the changing role of information technology in the car manufacturing plant he was studying. Unsure that this was an important part of the picture, he was slow to embrace the idea. But in the end, his thesis included an excellent chapter on that topic that was subsequently published in a prestigious journal and served as the basis for his (successful) research presentation to a hiring committee. Not all the advice you receive will work out so well. Plenty of times graduate students have been encouraged to transform their theses to better conform to a faculty member’s own idiosyncratic interests. So do not follow all the more quirky suggestions you might receive, for doing so can compromise your intellectual integrity and result in an incoherent thesis. Consult with colleagues to identify what is absolutely necessary and what avenues you can safely ignore. At the same time, remember that the people reading your work ultimately have your best interests at heart and may know more than you do about the broader area. They want you to produce a high-quality project and be well positioned in the job market. If you decide not to take your project in a direction recommended by a committee member, expect that at your master’s or PhD defense he will ask you to justify why you did not go down that route. At the end of the day, if you included certain themes in your thesis primarily to satisfy the demands of one committee member, you can always jettison those additions as you transform your thesis into a book or article submissions. Developing an ability to maintain your own vision of a piece of research while also incorporating other people’s (relevant) sugges-

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tions will serve you well, as it is an inherent part of getting your works published in scholarly journals.

41 GOSSIP

I know of a professor who obtained a parking spot reserved for people with disabilities because she wears high-heeled shoes. She argued that as a senior administrator part of her job was to project authority, which was difficult given that she was quite short. To compensate, she wore high heels, which were painful to walk in. So— following her logic— she needed a dedicated handicapped parking spot so she would not have to wobble great distances across campus. Embarrassingly, the university complied with her request. The university campus is full of characters, although most do not shamelessly manipulate social welfare programs. From Richard Russo’s Straight Man to David Lodge’s classic Small World, there is a literary subgenre that pokes fun at the foibles of academic life. Such authors draw from a rich vein of source material, given academics’ often peculiar behavior. A great joy in many professors’ lives is telling tales about such folks. This love of scuttlebutt partly explains why, as I have stressed, academic reputations can be tainted so quickly. Rumors about anything even remotely salacious can spread as fast as . . . well, as fast as a rumor. It is fun to chat about friends and colleagues, but be careful not to become a gossip. Develop a personal policy about what you will and will not talk about and with whom you will share such

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information. Think about how people— including you— might be hurt if this bit of information were circulated. For example, gossiping about your supervisor is particularly tempting, but it can be a colossal mistake given how closely your career is tied to that person. Gossiping about other students or faculty members is almost as dangerous since they are your future colleagues. Gossiping on the Internet and on social media is particularly risky, as hundreds or even thousands of people can read your scuttlebutt almost instantly. And you never know where your messages will end up. When I was on the job market, I interviewed for a position at a university on the other side of the continent. Within thirty-six hours of returning home, I received a copy of a “confidential” evaluation of my performance, including a candid assessment of my (negligible) aesthetic appeal. It turned out that one of the committee members could not attend my job talk, so her friend (also on the committee) wrote up an assessment and shared it with her via e-mail. The e-mail was forwarded to a couple more people, who sent it to several more, one of whom was a friend of mine from grad school. From her it landed in my in-box. So be careful. All of this might lead you to believe secrets are not safe in the academy, but that is the wrong conclusion. As you progress in your career, you will acquire intensely confidential insights into your colleagues’ and students’ finances, family life, mental and physical health, and the like. Maintain such confidences both because it is proper and because laws exist to ensure certain types of information are not discussed outside of appropriate circles. You do not want to find yourself on the wrong side of such regulations. If you have legitimate reasons to talk with other people about sensitive matters, try to do so in a face-to-face meeting or over the telephone to reduce the chance that your comments will go astray.

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42 SAY WHATEVER POPS INTO YOUR HEAD ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Here is a good way to torch your future. Two grad students attended a keynote speech at a conference. While they were listening to it, they kept the outside world up-to-date with a series of blisteringly snarky tweets about the speaker, who happened to be a leading person in their field. Another student who knew them both noted, “They likely made a lifelong enemy (if the keynote could even be bothered to care about their puny existence).” But that was not the end of it. The director of a key research center in their field also noticed the nasty rant-storm and became concerned. In fact, when speaking to his own grad students, he held these people up as an example of what not to do. As a director, he said, he would not hire someone with this sort of polarizing media presence, and neither would most hiring committees. One of the students who tweeted had actually hoped to get a postdoctoral position at the research center in question. Gone in sixty seconds. At another university, two similar projects were under way in different departments, each aimed at developing a new app. When one project was released, a grad student member of the other team tweeted the link and a comment, “Hasn’t this already been done?” Her supervisor then had to do damage control, as the comment not only irked their university colleagues (whom the student might have partnered with someday given their similar area of work), but also implied that both apps were the same, rather than unique projects valuable in their own right, thus undercutting her own project as well as that of her colleagues. The supervisor had to take the student aside and counsel her about using an “indoor voice” on social media versus an “outdoor voice.”

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The rapidly changing world of social media creates exciting opportunities for graduate students, but also many opportunities for screw-ups. On the positive side, many graduate students or recently graduated PhD students have presences on professional sites like academia.edu and LinkedIn. A number have their own well-developed websites showcasing their ongoing research and teaching, and perhaps featuring blogs about their work. When I was recently on a hiring committee, we paid a lot of attention to the professional websites of different applicants in drawing up our short list and making our final decision. Throughout this book, I stress the importance of becoming part of the academic culture of your department, your university, and in your field of research more broadly, and you can use social media such as Facebook and Google Plus to establish connections with colleagues. At the same time, the blurring of professional and personal worlds can be hazardous. Be careful about inviting your supervisor and committee members to be friends on Facebook. When you are supposed to be writing your thesis, do you really want your supervisor to see on Facebook that you just spent a “mental health day” lounging on your couch in your pajama pants, eating bowl after bowl of Rice Krispies, and binge-watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians? Having separate personal and professional accounts is one possible solution, although it may be awkward to decide which among your grad school circle qualify as personal friends. Another approach is that of Murphy’s Law: assume that anything you communicate on social media will find its way to exactly those audiences in your grad student life you would hate to hear it most.

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D E L I C A T E M A T T ER S

Extremely delicate situations sometimes arise in grad school. Some of the trickiest involve instances of racism, sexism, and the like. If you are the victim of such behavior, you will need to display considerable tact and maturity. Instances of discrimination can vary dramatically, making it almost impossible to present a single set of recommendations. If you find yourself being discriminated against, consult widely with colleagues and university administrators about your options. Even informal insinuations of discrimination are exceptionally serious. You will need to think about what you can realistically accomplish through different courses of action open to you, and how they might work for or against you in both the short and long term. Your love life can also produce delicate situations. Grad students, for example, sometimes become romantically involved with faculty members or even their supervisors. This is a terrible idea because of the inherent power differential and the fact that the graduate student has the most to lose from such relationships. If you work as an instructor or TA, you might find it tempting to become involved with your undergraduate students. Again, such situations have a tremendous power differential, but now you are the one

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in the position of power. Do not pursue such relationships. They are both unethical and potentially destructive for those involved. Among other things, they can do vast and permanent damage to your reputation. A different type of delicate matter involves the possibilities for plagiarism and different forms of cheating. The obvious advice here is not to cheat and not to appropriate others’ work without attribution. It is dishonest, and getting caught can end your academic career.

43 ASSUME THAT THE UNIVERSITY IS MORE INCLUSIVE THAN OTHER INSTITUTIONS

Universities create new knowledge and teach the next generation of students and researchers. Such noble ambitions can mask the university’s blemishes. Consequently, it can be disappointing or even shocking to encounter instances of harassment, racism, sexism, or homophobia in grad school. Nonetheless, it can happen. Society’s prejudices can also be the university’s prejudices. But the university can also be more progressive in some quarters than other organizations. For example, while far from perfect, large universities might be one of the better occupational environments for openly gay people. Universities still too often tend to use straight people as the implicit standard by which processes and people are evaluated. But openly gay people in the university are unremarkable (few people are surprised to encounter gay students and professors), and their concerns about mistreatment because of sexual orientation are generally taken seriously.

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You may have been raised in an environment where homosexuality was disapproved of, or in a country where gay people are persecuted and homosexuality is a crime. If so, the open presence of gay people on campus may at first be a bit disorienting. The university is an excellent place to reconsider your views on such matters, and to think about the sources of such beliefs. Regardless, the reality is that discrimination or harassment based on sexual orientation is a crime in North America and you must act accordingly. Issues of discrimination can play themselves out quite differently across different universities, faculties, and departments. For example, one of the most encouraging developments over the past quarter century has been what is known as the feminization of higher education. In several countries women are now the majority of undergrad students. At the same time, women still tend to be underrepresented in some fields and often do not have their share of faculty and senior administrative positions, although this appears to be changing rapidly. You could encounter subtle forms of sexism in the classroom, where male students tend to dominate conversations. Alternatively, you might find yourself in one of the disciplinary pockets where women are still not made to feel welcome and where feminist analysis is completely dismissed. I know an associate dean who, in an almost unbelievable recent incident, had to investigate allegations that a department was not admitting female graduate students. When she asked the department chair about this, he told her his department was reluctant to admit women because they are not committed to graduate education and often became pregnant. What made the chair’s admission of a blatantly illegal practice all the more stupefying is that it was made to someone who was (a) a woman, (b) a woman lawyer, (c) a woman lawyer with a PhD, and (d) a woman lawyer with a PhD who was associate dean! Sexual harassment (of various forms and to varying degrees) by fellow students or faculty members is not unknown. Again, this is

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a serious and thorny situation. If you are sexually harassed, seek out professional assistance and weigh the formal and informal courses of action available to you. You might decide to minimize the situation, make a formal complaint, change supervisors, and so on. You could discover that, though no fault of your own, none of your options come without a cost. Comparable issues arise in relation to race and ethnicity. If you come from certain ethnic backgrounds— say you are an Indigenous person— you may find the university an alienating place. You might quickly learn that the university does not observe (or even recognize) your cultural traditions, and there may be few students or professors who share your heritage. Many universities do, however, have policies to accommodate different religious traditions, so be sure to let people know if you have special needs concerning religious practices, holidays, and the like. You might encounter discrimination in the form of offensive jokes or assumptions about the caliber of students from certain ethnic backgrounds. In the contemporary university, however, many issues pertaining to discrimination tend to revolve around more systemic considerations— that is, the system does not recognize or accommodate the fact that students (and faculty) might not fit the university’s dominant occupational culture and practices and thus face less obvious forms of marginalization. Such subtle discrimination is probably most apparent to transgendered students or students with assorted forms of disability who must deal with buildings and teaching practices unsuited to their needs. All of this raises important, but complicated, issues about how to react to discrimination. There is no simple answer here. In hopes of not rocking the boat and harming your immediate pragmatic interests, you might simply ignore the situation, but doing nothing can be personally repugnant and will ensure that nothing changes. Alternatively, you might initiate either a personal or structural response— or both. If the issue involves just one individual, and you are comfortable addressing the issue personally,

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you can (delicately) talk to the person in a private setting. Suggesting that someone is acting in a discriminatory manner is a serious matter, so you will want to proceed carefully. Such discussions risk spinning out of control if the person you are criticizing does not share your assessment of the situation or becomes defensive— which will almost certainly happen. If it is too risky to confront the person directly, consider what other resources are available to you. You might arrange to meet with your department chair or grad chair. If other students or faculty members share your concerns, you could have a group meeting. There is both strength and safety in numbers. Appearing as a group will suggest you are not alone in your assessment of the situation. If you do not want to discuss the situation with the department, consider contacting the university’s ombudsperson’s office, the offices of human rights, equity, or safe disclosure, or the dean of students. There is a formal “chain of command,” so do not start at the top. And remember that although university administrators are obliged to take such issues seriously, the situation still might not be resolved to your liking. While informal discussions with university officials can be tremendously informative, there can be no official sanction against someone without a formal complaint. You might have to identify yourself in such a complaint, something you may or may not be comfortable doing. You might also find that “informal” discussions quickly become formal, as administrators can be legally compelled to respond to certain types of accusations, even if the person making the allegations wants to have only a casual discussion about the issue. If all you want at the outset is a safe environment to talk about the situation, look for an office that will not take formal action if that is not your wish. At my university, this is the office of Safe Disclosure and Human Rights. If the situation pertains to broader university policies and practices, consider getting involved in committees and groups on campus working to rectify such issues. At several points in this book I

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encourage you to participate in committees, as these can be a great way to work toward positive change. Sometimes students fear they will come across as complainers. If you use judgment and interpersonal skills to avoid this risk, you can instead be seen as someone eager to make the university better for everyone. Participating in such groups can demonstrate the university’s diversity, or as one of my grad students put it, that “the university contains multiple universities.” If you are troubled by marginalization and discrimination, it is possible, with a bit of work, to find mentors and colleagues who share your concerns. The recent move toward introducing nongendered bathrooms on campus to accommodate the needs of transgendered individuals is a nice example of the success of such grassroots initiatives. The university may seem an ideal, enlightened place, but it has not completely overcome the systemic injustices that plague other major social institutions. There are many positive currents and forces in the contemporary university, but problems are still being worked through. Simply being aware that such issues still exist can insulate you against the shock of encountering discrimination in an institution proud of being enlightened.

44 RUSH INTO A LEGAL BATTLE

Olaf had reached the end of his rope, so he filed a human rights complaint alleging a faculty member had likened him to a dog and said he was too old to be in grad school. What came next was predictable. Olaf transferred to a different department, where he discovered that none of the faculty members wanted to supervise him.

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Exasperated, he again took matters into his own hands and went on a hunger strike, which included a solitary vigil outside of the student union building, interviews with the media, and an online petition complaining that he had not been provided a supervisor. Olaf ’s situation exemplifies the fraught relationship grad students can have with their legal rights. On the one hand, once admitted to a graduate program, students have a series of rights. These would usually include employment rights pertaining to teaching or research assistantships, intellectual property rights, due process rights should disciplinary matters arise, and so on. On the other hand— and herein lies the dilemma— in almost all situations in life, you will find invoking your rights and seeking formal legal redress only has a chance of producing a satisfying result if you do not have a continuing relationship with the party you are in dispute with. Companies rarely sue each other if they hope to do business together in the future. You do not file a complaint against your spouse because of unfair treatment. If you do, expect your relationship to end soon. In Olaf ’s case, we can imagine that professors were not lining up outside of the chair’s office, saying, “Please let me supervise him. Yes, I know Olaf sued his previous department and is now on a well-publicized hunger strike, but I cannot wait to work closely with him.” Relationships in grad school are both formal, in that they are structured by explicit rules, and informal, in that highly personal assessments influence your chances of success. The informal dynamics can be remarkably consequential. In Olaf ’s case, he may have had sound reasons for feeling aggrieved. But by dealing with the situation in such a dramatic fashion, he essentially undermined any chance of establishing a healthy working relationship with his department or supervisor and of securing a strong letter of reference. Know your rights and use them when appropriate, but be conscious of the full ramifications that might follow from invoking such rights. You do not want to win the battle and lose the war.

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If possible, avoid finding yourself in a situation where you might need to invoke your rights. As noted previously, an easy way to avoid a common source of difficulties is to meet early and often with your supervisor to clarify mutual expectations. If you are unlucky and problems do arise, try not to escalate too quickly. I have a friend responsible for graduate student affairs across an entire campus. She handles at least two cases a year where a student immediately sends the university president a letter of complaint when the student encounters any form of snag. This is a textbook example of escalating too quickly. The president is certainly not going to personally deal with the issue, but by shooting your grievance to the top of the hierarchy, you demonstrate an ill-advised tendency toward escalation, annoy the people you should have been dealing with, and show that you do not understand how to handle disputes in complex organizations. And if the matter is resolved at the highest level, you might discover you have little input in shaping the final decision. Try to solve conflicts at the lowest level possible. Your legal rights can still play a significant role here. In your conversations with your supervisor or department chair about the troubling situation, for example, it can sometimes help to casually mention something like: “I thought the department is required to do X in this situation because of the [specific legal regulation].” This will let everyone know you are aware of your rights, but does not risk burning your bridges, which often happens if you immediately bring in the lawyers. You cannot defend your rights unless you know them, and know them accurately. The myths and misinformation circulating among grad students about their rights and responsibilities can be astounding. At the beginning of your degree, start to familiarize yourself with your rights, which will involve at a minimum reading the resources the university provides you. If a problem arises, have an informal (and confidential) discussion with the people on campus who are there to help you. One of the most signifi-

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cant is the ombudsperson, whose job is to help resolve conflicts by ensuring that people are playing by the rules. Have lunch with him before you decide to go on a hunger strike.

45 GET ROMANTICALLY INVOLVED WITH FACULTY

Although it is rarely discussed in a frank fashion, grad students and faculty sometimes become romantically involved. Here I am not talking about harassment or sexual assault, but consensual couplings. As these are adults, one might be tempted to see this situation as something the participants should work out for themselves. Be that as it may, these consenting adults should be attuned to the dangers of faculty–graduate student relationships. The most fundamental problem inherent in all such relationships is that faculty members have more formal and informal power than grad students. Even in seemingly consensual situations, questions arise about how free the graduate student was to decline the relationship. This differential power is acute if it involves a supervisor sleeping with a graduate student. Such relationships put students in an awkward situation because they invariably become privy to insider knowledge and departmental practices (and gossip) not normally discussed with grad students. Both students and faculty can become resentful and raise accusations about preferential treatment. I know of one situation, for example, in which the department chair and one of his students were in a relationship, giving the student insight into sensitive department matters and prompting insinuations that she was inappropriately shaping decision making behind the scenes.

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What might look like a caring relationship could, in fact, be part of a pattern in which a faculty member cycles through impressionable students. One is reminded of the professor who several years ago announced during a conference presentation that her sexual preference was “graduate students.” If the romantic relationship continues, the student’s relationships with all sorts of department members may change. Her accomplishments might become tainted or dismissed. People may suggest that she published an important article or secured a lucrative grant because her relationship gave her an unfair advantage. If the relationship ends badly, she can become a vulnerable target of gossip and informal recriminations, sometimes for years to come. For these reasons many people in the university believe such relationships should be completely forbidden. So resist temptation. However, if you do become involved with a faculty member, you will both have to take rapid steps to manage the situation. The first will be for both of you to meet with the department chair. Your might prefer to remain hush-hush, but in the contemporary university there is no realistic chance of keeping such relationships secret. Deal with it in a forthright manner. Next, you have to manage any conflicts of interest. A faculty member cannot be in a situation where he evaluates the work of a student he is sleeping with. He cannot assess your course work, be on your comprehensive examination committee, or be on your thesis committee. If you are in a relationship with your supervisor, you will have to find a new supervisor. This need for distance further accentuates the risks involved, as your relationship might preclude you from formally working with the person who otherwise would have been an ideal supervisor or committee member. As one of my more unsentimental colleagues put it: “A good supervisor is hard to find, but you can always find people to fall in love with.” Without condoning such situations, I should point out that I know of several instances where a fling between a student and

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faculty member ended amicably, and in some cases evolved into a long-term relationship. But more often, students end up feeling betrayed, exploited, and abandoned. These are risky situations, and unfortunately the grad student bears almost all the risk. So find your emotional connections outside of the faculty ranks. As you make your way through graduate school, you will also find that you will be in positions of authority. You might be an instructor, TA, or lab supervisor. In such roles you now have to be careful not to exploit your position. What to you might look like a casual fling with a student can look like harassment to the student or to an adjudication committee, while also opening you up to the prospect of manipulation or blackmail. These are real dangers, so keep things between you and your students strictly professional.

46 CHEAT AND PLAGIARIZE

The department chair called my friend Liane to her office during the second year of Liane’s PhD. An undergraduate student reading Liane’s master’s thesis found that it contained several unattributed passages taken directly from the work of a prominent scholar. Liane acknowledged that this was true but explained that it was an unintended mistake. When writing her thesis, she transcribed extended excerpts from other people’s work into her own draft chapters as a way to remind herself to engage with those works. As she revised her thesis she lost track of some sections, and inadvertently passed them off as her own work. Her explanation proved to be irrelevant: she was stripped of her master’s degree and expelled from the PhD program for plagiarism.

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I should not have to caution grad students about cheating, but it happens, and getting caught is probably the fastest way to destroy your reputation and career. Academics take plagiarism, cheating, and other academic offenses seriously. Professors have usually worked very hard throughout their schooling. They did what was expected of them, usually to an exceptional standard, which means they can view cheating as a personal affront. Their sympathies are with the people who followed the rules. A close friend still teases me for wasting an entire weekend trying to prove that an honors student had plagiarized his thesis. The writing was too rich, and the theoretical analysis was impossibly crisp for someone who was not even in grad school yet. I spent hours doing library searches and reading articles to unearth the original source of the work he was passing off as his own. It turned out that he was not cheating; he was a truly gifted student. The point is that academics will sometimes go to great lengths to discover and discipline cheating, since it challenges something we value deeply. The Internet, Google, and assorted paper-verification services make it easier than in the past to check students’ work. Plagiarism is the most familiar form of academic offense. It is easy to copy paragraphs and pass them off as your own. But all professors have stories about the quirky ways they have discovered ostensibly hard-to-discover plagiarism. In my case I once read a paper that after a decent introduction launched into the stratosphere: it was brilliant. It was also vaguely familiar; the student had pulled sections directly from a recent article written in the New York Review of Books. Obviously he did not know I subscribed, or that the author, Richard Rorty, was one of my favorite philosophers. So I asked the student to explain some of the more sophisticated philosophical concepts in his paper. He shamefacedly admitted that he had stolen the ideas, and then had a painful meeting with the associate dean. One of my closest colleagues also once marked a paper containing familiar sections . . . because she was the original author!

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The student had copied excerpts from a paper he found online. Unknown to him, the author of that online paper had actually plagiarized a different article, one containing unreferenced sections of my friend’s work. Be sure you know what is, and is not, plagiarism, since the distinction can sometimes be confusing. I know of one undergraduate student who handed in the same paper for two courses, only changing the title. Her defense was she was not plagiarizing because it was work she had written. The university disagreed, noting that students cannot get credit in different courses for the same piece of work. Familiarizing yourself with the conventions of proper citation is particularly important for international students or students who might be coming back to university from the business world where there can be entirely different traditions of referencing— or not referencing, as the case may be. The fact that master’s and PhD theses are now stored digitally and are accessible online creates new opportunities not only for plagiarizing but for discovering plagiarism. It used to be that a thesis submitted to a library would grow dusty and yellow from neglect. Now people can actually find and read your thesis. This is great, unless you have plagiarized. If so, it greatly expands the number of people who might discover you cheated. Usually this happens by accident, but in a culture of “gotcha” journalism, as some grad students advance in their careers, some people will seek out their thesis in hopes of dredging up scandal. We have already seen this happen with people who have careers in politics or law. If you do something wrong and are lucky enough to get off lightly, the informal consequences of cheating can again be significant. I recall a graduate student whose comprehensive examination contained several sections of someone else’s work. When this was brought to her attention, she said that the document she handed in was actually not her final version but simply an early draft. Nobody believed her, but she was not punished severely and only had to redo the exam. But several professors resigned from

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her committee, and to this day people whisper behind the scenes about her cheating. So again, recognize the important role of academic reputation. Copying other people’s work is only the most obvious example of academic fraud. Others include crossing the line between having someone edit your work versus being the main author. Such practices can be particularly tempting for students who have difficulties writing in English. Fraud might also include claiming to have collected data you never collected, or run tests you did not run, or manipulating statistics to suggest your findings were statistically significant when they were not. Such activities can be difficult to discover, so imagine the surprise of the student who was describing images of mouse cells at his defense, when one of his committee members pointed out they were actually deer cells. If you are caught engaging in these types of fraud, you can expect that your career will end abruptly. If you have to resort to fraud, you are pursuing the wrong profession anyway. If you did something bad, admit it, be contrite, and apologize to the parties involved. Taking responsibility for your mistakes can go a long way toward mitigating the sanction you might receive.

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A M I D O N E Y E T ? : O N FI N I S H I N G

The end of grad school is curious. Time races by, yet also seems to drag on forever. Your work will build to a crescendo as you complete your thesis and move toward your next career steps. In the rush to complete, be sure to take stock, address any outstanding gaps in your CV, and plan for your future. Be doubly sure you have completed all of your requirements to graduate. The most momentous of those requirements is the thesis itself. It will typically involve many more components and a longer timeline than you anticipate. As you make the final push to complete the thesis, be sure to plan for the formal defense. This could involve finding a suitable external examiner and preparing to make the best possible presentation of your research during your oral examination. Now questions about what you are going to do next become pressing and ominous. If you have followed the advice in this book, you should find yourself well positioned for a job either in the university or in the world of research in the private sector or government. Take advantage of opportunities to gain greater insight into the real world of research and teaching you will be entering. Your time in graduate school might end prematurely because you have to withdraw or take a leave of absence to deal with personal matters. Alternatively, your grad school experiences might have

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taught you that the life of a researcher or academic is not for you, or that your scholarly track record is positioning you for the type of academic career you would not find appealing. In such situations it might be wise and honorable to acknowledge that leaving your graduate program without completing your degree is the right move for you. I know many people who agonized about dropping out and years later had absolutely no regrets that they did not become academics.

47 SKIP JOB TALKS

The hiring process for new professors typically requires the three or four applicants on the short list of prospective job candidates to publicly present their research to the department. As a graduate student, you will come across posters or messages advertising these job talks. Skipping these events is a great way to limit your prospects on the job market, for you will miss out on vital practical lessons about one of the most important moments in an academic’s career. So avoid them at all costs if you want to screw up. And there are so many excellent reasons to skip them. They take time away from your already busy schedule. The topic is typically not related to your research interests. The research will likely be based on a methodology or theoretical framework you dislike or know little about. The questions from the audience may have little bearing on the talk you just witnessed but will instead be suspiciously close to the questioner’s own idiosyncratic scholarly interests. Alternatively, the “questions” will involve a professor giving his own mini lecture. Moreover, since you regularly go to conferences, you are well acquainted with making presentations.

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Those eager to do well, however, will see past such irritants to recognize the value of attending job talks. To start with, conference presentations and job talks are different beasts. You will not grasp the vital distinctions unless you attend both. Job talks, like many activities in the academy, are a performance with a series of rarely articulated expectations. Your skill as a presenter lies in how you meet those expectations in a way that allows your expertise and personality to shine through. Go to job talks to learn both the script and how candidates vary the script. Place yourself in the candidate’s shoes. Would you present your research in the same way, or can you think of a better approach? Did the speaker capture the audience’s attention? If so, how? Did the candidate use visual aids? If so, did those aids help or detract from the presentation? How would you respond to the questions the speaker was asked? While it can be intimidating to imagine yourself as a job applicant, particularly if you are starting out as a grad student, you should anticipate how you might handle a job talk even at the earliest stages. That is hard to do if you do not attend the talks. Whereas a conference is primarily about presenting research findings, job talks have a much wider scope. During a job presentation, department members are trying to envision having you in the department for many years. The audience is evaluating you as a researcher, teacher, colleague, potential mentor, and departmental citizen. Impressive talks provide a glimpse of all these attributes. Job talks typically contain four segments: personal introduction, research presentation, forward-looking conclusion, and questionand-answer period. When you do a job talk, begin by briefly introducing yourself as a person and scholar. Address how you became interested in your area of research and some of the work you did leading up to your current project. If you published any of your work in high-quality venues or received a “best graduate student paper” award, mention such distinctions. You are selling yourself, so some self-promotion is both expected and advisable.

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The research component is the largest part of the talk, but you still might have only thirty minutes to cover this information. A half hour is too short to provide a comprehensive overview of anyone’s thesis, yet many applicants mistakenly try to cover everything. The result is a breathless talk packed with overwhelming details. Instead, accentuate how your talk is only focused on a snippet— maybe one chapter— from your larger project. Briefly sketch the methodology and theoretical framework of your study, and present one particular bit of data or argument, ideally the most exciting or novel. Your conclusion should discuss where your research program is heading. Everyone recognizes that this is not a binding contract. Your interests and projects could undoubtedly change. Nonetheless it is still smart to show that you are thinking long term. In fact, to receive tenure in some universities, professors must demonstrate that they are engaged in research that has advanced beyond their PhD thesis. So even at the job talk it makes sense to chart where you are heading. Be specific. Identify the types of collaborations you plan to build, the journals you are targeting, and the agencies that will fund your work. With finances getting tighter, departments want to see applicants already thinking about seeking additional grants. Try to finish the scripted part of your presentation slightly early. The temptation is to go long because you have so much to cover, but the audience appreciates it if you finish a minute or two ahead of schedule. The final, and most intimidating, part of a job talk is the questionand-answer period. Everyone fears the questions, but they are rarely hostile. The department is selling itself as a good place to work, so faculty members do not want to appear antagonistic. You still might be asked questions that stump you, and this is a crucial reason why you should attend other people’s job talks. When watching presentations, pay attention to the art of how presenters elaborate on topics they know well and finesse questions for which they might not have the best response.

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If you are attending a job talk, do not be afraid to ask a question yourself. If you do, make sure it is an honest question and not an attempt to posture or to stymie the candidate. That person is there because the department is seriously considering hiring her, so faculty members do not want their grad students to appear pretentious or annoying. Moreover, it is likely at least some of the people in the room will see this candidate as their preferred choice. Asking a question that sounds like an attempt at sabotage can make for uncomfortable subsequent relations in the department. Scrutinize the talk. Is the presenter reading her presentation or speaking with minimal notes? Is she looking around the room and making eye contact? Is she standing or sitting? Has she mentioned how her research connects with that of other people in the department? Such finer points can carry enormous weight. To learn how other people interpret these details, ask a friendly professor to give you his candid impressions of the talk. The things he focuses on might surprise you. Pay attention to how a candidate presents herself. Grad students agonize over how to dress when interviewing for jobs. This is likely because it is the one thing they believe they can control in an otherwise open-ended process. When I was on the job market, I asked my supervisor if I should cut my ponytail. His sage reply was that if a department would not hire me because of something as trivial as my hairstyle, I probably did not want to work there for the next thirty years. Present a reasonably professional version of yourself. You probably do not have to buy a three-piece suit, but sandals are wisely replaced by dress shoes, and extreme piercings should be removed, at least temporarily. Job talks provide concentrated insights into all manner of academic issues. In fact, they are such an educational opportunity that if your department is not hiring, you should try to attend such talks in closely aligned departments. You might also learn about public talks being given by people applying for the position of department chair or dean. Again, find

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time to attend. Here the aim is not necessarily to envision how you would make such a presentation, but to receive an intensive education in university administration. As a professor you will be working in both a faculty (say, the Faculty of Arts) as well as a department (the Department of Modern Languages). As a graduate student you get limited exposure to the “big issues” facing those units, so it is useful to sensitize yourself to how they are governed and the administrative challenges they face.

48 EXPECT TO LAND A JOB IN A SPECIFIC UNIVERSITY

Planning a career in and after graduate school, and particularly a career as a professor, can involve complicated questions of geography. Where do you want to live and why? How much choice will you have? The graduate program you decide on may be in a part of the country, or another country, that might not be your first choice as a place to live. If you are in a serious relationship with a romantic partner, this will further complicate matters. When considering a PhD, be aware that you will likely need to move to some other location that may not be your first choice as a place to live (or, if you are in a serious relationship, your romantic partner’s first choice). A relatively small number of academic jobs will come up in any given year in your specialization. There can be fierce competition for those jobs, and they will be situated all over the map, even in different countries, so think seriously about opportunities that exist outside your home country. The upshot is that you will spend an extended period of time getting settled in one location for your PhD and then have to pick up and move. If you are

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in a serious relationship, prepare your partner for this reality and discuss what place to live might work best for both of you. My wife and I both wanted to stay on the west coast of Canada, but she had relatively portable job skills and (to my lasting gratitude) was supportive and ready to move where I found a job (although she had a veto power over some spots)! Fortunately, although I ended up getting hired in a city far away from our beloved British Columbia coastline, it was near the top of her list in terms of a place to live. We were comparatively lucky in that we had some choice. You might find only one job posting in your area of specialization and be lucky to secure that position no matter where it is located. A postdoctoral fellowship can provide a crucial transition while you are searching for a tenure-track job. Postdocs are academic positions that involve doing research and perhaps teaching, and typically last one or two years. They are common in some disciplines and extremely rare and competitive in others. If you are interested in a postdoc, you will need to apply toward the end of your PhD, so inquire about postdoc opportunities in the meantime. Like a tenure-track position, a postdoc is usually obtained at a different university from the one where you complete your PhD. If you have a partner who is also a graduate student, life can quickly become complicated when you both hit the academic job market. Trying to find jobs in the same location for two professors who are a couple is a common problem in academic life— so common, in fact, that it has a name, “the two-body problem”— and it can take years to resolve. If you have a partner who is an academic, keep this fact private until you are offered a job. Sometimes the university that offers one of you a job can arrange a position for the other person as well through a spousal hire, but this is by no means guaranteed. The university where one of you gets an offer might not be able to make acceptable arrangements for the other person. Academic departments also rarely hire their own students who are just entering the professorial job market, although they sometimes hire back their own PhD students once the students have been in a

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tenure-track job at another university for a couple of years or more. After three years as a professor at another university, the department where I did my PhD eventually offered me a job, and I know of a number of similar cases, including one of my PhD students. The bottom line here is when pondering a PhD and an academic career, be aware that you are looking at complicated, sometimes difficult, choices about where you will end up living. Academics and researchers work in a global labor market, and it is important to understand how mobile you might have to be.

49 EXPECT PEOPLE TO HIRE YOU TO TEACH YOUR THESIS

PhD students predictably spend much of their time focusing on their research. To put it glibly, you learn more and more about less and less. If you want to have a difficult time on the job market, concentrate exclusively on your research specialization and do not connect that work with larger academic issues. In that way you will ensure being seen as too narrowly focused to contribute to a department’s wider needs. The academic job market being what it is, a tenure-track job in your exact area of doctoral research is a long shot. So at the early stages of your PhD, begin thinking about how you can present yourself down the road as someone who fits a recognizable niche in the job market, preferably a niche that has a reasonable amount of hiring going on. Scan the advertisements for tenure-track jobs and ask yourself, Which of these jobs could I see myself applying for? How can I tailor what I do during my PhD program so it broadly fits some category of tenure-track position that is regularly out

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there? Thinking in terms of a particular niche in the market will help you decide which journals to submit articles to, which conferences to speak at, and which courses to teach. Do not go so far as to let the job market define you, however. Find research interests that you are passionate about, but be pragmatic. Once you get the coveted tenure-track job, you will be freer to shape your own destiny and define the kind of academic you want to be. Unfortunately, students doing the most interesting and original research sometimes have difficulty on the job market, precisely because they do not easily fit into existing disciplinary categories or subcategories. You should still pursue innovative research, but be resourceful and keep an eye on how you will define yourself as a job candidate. In addition to your primary research, for example, you may wish to pursue conference papers and published work that help define you in other ways. Although you do not want to teach too many courses during your PhD, those you do teach can be a selling point when departments are assessing whether you would be a good fit. If you can show that you are a generalist, with experience in teaching broad introductory classes in your field, this will almost certainly make you a more attractive candidate. For example, as a sociology PhD, I decided to market myself as a criminology specialist because of the large number of criminology jobs that always seemed to be available. I knew that people who could teach a broad survey course in criminology were sought after, since senior faculty do not always like to teach large introductory classes. Displaying enough mastery of the field to teach the course would help define me as a criminologist for hiring committees, so it was the first class I ever taught. At the same time, one substantial area of my research was in the sociology of the insurance industry (glamorous, I know). Never in a million years did I expect anyone to advertise for something so specialized and obscure as a sociologist of insurance. It might have been appealing for me to design and teach a fourth-year course in the sociology of insurance (whether any students would want to

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take it is another question), but it would have been a poor strategy to make one of my early courses so narrow and unmarketable.

50 TURN DOWN OPPORTUNITIES TO PARTICIPATE IN JOB SEARCHES

During your degree you might receive an e-mail asking graduate students to volunteer to be on a job search committee. When that message arrives, you will undoubtedly be busy and probably will not really understand what being on such a committee entails. So you will just ignore it and move on to other things. That reaction is a screw-up, because now you will miss out on participating in perhaps the most revealing process in the entire university. When your department wants to hire a new faculty member, it forms a committee to oversee the hiring process. The committee comprises a small group of faculty members and possibly administrators, and sometimes they ask for a graduate student representative. If so, you absolutely want to be on that committee, even if the job being advertised is not in your area of specialization. Why? Being on a search committee immediately makes you an insider, giving you concrete insight into how some of the otherwise opaque and mysterious aspects of the academic hiring process work. Hiring committees perform several distinct tasks, and each step in the process will give you insights into significant realities of academic life. At the beginning of the process, for example, there might be a departmental meeting where faculty members discuss what they are looking for in a new hire. Listen closely and you will learn a lot about the categories your discipline uses to identify its fields and subfields and how those map onto the job market.

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After the applications arrive, the committee will sift through them and select perhaps three individuals to interview, usually on campus but sometimes at one of the major conferences. You will read the application letters, CVs, letters of reference, teaching dossiers, and maybe some of the candidates’ publications. More important, you will be able to discuss those documents with the other committee members or at least listen in on their discussions. Such exchanges can be revelatory. You will see firsthand what is and is not really valued in hiring faculty, and learn how application letters and letters of references are written and interpreted. By participating in the interviews and observing the job talks, you will gain insider knowledge about the types of questions candidates are asked and how they are answered. In your subsequent discussion with committee members, you will also learn a lot about how people’s performances in interviews and job talks are interpreted, not to mention gaining invaluable insights into the personalities and professionalism of different members of your department and into some of the politics of your field. All of this will take time out of your schedule, of course, but if you are fortunate enough to be on a hiring committee, it will be one of the best ways to spend your time in grad school.

51 NEGLECT OTHER PEOPLE’S THESES

The thesis— whether a master’s or doctorate— can be scary. One reason is simply fear of the unknown. You may never have even seen a thesis before, much less written one.

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Fix this situation by reading a few theses. Most departments will have copies of theses written by former students, or you can find them through the library’s electronic archives. If possible, read the theses of some of your supervisor’s previous students, especially identifiably successful students such as master’s students who have landed good jobs or gone on to do a PhD, or PhDs who have gone on to tenure-track jobs. Do not worry about being an expert in the research area of the theses you read. Instead, focus on how the documents are crafted. Most of the academic works you read in grad school— books and journal articles— have undergone multiple stages of rewriting and editing. Do not use them as the model for your own work, for few theses reach that level of professional presentation. Instead, read others’ theses and ask yourself a few questions: What does the introduction look like? How is the body structured? What does the author try to accomplish in the conclusion? What is the level of writing and referencing? This will teach you the true standard you are expected to meet.

52 GET AN UNKNOWN EXTERNAL EXAMINER

The chair of Fletcher’s PhD committee read the first question from the external examiner’s evaluation of his thesis. Fletcher listened intently and stifled a laugh. Then he panicked. The question was in English, and it referred to some familiar academic concepts. But the wording made no sense. Presented with wild academic gibberish, Fletcher had to giggle. But the humor of

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the situation quickly evaporated as he realized he had to respond to a completely incomprehensible “question.” Here he was at his PhD defense— the pinnacle of his graduate student career— and the entire thing might blow up in his face because his supervisor had inadvertently asked a crazy person to be his external examiner. Fortunately, as Fletcher looked around the room, he saw that his committee members were equally baffled by the examiner’s ostensible question, and they had the good sense to steer clear of his mystifying comments for the rest of the exam. As you come close to finishing your PhD, you will have shared your thesis with your supervisor and committee members. From them you will get a sense of how they view your work. The external examiner can thus be the last great obstacle to securing your degree. The external examiner (or “external’) is a professor who independently assesses your thesis and also ensures no funny business is going on in how your department awards degrees. While not all universities expect your thesis to be examined by an external, many do. Sometimes this person comes from another department and sometimes from a different university entirely. She might attend the defense in person, if possible, or provide a written assessment of your thesis, along with any questions she might want to ask you. New communications technologies make it easier for external examiners from far-flung places to participate in PhD defenses via video conferencing. Formal and informal practices in selecting an external vary by university and department, as does whether the PhD student has any informal input into the process. To serve as an external a professor must have made serious contributions to your field of study and be able to evaluate the scholarly merits of your project. Usually this means she is a senior figure who has experience supervising her own grad students. She must also be independent of you or your supervisor; she cannot be a close friend or have previously

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worked directly with either of you. This “independence” requirement can be tricky. If it means that an external must be absolutely unknown to you and your supervisor, you might find yourself like Fletcher, teetering on the edge of a catastrophic screw-up. It is appropriate to require that your external examiner not have worked directly with you or your supervisor. But there is nothing wrong in making sure that your supervisor knows the external, not as a close friend but as a colleague in the wider academic community. Several factors make this a good strategy. First, there is always the risk that even level-headed people will become nasty or unreasonable when assessing someone else’s work. Always expect to have your work seriously critiqued, but if you can make sure that your supervisor has a collegial relationship with the external, you reduce the chance of being blindsided by unbalanced comments since the external will likely not want to appear irrational to her colleague. That said, finding such a person may be difficult. If you have a prominent supervisor and you work in a small scholarly field, she may have a formal relationship with most of the people working in your subdiscipline. This leads to the dreaded prospect of the completely unknown external— someone who might have a solid publication profile but is personally unknown to you or your supervisor. Try to avoid such individuals. Like any organization, the university has its share of screwballs. Getting a completely unknown external risks having an eccentric with no allegiances to anyone involved play a defining role in the climactic moment of your PhD. You and your supervisor should compile a list of suitable potential externals. Look for someone who you would be honored to have read your work. It could be a prominent academic you admire, or someone who is tied to influential scholarly networks. Your PhD defense is an opportunity to show off and market yourself. If you impress the external, she will remember who you are and might someday be in a position to offer you publishing or research opportunities. Some of my PhD students who were particularly impressive during their defense, for example, asked their external to write

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letters supporting their job applications. My external wrote me a reference letter that helped me win the job I currently hold. One external offered one of my students a postdoctoral fellowship. That last example is rare, but it accentuates the importance of choosing your external wisely. Finally, you might not want to choose an external who is the world expert on a particular theory or topic unless you are exceptionally well versed in that area. Also, if your research involves a sustained critique of one person’s scholarship, avoid that person as an external examiner. Professors aspire to disinterested objectivity in assessing criticisms of their work. But they are also human, and they can become defensive about their own research. Avoid the prospect of an oversensitive or emotionally wounded external.

53 DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE ENDGAME

How will your graduate degree come to an end? The obvious, but naive, answer is that it is done when you have exhausted your analysis and defended your thesis. In reality, a series of factors external to the thesis itself typically shape when and how a thesis is completed— what I refer to as the grad school endgame. The biggest factor in finishing a thesis is often the desire to be done by a certain date. Students might hope to be on the job market at a certain time, or they may be moving, or they may not be able to afford tuition for another term. I recently had a student who was due to start a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship— if he could complete his PhD by a specific date. He calculated the timeline and realized that he had to write like mad for several months

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to meet the cutoff date. Nothing focuses the mind like a firm deadline. He submitted the final paperwork days in advance (and the day before the university closed for winter break). Everyone who supervises graduate students has comparable stories about students sprinting to finish by a deadline— sometimes successfully, often unsuccessfully. If meeting a deadline to complete is important to you— and it will be— a great way to screw up your plans is not to understand and plan for the endgame. For master’s students, the process is not complicated. You give your finished draft thesis to your supervisor, who reads it. If she believes it requires changes, you make those changes and return it to her. When she believes it can be defended, you will share it with the full committee and schedule a defense date. This process varies somewhat depending on the preferences of the faculty members involved. For example, sometimes the student submits chapters or a draft to committee members at the same time as the supervisor. You should work out with your supervisor in advance who will read what at different stages of the thesis process. Things are more complicated and prolonged with a PhD thesis. Below is a hypothetical timeline to completion from the point where a student is done with her thesis (or believes she is done) to actually defending the thesis and submitting the final administrative documents. This is an accurate estimate, but you may move more slowly or quickly depending on how briskly your supervisor and committee members read your thesis and return comments to you, the extent of revisions they want you to make (and how many rounds of revisions they require), and the unique policies of your university. The process starts when you hand in your completed thesis to your supervisor. Many students mistakenly assume at this point that the end is right around the corner. Until now your supervisor has probably seen only individual draft chapters. This will be the first time she has read your entire

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tHe PHD enDgame Task

Weeks Allotted

Hand in (what you believe is) the final version of your thesis to your supervisor, who reads it to see if it is ready to go to the supervisory committee.

3+

Supervisor returns the thesis to you, indicating that it needs more work. You make the required changes.

1–4+

Submit the revised thesis to the supervisor to determine whether it is ready for the supervisory committee. The supervisor reads the document and suggests any further changes.

2

Make any needed revisions and provide this version to your supervisory committee members.

1

Committee members read the thesis to see if it is ready to defend.

3+

Committee members return it to you, indicating that it needs extra work. You make the required changes and return the revised document to the committee members.

2–4

Committee members read the revised thesis to determine whether it is ready to defend.

2

The committee agrees that it is ready to defend. If your university requires your thesis to be assessed by an external examiner, a potential external is informally approached.

1

Formally propose external examiner to university administration.

1+

University administration evaluates the suitability of external examiner.

2

External examiner is (you hope) approved and formally invited to be the examiner. The external examiner accepts the offer.

2

Submit thesis to the external examiner and other members of your committee. They read the thesis.

4–6

Schedule the exam itself.

1+

Defend thesis. Make any final edits required and submit final version to the library along with any necessary paperwork.

1

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thesis from start to finish. Expect her to need some time to read the full manuscript and provide substantive comments. Faculty members are busy and do not have large, empty blocks of time waiting to be filled with reading theses. Indeed, I find few students more exasperating than those who disappear for months or years only to suddenly reemerge with a several-hundred-page manuscript that they expect me to read immediately. Since this will be the first time your supervisor has seen the entire document, you should expect her to suggest revisions. These could be major, involving an extensive reworking of your analysis or argument, or more minor issues of continuity and writing style. Either way, plan on making changes. Your supervisor might require that other students reanalyze any data you have produced to ensure accuracy. If so, it will add more time to the process. You might be able to do the revisions quickly, or it might take you months to complete them, depending on the nature of the changes. Once revised, the document will go back to your supervisor, who must again find time to read it and offer an assessment. She might want you to make further changes, or, if all goes well, she will deem it ready to go to your supervisory committee (usually two other people). The supervisory committee will also need time to read the thesis, and this is likely to generate another round of revisions. Away you will go to make changes once again, and the committee members will have to vet the revised thesis before they sign off on it. (As with a master’s thesis, individual preferences about this process may vary. In some contexts, PhD committee members may read chapters at earlier stages in the process.) Once your committee agrees that the thesis is ready to defend, an external examiner may have to be named, as discussed above. If you have someone in mind, your supervisor or departmental graduate chair will likely approach her informally to see if she is willing to serve in this capacity. If so, the university administration will

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have to formally appoint this person, something that can add yet more time to the process. (In one memorably frustrating instance, it took me weeks simply to nominate the external because he had to provide a current copy of his CV, something he had not updated in years.) You then provide your final thesis to the external and the other members of your full committee. The external will have between four to six weeks to read the document and provide a written report. Now you schedule the defense. This can be the most exasperating part of the entire process, given the difficulty in finding a time when so many professors are available. Prominent scholars have events booked years in advance. Some of your committee members might be on sabbatical when you hope to defend. Scheduling difficulties may arise because of teaching obligations, holidays, illness, parental leave, and a staggering array of other commitments. Expect aggravation as the potential date when everyone can meet is pushed ever further into the future. At the defense itself, your examiners might decide you need to make some minor changes to the thesis before it can be submitted to the university library. You might also discover that you must reformat the entire thing to meet library guidelines. Do yourself a favor and write your thesis according to those requirements from the outset; it will save you time at the end. Now you can submit the final thesis to the library along with any additional paperwork required by the university administration. Congratulations. Now you are finished with your thesis. The timeline above should serve as a good model; consult with your graduate chair to create a comparable chart for your program. If you want to defend by a particular date, work backward to determine when you realistically need to give your supervisor the thesis to get the process going. Without careful planning and realistic timelines, you will surely fly past your deadline. Or you will find yourself in a panicked rush to finish, creating other problems. Hurried work tends to be sloppy

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work, as students compromise the quality of their analysis and the caliber of their writing to finish on time. While the delays inherent in the process can be frustrating, you can also treat them as an opportunity. For large chunks of time during the endgame, the thesis will be out of your hands as other people read it. Use this time wisely. Do some teaching, review current research not in the thesis, or write up additional material that did not make it into the thesis but could form the basis of journal articles.

54 BE BLASÉ ABOUT YOUR DEFENSE

I recently had a student return from overseas to defend her PhD. She arrived a few days early, but she did not arrange to meet me. She also did not talk with me until almost immediately before her defense, so she did not know that the external examiner was unable to attend the defense in person and had provided a written evaluation of her thesis— something that would profoundly alter the interpersonal dynamics of the defense. My student had also prepared far too long of an opening statement and had to frantically reduce its scope before we started. Such a cavalier attitude toward a thesis defense might appear astounding, but it is not unique. Students are always anxious about their defense, but many do not adequately prepare for it. At a minimum, talk with your supervisor and the graduate chair to learn the procedures for the defense. Remember that committee members are often asked to assess both your written thesis and your oral performance, and you must clear both hurdles to earn

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your degree (master’s or doctorate). Getting a graduate degree— particularly a PhD— is partly a reflection of your ability to do research and teach at the highest levels. If you cannot clearly articulate and defend your project, then you are not ready for those roles. And failing on the basis of the oral defense alone is not some purely hypothetical possibility. When I was doing my PhD, I saw it happen to a student who had debilitating public-speaking anxieties. That said, failure is rare, and it would be extremely surprising to fail if you have not been getting strong signals that there are problems. If other students or the public are allowed to attend defenses at your university, make absolutely certain to attend a few yourself. Thesis defenses can be needlessly secretive. Attending some demystifies the process. In my department, although the defenses are officially public, a student who wishes to attend a defense usually asks the student defending if it is okay to attend. In other departments, defenses are understood to be public processes open to anyone, with no permission sought in advance. At the beginning of the defense, you will likely make a presentation. If so, keep it short. You might give a concise summary of your main findings, or you might say a few words about how you became interested in the project, how your research question evolved, what surprised you about your findings, where your research is headed next, and so on. Ask your supervisor what the typical presentation consists of and how long it normally is. Always rehearse it and time it in advance. If you speak for too long, the committee chair may simply cut you off, leaving you flustered. The next stage is the question-and-answer session, which amounts to the majority of the defense and is the most important phase. Your committee members take turns asking questions, usually starting with the external examiner. Depending on the committee and normal practices, you could go through two or three rounds of questions. For a typical master’s defense, this might last an hour or an hour and a half, where a PhD defense will take between two and three hours.

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Keep your answers short and on topic. A simple yes or no is rarely sufficient, and a cavalier response such as “I do not have the slightest idea” can be fatal. Instead, directly and succinctly answer the question. Although the exam is called a defense, try not to be defensive. Prefacing some of your answers by saying “that’s a good question” helps in this regard. You will undoubtedly be asked some tricky questions for which you do not have a good answer immediately at hand. Do not panic, and do not ramble. Some students try to deal with these situations by filling the air with words. Your committee is not stupid. Professors can tell when you are saying a lot but really saying nothing. It is all right to silently collect your thoughts for a few seconds before answering. Sometimes graduate students have a hard time because academics tend to bury their questions in long, convoluted mini-lectures. Taking notes when the question is being asked can help you identify the heart of what your committee member is getting at. Pretending to write out the full question can also give you some extra time to think about how to respond. If you are still stumped, you can ask them to reiterate by saying: “I guess I am not clear on exactly the question you are asking.” Another good strategy is to put the question in your own words and say something like, “If I understand you correctly, you are asking about the relationship between my theory and my methods, correct?” If you are asked a complex, multipart question, answer the easiest component first. This allows your brain to work away on the more difficult question while you are dealing with the first part. In your answers, strike a middle ground between being too amenable to criticism and too resistant to it. It is okay to concede minor points about things you might have done slightly differently, other data you would have liked to collect, other theorists you might have incorporated, and so on. But do not concede key aspects of your thesis. A friend of mine was once in a defense where the student said: “I guess you’re right, there really isn’t much that’s original in my dissertation.” Ouch.

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Committee members with whom you are friendly might surprise you by appearing harsh during the exam. No matter how personable they are with you otherwise, they must act as a gatekeeper and rigorously evaluate you and your thesis. With a PhD thesis in particular, getting asked a series of tough questions during the defense is a rite of passage. Often the strongest students with the best theses will get asked the hardest questions. And sometimes committee members will use your defense to ask difficult or penetrating questions to impress the other faculty members in the room. As the defense progresses, it might move into abstract issues about reality, the nature of evidence, or, if you are really unlucky, the question “What is Truth?” If the discussion strays into such deep metaphysical waters that you risk drowning, bring it back to your thesis. You are the expert on your research, so steer the conversation toward your particular contributions. That might involve saying something diplomatic, such as, “I think those are fascinating issues, but what I believe I accomplished in my thesis is . . .” Or the discussion might go in an entirely different direction, becoming quite casual, almost like a chat. If so, participate in that conversation, but remember that you are always being evaluated during the exam. Do not take the apparent chattiness as an opportunity to say something flip or foolish that could raise questions about your research or your competence. While you might assume that the defense will be an ordeal, you might be surprised to find it enjoyable and even invigorating. We all work in specialized areas, and we do not often have the opportunity to talk at length about our work with a group of scholars. Being grilled by a panel of professors may seem to place you at a disadvantage, but you will also enjoy a big advantage: this is a topic you have devoted months or years of study to, whereas the committee will have spent only a small fraction of that time reading your thesis. So try to enjoy yourself. But in order to enjoy yourself you need to prepare in advance. Write out answers to some hypothet-

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ical questions— both ones that you can expect to receive as well as a few “dreaded” questions. If you have had previous discussions or debates with a committee member about particular aspects of your thesis, you can expect to hear questions on those topics at the defense. Practice (and time) your introductory presentation both before a mirror and in front of friendly students and professors who are not on your committee. During this trial run, invite questions from audience members and ask them for honest feedback on how you did. Such preparation will pay dividends in terms of your performance and comfort level at the defense. Your defense will likely go well. That said, hold off on plans for a party immediately afterward. If your committee gives you a rough ride or requires you to make revisions before the thesis passes— a fairly common outcome— you might not feel like celebrating. Also, if you have been running on a mix of caffeine and adrenaline, when all is done you might just want to sleep.

55 DO NOT PLAN FOR YOUR JOB INTERVIEW

I nearly screwed up the interview for my first, and thus far only, academic job. Near the end of the interview, the committee chair asked what I might want to teach if I was hired. I jumped at the opportunity to stress how eager I was to teach courses in the sociology of science and went into great detail about how I would organize those courses. The department chair winced. Years later he told me he was cringing because I had stupidly forgotten I was applying for a position in criminology, not in the sociology of science. He then had to do damage control, convincing the commit-

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tee that I really was a criminologist and not just masquerading as one in my attempt to land a job. Once you make the short list for an academic job, the interview may feel like an endurance test. It can consist of a campus visit where you teach an undergraduate class, meet with graduate students and faculty members, give a formal job talk, meet the dean, undergo a formal interview, and maybe have dinner with the search committee. This is a complex process, and I do not aim to be exhaustive in my coverage of it. There is a large literature on the final stages of landing an academic job; if you visit any bookseller’s website and type in “academic job search,” you can take your pick from among the many books offered. Here I will highlight just two key screw-ups characteristic of the formal interview— the moment you are alone in a room with the hiring committee. In some disciplines this interview might take place at the major conferences that everyone in your field is expected to attend, or it could happen during your visit to the university that is advertising the job. There might even be a preliminary interview via videoconference. The first way to screw up the interview is to know nothing about the department where the position is offered. It will give the impression that you do not really want the job. Study the department’s web page. Does it have specific areas of specialization or unique research units, and does it house academic journals? Some departments regularly go through external evaluations. Ask the chair if he will give you a copy of any such documents. A chair might prefer to keep such information confidential, but if not, you will glean important insight into the history of the department, pressing issues, and its plans for the future. Look online for the vision statement or academic plan for the faculty where the department is housed. These are often full of broad platitudes, but being able to refer to some key phrases or notable ambitions identified in these planning documents demonstrates that you have done your homework and are a serious candidate. Remember to read the profiles of individual fac-

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ulty members to learn a bit about their background and research interests. The committee can ask you almost anything about your professional work. It cannot, however, stray into areas that are legally off-limits. Depending on what country you are in, prohibited topics might include your sexual orientation, whether you have children or plan to have them, your religion, your age, whether you are in a relationship, and so on. If you are asked such questions, try to sidestep them by replying, “If you are asking me whether I have the time and commitment to do this job, I can enthusiastically say yes.” The other great way to screw up the interview is not to prepare sample answers. Most questions revolve around a series of familiar themes about research, teaching, and your future scholarly plans. The Internet is full of sample interview questions. Track them down and sketch out some responses. Some of the researchrelated questions could pertain to journals you expect to publish in and potential sources of funding for your research. You might also be asked about the significance of your research or how your research has influenced your teaching. Candidates often stumble when they are asked to describe an instance in which they had a conflict with a colleague or student and how they dealt with that situation. Plan for this question. Do not say you never had a disagreement; most people will not believe you. Also expect to be asked about your strengths and weaknesses. It is usually easy to accentuate your assets, but people struggle when discussing their limitations. Do not reveal your darkest professional secrets. Instead, say that your weaknesses essentially pertain to things you might not yet have had an opportunity to do— say, organize a conference, put together a large grant application, edit a special issue of a journal, and so on. Indicate you would be keen to take on such tasks in the future. Do not say your limitations are that you are a perfectionist who works too hard and has to develop a better balance between your work and home life. Such answers are corny and artificial.

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You will also be asked three to six questions about teaching. Here are some examples from recent job interviews: • How would you characterize your style as a teacher? • What aspects of your teaching do you consider to be a “work in progress” or something you would like to develop? • What courses have you taught to date, which ones would you want to teach again, and what new teaching areas would you like to move toward? • What is your philosophy of teaching? • If you have a student who is doing poorly in your class but has not missed classes and appears to be a good student, what would you do?

In answering these questions, try to be specific and use examples when possible. As with your thesis defense, remember that you are being evaluated. No matter how casual the discussion becomes, you are always “on.” This is true in the formal interview as well as in your informal discussion with faculty members during your campus visit. At the end of the interview, you will be asked if you have any questions for the committee. Come prepared with a few questions. You might ask why the department wants to invest in your particular specialization, what niche they hope the successful candidate will fill, how the new person would fit into the graduate program, the strengths and limitations of the undergraduate students, and so on. This, however, is absolutely not the time to ask about salary, teaching load, sabbaticals, release time, the standards for tenure, and the like. Save those questions for your private meeting with the dean or department chair. Above all, be enthusiastic. Be knowledgeable about and interested in the department. Clarify how you will contribute to both the department’s future and to the research and teaching interests of individual faculty members.

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56 PERSEVERE AT ALL COSTS

Graduate school can take two or more years to complete for a master’s degree and four or more years for a PhD. During this time, challenges in your life can arise in areas other than your degree. For example, it is fairly common for relationships to fall apart. This can occur naturally, but it can also be accelerated by the strains of graduate education. You can become absorbed in your work and may sometimes be under stress, neither of which makes for a healthy relationship. As you progress through your degree, you are also, through a series of often-imperceptible changes, becoming a different person, someone with new friends, interests, and routines. Existing partners may not like this transformation. But relationship issues can be among the least traumatic of the difficulties you encounter. I know grad students who have become seriously ill, have been in abusive relationships, have confronted alcohol and drug addictions, have seen family members hospitalized, or have mourned the death of their parents or loved ones. One student in my department was left homeless after a fire destroyed his house and all of his family’s possessions. If you encounter such shattering personal difficulties, confront them and make whatever arrangements are necessary to ensure your physical, psychological, financial, and emotional well-being. Ask your supervisor and graduate chair for support and guidance. You will not be the first person to request such assistance. Seek professional help from university mental health and counseling services. When facing overwhelming personal issues, a singular focus on your degree can become destructive and self-defeating. There is no shame in obtaining a leave of absence from your program to

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take care of yourself and your family. Most universities will stop the clock in such instances, meaning your time away from your studies will not count toward how long it took to complete your degree. And it is not only personal issues that might cause you to think twice about continuing your graduate education. After the first year or two, reflect on your progress, work routines, how your CV is developing, and the like. If it is clear you are heading for a situation where you will be perpetually chasing poorly paid contracts that provide little job security, it might be a good idea to get out. The university laments the fact that approximately 50 percent of PhD students fail to complete their degree (something that varies considerably by program and country). But for a number of people who start graduate degrees, especially PhDs, it can be the wisest move at a certain point not to continue. Some warning signs indicating that you might contemplate withdrawing include not feeling motivated, being unable to write, missing deadlines, not keeping up with other students in your cohort, avoiding your supervisor, and failing to manage your finances. A PhD student I know well recently made what I thought was a well-considered decision to drop out during the second year of her program. She sent a thoughtful e-mail about it, and I asked her if I could quote from it here, to capture her thinking: I’ve recently decided to look for full-time employment. There are a number of reasons for this. I’ve had some side jobs this year (facilitating workshops for student services, organizing a conference), and they’ve made me realize that the things I love to do and am really good at aren’t really congruent with a PhD program. I’m fine at research, and I love reading about the research of others, but I’ve had some pretty good indications this year that research is really not my calling. Also, the fact that I’ve had so little intrinsic motivation to work on my comp this year is a sign I probably shouldn’t be doing this.

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I really don’t want to become one of those grad students who has to be dragged along through the PhD process. I used to look at my fellow grad students who weren’t productive, and think, “What are they doing here?!” I realize I have become one of these students. I used to have lots of inner motivation and initiative in this area, but lately it’s been seeping into my other projects and jobs. Also, on a totally practical level, I’m about to turn 31. In three years’ time I’d much rather be able to be on maternity leave from an already established job, rather than just entering the job market. The timing just seems to be off for me. I know 31 isn’t that old, but it’s old enough that I’ve had to start to think about this.

Anyway, I thought she made a good call, given what she wanted out of life, even though she definitely had the talent to complete a good PhD. I know other students who have made similar decisions. They are definitely much better made in the second year of a PhD than in the eighth year.

57 CONSIDER A NON-ACADEMIC CAREER A FORM OF FAILURE

Higher education is changing rapidly, and academic employment patterns are changing as a result. While it is still possible to make a smooth transition from graduate student to tenure-track faculty member, the number of tenure-track jobs has declined both in absolute terms and as a proportion of all academic jobs. One reason has to do with supply and demand: universities graduate far more PhDs than there are entry-level faculty positions. Another is

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a function of labor economics: adjunct and contract positions are far less expensive and involve less of a commitment for the university. Consequently, university research and teaching positions are becoming increasingly temporary and precarious. Such trends are more pronounced in some disciplines than others. About half the PhD graduates in my department still eventually get tenure-track jobs, but many others do not even complete the PhD, sometimes because they sense that their future lies outside academia. The prospect that PhD graduates will have to find jobs outside of the university is now a familiar one across the entire campus as well as nationally and internationally. Recognize this fact from the outset, and contemplate careers beyond the traditional university system. This will take some work on your part and a bit of a mental adjustment. While there has been talk about the need to prepare PhD graduates for nonacademic careers since the 1980s, the university has not done much in this regard. Some disciplines, such as chemistry, have a rather seamless movement of graduates into industry, but in many other areas graduates go through an anxious period of soul searching as they realize they will not be following the career path of their supervisor. This situation might initially be disappointing, particularly since many professors still privilege an academic career. However, I know lots of people with graduate degrees who have had lucrative and stimulating careers in education, government, editing, and private sector research, among other areas. If you are a master’s student who is contemplating going on to do a PhD, use your time in your master’s to seriously consider whether an academic career is right for you. This should involve evaluating the potential job market for PhDs in your discipline. If the prospects of an academic job do not look promising, you should contemplate making the master’s your final degree. Even if you do plan on a career in the academy, explore the alternatives. Go to talks about alternative occupations. Attend job

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fairs where employers come to campus to publicize careers in their field. Ask about examples of former students who have gone on to non-academic careers. Also think about starting to network in the non-academic areas where you might land a job, as this can help to smooth the transition.

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FINAL THOUGHTS

We hope that our concrete advice on avoiding common screw-ups has helped— or will help— you excel as a graduate student. While our advice focused on specific scenarios, many of the recommendations revolved around a handful of major themes. Now is a good time to step back from the particulars and identify five key principles that will help you thrive in graduate school and afterward. The first is to maximize opportunities. Grad school is an occasion for you to carve out a life in academics and research. But for this to happen, you need to be on the lookout for opportunities along the way. Some are readily available to all graduate students, such as the chance to teach or attend seminars designed to help students learn about the nuances of academic life. Others land in your lap because you were in the right place at the right time, such as an invitation to publish a chapter in a book in your area of research. Either way, take advantage of the resources and opportunities available to you. The second principle is to take responsibility. Whether this involves getting your writing done, planning your finances, or ensuring a healthy family life, you need to take charge because nobody will do it for you. Many people will help shape your grad school experience, but you are responsible for directing your program and career. You must identify your own professional ambi-

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tions, and take steps to pursue your best interests, all while navigating possible stumbling blocks. The third principle is to build healthy professional relationships. The solitary genius is a myth. At the end of the day, much of an academic’s professional life revolves around a comparatively small but monumentally important group of people. Identify the different roles these individuals play in your professional and personal life, but recognize that they are not just fulfilling a role. They are people with their own sensitivities, expectations, and ambitions. Whether you are dealing with your supervisor or support staff, you need to remember that respectful and productive relationships do not just happen; they require work on your part. Fourth, look for help. It is not a sign of weakness. Nobody starts out knowing how grad school or the university works; find assistance where and when you need it. Reading this book is a great start, but there are many things it does not address because they are specific to your university, program, or personal situation. Read the relevant university web pages and remember that there are people on campus whose job it is to help you. There really are no dumb questions, so find the help you need. The final, and most important, principle is to forge a professional reputation you will be proud of. Your reputation—as a scholar, colleague, and a human being—should be your most cherished academic asset. It will be built from the sum of many small actions spread over a long period of time. And while your research profile will be key to your reputation, so will the ways you comport yourself, handle stress, relate with other people, and the like. You start building your professional reputation the minute you apply to enter graduate school, and your subsequent actions contribute to it throughout the rest of your career. While this book emphasizes some pitfalls of graduate education, fear not: grad school can be, and is, enjoyable and rewarding. We hope that reading this book will make it even more so for you. In the meantime, work hard, have fun . . . and don’t screw up.

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AP P E N D I X : A S K E T C H OF GRAD SCHOOL

Graduate programs vary greatly between universities and between different disciplines. I cannot do justice to the many forms of diversity here, so instead I will present a broad-brush sketch of grad school and how it works. The most basic distinction in grad school is the difference between the master’s degree and PhD or doctorate degree. A PhD is a discipline’s highest degree, and having that credential allows you to compete for a job as a professor. People with doctorates also work in other fields, including business, politics, private-sector research, activism, industry, editing, government, and journalism. But in the humanities (such as English or philosophy) and to some extent in the social sciences, PhD programs typically do not present themselves as a form of job training for careers outside of the academy (although that is starting to change in some disciplines). Having a PhD in engineering or applied sciences allows you to move much more easily into high-level jobs outside the university. A PhD is more risky than a master’s: PhDs take many years longer to complete; the possibility of not completing the PhD is high; and obtaining a PhD in itself is no guarantee of an academic job. You should therefore approach the PhD with caution and careful consideration, and with a clear plan about your career afterward and how you will get there.

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There are three kinds of master’s degrees. The first is the coursebased “terminal” master’s degree, which is more common in the social sciences and humanities but can be found elsewhere. It is called a terminal degree because students seeking it are not necessarily expected to go on to a PhD. Instead, the emphasis is on completing a set of courses. Such a degree can be attractive to people who want it for career purposes since it likely can be completed part-time. This kind of master’s can still be a stepping-stone to a PhD, but some PhD programs prefer that the master’s include a more sustained individual research project, which is typically not part of the course-based master’s. The second type of master’s degree, known as a thesis-based master’s or research-based master’s, places greater emphasis on independent research. In addition to doing course work, students in such programs undertake an independent research project. Like the terminal master’s, this degree can be a stepping-stone to a PhD, though students enrolled in it need not continue on (and many do not). Finally, some master’s programs are explicitly designed to move you directly into a PhD. This can involve students moving straight from their undergraduate studies into a PhD program. If they do not complete the PhD or do not perform adequately during the first year of their PhD, they may be removed from the PhD program and considered for a master’s degree. Not all universities offer graduate degrees in all fields. Admission to all programs is competitive, sometimes highly so. Applicants must compile a formal application package. That typically consists of a statement of interest, an account of your research plans, a transcript of your grades, a writing sample, and letters of reference written by professors who can speak to your academic accomplishments and scholarly promise. Many schools will want to know your score on a standardized test such as the GRE (Graduate Record Examination). If you are not a native English speaker, they will also want your score on a test of English proficiency; in North America it is the academic TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language).

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Students admitted into a PhD program are typically— but not always— funded. These funds can come partly or fully from working as a teaching assistant (TA) or research assistant (RA). Some faculty members with large grants support graduate students independently by hiring them as assistants on a research project. The university might offer graduate students a scholarship or waive their tuition. In addition to external foundations, national bodies such as the National Science Foundation in the United States or the Tri-Council in Canada also offer competitive scholarships, which students need to apply for. Fees and funding options are different for students who are not citizens or permanent residents of the countries in which they study, presenting an extra challenge for international students. Many programs fund master’s students through some version of these arrangements, but many other master’s students are unfunded. Both funded and unfunded students can discover that not all their expenses are covered, forcing them to take out loans to cover part of the cost of their graduate education. An increasing number of master’s students also work part time. Students who enter graduate school undergo an adjustment period. One immediately apparent difference between the undergraduate and graduate school experience concerns your relationships with faculty. Whereas undergraduate education in large universities can be a somewhat anonymous experience, grad school is designed to allow you and your professors to get to know one another personally. You might be encouraged to call your professors by their first name, although not everyone likes this practice, so be sure to proceed on a case-by-case basis. Your courses will be smaller seminars populated by other grad students, sometimes a mix of both master’s and PhD students, which will also enable you to get to know your graduate student colleagues. Graduate seminars at my university contain five to twenty students. Grad students also become better acquainted with faculty by working as TAs or RAs. In this sense, grad students are vital to the

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university’s enterprises of teaching and research. So while grad students are there to learn, they also contribute to the university in indispensible ways. Many universities could not perform their core functions without grad students. THE THESIS

In North America, both doctoral and master’s students (if they are writing a thesis) will have to assemble a group of professors (typically five for a doctorate and three for a master’s) who will serve as their thesis committee. Your supervisor can have varying degrees of input into this process, sometimes even playing the lead role in crafting the committee. Members of your committee will help guide your research and evaluate your final project. Most important among those individuals, by far, will be your supervisor, who will, one hopes, work closely with you on your thesis. The aim of a master’s degree is to provide students with more advanced research skills and specialized knowledge than is possible at the undergraduate level. Master’s degree requirements are straightforward and typically involve a set program of courses that students must take (allowing some scope for personal choices). Students in a thesis-based master’s program must complete a combination of course work and an independent research project that the thesis committee evaluates. The PhD student’s ultimate goal is to complete her thesis (also sometimes called a dissertation). This is a sustained piece of independent research that contributes to knowledge in its respective field. Depending on the discipline, it might involve writing a monograph, which is several hundred pages long and is sometimes published as a book. Or it might require writing a few standalone articles that address a roughly similar theme and are treated as a single scholarly contribution for the purpose of granting the degree (sometimes called an integrated thesis). In other disciplines, the thesis is comparatively short; in statistics or physics,

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for example, it might consist of a succinct but intense series of advanced calculations designed to solve a mathematical problem. PhD students in different programs face different formal requirements over and above the thesis. In the United Kingdom and in some biological sciences in North America, these additional requirements are comparatively minimal; the emphasis there is placed squarely on the thesis, which you might be expected to start almost immediately upon entering grad school. Students in North American universities tend to face a greater number and range of formal degree requirements. For example, they typically start their programs with a year of course work. PhD students must often also pass one or more comprehensive examinations demonstrating their mastery of a core of scholarly works within their discipline. These exams involve a written essay or an oral defense, or sometimes both. In many programs, doctoral students must also pass a proposal defense before starting their research. The proposal defense involves assessing the candidate’s ability to pursue advanced research and scrutinizing the research plan to ensure that the methodology is appropriate and that any findings will contribute to knowledge in the field. In some disciplines this process is formally conducted by a committee; in others it is informal, with the student briefly proposing a potential research project to her supervisor or suggesting a research project that builds on existing work being done in a lab. After the student has collected her data and written up her findings, the thesis must be defended. For PhD students, the full supervisory committee will conduct the examination. In North America this will include the supervisor, while in the United Kingdom the supervisor is not part of the examination as she is not viewed as impartial. An external examiner from outside the university also might participate in the exam, again depending on the university’s requirements. That person might appear at the defense in person, participate via videoconference, or provide a written assessment

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of the thesis. For all examiners, the evaluation centers on the student’s presentation and analysis of the research and whether her findings advance knowledge in the field. THE PROGRAM

Beyond these familiar expectations, different PhD programs might require students to take ethics training, demonstrate secondlanguage proficiency, or take some teaching instruction. There are considerable differences in how long it can take to complete these degrees, even among students enrolled in the same program. A master’s degree might take from one to four years to complete (two is common). A PhD can take from three to seven or more years. These timelines depend on the program, how long it takes a student to complete her research, and any life events that might delay her progress. I have been talking about the formal requirements of graduate degrees, but a huge part of grad school comprises all your other activities as well. If all you do during grad school is what you are officially required to do, you will miss out on a lot. In particular, if you approach your PhD by completing only what it is set out in the university calendar, your chances of getting a job at the end will be low. Earlier I mentioned that grad students make important contributions to the university’s teaching and research as paid assistants. TAs help professors or instructors teach larger undergraduate classes. This work might involve marking assignments, essays, and exams and meeting with individual undergrads to help them; it can also involve leading undergrads in discussion groups or tutorials or even giving a lecture to the class. If you are planning to have an academic career, the TA position serves as a valuable apprenticeship for future teaching. In most institutions with graduate programs, the professors conduct research. They may have research grants, allowing them

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to hire grad students as RAs. Some disciplines also offer RA work that is funded by industry. Beyond the benefits of funding, being an RA can be a good way to gain hands-on research experience under the guidance of a senior researcher. Some grad students even get the chance to coauthor academic publications through their RA work— although this opportunity will depend on the discipline and special arrangements with the supervisor. YOUR DEPARTMENT

Grad students are typically located in a department, which serves as your academic home. Which department you are in (combined with the degree requirements you fulfill) will dictate what degree you receive. Some departments have several programs offering different degrees. Students housed in a psychology department, for example, might be enrolled in counseling psychology, adolescent psychology, or cognitive psychology. Most of your daily activities will take place within your department or more narrowly within your research group. The primacy of the home department in a graduate student’s life makes it essential to understand what a department is and the different types of people found there. Again, there is lots of variability both within and among university departments, but they all fulfill roughly similar roles. Departments are organized by scholarly fields or disciplines, such as physics or chemistry. Departments are the administrative units responsible for managing the degrees, teaching the courses, and conducting the research associated with those substantive areas. Both grad students and faculty are housed in such units, but not all faculties are departmentalized. Grad students in fields such as law or nursing might not have a department, in which case their faculty serve as the academic home; thus, they will simply be students in the Faculty of Law or Faculty of Nursing.

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THE PEOPLE

The department chair (or head) is responsible for the department’s oversight and management. He is a faculty member, typically a senior professor, who takes on this administrative position for a set period of time, say, five years. He manages the budget, hiring, grievances, office allocations, and faculty evaluation, and he occasionally plays a role in course scheduling, graduate student admissions, and teaching assignments. One might say that the chair is the boss of the department, but this is not quite true: chairs do not have the executive powers that managers enjoy in a corporate workplace. Most departments also aim to reach decisions in a collegial manner, and a chair tends to seek consensus rather than dictating what people will do. Meetings can consume a considerable portion of a chair’s time, which means as a graduate student you will probably have few dealings with the chair unless he is your supervisor or a member of your committee. The chair usually has an administrative assistant, who is not a professor but a university staff member. This person has a wide range of duties in helping the chair, and sometimes plays a role in managing the department’s finances— although this might also be done by a separate financial officer. As is the case with senior administrators, administrative assistants can be influential forces in all aspects of running a department. There will also be a graduate chair, who is a professor responsible for overseeing the graduate program; her duties can include making changes to the program, managing student grievances, and admitting new students. If you have a serious problem with your program, it will typically come to her notice at some point. The graduate chair may be the person you deal with when making the decision to come to a particular department, and she can be a good source of guidance and help with solving problems that might arise during your degree. Sometimes the graduate chair has an administrative assistant who handles the administrative

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or paperwork side of the graduate program and can be helpful in negotiating university bureaucracy and dealing with practical questions. This is someone you will likely get to know well during your graduate studies, and, as with the graduate chair, it can be useful to cultivate a friendly relationship with him. Departments also have administrative staff, but there is tremendous variability in how such support is provided. The amount of administrative staff support in departments has declined drastically over the past twenty-five years, largely by reducing budgets and shifting more administrative tasks on to professors. A department might have administrative staff responsible for supporting the undergraduate chair, graduate chair, or managing the front office. Such roles could be accomplished by many different people or, in a small department, by only one person. The main academic figures in a department are the faculty members and instructors. At first it can be hard to differentiate how these people fit within the departmental structure, but rest assured that a formal hierarchy distinguishes one faculty member from another. The university has academic ranks that differentiate junior faculty from more senior professors. Confusingly, the names for these positions are different in different countries, and the same title can have different meanings in different countries. Assistant professors (or lecturers, as they are known in the Australian, British, and New Zealand systems) have usually finished their PhD within the previous few years. They are hired into a kind of probationary period where they are expected to conduct research, teach undergraduate and sometimes graduate courses, and do a small amount of service work. The university uses this period to determine whether they should receive a continuing permanent position. Assistant professors aspire to be promoted to the rank of associate professor (known as a senior lecturer or reader in some nonAmerican systems), a position that often involves receiving tenure. For North American academics, getting tenure is perhaps the

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most important moment in their career because it gives them considerable job security; indeed, it is sometimes characterized as having a job for life. In fact, tenured faculty members are occasionally relieved of their positions, but for this to happen the university must first demonstrate gross incompetence or abuse of duties. Assistant professors who do not have tenure may work with grad students, ideally in concert with more senior faculty. In some departments, assistant professors are required to have a more senior faculty member as co-supervisor and do not have the right to supervise graduate students on their own until they become associate professors and receive tenure. Academics are expected to produce new knowledge in their research and to challenge established understandings and practices. Doing so can single them out for harsh and unfair criticism from vested interests that might fear new findings or who are personally and financially invested in established arrangements. Tenure is designed to provide academics with the confidence to adopt political positions that are sometimes unpopular in the wider society, or to explore what at first might appear to be heretical ideas, without fear of losing their jobs. In North America, someone becomes eligible for tenure after being an assistant professor for four to six years. If tenure is granted, the faculty member is usually promoted to associate professor (although in some universities, granting tenure and granting promotion are separate decisions). Associate professors assume the full breadth of scholarly responsibilities: doing research and teaching (both graduate classes and undergraduate classes), taking on more serious and sustained administrative roles, and mentoring grad students. After several years, or even decades, associate professors can apply to be promoted to the rank of professor or full professor. This is the top academic rank in the North American system. These people are central figures in any university and are expected to take on more prominent administrative positions. Consequently, many

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department chairs and almost all deans are full professors. Some of these people receive additional distinction by being awarded a named chair (such as the Cyberdine Systems Chair in Artificial Intelligence), which is often supported through endowment. The final group of people who might populate a department are the postdoctoral research fellows (PDFs). These individuals have completed their PhD and have been awarded fellowship funds allowing them to conduct research for anywhere from one to five years, depending on the arrangement. Such fellowships can be highly competitive, something that also makes them prestigious. Doing such a fellowship can be an excellent way for graduates to build their CV before they apply for tenure-track positions, and it also provides them with secure employment while they hunt for a more permanent job. In the natural sciences, having a postdoctoral fellowship is sometimes a competitive advantage when seeking a faculty position. In some fields, however, a PDF can be a form of consolation prize, indicating that the individual did not land a tenure-track position.

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A C K N O W L E D G M E N TS

We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to our graduate students, all of whom have taught us so much. Thanks are due to the many individuals who read early versions of the book, who allowed us to interview them about different aspects of graduate education, and who contributed suggestions. Thanks also to Kumarie Achaibar-Morrison, Sandra Bucerius, Deborah Conners, Sara Dorow, Andrea Doucet, Nancy Evans, Karen Foster, John Gilliom, Ariane Hanemaayer, Lois Harder, Joanna Harrington, Laura Huey, Karen Hughes, William Johnston, Paul Joosse, Naomi Krogman, Steve Kuntz, Lisa Langford, Jason MacLean, Temitope Oriola, Lynn Penrod, Renee Polziehn, Chris Schneider, Krista Shackleford, Bill Stapes, Caitlin Tighe, Serra Tinic, Daniel Trottier, Jennifer Whitson, Heather Zwicker, members of the sociology doctoral seminars at Carleton University and the University of Alberta, and everyone who participated in the panel discussion “How to Screw Up in Graduate School” held at the 2014 Canadian Sociological Association conference. Even senior faculty members need guidance. Kevin Haggerty is particularly grateful to Harvey Krahn for his ongoing mentoring and friendship. And while he does not think much of my advice now, I hope that if Declan ever chooses to go to grad school, he finds this book useful.

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Aaron Doyle thanks the faculty, students, and staff of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University for making it a wonderful place to work for the past thirteen years and for providing a lot of the knowledge that went into this book. He will be forever grateful to Liz, Genny, and Charlie for all their love and support while he negotiated the academic path. We would like to thank John Tryneski at the University of Chicago Press for his enthusiastic support for this project and Leslie Keros for her careful editing of the manuscript. Kevin and Aaron thank each other for more than two decades of friendship and mutual support in surviving many of our own screw-ups in graduate school and beyond. We are both deeply indebted to Richard V. Ericson.

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INDEX

applying to graduate school. See under graduate school attitude, 109–23 careers. See jobs cheating, 1–2, 128, 137–40 complaining, 110, 119–20 about discrimination and sexual harassment, 130–32 to editors, 115 about students, 66 comprehensive exams. See exams conferences, 78–80 and networking, 79 co-supervisors. See under supervisors criticism, 98, 113–15 curriculum vitae (CV), 67 and postdoctoral fellowships, 185 and professional development, 58–59 and publications, 80, 92–95 and scholarships, 37 and teaching, 67, 69 discrimination, 127–32 racial and ethnic, 127–28, 130 reacting to, 130–32 religious, 130 sexism, 127–29 dissertation. See thesis

family, 38, 81–84, 87–88, 146–47, 168–69 funding, 29–30, 35–39, 177 and international students, 85 loans, 38 scholarships, 37, 95, 114, 177 ethics. See under research exams, 61–63 and admission, 13, 176 exercise, 82–83 external examiner. See under thesis extracurricular activities, 58–60, 81 gossip, 123–24 graduate school applying to, 11–13, 24–28, 176 choosing a university (see under university) completion time, 33–34, 90, 156–59, 180 course work, 176–79 finishing, 67, 72–75, 141–42, 155–60 sketch of, 175–85 withdrawing from, 169–70 help, asking for, 44–45, 174 hiring. See jobs

189

interdisciplinary studies, 30–32 international students, 38, 85–87, 107 isolation, 60, 85 jobs, academic, 15–22, 27, 146–50, 183–85 hiring committees, 95, 124–26, 150–51 interviewing for, 142–46, 164–67 job talks, 65, 142–46, 165 and publishing, 90, 95 ranks, 183–85 and teaching, 66–67, 69 jobs, non-academic, 21–22, 170–72, 175 jobs, while in graduate program, 37, 87–88 language, proficiency in, 86–87, 107 letters of reference, 13, 60, 111, 117, 176 master’s degree, 3, 14, 176 and publishing, 96 mental health, 168

theory, 98–100 topic, 63–65, 96–98, 149 responsibility, 55–56, 173–74 rights, 132–35 romantic relationships, 83, 127–28, 137, 146–47, 168 with faculty, 127, 135–37 with students, 127–28, 137 scholarships. See under funding sexual harassment, 129–30, 137 social life, 81–87 social media, 125–26 supervisors, 3–4, 41–56 changing, 53–54, 121 choosing, 26–27, 41–42, 45–48 committee (see supervisory committee) co-supervisors, 48–50 expectations of, 50–51 supervisory committee, 25, 31–32, 51–53, 112, 121–22, 153, 178

organization, 75–77, 84 parenting, 100 peer review. See under publications perfectionism, 62–63, 166 PhD, 3, 15–19, 175 completion time (see under graduate school) reasons to avoid, 15–19 value of, 15–16, 90, 170–71 plagiarism. See cheating postdoctoral fellowship, 147, 185 procrastination, 60, 63, 93, 101 professional development, 58–60, 69 publications, 90–96 peer review, 93–94, 113–15, 117 value of, 67, 90–92, 95–96

teaching, 65–70 improving, 66–67, 69–70 value of, 69, 149 teaching assistantship (TA), 69–70, 177, 180 thesis, 8, 178–80 defending, 122, 152–55, 159–64, 179–80 external examiner of, 152–55, 158, 179–80 finishing, 121–22, 155–59, 178–79 proposal defense, 179 reading, 151–52 theory, 98–100 topic, 63–65, 96–98, 100 writing, 64, 78, 90–91, 96–100, 121–22, 178–79 time management. See organization

RA (research assistantship), 26, 37, 177, 181 reference letters. See letters of reference rejection, 17, 37, 94, 113, 115 reputation, 109–12, 116–20, 123, 174 research, 96–99, 180–81 access, 73–75 ethics, 73–75 methodology, 98–100

university administration, 146, 181–83 choosing, 22–28, 47 departments, 30–31, 181–83 funding of, 21 moving away from, 70–72 and neoliberalism, 20 organization of, 181–83

190 / INDEX

work. See jobs writing, 89–108 book reviews, 91 coauthorship, 91–92 and conferences, 78–79

deadlines, 79, 100–101 improving, 89–90, 106–8 schedule, 101–3 thesis (see thesis, writing)

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