When I was a graduate student, I had a difficult time with a lot of aspects of academic life. I also didn’t feel like anyone around me had the answers to the questions I was asking, so I began to try to teach myself how to become a scholar. Eventually, I started to collate the materials I found most useful to share with the incoming first-year cohort in my department each fall. This is not meant to be the end-all-be-all authoritative source, but rather, a collection of things I wish I had been taught or told while I was coming up as a student. I hope it proves as useful for others as it was for me.

Key books to read

Zachary Shore “Grad School Essentials”
Jessica Calarco “A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum”
Kevin D. Haggerty and Aaron Doyle “57 Ways to Screw Up in Grad School: Perverse Professional Lessons for Graduate Students”
Thomas S. Mullaney and Christopher Rea “Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World)”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”
Karen Kelsky “The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your PhD into a Job”*
Cal Newport “Deep Work – Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World”**

*There are good reasons to be skeptical of this book and Kelsky’s by now well-known grift. Do not take this as an endorsement of the scam that she has been running on the precarious for the past decade. The first 130 pages of the book, however, did more to de-mystify the job market for me than anything else I encountered. The job market is bad, by the way. Real Bad. Be prepared for that: “Only 7% of PhD grads end up in academia… can we all stop talking as if it’s vocational training for an academic career, and start helping employers and the students themselves understand the spectrum of skills they have to offer?” (Jenny Andrew July 7, 2019). Plan for the possibility that you will not get a faculty job from the beginning of graduate school. Some tenured faculty will try to convince you otherwise. DO NOT LISTEN TO THEM!
**You should be aware that there are numerous critiques of Newport’s framework, many of which I agree with. I don’t think you need to adopt his approach wholesale (I certainly haven’t) but there is great wisdom in this book about how to do your best work.

Foundations and Scholarly Skills

Your First Year in a PhD

The following is an excerpt from a conversation between Julie Miller Vick, the recently retired as senior associate director of career services at the University of Pennsylvania, and Jennifer S. Furlong, director of the office of career planning and professional development at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. They are the authors of "The Academic Job Search Handbook" (University of Pennsylvania Press).

Jenny: To get off to a good start it's crucial to be involved in the life of your department and attend the activities, seminars, and meetings that it organizes for students. Faculty members will expect that of you and will see your participation as a sign of your level of engagement in the field.

Attending those events may sound like an added burden, in addition to your coursework and teaching responsibilities, but think of it as a chance to get to know people in your department. Graduate school can be an isolating experience, so it's important to take the time to connect—intellectually and socially—with others, particularly in the early years of your program.

Julie: Your adviser will be in charge of helping you get your Ph.D, but you will be in charge of your career. It is vital that you pay attention to what interests you, rather than looking to your adviser for guidance on that. Keep track of potential areas of research interest. Eventually you will need to select a dissertation topic, and you will want it to be something that excites you. Take courses with different professors in your department and, when possible, in related areas of study. Be sure to introduce yourself to your professors, to fellow graduate students, to staff members (such as a graduate coordinator), and to administrators. You never know from where opportunities will arrive.

Jenny: Besides departmental events, attend lectures and programs elsewhere on the campus to widen your circle. It's also a good idea to start to get to know your scholarly association's website; read not just the scholarship but about the discipline itself and about the services the association offers. Most scholarly societies have listings of job announcements and fellowships, along with helpful professional advice. Too often, I see students who have missed a couple years' worth of relevant information simply because they did not know to look to a scholarly association as a source of information and support.

To these great suggestions, I would add: identify the most important journals in your field and specialization and start reading them regularly. You need not read each issue cover-to-cover, or even everything in an issue. But you should get in the habit of consulting these regularly, as it will save you a lot of time and energy later. Find and peruse recent PhD theses in your topic and those written by your advisor’s former students.

reading: Learn to power-skim

Sadly, you cannot possibly read everything. When you are in course-work, reading will by necessity be more like surgery than like mowing a lawn. You will need to dissect a text, pull out everything that is important, and then move on. If a text is truly significant to you, you can spend more time with it, but know that you will have time to come back to it later, ideally many times. For now, you need to develop the ability to efficiently absorb written material.

Once you have mastered this, then you will probably be best served by unlearning it, but you gotta know the rules to break the rules.

This is not easy and it will be rough at first, but you will get better with time. The point here is that coursework will take all the time that you give it and then some, and there are more important things in the world than preparing for seminar. Make no mistake, coursework is very important to your development as a scholar, but you will regret it if you let it take up all your time. There is much more to be done, so strive to be as efficient as possible with seminar prep.

I ripped this quote from somewhere I’ve long since forgotten, but:

“Terry Gross, who I look on as a model in many respects, has a rule about doing book interviews. It's the same rule that we have throughout National Public Radio. It's that you have to read the book. If you think about the number of books that Terry does every week, you begin to realize, there's no machine on the planet that can actually read all of those books, every single page. Terry has a very interesting rule, which is, "The eye must fall on every page." Not quite the same as reading. But you do have to make an effort to try and read the whole thing, if it's somebody coming in solo to do a book interview.”

reading responses

Learn to write good reading responses. These will often be required in graduate seminars, for good reason. They are the building blocks of everything you will write later as you strike out on your own post-coursework. There are four things you should include:

  • Summarize the main issues, problems, and or issues addressed by the text

  • Critically analyze the text’s argument, thesis, or intervention

  • Draw out implications of the text, and/or advance your own assertions or questions about it

  • Address what the author has overlooked or brushed aside; what is novel or conventional about the arguments and inferences of the text; what is generative and useful in the text?

    How to Read an Academic Book or Article (Morgan Liu)
    Interrogating Texts
    How to read journal articles like a professor

Writing

This is one of the main stocks-in-trade of the craft of scholarship. And it is a skill, one that you can practice and improve with consistent effort.

Organization and planning

Get your files in order. Keep them safe and organized. There is no one-size fits all strategy that will work for everyone here, but minimally I suggest having an inbox system and to regularly devote time to triaging your inbox. Sort things by priority, topic, time, project, however suits you. I would also recommend maintaining good file-name practices so that you can more easily search for things.

Write a project plan list with some key initial research objectives and preliminary deadlines for things like applications for funding, workshops and training programs, visas and permits, etc. This plan will get revised over and over again so it doesn’t need to be pretty, but you just need to start thinking ahead.

Get started with using a reference manager software (Zotero, Evernote, Mendeley, etc.). There are many options, some of which are barebones and only manage bibliographic information, and others of which are powerful analytical tools in their own right. Ask around, try some things out, figure out what works for you. When you find one you like, stick with it. You will need it later.     

Find a good supervisor and cultivate a relationship with them

If you don’t have one, begin cultivating relationships with professors who might serve as a dissertation chair. This means do your homework, go to office hours, attend department events, get to know the faculty. If you do have one, meet and set up a framework for working together. Agree on how often to meet, how to assess progress when the supervisor is away, expectations for feedback, benchmarks, etc. Some advisors will take the lead on guiding you through not only the program requirements but also professionalization and your training as a scholar. Other advisors will not be as proactive. Therefore you need to gauge quickly the extent to which you need to take responsibility for arranging meetings with your supervisor and for making sure these meetings are productive (one strategy is to provide a short agenda before the meeting). It will also be a good idea to review your skills and training needs (ideally in consultation with your advisor) and make a plan for addressing any gaps. I don’t remember where I found this page of specific things to discuss with a prospective advisor, but will gladly give credit to the right person/people if the source is identified.

Develop your research interests

How to Develop your Research Interests (pp. 9-15 especially)
Defining a Research Trajectory
Moving from an interest to a Research Question

Invest in your development as a teacher

A page I put together for a guest lecture in a professionalization seminar in my department. Much to be added here of course, but a start.

Miscellaneous Advice

  • Know when not to work for free

  • Take breaks!

  • Take care of yourself

  • The fact of the matter is, we have good days and we have not-so-good days. We have technique for those moments when you can't think of anything else. Technique is what we fall back on when we are out of ideas. (Julia Cameron)

  • Remember that graduate school is not your entire life!

  • Resist grindset culture, but do be aware that you can increase your capacity. Also most productivity advice is basically cribbed from Getting Things Done. I have used a modified version of that system for 10+ years and it has really helped.

    • Instead of focusing on doing more things, focus on doing the right things. Find tasks that are aligned with what you care about, so you know why you want to accomplish the things you’re doing.

    • Develop a “growth mindset.” According to research, the main quality that separates successful people from unsuccessful people is whether they think their intelligence and abilities are fixed.

    • Remember: for all its faults, academia does have upsides! There’s a reason why you chose to be here.

  • Always seek out feedback

  • Don’t expect too much from professors without first investing in the relationship

  • Don’t let people use up your time and energy for things that you don’t get anything out of

  • Make friends in other departments. If your institution has one, get involved in the graduate worker’s union

  • Rely on other grad students, if you have questions, ask!

  • Write an article/book that you would want to read. Best for creativity

  • At the end of the day, celebrate what you did get done instead of regretting what you didn't!

  • Writing is like cooking – mise en place helps everything go smoothly during assembly

  • When you feel uncomfortable, that means that there is a lesson to be learned

  • When you feel weak, that means that there is strength to be gained (i.e. you’ve identified an area for improvement)

  • For better or for worse, academic success is:

    • 80% people skills

    • 20% technical competence and academic nous

  • What to do

    • Write daily

    • Unplug. Your schedule will depend on your commitments, dependents, and care-relations. When you have off-time, though, be off!

    • Get 7 to 9 hours of sleep

    • Get regular exercise

    • Connect to others via conversations about your work

    • Be proactive about dealing with the #hiddencurriculum (and help out those coming up behind you!!) See this folder on my Dropbox for a bunch of resources on this.

  • What not to do

    • Compare yourself to others

    • Believe that more work is always better

    • Suffer alone

    • Get stuck after one failure

get on academic twitter, there’s lots of good advice there

Erica Chenoweth 7 December 2018

Better to take a B+ Swing at an A+ question than an A+ swing at a B+ question.

Matt Grossman 5 May 2018

Never skip the acknowledgments when reading academic books & dissertations; they are the author’s causal story of how their ideas developed & critical context for understanding academia as a social enterprise & how ideas are recombined to advance knowledge.

Tyler L Kelly 15 Feb 2019

No one really prepares you in your academic life for the sheer number of loose ends you have running simultaneously and how to organize them.

Melissa Ingala 4 Jul 2018

I am not “getting paid to learn” as a PhD student. I am getting paid to create new knowledge.

Katy Peplin 18 Feb 2019

Do not save the big questions – what am I doing here? What makes me happy? What would fill me up? What gives my life value and meaning – until after [you finish this year, this dissertation, get a job, get tenure, get full]. Answer them now, because they’ll help you move forward

Anthony K Webster 20 August 2019

I read a piece of advice for new graduate students that said you need to treat everyone, fellow graduate students & professors, as your competitors. I’m not going to link to it, but let me just say, don’t do that, don’t be that kind of academic, we have far too many. Be better

Robin Grenier 4 Feb 2019

Always telling my students, “did you ever consider there’s a gap because it’s not worth studying?” It freaks them out for a moment but gets them thinking more deeply about what they’re pursuing and why.

Eric Sprankle 5 December 2017

If you’re going to research a marginalized group, start with three questions:
1)     Does the group want the research?
2)     Will group members be involved in all parts of the research?
3)     Will the research benefit the group, regardless of the results?
It should be yes to all three.

Amber Griffiths 18 December 2018

A wise person told me to always choose people not projects:
-a bad collaborator/supervisor can make the very best projects awful
-a good collaborator/supervisor can make the worst projects brilliant
Sound advice, always.

Darren L Dahly 31 August 2018

Tip for Postgrad Research Students – Don’t just ask your supervisor “what to do”
Instead
1)     Research the options
2)     Outline the pros and cons
3)     Make your own decision
4)     THEN ask for your supervisor’s opinion

Timothee Poisot 19 August 2019

Take vacations during your phd. Your brain literally cannot run at capacity all the time

Caroline Holland 18 August 2019

Dear new grad students starting MA/PhD coursework,
The loud male grad students in your seminars who name-drop fancy concepts without explaining them are not smarter than you

10 Rules for Students and Teachers – John Cage

Rule 1: Find a place, and then, try trusting it for a while
Rule 2: (General Duties as a Student) Pull everything out of your teacher. Pull everything out of your fellow students.
Rule 3: (General Duties as a Teacher) Pull everything out of your students.
Rule 4: Consider everything an experiment.
Rule 5: Be Self Disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self disciplined is to follow in a better way.
Rule 6: Follow the leader. Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
Rule 7: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It is the people who do all the work all the time who eventually catch onto things. You can fool the fans – but not the players.
Rule 8: Do not try to create and analyze at the same time. They are different processes.
Rule 9: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It is lighter than you think.
Rule 10: We are breaking all the rules, even our own rules, and how do we know that? By leaving plenty of room for “x” qualities.
Helpful Hints: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read everything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully and often. Save everything, it may come in handy later.

FIVE TIPS FOR THESIS WRITERS — Richard Bulliet FaceBook Post 27 July 2021

1. Choosing a topic will shape your entire career. It will lead to your first book, and probably your second, the one on which your tenure will depend.
2. A topic that sounds great to a person knowledgeable in your field may be just so-so. One that requires some elucidation is more likely to be on, or hopefully beyond, the field’s cutting edge, and thus more likely to still be original when you get finished.
3. Trim your “archive” to your methodological skills. Too big a bite may prove impossible to swallow, or take impossibly long.
4. Reading a text and summarizing its contents in English may be a great field contribution, but it isn’t a thesis.
5. Write your introductory chapter last. You won’t know until you finish what your thesis is about.