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ACADEMICS ONLY

Should I apply to a PhD Program or wait?

12/10/2020

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PictureLots more tips and insights on whether and how to apply here.
Should I apply to a PhD program or wait?    Since grad school application deadlines are due around January 1, here's some super-short answers to some questions you might have [many more tips can be found here]:
 
• “How can I afford it?” Most really competitive PhD programs have assistantships that pay your tuition and living expenses.  
 
• “Should I retake my GRE or TOEFL test?”  Probably not enough time.  If you think you have a good score, but you think it could be better, go ahead and apply. You can always retake the test next year and really focus on prepping for it. 
 
• “What do I write in my Statement of Purpose?”  Four things: 1) Why you want a PhD so bad that you are singing about it in the hallway, 2) what you will do with a PhD, 3) what specific topics or questions you’re interested in, and 4) why that school’s a great fit.   
 
• “Who should write my recommendation letters?”  Ask the best-known researchers you know in the field that you are applying.   Next, ask anyone you’ve done research with. Third, ask whoever knows you best and will write these before the deadline. 
 
• “How many schools should I apply to?”   Since you’re doing this at the 11th hour, I’d limit yourself to three schools: Your dream school, your “best-fit” school, and a safety school.   Otherwise, if you had lots of time, you might apply to as many as 10.  (The third time I applied, I applied to 14). There are lots of tips on which schools to apply to here.
 
• “If I don’t get in to my dream school will it hurt my chance for next year?”  Nope.  They either won’t remember you applied (they might have 100+ applications), or they’ll think you’re persistent.  And as someone once told me, "The P in Phd stands for 'Persistence.'"
 
With three weeks to go before the deadline, the most important part of your application is your Statement of Purpose.  At this point, you can’t change your GPA, you can’t retake the GRE, and you can’t hang out at the mall hoping to make best friends with a Nobel Prize-winning recommendation letter writer.  
 
What you can do is to write and rewrite your Statement of Purpose.  Then have your recommenders give you comments on it. Many students are too shy to ask for this feedback, but it’s the most important thing you can do right now. I didn’t ask for feedback on my Statement the first time I applied, and I got into exactly -- hmmm -- zero PhD programs. 
 
If after reading all of this, you’re still humming “Yo ho, yo ho, a PhD life for me,” take the plunge.  Being an academic is a tremendously rich and rewarding calling.  Pick three schools, apply, and when you hear back from them, we can talk about course corrections. 
 
Good luck with a great career.

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Which PhD Student  Will be Most Successful?

11/11/2020

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A close friend of mine believes successful PhD students have three things in common:  They're smart, they work hard, and they have good judgment. The secret sauce here is "good judgment."  Although smarts and hard work are important, most PhD students would have never been admitted if they weren't already smart, hard workers.  
 
But having good judgment is more elusive.  It includes things like knowing what's "interesting" and what isn't, knowing what's worth worrying about (and what isn't), knowing what's important to prioritize, knowing how to solve a people problem, knowing whether to persist on a project or to move on, and so on. 
 
But advising a PhD student to "Have great judgment" is like advising a football team to "Score the most points."  It doesn't tell them how. You can't say "Have great judgment" and then say "Next question," "QED," or drop the mic and walk out.
 
Maybe there's two types of judgment -- technical judgments and nontechnical judgments.
 
For graduate students, building technical judgment is about learning the whys of research. One way to build better technical judgment is to boldly ask lots of "Why?" questions of your mentor, advisor, or of an older student:  "Why did you send it that journal?  Why didn't you use a different method?  Why did you ask the research question that way?"  Most of us shied away from asking technical judgment questions because we didn't want to be irritating or look like we didn't belong.  Most professors I know actually like to answer these questions, and they love to see an engaged student step out of a silent huddle. 
 
Developing good nontechnical judgment is trickier.  Yet this is the critical judgment you need to troubleshoot how you can be a better teacher, or whether to choose the risky dissertation you want to do versus the safe dissertation your advisor wants. It involves figuring out how to deal with your off-the-chart stress level or whether you should take a job at a teaching college or go into industry.   Our tendency as a graduate student is to get feedback from peers in our same year.  A more effective one may be to get it from recent graduates or from professors who have seen cases like these and know how they worked out.  You can even get nontechnical advice from professors you know in other departments. The best nontechnical dissertation advice I got was from a Medical School professor from my church.  It was straightforward, unbiased, kind, and based on lots of students he had known. 
 
As professors, we can help to build better technical judgment by encouraging questions about our research judgment calls, or we can give it as color commentary or as context when we discuss a research project.  But again, helping students with nontechnical judgments is trickier.  One way to do this is in the third person.  This can be by discussing a problem that "their friend" is having or by discussing a relatable case study.
 
Here's one approach to building nontechnical judgment.  I used to teach a PhD course where we'd meet in my home for a casual last class session. The first half of the session would be a discussion about graduate student success and the last half would be dinner.  Each student had been asked to anonymously write down a dilemma that "one of their friends" was facing that was being a roadblock to their success.  We'd mix these 9-10 dilemmas up, and we'd relax in the living room with a glass of wine and discuss them one at a time.  For each one, we'd talk about similar experiences, options, solutions, and so forth.   By dinner time, we had a more balanced perspective and some suggested next steps for many of the dilemmas.

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Over the years, it seemed that about 70% of these dilemmas were about the same 7-8 issues.  These were like the issues mentioned above -- "risky vs. safe dissertation," "stress level," "leave academia," and so on.  
 
Here's a second approach to building nontechnical judgment. Given how similar these dilemmas were from year to year, I wrote up 1-page PhD student case studies that involved slightly fictionalized people who were facing these common problems.  These case studies were in the syllabus for the course, and we'd take the first or last part of each class to talk about that week's case study.  The common dilemmas faced in your field may be different, but the enthusiasm your students would have in discussing them would probably be the same.
 
Some people might be born with great judgment, but for the rest of us, it's a lot of trial and error and a lot of asking bold questions.  If you're a graduate student, you've got a lot more license than you might think to learn from trial, error, and bold questions.  If you're a professor, there's a lot we can do to help them.
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How to Choose the Best Ph.D. Advisor

10/8/2020

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A former summer intern was over with her PhD-student husband, Jack, a while back, and the issue of who to choose to be your dissertation advisor came up after dinner when he and I were alone.  He asked whether it's best to choose the most famous advisor in the department or whether you should instead choose the one who likes you the most, even if they aren't well known.  
 
Picking the hottest, most famous person in a field is one way to pick an adviser.  After all what could go wrong?
 
Case Study #1.  A number of years ago at a different university, I had a good friend who was starting her PhD in environmental engineering over a second time.  Her first go-around had been after she chose the “most famous” person in her field at the most famous school in her field as her adviser.  She hated it, hated the school, and ended up leaving with what she called “a consolation Master’s degree.”  She said her famous adviser had never around, never cared about her, never thought she was smart enough or working hard enough, never liked her ideas, and that he played favorites with the more advanced students.
 
Case Study #2.   I too had originally chosen the “most famous” person in my field, and things didn’t work out.  As a 3rd year PhD student I thought I was going on the job market.  Instead I was told my funding was being eliminated, and that I had 4 months to find a new dissertation adviser, a new dissertation topic, and to defend that topic, or I would be asked to leave the program (probably without the consolation Masters). 
 
But one conversation rescued me from having to start a PhD a second time a different school.  Three shell-shocked days after being blind-sided, I was talking to a friend who was a professor in the medical school.  I told him what had happened and about my confusion.  He said, “If I knew you were going through this, I would have told you what I tell my graduate students.  ‘When it comes to picking a thesis committee, you pick your best friend to be your thesis adviser, your favorite uncle to be one committee member, and your favorite cousin to be your other.’”
 
His advice was a radically different approach than what I had used, different than what my  environmental engineering friend had originally used, and different than what Jack was planning on doing.  This Med school professor's  advice was to “Pick your best friend to be your advisor”  -- not “the most famous” person in the department, or not even the person whose research interests are most like yours.  Pick the person who likes and believes in you and in your best interests. You might not be as “hot” when you graduate, but you might be a lot more likely to graduate in the first place.
 
On my second chance, I chose my "best friend" as my advisor.  My environmental engineering friend started over at a different university and chose her best friend.  And I hope Jack is the one who doesn't need a second chance.
 
Picking a star-spangled dissertation or thesis committee that you think will make you “hot” on the job market is a great strategy for Super-Duperstars.  For the other 90% of us, we should pick one that will help us graduate.
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Welcome to Academics Only

10/1/2020

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You might be first person to read this.  It's brand new website.  The video gives some background, but here's a bit more detail.

Academics Only is a intended to grow into a "How-to" community for anyone interested in academia.  It's specifically intended to grow into a community that's super helpful to new people:  frustrated PhD students, anxious new professors, and independent scholars.  There's separate resource tabs for each group, and there's a monthly blog that's usually of general interest.

Academics shines most brightly when it's cooperative.  Here's a place where we can share the ideas, strategies, and systems that we think will help others.  Right now most of the content is being moved over from my old website, so needs to great advice from other people. A lot of people could use your help.

For instance, if you created a useful Teaching Tip Sheet, here's where you could share it.  If you read a helpful article on how to write more clearly, here's where we could post a link.  If your advisor gave you a great template creating a conference poster,  here's where they could share it.  It's for basically anything you personally created or discovered that you've found used and that could help others.
  • A pdf handout of teaching advice
  • A tip list on surviving grad school
  • Favorite career-guidance articles
  • A checklist for submitting a paper​
  • A list of inspirational quotes
  • A productivity aid you developed
  • The goal-setting system you use
  • Relationship tips for scholars
  • Your most useful go-to websites
  • Helpful academic How-to articles
  • A method to keep perspective or manage stress
  • Or whatever makes you smile or work better

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​You can either send me what you have, or you direct me to what you discovered and I'll track down the author.  Also, you can either post it with your name or post it anonymously. Just shoot me an email and we can schedule a call if needed. 

Academia can be incredibly rewarding -- for you, your students, and those influenced by your research and other projects. I hope some of the ideas here can help speed you down that road so you can have a bigger impact and a lot of fun.


Let me know below what might help you most.
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<<Previous

    Welcome...

    Academics Only is a how-to community that  helps  us share our best practices as PhD students, new professors, and independent scholars.

    Helpful tools and tips on how to graduate, get tenure, teach better, publish more, and have a super rewarding career.
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    Top Downloads

    1. A Useful Syllabus
    2. 30 Top Lessons
    3. PhD Case Studies




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    PhD Students

    1. Get Accepted
    ​2.  Find an Advisor
    3. Get Smarter
    4. Choose a Thesis
    5. Advisor Warning!
    6. Get a Job
    7. Start a Job Early? 

    Relevant Posts

    All
    Independent Scholars
    New Profs
    PhD Students


    Some Older Posts

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    Develop great judgment

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    Choose the Best Advisor

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    Give useful advice

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    How not to retire

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    Useful sample syllabus

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    Party with students!

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    Stay focused

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    Get into a PhD Program

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    One way to write a lot

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    Use PhD case studies

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    Thank a mentor

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    Blow an interview

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    Teach for impact

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    Ace an interview

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    Do solution-based research

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    Am I a mini-me?

    A full set of older blogs can be found here.

    Archives

    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    June 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    September 2019
    June 2019

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Share Your Insights and Ideas

What have you created or found that's been useful and could be helpful for other PhD students, new professors, or independent scholars?  ​
​
  • A pdf handout on teaching 
  • Tips on surviving grad school
  • Favorite career-advice articles
  • A paper submission checklist 
  • A list of inspirational quotes
  • A productivity aid you use
  • ​​​​The goal-setting system you use
  • Your most useful go-to websites
  • Helpful academic How-to articles
  • A method to keep perspective or manage stress

​Send an email to AcademicsOnly@yahoo.com if you have something you think would be useful to share with others on this website
, or if you have ideas on how to make this more useful to you or your students.
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If you want to know when new tools added, blogs written, videos made, or whatever, we can send you an update that points out what might be relevant to you.
Keep me posted