Dr. Crazy has a great post today about trying to demystify the kind of identity loss process of graduate school, the full scale annihilation of self that has inspired and still inspires the worst sort of imposter syndrome in each of us.
As I read it, I thought, Man, I wish I had read this about ten years ago. And then I recalled having said that to myself about fifty times over the last four years since I started blogging. So it occurred to me that maybe we should keep some kind of compendium of required reading posts for surviving graduate school, a kind of edited one-time carnival.
So, if you wouldn't mind, dear readers, could you complete as many of the following tasks as possible:
a) Check your archives for as many posts as you think would be useful for such a collection.
b) Think of posts you've seen at other sites that would be good submissions.
c) If the mood strikes you, compose such a post.
d) Maybe announce and link this post so your readers (since my readership is comparatively small).
e) Keep this post in mind if in 3 months someone else posts an essential post on surviving graduate school.
So copy post addresses in the comments, or just gmail me at delightandinstruct . . . if I get enough good references (and I'll poke around for them, too), I'll put up the results ASAP.
43 comments:
Hey, I did a quick search of posts and I did a tag for all of them (also tagging the most recent, so just head over there and click on the tag). I'll also check with old posts at the Chronicles that might be of use, but haven't gotten to that yet :)
Ok, just looked around at the Chronicles, and if you do a search for advising students about grad school in the search bar, you'll come up with a post that has a label - click on the label and you'll come up with the other posts that I wrote over there that seem relevant. (WOW was my voice harsh over there.)
My big contribution to this is my "professionalization" post. And the rest of the academic blogosphere -- including you! -- weighed in with really smart stuff, too. My god, the comments! They're even more useful than the post itself!
Here's a link to it.
What does the tag say? If we used the same tag on all our blogs (besides the official To Delight and Instruct Compendium of Grad School Advice(TM)) it would help make them easier to find.
Ooh, I'm pretty poor with tags, but let's say grad-compendium or gradcompendium, and I'll start to technorati tag stuff. I haven't even figured out delic.i.ous yet....
All set. I put them under "grad-compendium" & will make a link tomorrow.
There's probably some relevant stuff in the Carnivals of GRADual Progress (links to all the past carnivals can be found here).
Likewise, this post is something that the next carnival should definitely link to!
Horace, thanks for doing this. I'm about to become an M.A. candidate, and have my eye on an eventual Ph.D., and will make use of whatever resources you uncover.
However, let it be said that Dr. Crazy's post (unnecessarily, I think, to no fault of Dr. Crazy's) scared me. It's not that I think the post was in any way misguided, but I do hope that I'm sick to death of the "Don't go to grad school" talk that everyone feels obliged to give to folks who are about to enter it, and am looking forward to hearing some more optimistic stories and advice.
Funny, the stories I hear from friends "in real life" are much happier than those one finds in various fora around the intertubes.
And thanks again -- this is great.
I should proofread comments before I post them. I don't hope to be scared to death. Yikes.
(Have I mentioned that I greatly enjoy your blog? Because I greatly enjoy your blog.)
sorry for deleting, i have a link but couldn't figure out how to link it in my comment--i'll be back after more coffee.
Hi Horace! Very much enjoy your blog. Since I started blogging as a grad student, I should probably go back through and see what would be helpful for a grad student to see. Quite a number of mine are getting up on my soapbox about one or another thing about grad school -- working all the time, professional jealousy, bootcamp, etc. I think my blog is where you go if you want to feel like you're not the only person in the world who feels crazy and like nothing makes sense, not where you go for "advice." Are you interested in that sort of thing for your carnival/resource?
I rarely ever write straight posts, so let me start by recommending Sisyphus's response, which is excellent. For oblique looks at academic life -- mostly from the perspective of the dissertator, as that's when I started blogging -- I submit the following: Day in the life of a dissertator, DISADVENTURE, Coming to theory, Running away from it, and some links to my posts on MLA 2005 and MLA 2006. These are the posts other people told me were helpful. Hope they help you.
I'm delurking, though I've been happily reading for a while.
I've got a post up (written partially in response to Dr. Crazy's post) about how working in the non-academic job market can really make a difference in terms of the traumatic shift from undergraduate to graduate student.
Hey, Thanks all for the links so far...keep em coming:
Styley Geek: I'm going to go the GRADual Progress posts, but are there any that off the top of your head seem particularly smashing?
Undine: How did you tag your posts? I haven't figured that out yet...
Scott and Jane, thanks for all those links...they'll be useful, I think.
Earnest English: suggest the posts that work best for you, and if they seem to fit with what else is in the mix, I'd be happy to include them...
Adjunct Whore: I think I might be able to figure out your link from the comment notification I got...
Thanks again, everyone!
If they're not useful, don't worry about including them. I won't be offended. I only wanted to share the "slice of life" posts that people seemed to've responded to.
Horace, I don't know if I did this right or not, but I didn't see any instructions at Technorati & so modified the code on this page and pasted into my pages:
http://teachingcarnival.blogspot.com/2006/02/how-to-tag-for-teaching-carnival.html
I just substituted grad-compendium for teaching-carnival in the code.
Ditto for my post; no need to use it if you don't find it useful.
Hey Horace,
GREAT idea! Here's my contribution: http://bardiac.blogspot.com/2007/06/what-grad-student-should-know.html
This is going to make for some interesting reading!
Horace:
Here's one of my favorites from my early blogging days
the Good Enough Dissertation Advisor
Great idea.
TR
I've got a couple of recent ones under the label of phd on my northern lights site. I'm doing my phd in England so it's a bit different from the US, but my posts are mainly about the writing process and self-doubt, so it's probably universal (though I guess you get a lot more structure around that with all the subjects you have to take...) I can email you the links if you're interested and that's easier.
I wrote one on why I think grad students should publish with some links to other blogs on the topic.
Sounds interesting.
If I might suggest: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=869. Funny, yes, and oh, so true!
In the free unneeded advice for grad student category...
http://barnetbound.blogspot.com/2006/12/graduate-students-and-service.html
First time reader here. I will look back through some of my posts and through the carnival I hosted. And, if you want a laugh, you should definitely follow phd me's advice and check out Ph.D. Comics!
Horace, I've gone back and tagged my recent flurry of Practica posts with a category "grad-compendium", which technorati seems to suggest will be read as a tag. In any case, you can get directly to my tagged posts via this link. Thanks again for doing this!
Whoops! I wrote in my blog how I'm planning to contribute a post on grad school and "family planning" (two significant choices, and how they relate to one another), but this was at the end of another post (about autism, which has now tracked back from here. . . who knows what people are inferring from that!?). I am going to undo the link, but will get to my real contribution soon. . . Apologies to your readers for the misdirection ("by indirection find directions out"?!) . . .
so i took a few days off and finally remembered to come back and give you some links. the first is post-defense, the second is something like a riff on all of the alternative paths i almost took. i am a firm believer in the non-academic choice--there are quite a few things english/humanities phd's can be happy AND make money at. so first, try this http://narratives--glove.blogspot.com/2007/05/more-confessional.html and then this: http://narratives--glove.blogspot.com/2007/03/new-day.html, for other jobs.
Here's a link that I often recommend to my students who are contemplating grad school. My usual starting advice tends to be, "Don't do it."
Should I go to graduate school?
Oh... and there's a continuation of the post here as well:
How long should I search for an academic position?
Ok, now I've written a post on the topic too. Although from its title you can probably guess it's not quite what neophyte is hoping to read: Horror Stories
In 2004, I wrote some thoughts about whether to get a PhD:
http://gullybrookpress.blogspot.com/2004/02/two-weeks-ago-long-time-in-land-of.html
Oops. Here are two of mine that may be useful to those wanting to hear about how to approach dissertation writing and what sorts of fears emerge out of that process: the links are http://wwwmama.typepad.com/working_writing_wailing_m/2007/02/dissertation_wr.html
and
http://wwwmama.typepad.com/working_writing_wailing_m/2006/10/facing_fears.html
Nice idea! I made a blogger label (grad-compendium) of relevant posts for my blog.
This is a great start to a wonderful idea. I have linked to you at my blog, and will start to re-tag posts. What a resource!
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