A Field Guide to Grad School

Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum

Jessica McCrory Calarco

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691201108
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

An essential handbook to the unwritten and often unspoken knowledge and skills you need to succeed in grad school Some of the most important things you need to know in order to succeed in graduate school—like how to choose a good advisor, how to get funding for your work, and whether to celebrate or cry when a journal tells you to revise and resubmit an article—won't be covered in any class. They are part of a hidden curriculum that you are just expected to know or somehow learn on your own—or else. In this comprehensive survival guide for grad school, Jessica McCrory Calarco walks you through the secret knowledge and skills that are essential for navigating every critical stage of the postgraduate experience, from deciding whether to go to grad school in the first place to finishing your degree and landing a job. An invaluable resource for every prospective and current grad student in any discipline, A Field Guide to Grad School will save you grief—and help you thrive—in school and beyond.Provides invaluable advice about how to:

• Choose and apply to a graduate program
• Stay on track in your program
• Publish and promote your work
• Get the most out of conferences
• Navigate the job market
• Balance teaching, research, service, and life

Chapter 1

CHOOSING A PROGRAM

You think you might want to go to grad school. But how do you decide? And even if you know you want to go to grad school, how do you decide which program to choose?

Some people go to grad school because they’re not sure what else to do, but I don’t think that’s the best approach. Given the time, effort, costs, and trade-offs involved, you should go to grad school only if it’ll help you achieve your career goals and only if it won’t break the bank—or your spirit—in the process.

Essentially, it’s important not to treat grad school as an end in itself. Instead, going to grad school is more like packing for a trip, where the destination is the job you want to do with your degree. If your ideal trip is a month in Paris, you might want to learn some French and you might need a passport and visa before you go. If instead you want to spend a week hiking in the Appalachian Mountains, taking French classes would be a waste of time and money. Meanwhile, if you don’t have a solid pair of boots, a fully stocked backpack, and key survival skills, there’s a good chance you won’t last the whole week or, worse, that you’ll get hurt along the way.

Like different destinations, different careers require different tools, knowledge, and credentials. You want to choose a program that can get you where you want to go. To put these decisions in context, let me tell you a bit about my own path to grad school. As an undergrad, I worked as a research assistant for an education historian. I got to help edit a book manuscript, and I even got to do research in the National Archives in Washington, DC. That taste of real academic research, plus my love for college classes more generally, had me hooked—I didn’t just want to work for a college professor, I wanted to be one myself. At the time, though, I had no idea how to actually become a college professor—no one in my family, or even my extended family, had ever gotten a doctoral degree. I was lucky, though, in that my undergrad professors noticed my passion for research and encouraged me to consider grad school.

At first, I was hesitant—I didn’t know anything about doctoral programs, and my dad really wanted me to go law school instead. He saw law school as a clear path to a stable, well-paid career. But I wanted to do research. And I wanted to teach. So eventually, after a number of incredibly helpful conversations with my undergraduate professors, and lots of research online, I decided to take the GRE (a standardized admissions test for grad school) and apply to doctoral programs.

At the time, I was double majoring in sociology and education studies, and I was interested in researching inequalities in schools. Given those interests, I initially looked into doctoral programs in education. However, when I mentioned this to my undergrad professors (including one in sociology and two in education studies), they all urged me to consider a doctoral degree in sociology, instead. With a doctoral degree in education, my job prospects (at least in academia) would be limited to schools of education. With a doctoral degree in sociology, I’d have more options—including both sociology departments and education schools. That’s because disciplinary departments (e.g., sociology, history, biology) typically hire only scholars trained in those disciplines. For identity and status reasons, those disciplinary departments tend to view scholars trained in interdisciplinary programs as lacking the expertise to teach in a disciplinary program. Meanwhile, interdisciplinary schools and programs (e.g., education, public health, public policy/administration) hire a bigger mix of scholars, including some trained in disciplinary departments and others with interdisciplinary degrees.

Those conversations helped me navigate the complexities of academic culture—they helped me figure out what I couldn’t have figured out on my own.

That’s what I hope to do in this chapter—help you identify key factors to consider when deciding whether to go to grad school, what kind of degree to pursue, and which program to choose. We’ll talk about matching your degree to your career goals. Distinguishing different degrees and programs. And choosing a program that meets your short-term and long-term needs. Finally, we’ll talk about how to apply. How to boost your GRE scores and how to cope if your grades and scores aren’t as high as you want them to be. How to write a strong personal statement and how to tailor it for each program on your list. How to ask for letters and how to respond if you get asked to write them yourself.

Matching Your Degree to Your Career Goals

When one of my undergraduate students tells me they’re interested in grad school, the first question I ask is “What do you want to do after grad school?” The answer to that question will determine what kind of degree you should get and whether you should go to grad school at all. As we’ll talk about more in the next section, different degrees (and nondegree certificates) serve as credentials for different types of careers. If you want to teach chemistry at a school like the University of Chicago, you will almost certainly need a doctoral degree. If you want to be a public policy analyst at a think tank, or if you want to be a school social worker, a master’s degree is probably all you’ll need. And if you want a high-paying job in computer and information systems management, an internship during college might open more doors than a graduate degree.

So, how do you figure out which kind of degree you’ll need for the career you want? If you’ve already graduated and started working, you may have reached the limits of what you can achieve with just a bachelor’s degree, and you might be looking to grad school to help you move up the ladder in your field. If that’s the case, then I’d recommend talking with some of the higher-ups in your organization about their experiences in grad school and what degrees and programs they’d recommend you try to pursue.

If you’re still an undergrad, or if you’re working but interested in switching fields, then I’d suggest starting your grad search process by thinking about your career role models—people whose careers you’d love to have yourself. It might be someone you know, like a favorite college professor, or the director of the nonprofit you volunteered with in college. Or it might be someone you know of, like an economist you saw interviewed on TV.

Once you have the names of a few potential role models, you can start doing some research. It might feel a bit like stalking, but that’s why websites like LinkedIn exist. So don’t feel weird. Academics (people who teach and/or do research in college or university settings) Google each other’s research and websites and CVs all the time (CV stands for curriculum vitae, which is basically the academic version of a résumé—more on academic jargon in chapter 3). Look up where your role models went to school, what degrees they earned, and what jobs they had before they got to where they are today. Then, ideally, do a little triangulation. Find other people working in similar positions, and look up their career trajectories as well. That’ll give you a sense of whether you need a degree and, if so, what kind of degree you need, to get where you want to be.

Now, you might not have a specific career role model in mind. Instead, you might have a sense of the kind of career you want. Maybe one involving research, or writing, or marketing, or product design. Maybe you want a career where you’re working directly with people and making a difference in their lives. Maybe you’re worried about the environment and climate change. Maybe you like working with numbers. Or maybe you love listening to podcasts about politics and policy. A visit or an email to the career services office at your undergraduate college or university can help you link those interests to potential careers and possibly put you in touch with alumni who work in those fields. Even if you have already graduated, they’ll be able to help you think through various career options that match your interests and possibly connect you with alumni who can tell you more. Remember, the career services people have an interest in helping you because if you get a good job, the university can brag about you in its stats, and you’ll probably be more likely to donate money to the university someday too.

Along those lines, there are lots of careers that require (or at least increasingly require)² graduate degrees. There are the obvious grad-school-linked careers, like college professor and research scientist. Beyond that, though, you might also need (or at least benefit from having) a graduate degree if you want a high-level career in a field like:

• Public policy
• Market research
• Pharmaceutical development and testing
• Nonprofit management
• Computer science and engineering
• Marriage and family therapy
• Social work
• Criminology
• Biostatistics
• Financial analysis
• Public relations
• Human resources
• Information science
• Database administration
• And so many more³

As you’re wading through various career options, trying to make sense of people’s résumés and CVs, you’ll probably encounter lots of acronyms—things like MSW and MBA and PhD. In the next section, we’ll talk about what all those letters mean. We’ll also talk about why it’s not just the letters that matter but also (at least for many careers) the school that granted the degree.

Essentially, once you figure out what degree you’ll need for the job you want, it’s time to find a program that offers that type of degree (or nondegree) you’ll need.

Considering Your Options

Grad school isn’t just one thing. There are nondegree programs, master’s programs, and doctoral programs, and they differ in important ways. The primary thing to consider in choosing among those programs is what you want to achieve, career-wise, by going to grad school. Beyond that, though, you’ll also want to think about the amount of time it’ll take you to complete these different programs and the amount of money you’ll have to spend (and forgo) in the process.

Nondegree Programs

Some programs and schools offer certificates, badges, and other microcredentials that will, at least in theory, bolster your job-related skills or make you more appealing to potential employers. For example, if you want to learn the business side of publishing and connect to important players in the industry, the Columbia Publishing Course at Columbia University is a six-week summer program that can give you a leg up in your career.⁴ Or maybe you’ve finished an MD degree, and you’re interested in doing research, but you don’t want to...