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[imawakenow]

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

I would include a session or discussion specifically about conferences--which ones are good for which types of projects, which ones "everyone" everyone attends vs. more specialized conferences.

When I started grad school, I think everyone assumed I knew what conferences to submit to and the difference between a regional and national conference. This was quite mysterious as an M.A. student (especially one whose adviser was leaving).

I would also talk about the value of using your class papers as building blocks for conference papers and/or theses. Again, I think people just assumed I knew how to use a class to set up a conference paper and that the days of writing just to write were somewhat beside the point, but it took me a while to learn that.

Finally, the one thing I remember from my M.A. orientation (different than an entire class, of course) is something the DGS said: "Done is good."

I know it's a cliche, but I would just spend some time talking about the importance of just finishing and how easy it is to let perfectionism (and many other things) derail you.

Anyway, I'm not sure if this is what you're after, but these are a couple of things that either helped me or would have helped me in an Intro to Grad studies course.

[pink_]

My intro to Grad Studies course was a strange mixture of editorial theory and intro to lit theory, so it wasn't paricularly useful save as a kind of bonding experience for our class--it was the one things that everyone took together.

Seconding the recommendation about conferencing: abstracts vs. how to choose a conference; conference papers v. articles; how to read (seriously). 

One of the most useful things for me as a grad student happened in a different class.  There, the professor required all of her dissertating grad students to attend the class and each of them gave a presentation about their project and what it meant to be at that stage of the process.  This was useful not only because it demystified much of the process, but also because I got to meet more advanced students who wouldn't typically have interacted with entering grad students.  I don't know if something like this would be practical for an intro to grad studies seminar, but I found it very helpful.

[prof_smartypants]

I'm in the social sciences. I'd add some specific sections on organizing and beginning the research process - maybe assign portions of The Craft of Research by Booth, et. al or Creswell's Research Design. I've found that most grad-level methods classes skim over the actual process of doing research, and these two are excellent sources to guide incoming graduate students through the process of doing independent research.

[beryl]

My intro to grad studies class was basically a "methods" class--translation, theory. It was not helpful at all. Like your grad students, I was bright but ill prepared. Many of the people in my cohort went to fancy SLACs, and already seemed to know how to write a seminar paper. The whole first year of grad school, I wrote s***ty papers because I had no understanding of how to frame my research. I wish the Semenza book had been out then, it would've saved me a lot of aggravation (and saved my professors from reading terrible work!).

I think the idea of emphasizing what is a successful year is a good one. A lot of MA students in my program think that they need to start publishing even though very few of them are ready to. It's important for MA students to understand what will be expected of them later on, so they don't find publishing a mystical/scary process, but they need to have a better understanding of what is expected of them at the master's level.

[asteria]

For a history of the profession, maybe check out Professing Literature, by Gerald Graff. You said some of your students are in composition; from what I remember this book covers all the bases, its title notwithstanding. 

[watermarkup]

I had a good intro to grad studies course my first semester in grad school that covered bibliography and methods for my discipline, academic writing, publication outlets, professional issues, etc.

All that was missing was an introduction to graduate studies. What I felt like I was missing at the time was some basic information about how the whole program fit together. What are these "comps" of which people spoke? What were the advantages and disadvantages of writing a thesis for the MA? What is a DGS? I would have liked a basic road map for how the next several years of my life were supposed to work. Yes, I know I could have just looked up everything in some handbook somewhere, but what I needed was someone who actually understood the handbook to explain it in plain language and separate the really important parts from the boilerplate. I actually received my MA over a year after I deposited my thesis because 1) it was just a mile marker on the way to a Ph.D., and 2) I honestly had no idea that I needed to file for graduation to receive it. Maybe you could include a few words in some class session about the basic mechanics of being a grad student?

[verysneaky]

I know I'm late to the party, but I thought I'd add to the discussion. I like hapax's list a lot, and I also love love love the Semenza book. Only a couple things came to mind to add, and they might be specific to me:

1. It would be really great to get an overview of the major journals in each subfield along with some discussion of how they were perceived in the field. It's hard when people say "send it to the best journal at which you think you might have a chance" if you don't even know how the field breaks down. It's also really nice to know that A is the Fact Journal and B is the Theory Journal, C is for Early Basketweaving and D for Late, whatever. An open discussion of the journal landscape, plus maybe a chance for grad students to develop their own reading lists (these are the pubs I think it would be useful for me to read or skim regularly, given my research interests), would be really helpful. Somehow I can't think of a way to ask a professor "What journals are top-tier, which are middling, and which are low?" without sounding pretentious.

2. It would be nice to have an in-depth discussion of, say, five different, common ways to organize an article length paper. I end up using the same template much of the time (at least for a 20 pp. project), and it's essentially a glorified five paragraph essay. It works, but still. I know that we are all supposed to know this already, and I kind of do, but I really feel like you can always afford to learn more about setting up an argument. Then again, that's probably because I have a truly terrible time with this step.

[academic_cog]

I had a very unhelpful Intro to Grad Studies class with a professor who retired the same year. We did a lot of work on preparing philological exercises and, I don't even know how to explain them, but typed up versions of old editions with lots of codes to explain the fonts and formatting of the page ---- copying out old sheets that he had clearly typed on a manual typewriter back in the early 60s. The following year a new prof taught the class and did lots of cool work with exploring technology. Sigh.

The other thing this new prof did was bring in the anniversary issue of PMLA --- the millennium issue? --- and they got to talk about the history of the association and how concepts of what is literary scholarship changed, which I thought was really interesting. Its somewhere between the nuts-and-bolts stuff people are suggesting and trying to understand what a field is and your place within it.

Oh, and one useful thing I did do in my intro class was each of us did a five minute presentation on a journal, maybe 3 of us at the beginning of each week's session. We had to talk about its structure and scope and interests and editorial board and how often it published. It was a nice exercise in that I had to do the work to find a couple journals and present them, but most of the people in this program had such different interests that I didn't necessarily get much out of their presentations on Speculum or ASLE. It did show me just how huge lit studies is though.

[prof_smartypants]

It seems that a lot of suggestions here are specific to PhD students, which is fine, but didn't the OP ask about a Master's level class? I did both a MA and a PhD in social science disciplines, and didn't present at conferences as a master's student, didn't really think about publishing so much, etc.

What I was confused about at the time was the basic transitions between undergraduate and graduate study (some of which have been mentioned upthread). These include how to read journal articles (we mostly read books and sections of books at UndergradSLAC), how to balance grad school and life, issues regarding the requirements for the degree (do I get help finding an internship if it's required; what is the timeline for completing the thesis; how many readers should I have on my thesis committee; if I want to go on for a PhD, what would be the best courses to choose).

Also, many grad students starting out are daunted by the length of the writing requirements. They probably have never written anything longer than 15-20 pages. How to even begin thinking about a 50-60 page thesis? How to start becoming an independent researcher - discriminating between legitimate and bogus online sources, how to write up results of primary research, how to survive group work, etc.

[imawakenow]

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.

[prof_smartypants]

Ah, my bad.

I get defensive about this stuff because in our similar class for PhDs, the profs spent all this time talking about impact factors and the tenure process. Just what a first year PhD students needs to hear. No mention of comps, or what specific courses would fulfill different requirements, or what was expected of graduate students at the university, or how to find TA positions, or what the expectations of those were...

[stangoldsmith]

You should contact someone at your library and have your class meet once or twice for a presentation on doing research and all of the library's potentials.

A professor gave us a class like this once and it opened up the doors of possibility for me in terms of how much research I could actually do in my library and via its website, etc. etc.  I wish it was my first class of grad school versus a random seminar during my second year.

[punchnpie]

You should contact someone at your library and have your class meet once or twice for a presentation on doing research and all of the library's potentials.

I almost posted something like this earlier. There are subject specialist librarians in your library; many of them with a masters in the subject as well as their library degree. I'm constantly surprised that 1) the librarians don't make more of an effort with the departments to inform both students and faculty of their services and 2) that in the absence of a special class, grad students don't make an effort to have an individual interview with the subject specialist.  This is an ongoing problem in the field - the librarians have a lot to offer, but often they only teach an 'intro to the library' at the beginning of the term and then wait for students to come to them. They usually aren't very pro-active with the departments, which many people, including myself, have written that they should be.

The librarian will come to your class, OP, or there is usually some kind of group room with technology so everyone can practice using the databases. They want to help, they just need to know you want their help. This is an ongoing p

Even in a master's program in library science, you can't assume that new students know what journals and databases to use or the library's resources for their field. I bring in a subject specialist at the beginning of the term so students will be better informed. 

[bewilderedta]

This thread is interesting to me even though there is no "Intro to Grad Studies" course in my department. I kind of wish that there were. One thought I had was: in our department, we're expected to have a very wide & general knowledge of the whole field before we settle on a specialization. So a series of meetings with different faculty members, each talking about his/her subfield and interests on a general level, might have been useful. My cohort arranged some informal meetings like this that I found very useful.

[egilson]

While I appreciate the "how to read a book in an hour" recommendations, and while those got me through the final few weeks before comps when I was filling in gaps, I think they depend on knowing which books you can read in this manner and which books you must not read in this manner. A couple of students in my immediate cohort have been caught out repeatedly (and often embarrassingly) during seminars for blatantly having used this technique inexpertly when they shouldn't. I think that new grad students need time to learn when they can skim and when they should buckle down and grind (though one rule of thumb may be that if you're going to read a book in an hour so that you can watch your favorite television show or spend more time at the bar, you'd better not).