In about 10 minutes I am headed to orient our small group of incoming MA in Social Technologies grad students. I figure this is a chance to get down verbally with the young folk and give them some advice for succeeding in grad school.
1. Have a plan (A and B)
It’s true, many people enter graduate school by default. They aren’t quite sure what they are going to do with a grad degree that they aren’t without. But humans are goal oriented. You need a goal that you are working toward. It doesn’t matter what that goal is, or if you have to have a new goal (you will), only that you have a place you are moving toward. Like sharks, a grad student without a target is dead in the water. Don’t expect, as with undergrad, for the conveyor belt to just keep turning and plop you out on the other side. This isn’t a holding pattern.
Our program has dual ends: it is intended both for those interested in an academic research career and for those interested in a more traditional career path. You should prepare for both. Even if the academic side isn’t your thing, now is the time to engage in that. Even if you are very sure you don’t want to go into business, you should prepare to. You should dedicate your time to both Plan A and Plan B, and ideally to work that will allow you to build toward both.
Relatedly, from day 1, you should be putting together an “idea file” or “dream book” that you can draw on for your degree thesis project.
2. Say “yes.”
One of the pieces of advice that you hear a lot of in grad school is “you don’t have to do everything.” There are so many things that come along that have absolutely nothing to do with your own coursework or research, that it is tempting to tunnel. In my experience students who say yes to opportunities and try for things that they may never get have a far more rewarding graduate experience.
Someone interesting coming to campus? Go. Someone doing a research symposium on a topic you have only a passing interest in? Go.
For goodness sake, go and talk to your faculty. Set up a time just to get together and chat about their and your research. Make an excuse to meet with them.
Apply for things you know you cannot get. It isn’t wasted effort. It’s good to get accustomed to rejection, and to realize that you have 0% chance of getting something you don’t apply for. And please do apply for money. Get someone else to pay for your school.
Volunteer to help. Yes, you don’t have time. But look for projects (with other students, with faculty, within the community) where you can have a positive effect. There’s no better way to find your passion.
3. Brand yourself.
Yes, the terminology here is icky. But you should be “that person.” People should know what you do. That means, minimally, you should tie your work together in a public way. But it also means you should have a short statement that relates to your goal(s) (see #1), and you should talk publicly about it in as many venues as you can and at every opportunity. You want to open up the possibility that when someone says “Oh, you have a question about blockchain?” someone in the room will say “Fiona is all about that.”
Part of this is also networking on the network. You should seek out opportunities to get to know people who are interesting and who might be able to help you. The fact is, you probably don’t know who can help you, and so it is a good idea to meet as many people with shared interests as possible. This is a big university, and a bigger city. Swim outside the local pool.
4. Own your time
When I started grad school, I had a great mentor (Gerald Baldasty) who told us something that should be obvious: break your day into segments–15 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour if you must–and accomplish something in each of these. The single most significant point of failure I have seen for grad students is those who think grad school is about showing up to the seminar and nothing more. Showing up really is important, but without the work that happens outside of it, it ends up not mattering.
He also reminded me that grad school only lasts for a few years, but that the people you love can be a lifetime relationship. Make sure you keep your priorities straight. It’s important that grad school is prioritized, but your family is more important. It may be the only thing that keeps you relatively sane through this process.
What did I miss? What advice would you give to a new grad student?
No Time, No Space
I am trying to write about stuff, with some help from friends in the onlines. I was just going to keep this private, but then I remembered “Hey, I have a blog!”
No Time
I keep coming back to the Tim Ferris book, the Four Hour Workweek, and the idea that if you didn’t have structural demands on your time, how would you use it. Some of this hits at the end of any semester, but even before the semester was done my days seemed unmoored.
I also think of the ways in which we think about the beginning and the end of time. It’s hard to think of time “starting,†but from my limited understanding of the big bang, that is the claim. Because time is just a measurement of movement or of speed. Stuck here in my chair, occasionally moving to my kitchen or my bed, means that things paradoxically seem to move much more quickly.
Coming to the end of the day with nothing much accomplished isn’t exactly a new thing, of course. I manage, thanks to a preternatural ability to procrastinate, to get little done most days. But now it seems as though it is instantaneous. The days starts, the day ends, where does it go.
That’s not exactly true. There are beats, like a faint and fading heartbeat of a hibernating bear, the steady drum replaced by the 8:30 workout on zoom, by the kids’ morning meeting with their teacher and class, by lunch. Because lunch is now on my calendar. That wasn’t ever the case before.
When we first isolated I thought the best thing for the kids was structure. I know from Instagram and Facebook I wasn’t the only parent with this idea. Lots of colorful calendars were shared. I tried to replicate the kids school calendar somewhat, and since we had yet to set up individual computers for the two of them, we needed to set up a bit of time sharing for the things they needed to do for school. But we quickly moved to task orientation: they needed to finish a few small things each day, after which they could spend time on Minecraft or playing with Lego, or, before it got too hot, outside.
I feel as though I have all the time in the world (I could invent Calculus!) and none at all.
And I feel guilty. I feel guilty for not using this time well. I feel guilty for enjoying much of the time with my family. I feel guilty for being of decent physical health, of having a job, of having a large and comfortable home. I feel guilty because in many ways this is what I always dreamt of–though it is twisted in the ways that dreams always come true in fairy tales. And the final twist seems to be I am doing a shit job living out my dream.
No Place
It’s not entirely true that I’ve got nothing done. Lots of small projects around the house are slowly being accomplished. Disaster areas are being cleaned out. The whole family pitched in to refinish the floors in two rooms early on in this thing. But there is this weird sense of wanting to nest at the same time as wanting to connect. And that connection makes things in some sense spread out and worse.
I mean, it is great that we are doing big family Zooms. It’s only possible because we have so much less scheduled time, so it can happen that my family can meet up across nine time zones. And I’ve talked to my extended family more in the last two months than probably in the previous two years.
And this thing I am doing now is that kind of an outreach, though I’m not yet sure what it looks like or what I am supposed to be doing with it.
Again, it was part of my dream that when in isolation I could roll into some kind of salon. I wanted to do it in my home anyway: a monthly salon where we invited interesting people to have conversations on interesting themes over dinner. But all that interestingness comes at the cost of a lot of logistical leg work. So, early on, I thought: we’ll Zoom.
This was in the time before 8 hour zoom meetings. It was before everything was Zoom. My kids have now taken to opening up a Zoom room so they can chat and see each other while playing Minecraft. Early on I offered a Mumble server or Discord: no, Zoom was the technology everyone was using for school, so it was easy. I am naturally concerned about my children becoming feral. I mean, my wife and I are hardly wolves, but a year of no contact with other kids the same age could turn them into… well, into what many fear most… it could turn them into me.
Instead, they seem to be adapting quite nicely to the idea of calling up their friends on a screen and chatting while they are playing games. It’s a natural extension of their working patterns from school. As a result, although I worry about losing a few more of those rare time beats during the summer, it seems like they have shaped this liquid place out of the kitchen tables and other computers of their friends across the city and beyond.
I, on the other hand, feel like I need to go more extreme. I feel like I should let go of artificial deadlines. I feel like I should cut out social media and online interactions. But that urge is like the urge to jump off a boat into open water. I’m not sure how much I’ll like it when I get there.
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