Things They Don’t Teach You in Grad School

As I was speaking at a faculty meeting the other day, I had a thought that comes to me with some regularity these days: Right now, almost nothing I do in my job as dean of the faculty is directly related to what I learned in graduate school, or to my original plans when set out to earn my Ph.D.

I certainly never thought that I would become an administrator, at least beyond the department chair level. Even as a visiting instructor, though, I quickly developed an intense interest in how my college worked. The analytical thinking and institutional skepticism inculcated by scholarly training in my discipline (English) most definitely contributed to that interest. I think they also made me a pain to our administration in ways that I now understand quite thoroughly.

But budgeting, student recruitment and retention, strategic planning, facilities, personnel, and other issues that I now deal with almost daily were definitely not on my agenda back then. Even as a young professor, a lot of the issues I encountered were simply not part of my graduate training. Life as a new faculty member was full of surprises, not all of them pleasant. The relative purity of graduate school’s scholarly agenda does not fit that cleanly with the life the vast majority of college and university faculty members end up leading.

I am nevertheless immensely grateful for my disciplinary training. Although it has a complex and abstract relationship with my current daily work, it still was excellent preparation for the duties I now fulfill. Every day I am glad I am a fast and thorough reader, and a fluent writer. I am thankful for the training that has made me a skeptical consumer of language.

Most important, I am glad I spent a lot of time as a faculty member. I hope I still understand and sympathize with the particular challenges faculty members face in dealing with students, their teaching loads, and the challenges of scholarly and creative activity at a small, teaching-oriented university. My teaching experience has made it easy for me to speak to groups and think quickly on my feet, and to answer unanticipated questions.

But if you had asked me 15 years ago what I would be doing today, I would surely not have answered correctly — not even close.

What have you encountered in your career as a faculty member or administrator that was not part of your planning or training when you were a graduate student?