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[prof_numnutz]

Hey there fellow grad students. Perusing the other forums I see a lot of ridicule from professors directed toward their students, i.e. snowflakes, lazy, naive, etc. Time to turn the tables a bit...

I'm a 2nd year grad student in a humanities PhD program. I find that many of my professors are woefully out of touch with the vast majority of their grad students: most of them literally assign more work than humanly possible. They seem to have no concept of how much time it actually takes to complete what they have assigned. Two of them who do occasionally specify amounts of time invariably do so in a condescending manner implying that our problem really is bad time management, lack of dedication, work ethic, etc. and they tend to grossly underestimate the actual time involved.

A typical example would be the claim that what took 2 or 3 hours should not have taken more than 30 minutes. Why? Because they said so, apparently. Clueless. I find myself constantly having to decide whose turn it is to be "sorely disappointed" this week. Which Peter will I rob to pay which Paul.

BTW I am supposed to be studying for qualifying exams in my "spare time." HAHAHA like grad students have spare time. Yeah, baby. That's the ticket...

[ptarmigan]

I get what you're talking about, and I enjoy whining with my fellow grad students as well, but it's more or less baseless. If something should take 30 minutes and it takes you 2 hours, it's because you need more practice, so you'd best get crackin'.

I'm not sure how your program is, but most of the professors in my program came from better schools than this one (which I think is typical unless you're at the tip top, where there are not better schools), and were for the most part subject to even harder and more stringent requirements for getting their graduate degrees. So they are just not going to be sympathetic to claims that they are requiring unreasonable amounts of work.

It is also my understanding that, if you're looking to get a tenure-track job at a research-oriented university, your first few years there will involve more work than a typical graduate program - another reason professors are unsympathetic to our supposed plights.

So, as I said, I get it, and I whine too. But I don't think there is anything actually, objectively wrong. It's just hard. It's supposed to be.

[galactic_hedgehog]

I find that many of my professors are woefully out of touch with the vast majority of their grad students: most of them literally assign more work than humanly possible.

That's because we're not human.  Duh.

BTW I am supposed to be studying for qualifying exams in my "spare time." HAHAHA like grad students have spare time. Yeah, baby. That's the ticket...

You have much more than we do.  Get back to work.

[larryc]

OP, I strongly suspect  that your problem really is bad time management, lack of dedication, work ethic, etc.

[asteria]

Sometimes you don't finish everything. It's not a big deal unless it happens a lot. That's assuming you are referring to reading for seminars and not writing. And if you are referring to reading, when you get to later stages of your program, you are going to be grateful for all the reading you have under your belt and wish you had done more.

I almost hoped this was going to be about professors who were out of touch with their field when that field also happens to be your dissertation field. Now THAT is a problem.

[chaosbydesign]

If by 'out of touch' you mean expecting us to treat grad school as a full-time job along with working as many hours as is necessary to fully understand/complete something regardless of how long they think it should take, then yes...

It's supposed to be like this. Sometimes I might whine about something taking longer than I would like it to, but at the end of the day that time is time well spent, as I always have a better understanding at the end of working on something. If everything is quick and easy, you're not learning anything.

[prof_numnutz]

No I mean quite literally that they assign more work than one can actually do in the time allotted. During my first several semesters I averaged about 4 hrs of sleep/night and still wasn't able to get it all done. Not by a long shot. The particular example I had in mind required more than 30 minutes merely to locate the material let alone actually do anything with it.

Also, a few of the newer professors DO actually have a clue and are reasonable in their expectations. It is the old salts and the god-complexers who are either clueless or just don't really give a good gawd-damn at this point. ;-)

BTW don't think I'm bitter. I'm actually quite zen about it all at this juncture. Yet, the truth must be told all the same, no.

[chaosbydesign]

What do your classmates think about the workload?

[prof_numnutz]

OP, I strongly suspect  that your problem really is bad time management, lack of dedication, work ethic, etc.

Thanks Larry. I really do like you. I'm just disappointed I couldn't get a "STFU"--then I'd know you really care. lol.

[voxprincipalis]

Hey there fellow grad students. Perusing the other forums I see a lot of ridicule from professors directed toward their students, i.e. snowflakes, lazy, naive, etc. Time to turn the tables a bit...

I'm a 2nd year grad student in a humanities PhD program.

Goodness. From your moniker I'd have assumed you were actually a professor (i.e., some combination of PhD-in-hand or ABD who is a full-time TT or VAP or an adjunct).

Huh.

Surely you know such complaints will get no traction here. Have you *met* grad school? And it only gets harder from here. You had best figure out how to work more efficiently or you will fall off the horse sooner rather than later.

VP

[goaswerfraiejen]

Mine is a humanities field, and I'm just finishing up coursework. I have had several professors in the past (at both the MA and PhD level), usually of a certain persuasion in my field, who have expected far too much prep for weekly seminars. I don't mind prepping up to 40 pages of highly technical material per course per week. Any more than that, however, is just too much to handle, especially when I am also required to prep to teach twice a week.  For some courses, I have had reading loads of over 200 pages. Bear in mind that this is highly technical material; it's not like it's a novel or something. Once, last semester, I audited a course that had twenty-nine megabytes of reading one week. That's 29MB of PDFs...

Inevitably, we never end up covering much ground in class, because there's simply too much to ground to cover in the first place. It would be fine if I only had the one course, but that's sadly not the case. And when more than one course is assigning such heavy loads, it's just impossible to accomplish all the reading. Luckily, my specialization functions a little differently, so I can usually retreat into the safety of a course or two per semester with a more manageable workload.

Ultimately, I don't end up doing all the reading. I do what I can, and hope to catch up on the rest at a later date. At the very least, I've got the readings ready to hand. I guess it's good practice for when the coursework runs out.

[ptarmigan]

No I mean quite literally that they assign more work than one can actually do in the time allotted. During my first several semesters I averaged about 4 hrs of sleep/night and still wasn't able to get it all done. Not by a long shot. The particular example I had in mind required more than 30 minutes merely to locate the material let alone actually do anything with it.

If this is true for all or most students in your program, then you probably won't be heavily penalized for not finishing everything. If not, then you may be one of the weak students in your program. Good luck - that is a difficult position to be in.

[hegemony]

People are defensive, as usual, and I'm sure we all know students who glance twice at the reading and complain about the workload.  But I do want to say that there are indeed some profs who underestimate the time it will take to read all the assignments, let alone do a thorough job and think about the readings.  I hear some of them griping in my department -- "only 200 pages of Foucault and none of them had gotten halfway through it!"  And this when the students also have another seminar, plus a five-day-a-week language course, e.g. Latin, plus they're teaching their own 40-student classes (probably for the first time) in the same semester.  It is possible that some profs can overestimate how much work a student can reasonably get done.  Come to think of it, sometimes administrators overestimate how much work profs can reasonably get done too.  Unfortunately, this is the time to learn to streamline, cut corners, hold the line, and bluff.

[cgfunmathguy]

Unfortunately, this is the time to learn to streamline, cut corners, hold the line, and bluff.

This. I find that first-year undergrads don't fully connect the dots about college-level workloads being substantially higher than high-school workloads until their second semesters or later. Unfortunately, it seems (in my experience, which is purely anecdotal) that first-year graduate students suffer the same problem when comparing graduate-level and undergraduate-level workloads. Are some unreasonable? Probably. However, it the consequence of stepping up in the levels of education. You learn what's important to read fully, what's important to skim, and what can be blown off. This happens at each change of level. Also, as someone else noted, realize that you're going to have a larger workload once you leave grad school. Adapt and move on, or fail to adapt and fade away. The choice is yours.

[pigou]

Sleeping less doesn't necessarily increase the amount you can read. You will be awake for more hours, but may not be able to focus as much. You will read slower and retain less. Coffee helps to some extent, but it's not advisable if it's a long-term issue rather than just one really busy week.

One issue might be that you're a slow reader. That should improve with practice. However, you also have to be aware that you're not reading for pleasure and so a different reading style may be appropriate. If you read from beginning to end, you're in "leisure reading" mode, which isn't optimal for academic reading. Instead, you want to read introduction, conclusion, and chapter headings first. That is, you want to know where the book is going before you actually read the book. This applies similarly to articles, where the introduction section can often be skimmed or skipped entirely, whereas the abstract and the discussion merit repeated reading.