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[harry]

I'm cross-posting the following from the "In the Classroom" board, since I'm also specifically curious about graduate student experiences with the following course--what you've done/read, and what you think now might be valuable to have done. To whit:

I work at a state R1 where (as the subject of this thread suggests) I've been asked to teach our "intro to graduate studies" course for our incoming MAs and PhD transfers. I'm looking for some text or essay suggestions to help flesh out what I'm already considering.

A bit of background--my own experience with this course as a student was a plodding one based on some very old models of scholarship (the year after my department junked the course). Our department is a decent one but by no means top tier, and the course will have a mix of both "lit" and "comp" students. I'm taking a dual approach focusing on both their entrance into graduate study in our discipline--English in all its iterations--and their entrance into the "university" (their other, larger profession).

I'll want to do at least a bit on the status of scholarly inquiry, presumably something along the lines of "what's current in gender/close reading/historicism" etc. But the course isn't meant to be an introduction to theory per se. Based on practical experience I'm going to limit the course's interest in "preparing for the job market" and "revising essays for publication" since that's work they'll do quite a bit later in their studies. What I have been encouraged to think about--and it's something I agree with--is a focus on researching and writing at the graduate level, i.e. how does one conceive of/frame a topic, pursue it, and write an appropriately sophisticated essay (or other project version). Our students tend to be bright but a bit unpolished, often those who have rightly impressed their undergraduate teachers but can be surprised at the jump to graduate school-level work.

I've got my own thoughts, but does any of this bring to mind particular work you think might be worth introducing?

[smallways]

I had a professor hand out statistics about job placement rates broken down by sub-field. That was very useful. Examples of successful applications for the external funds that are most commonly sought by your students would also be great.

[readandwept]

Some of the things that scholars use most are rarely formally taught, in my experience -- things like: how do you organize your citations and articles when working on a topic? What kind of notes do you take when reading? LarryC's patented "read a book in an hour" method comes to mind; when I started grad school I read by trying to read every word, slowly, in order, and it was disastrous. I also retained relatively little of what I read because I had no systematic way of keeping notes.

A class that presented various professors', and more advanced grad students', ways of dealing with really practical stuff like this, without implying that any one way is "the" right way, would be very valuable in my opinion.

Finally, I second the idea of helping with external funding applications, but I have a caution about this too: for my cohort, this made the first month of grad school more anxious and overly focused on professionalization (in a narrow sense) than I think it needed to be. My favorite parts of our Intro to the Department workshop were when particularly engaging professors talked with us about their research (some were really boring, though), and one day when we all just talked about what we were finding stressful. Everyone was surprised to learn that everyone *else* felt overwhelmed and stupid, too. It was a fantastic discussion.

[mfaer]

Some of the things that scholars use most are rarely formally taught, in my experience -- things like: how do you organize your citations and articles when working on a topic? What kind of notes do you take when reading? LarryC's patented "read a book in an hour" method comes to mind; when I started grad school I read by trying to read every word, slowly, in order, and it was disastrous. I also retained relatively little of what I read because I had no systematic way of keeping notes.

A class that presented various professors', and more advanced grad students', ways of dealing with really practical stuff like this, without implying that any one way is "the" right way, would be very valuable in my opinion.

Finally, I second the idea of helping with external funding applications, but I have a caution about this too: for my cohort, this made the first month of grad school more anxious and overly focused on professionalization (in a narrow sense) than I think it needed to be. My favorite parts of our Intro to the Department workshop were when particularly engaging professors talked with us about their research (some were really boring, though), and one day when we all just talked about what we were finding stressful. Everyone was surprised to learn that everyone *else* felt overwhelmed and stupid, too. It was a fantastic discussion.

Could you please point me to the LarryC Read a Book in an Hour infomercial? I need to use that next year.

[hapax]

Disclaimer: I have not actually taken an Intro to Grad Studies course yet. I will be doing so come August. Here's a list of some things I hope to encounter:

• I've been using Refworks but I know many students as undergrads are never exposed to citation software, and I'm pretty sure I could be doing a better job of using Refworks. So, an explanation of how to organize your citations and notes.
• How to skim readings and take good notes. I'm still reading nearly every word and tend to over-highlight.
• How to write a good grant application; if you time it right you could actually have the class all apply for an external grant.
• Drafting abstracts for conferences. I've no idea how to do this on my own and am quite frankly somewhat deathly afraid of it. How do you know when you have enough material to swing a presentation? At what point in your grad school career should you be submitting to conferences?
• What about journals? I know this might scare some minty-fresh grad students, but it might also come as a relief. We get the "publish or perish" vibe from all sides (I have definitely gotten the message on this forum) and so at least having a general idea of when we should start producing would help. Knowing that I'm not expected to produce a fully-formed groundbreaking article out of nowhere the moment I walk through the door would probably quell a lot of my nervous jitters right about now.
• More discipline-specific information, ranging from the citation format(s) to the top and good journals in the field/subfields. You'd probably expect everyone to know this already, but if you establish it early on then they'll have no excuse when they try to use some weird MLA-Chicago mishmash instead of APA down the road.
• I also like the idea of the research overview. It catches everyone up to the current state of the field (as undergrad courses often lag behind in this regard) while giving an overview of all the different subfields. I know that in a discipline as widely flung as mine it's quite possible to be unaware a given subfield exists, let alone know much more about it beyond its name.

I should note that my program has separate "Intro to Grad" courses for the MA and PhD students; I wrote this with the first course in mind. The later course focuses (I hope) more on article revision, collaborative research, and job applications, etc...

[systeme_d_]

Hi, Harry.

My university's trying to convince me to take over a similar university-wide class, so I've looked at past syllabi and here's the text most others have used.

Darley, JM, Zanna, MP & Roediger, HL III, eds. The compleat academic: A career guide. 2nd ed.  American Psychological Association, 2004.

I've also looked at:
Barnes, Sandra. On the Market: Strategies for a Successful Academic Job Search. Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007.
Vick, Julia Miller and Jennifer S. Furlong. The Academic Job Search Handbook. 4th ed. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
DeNeef, A. Leigh and Craufurd D. Goodwin. The Academic’s Handbook. 3rd ed. Duke University Press, 2007.
Gray, Paul and David Drew.  What They Didn't Teach You in Graduate School: 199 Helpful Hints for Success in Your Academic Career.  Stylus Publishing, 2008.

I have not made any decisions yet, so I'll be reading this thread to see what current grad students have to say!

[jennyfields]

I've read "Graduate Study for the 21st Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities" by Gregory Colon Semenza this summer and found it very informative and accessible.  The language is extremely straightforward.  If one didn't use the whole text, I could see it being very conducive to short heading specific extracts, page-long hand outs, etc.

And I second the call for this Book in an Hour infomercial.

[jennyfields]

Sorry to derail the thread, but I found the information from the post requested:


1. Create a clean space--a table, the book, paper and a writing utensil, and nothing else.

2. Read two academic reviews of the book you photocopied beforehand. Don't skip this step, these will tell you the book's perceived strengths and weakness. Allow five minutes for this.

3. Read the introduction, carefully. A good intro will give you the book's thesis, clues on the methods and sources, and thumbnail synopses of each chapter. Work quickly but take good notes (with a bibliographic citation at the top of the page.) Allow twenty minutes here.

4. Now turn directly to the conclusion and read that. The conclusion will reinforce the thesis and have some more quotable material. In your notes write down 1-2 direct quotes suitable for using in a review or literature review, should you later be assigned to write such a beast.
Ten to fifteen minutes.

5. Turn to the table of contents and think about what each chapter likely contains. You may be done--in many cases in grad school the facts in any particular book will already be familiar to you, what is novel is the interpretation. And you should already have that from the intro and conclusion. Five minutes.

6. (Optional) Skim 1-2 of what seem to be the key chapters. Look for something clever the author has done with her or his evidence, memorable phrases, glaring weaknesses--stuff you can mention and sound thoughtful yourself when it is your turn to talk in the seminar room. Ten minutes, max.

7. Put the notes and photocopied review in a file folder and squirrel it away. These folders will serve as fodder for future assignments, reviews of similar books, lectures, grant applications, etc.


The above works better with some books than others, but will generally do the trick. Another good technique to have is paragraph surfing. Read the first sentence in each paragraph--and nothing else. After a few disconcerting minutes, it become surprisingly easy to make sense out of a book this way, and it is fast.

[pink_]

I've read "Graduate Study for the 21st Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities" by Gregory Colon Semenza this summer and found it very informative and accessible.  The language is extremely straightforward.  If one didn't use the whole text, I could see it being very conducive to short heading specific extracts, page-long hand outs, etc.

And I second the call for this Book in an Hour infomercial.

Seconding this recommendation.

[imawakenow]

Darley, JM, Zanna, MP & Roediger, HL III, eds. The compleat academic: A career guide. 2nd ed.  American Psychological Association, 2004.

Read it as a grad student and liked it a lot. It's definitely focused on psychology and social sciences, although I think a lot of the comments and lessons would translate to any discipline.

Vick, Julia Miller and Jennifer S. Furlong. The Academic Job Search Handbook. 4th ed. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

Read when going on the job market. It include some things that were worth knowing, but I thought a lot of the content was somewhat obvious. Might be less useful for students just starting grad school.

You might take a look at "The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School through Tenure" by John A. Goldsmith, John Komlos, and Penny Schine Gold. Each author has a slightly different perspective (one is at a SLAC, one at Chicago and one somewhere else).

[smallways]

I've read "Graduate Study for the 21st Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities" by Gregory Colon Semenza this summer and found it very informative and accessible.  The language is extremely straightforward.  If one didn't use the whole text, I could see it being very conducive to short heading specific extracts, page-long hand outs, etc.

And I second the call for this Book in an Hour infomercial.

Seconding this recommendation.

And thirding!

A wonderful young professor who acted as an informal guide for a lot of my cohort loaned me this during my MA and it was an amazing help. I was killing myself serving on a katrillion committees, constantly worrying that I wasn't working hard enough, and putting time into department politics instead of reading in my field. This book helped me prioritize my time, cut back on extras, and focus on my real work and productive service. It absolutely saved my sanity.

[systeme_d_]

I'm glad to hear the Semenza book has been so helpful for many of you, but the class I'd be teaching (if I cave to the pressure) would be for students in all disciplines.

"The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School through Tenure" by John A. Goldsmith, John Komlos, and Penny Schine Gold.

I'll be looking into this one next.

[pink_]

I'm glad to hear the Semenza book has been so helpful for many of you, but the class I'd be teaching (if I cave to the pressure) would be for students in all disciplines.

Fair enough, but the OP seems to be in the humanities.

[systeme_d_]

Clearly, he is.  I was clarifying my own concern.

[harry]

[Just saw the recent posts as I was typing--yep, I'm in the humanities, as this post will indicate]

Thanks for the replies (Greg's book was a good choice in part because of its focus on research writing, which has been a bugbear in our program lately). Since this thread has generated a decent number of responses, I thought I'd add what I'm going to do.

As I mentioned, there will be a dual focus on both our field and how a university works--I've found that many students don't know how universities actually function (what does a provost do? how does power flow within the institution) despite the fact that these same students will be at the mercy of such institutions or seeking to join them.

Re: preparing for studies in our field, we'll be doing a couple of things. I won't focus terribly much on job market practical skills (that's the focus of another set of workshops in our department). Instead I'll have them work out a timeline of what sort of things they might want to have accomplished by each year of their program--what are the benchmarks of success at year 1, 3, 5, etc.? I'm hoping that will put the push for professionalization in its proper context. For example, while one should be thinking about publishing, rarely should one think that their first MA paper is the place to begin trying to publish.

Conference abstracts will be a likely topic, as well as preparing a project prospectus (required in our department for both the MA and the PhD thesis/diss). Such work falls under the larger category of preparing one's research skills and profile--how do you conceive of a project that not only situates itself within the field but also advances it in some way?

One additional note--from several colleagues in rhet/comp I've been encouraged to discuss how to collect and analyze primary data--something different than reading texts in literature but something that seems to be increasingly important in r/c. It's important (for me at least) to remember that not all of my students will be lit folks, and that r/c folks often encounter different discourses.

Happy to hear more suggestions if anyone cares to share them.