Graduate School Application

Graduate School Experience: Formal process

2008-01-26T03:38:00.000-08:00

The first 2 years are taking required classes and writing your Master’s Thesis.

1. You’ll probably begin your thesis research end of your first year.

2. You’ll need a thesis committee to consult regarding your research.

Your Thesis Committee is usually made of at least 2 faculty members who will guide you in your master’s thesis research.
Once you are done writing up your thesis, your thesis will be reviewed by at least 2 thesis readers. The thesis readers will decide whether you pass or need to rework your thesis. They will send their recommendation to the department larger thesis committee.
You and your thesis committee will have a chance to defend your work and respond back to the thesis readers. Your thesis committee members should be there to help and defend your work. Note I said “should” because they don’t always.
An agreement will be reached on whether you will make minor or major revisions to satisfy the thesis readers. If there is disagreement, there would be an arbitration committee (3rd readers) to settle the disagreement.

3. You need to have a pass on the thesis to move on to the next stage.

4. Occasionally, the department decides that you are “not Ph.D. material” and will urge you to discontinue the program by giving you a terminal master’s degree.

The 3rd and fourth year are more classes and preparing for your field or comprehensive exams. Some programs have two; others have 4 to 6 exams.

1. Basically, you need to demonstrate mastery of the field. They usually give you a list of books to read and a list of questions that could be asked on the exams. You prepare yourself and file when you’ll be taking the exam. The test can involve a whole day, several days or a whole week of typing up your answer to the questions given on the beginning day of the exam

2. Sometimes, the department allows you to come up with your own questions for the exam. In this case, it is a selfdesign exam. Often times, this self-designed exam is a literature review for your dissertation project

3. Around this time, you should consider exploring other resources and meeting other faculty outside your department. In your dissertation time, you will need an outside faculty for your dissertation committee.

4. After taking required courses, you’ll have time for elective courses. Make sure you take classes that will prepare you for the dissertation, to help you narrow down your topic of interest.

Be careful not to get stuck with taking classes after classes without seeing an end in sight. You will always find interesting classes to take within and outside your department.
There are too many information out there; you cannot know everything. The point is to be able to know the overall picture and where your work is situated in the larger picture. It is impossible to know everything.

Your fifth-year and on involves preparing your dissertation proposal or project.

1. You need to write up a dissertation proposal and have it approved by your dissertation committee before you can carry out your dissertation project.

You need to set up a dissertation committee who will guide you in your research design, execution and write-up.
Pick faculty who knows something or is expert in your area of research. If not, he/she should be open to learn new things and is able to guide you in what they know. They should want to help you in your endeavor and not give up on you just because they are not familiar with your topic.
The dissertation committee usually consists of 2-3 faculty members in the department and an outside faculty member.
One person will be your dissertation committee chair or 2 can be your dissertation committee cochairs.
The Chair or Co-Chairs are the ones working most closely with you. They are the ones to defend and support you when other committee members disagree about the direction of your work.
Dissertation committee members should know your work better than any other faculty. They will also be the ones you most likely to turn to when you need recommendation letters as you apply for jobs.
Try to pick members who can give different types of feedback to your work (methodological, theoretical, substantive, moral support, etc.). As well, they should be people you respect and can work with; they have your interests of finishing the program.
Some people may be reliving their dissertation stage and won’t pass you until you have a “perfect” and flawless dissertation. This could drag you in the program for many more years than necessary.

2. Once your dissertation project is approved, you need to carry out the research, collect the data, analyzed the data and write up your findings.

3. For some dissertation advisors, they want full report every week or month. For others, they don’t see you until you’re ready to defend your final dissertation. In any case, make sure to consult them when you are stuck, and make sure that they also feel that it’s their job to advise you through while you’re working on the dissertation.

4. Often, you’ll need to meet up with your committee members again to defend your dissertation. Sometimes, they just need to sign off the dissertation and do not require a formal dissertation defense meeting.

5. The final passing test of the dissertation process after the substantive test by your dissertation committee is the librarian’s formatting test. This is just tedious work of making sure your filed dissertation meets the formatting standards and requirements of the university’s library. It may take several days to make sure your formatting (margins, fonts, type of paper, table and figures, page numbering, headings, etc.) is correct.

Is Graduate School For Me?

2007-07-04T16:26:00.000-07:00

To determine if graduate school is right for you, start by asking yourself the following questions:

1. What do I want to accomplish in my life?

2. What are my short and long range professional goals?
Many careers in Computer Science do not require a graduate level degree. However, if your professional goals include management, research in a university or a national lab, or teaching at a college or university, you should seriously consider obtaining a Masters or Ph.D. degree.

3. Is graduate study necessary for me to achieve these goals?
To teach or do research at a university, a Ph.D. is almost always required. At least a Masters degree is necessary to do research at a research laboratory. Community colleges will hire teachers without a Ph.D., but a Masters is always manditory. Many companies will require employees interested in management positions to already have a Masters, or to have a plan to obtain one in certain period of time. Some companies will provide funding for employees to obtain their Masters.

4. Do I have the interest and ability to be successful in a graduate program?
Do your interests include teaching others, research, and self-motivated learning? Do you have the ability to organize your time, motivate yourself, work on large-scale projects, interact with others, and communicate ideas clearly? Have you done well in your computer science classes on the undergraduate level? If so, you probably have what it takes to succeed in a graduate program.

5. Am I willing to invest the time and money to pursue another academic program?
Actually, money is usually not an issue for computer science graduate programs. Your tuition will most likely be waived by the school or provided by the company for which you are working. In addition, most students receive a stipend in the form of a teaching or research assistanceship, which is adequate to maintain a decent standard of living. True, you may be giving up a high-paying job for a few years while you complete your degree, but a post-graduate degree will broaden your career choices, and provide you with an even higher salary. As far as time investments go, the average student is able to get a Masters degree in two years, and a Ph.D. in five to six years.

Masters vs PhD

If from answering the questions above, you feel that graduate school is right for you, the next step is deciding whether you want to apply for a Masters or PhD program.

If you feel the least bit interested in obtaining a PhD, apply for PhD programs. If later on you decide you only want a Masters, you can fulfill the requirements for a Masters and leave the program early with the Masters degree. It is much more difficult to switch from a Masters program to a PhD program. Even if you are sure you want to get a PhD, make sure you fulfill the Masters requirements along the way (not difficult in most PhD programs), so that if any unexpected events make it impossible for you to obtain your PhD, you can at least get a Masters for your efforts.

If you are only interested in getting a Masters degree, be warned that funding is more difficult to obtain as a Masters student. Since the program takes only about two years to complete, this is not a major setback (especially considering the salary boost you will receive once you get your degree). Your other option is to find a company that will pay you to get your Masters. Generally, this takes longer since you will be working and studying at the same time, but funding will no longer be a problem.

Grad School in Economics: Choosing classes

2007-07-04T15:25:00.000-07:00

Graduate schools care much more about what hard classes you've taken and how you've done in them than about overall GPA.
If you have taken difficult classes its probably a good idea to point this out in your application essay because schools might not know what the math classes are, which economics classes are the advanced ones, etc.
Real analysis is an especially important class because it tends to be demanding everywhere, and forces you to do logical and formal proofs. Get a good grade in this class.
Taking some graduate classes can be a good thing, but be prepared. You will be at a disadvantage since the grad students will all have study groups. Try to join a study group and devote serious time to any graduate classes you take.

Networking on the Network: A Guide to Professional Skills for PhD Students! SECTION 3. Building a Professional Identity

2007-06-04T15:58:00.000-07:00

So far I have been talking about networking at the one-to-one level. That's where it starts. But the research community is a public place, and as you become established in your field, publishing in journals and speaking at conferences, you will also develop an identity. This section describes some of the basics of building such an identity. I call it a professional identity because its workings are governed by the tacit rules of the research profession.

Socializing at conferences
Sooner or later (hopefully sooner), you will start attending research conferences in your field. Section 2 has already discussed the techniques for approaching someone at a conference that you have already written to. This section offers more suggestions for getting the most from a conference.
First, though, let me explain what a conference is. Almost any professional field will have one or more annual meetings, typically three or four days in length, sponsored either by a professional association or by an organization created specifically to host that particular conference. Most such meetings are held in a different city each year, although some smaller meetings are held in specific appealing places (e.g., Hawaii in January). In recent years many conferences have started gesturing toward globalization by (for example) rotating between the

United States

and Europe. Most conferences, especially larger ones, are held in expensive downtown convention hotels, for the simple reason that such hotels are the only places where large numbers of out-of-towners can sleep. At first it might seem like a scam that everyone in your field gets to travel to a different interesting city every year for a conference. You'll stop thinking that way, though, once you have been to a few dozen conferences and gotten sick of traveling. People's home institutions are spread out, they have to meet somewhere, and so they might as well meet someplace reasonably nice, hopefully with good airline connections. They'll be spending most of their time in homogenized airports and hotels anyway, so it's not like a trip to a resort.
The fundamental purpose of professional conferences is networking. Everyone in your field has a professional network, just like you. They built their networks the same way you are, and they attend conferences to keep their networks in working order. In the old days, before the Internet, conferences were also occasions when committees would meet, for example to edit journals or plan future conferences. That does still happen to a degree, but e-mail and the Web have moved most such logistical matters online, leaving the more ceremonial functions to face-to-face conference interactions. Conferences are also occasions to publicize your work, although that function can hardly be dissociated from networking, and they are places for the job market. Some conferences have evolved rituals for interviewing job candidates in hotel rooms; others simply provide hunting grounds for advanced graduate students to network with senior scholars whose departments are likely to be hiring. For all of these reasons, you should attend conferences, and take them seriously as professional occasions, as soon as you have research that's ready to report.
Although each field has its own practices, as a broad generalization conferences accept papers in two different ways: either you submit your paper (or perhaps an abstract) as an individual, or else you join a coherent "panel" of papers that are submitted to the conference as a group. In either case the program committee somehow decides which papers get accepted. You should find out which practices obtain at the conferences you hope to attend, and plan accordingly. If the conference only accepts panel proposals, it would not be excessively presumptuous of you to start organizing a panel yourself. You might discover that the people you approach are already putting panels together, in which case they might (or might not) include you in their planning. This process can get a little bit clumsy, but don't worry about it.
If the conference takes individual paper submissions, then you should seek detailed advice about the politics of the process. For example, some conferences require you to provide a few keywords on the title page so that the program committee can route your paper to the most suitable referees. Obviously you want to include the keywords that get your paper routed to the referees who are most likely to appreciate your work's virtues, and only your faculty advisors can tell you what those keywords are likely to be. (You should find out whether the conference is formally refereed, meaning that the program committee recruits people to actually write comments on each paper, accepting some and rejecting others. Formally refereed conference papers are more valuable in career terms than papers that were handled more informally.) Papers that are accepted individually will usually then be grouped into panels by the program committee, so that the program will list your paper alongside a few other people's, and responsibility for convening the panel will be assigned to a panel chair, most likely a regular conference attendee whom the program committee has drafted for the job.
Some conferences distinguish between papers and posters. A paper is something that you present in front of an audience, at a set time, with a microphone and audio-visual aids. Posters, on the other hand, are grouped into one big room. You'll be given a bulletin board of a set size, and you'll be asked to prepare a poster that can be tacked up on the board. Conference attendees will be able to browse through the posters, and certain times will be advertised when poster authors are asked to be available alongside their posters to chat with passers-by. A poster is a lower-status form of presentation than a talk, but no stigma attaches to it, and you shouldn't be embarrassed to prepare a poster. Once you get over the feeling that you're a salesperson waiting on customers in a shop, it can be a more relaxed way to talk to people individually than the crush after a panel is over. If you do prepare a poster, take the time to do it right, with appealing and legible graphics.
Conferences cost money. Most conferences have discounted student rates, which you might even be able to afford. Many conferences offer free registration for students who are willing to engage in menial jobs such as staffing the registration desk, and you should go ahead and accept such deals unless it offends your pride. There might be a Web page for students looking for other students to share hotel rooms with, or perhaps you can establish such a page yourself. If you are getting ready to go on the job market then you should guilt-trip your thesis advisor into paying your airfare to the conference, or at least make sure to write travel money into the relevant grant proposal well ahead of time.
Here, finally, is the promised advice for socializing at conferences, partly adapted from notes by Dan Ryan.
Many conferences are preceded by smaller one- or two-day workshops; these events will usually provide a more focused and comfortable occasion for mixing with people than the larger conference. It is much easier to approach someone at random during such an event, something that tends to work poorly in a crowded conference setting.
Stay in the main conference hotel if at all possible; when you check in, locate the fitness center, if any, and the nearest good breakfast place. Study the conference schedule to determine which talks you'll be attending, and find out in advance where the meeting rooms are. You'll be happier if you don't look lost. Go find the room where you will be speaking and check it out. Find a moment when nobody is using the room, stand at the speaker's podium, and get used to the energy.
Once the event gets rolling, act like a host. Introduce people to one another, include them in things, and notice when they are feeling bad or being oppressed. Hunt for the person who is chairing the panel that you are speaking on.
When your talk comes, keep it simple. Practice your talk several times in realistic conditions before traveling to the conference, so you can be confident of doing well when the time comes.
If you aren't accustomed to speaking with a microphone, take a moment to do it right. If the room has an audio technician, ask if you can get a cordless lapel mike, which is much less constraining than a mike that is mounted on a podium. Refuse to use a headset or a hand-held mike, which are only for experienced performers. If you must use a podium mike, you can avoid looking like a fool by stopping briefly to familiarize yourself with its on-off button. If you are the first speaker in a session to use the mike, check the sound level ("can you hear me?") before you launch into your talk. If you are seated at a table with the mike on a stand in front of you, resist the temptation to press your mouth right up against it. You don't want the mike directly in front of your mouth, since the wind from your sibilants (s-sounds) and plosives (p-sounds) will make a roaring sound in the speakers. Sound travels in all directions, not just straight out of your mouth, so put the microphone just below your mouth. That will also help people to see your face. If you have problems with the microphone, don't be shy about stopping to get help. It happens all the time.
The chair of your session should tell you in advance how long to speak for. If not then ask. Try to finish on time. But if your talk runs more than a minute over your allotted time, suppress the overwhelming urge to race through the rest of it at 100mph. Don't be one of those people who says "in conclusion" but keeps on talking. Instead, just give up. Shrug and say, "oops, well, I've gone over time so I'll just stop here; I have the full paper here if anyone wants it", and then briefly remind everyone what your bottom-line conclusion is. Everyone will be impressed at your poise.
After all the panel members' talks are over, a question period typically follows, with audience members specifying which speakers their questions are addressed to. Don't worry if you aren't asked any questions; questioners are often drawn to the most provocative comments, and provocation doesn't imply quality. If you are asked a question, resist the temptation to launch into a long speech that explains all of your intricate thinking from the beginning. If the question has a short, conclusory answer (such as "yes" or "no"), say the short answer first. Having said the short answer, you might find that the long answer becomes shorter as well.
When your panel is over, hang around for a few minutes in case anybody wants to chat. Bring business cards to exchange (but, as the speaker, don't offer anyone a card unless they offer a card to you). Affect a calm, low-key demeanor and ask them, with genuine interest, "are you working in this area as well?". When you're done, go get some fresh air.
Relax. Take care of yourself. Breathe. Drink water. Buy a book. Don't drink coffee. Don't eat junk food. Rarely pass up an opportunity to go out with a group to eat. If you run out of things to do, go figure out who the smartest people at the conference are, especially the more human and less established ones, so you can start promoting their work.
If you have a laptop computer, consider typing in a straightforward narrative account of the ideas presented at the conference; after the conference is done, you can help others by editing this narrative for clarity and sending it to a mailing list of people in your field. This is a low-effort way to help the community and get your name out.
Start imagining yourself into the role of conference organizer by consciously noting aspects of the conference that are especially well- or poorly-organized.
Some technically advanced conferences have created Web-based systems for helping attendees connect with each other and schedule their time before the meeting even begins; advocate that such a system be built for any conference that you might be involved in organizing.
The most basic skill for attending conferences is talking to other researchers about your work. They will ask you, "What do you work on?", and you need to be able to answer this question any time, to anyone, at any length. This is amazingly hard, and you may end up kicking yourself at your stammering non-answers. That's fine; it's part of the process. You should rehearse answers to this question before attending conferences. Your local research group may not be helpful; since they already know what you're working and share all of your assumptions, you rarely need to explain yourself at a basic level to them. Try practicing ten-second explanations, one-minute explanations, five-minute explanations, and so on, up to a full-length talk.
The hardest part is tailoring your explanation to your audience, and this is an area where you should invest sustained, structured effort. Do you remember when you were in the library, identifying researchers whose work was related to yours in various directions? This is similar. Try to avoid explaining your work to a complete stranger. Instead, get them to talk first. And while they are talking, work to articulate specific elements that your respective research interests share in common. (By the way, the phrase "I am interested in ..." actually means "I am conducting research on ...".) Perhaps you both employ qualitative research methods. Perhaps you are both doing comparative work. Perhaps you both have a political agenda, even if maybe not the same one. Perhaps you are both studying the history of a certain region, or a certain century, or a certain industry, even if other elements of your research topics are different. Perhaps you are both aiming your work at industrial applications. With practice, you will begin to spot the commonalities at a greater distance.
Once you have identified the commonalities between your two projects, fashion an explanation of your own project that puts the common elements in the foreground and leaves the other elements in the background. For example, if you are using economic theories to study the Mongolians, and the other person is using cultural theories to study the Mongolians, put the Mongolians in the foreground; explain what sources of evidence you're using, what particular people and places you're looking at, and so on, and then mention along the way that you're using some economic ideas to look at those things. On the other hand, if you are using economic theories to study the Mongolians, and the other person is using economic theories to study the Japanese, put the economic theories in the foreground. Explain what theoretical authors you are drawing on, what methods you are using, what big economic questions you're hoping to help answer, and so on, and then mention along the way that your case study happens to be drawn from the Mongolians.
This strategy of foregrounding shared elements might seem weird at first; it might even seem manipulative or phony, as if there were one single authentic answer to the question "What are you working on?" and all the other answers are artificial. But that's not how it works. The answers that you construct for people from unfamiliar backgrounds will certainly feel unfamiliar. But if they are honest representations of your work then they are good, informative, relationship-building answers. Once you get some practice consciously constructing explanations of your work for many sorts of people, you will begin adjusting your explanations automatically, and the sense of weirdness and fakeness will dissipate.
If you have a hard time traveling to face-to-face meetings
The Internet helps people at far-flung or ill-funded universities to keep their hand in the research world. Here are some guidelines:
* Follow the basic six-step outline I described above, more or less omitting the steps that involve face-to-face contact. This is better than trying to undertake those steps using e-mail, since e-mail really is not very good at some things.
* Correspond. Spend lots of time writing intelligent, thoughtful letters to people about their manuscripts and papers, along the lines I've described.
* Translate. If the major language of your country is not English, but you are corresponding with authors who do write in English, consider translating short papers that provide introductions to their work. This is a good way to build professional relationships, as well as bridges between different intellectual cultures.
* Publish. And then make it a priority to get reprints into the hands of people who might be interested in them. If postage is a problem, make a postscript file (or preferably several different formats, since not everyone can translate postscript) available on a Web site or ftp server.
* Join the conversation. You might be isolated geographically, but you don't have to isolate yourself intellectually. Make sure that your letters and papers are part of a conversation. That is, formulate your professional papers as responses to the existing literature, and to particular contributors to that literature, and make clear the nature of your debts to those authors and the nature of your own contribution. If you're not clear how this is done, use existing papers as a model.
* Relentlessly promote your own work. Mention your ideas and publications in messages to appropriate electronic discussion groups. But always keep it low-key. No fanfare, no hype, no big claims. Cultivate an attitude of quiet, confident intellectual seriousness, and then consciously and carefully project that image.
* Make yourself useful. When you read something you genuinely respect, send a brief review and recommendation to the appropriate discussion groups. Pass along useful items you encounter on the net. Invent some useful network facility, if only an annotated bibliography or guide to resources.
* Be systematic. Once you've gotten accustomed to the whole process of networking, take a few days out to search all available resources, both on the network and on paper, and make list of all of the people you want to approach using the six-step process and all of the e-mail discussion groups you want to publicize your work on. Then slowly and systematically, over several months or a year, approach them all. The process takes lots of time, but it does work.
* Keep trying to raise travel funds. The professional contacts you develop on the net ought to be able to help with this, since the world is full of international travel grants and exchange programs that are relatively easy to set up once you have willing parties on both ends. But wait until you have a fairly strong relationship going before you try this.
* Make your travel count. Don't spend your hard-earned money on travel unless you're going someplace where you can meet with several people you already "know", if only through e-mail correspondence and the networking process explained above. Unless you're an unusually sociable or charismatic person, don't attend a conference in the abstract hope that you'll meet someone useful there.
* Share your experience. Help build the electronic networking community by getting involved in Local Civic Networks and the like. Reach out to people in your area whose interests in computer networks might be different from yours, and do some community-building among them. Reflect on how your relatively marginal position in the world's research system conditions your work and your life. Write down your experiences and advice for the benefit of others.
Publication and credit
Another dimension of the institutional structuring of professional relationships pertains to credit. If you do something new, you ought to get credit for it. Credit resembles money in the sense that you can "buy" certain things with it -- for example further research funding. (Credit for this observation, for instance, belongs to Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar in their book, "Laboratory Life".) Credit can also be understood as an informal type of intellectual property. A research paper resembles a patent application, which is always drawn as widely as possible, consistent with the actual accomplishments of the work and being careful not to trample any prior art. But credit differs from money and property in other ways. The most important of these is that nobody is keeping an objective ledger of who gets credit for what; it's much more an evolving consensus that only becomes formalized years after the fact. Many people get neurotic about credit and invest tremendous effort trying to manipulate others into giving them the credit they think they're due. But the actual keys to getting due credit for your work are simple. The first is to publish promptly. When you do something good, write about it and get it out there. And the second is to do your networking. I have already explained one reason why writing helps with networking -- it gives you something to talk about. A second reason is that if you talk about your work without having circulated it in written form then you will be (perhaps justifiably) paranoid that someone else will (perhaps innocently) publicize your idea before you and therefore get the credit for it. Don't get yourself into this demoralizing rut. And understand where the danger comes from: when two people are doing research in the same area, their relationship is inevitably structured by a tension between a natural alliance (helping one another, organizing things together, jointly publicizing the shared area of research) and natural competition (over credit for new ideas). This tension will be much easier to manage if you continually put sane amounts of effort into both your writing and your networking.
When you do publish your work, where should you publish it? Two errors are common. One error is to choose your publication venues reactively by simply publishing in the places where someone in your network happens to invite you to publish -- for example, in a book that this person might be editing. While accepting such invitations might actually be a good idea, don't let invitations drive your publication strategy. Instead, talk to people who are knowledgeable, hit the library, map out all of the potentially relevant publications, and make conscious decisions. This leads us to the second common error, which is to get obsessed with publishing in the "good places". Lots of people get preoccupied with ranking journals, so that publication turns into a zero-sum status game. This is most unfortunate. It is much better, in my view, to think about publication choices in terms of professional relationships. A journal is not just a badge of rank. Much more importantly, it is a gathering-place for a particular community of people, namely the professionals in that field who read it. When you publish in a particular journal, you are doing two things: (1) you are representing yourself as being relevant to such-and-such a research community, and (2) you are introducing yourself to that community and inviting them to get to know you. So instead of asking, "where is the high-prestige place to publish", ask "who would I like to associate with professionally?". That makes the decision much easier. If you don't know what sorts of people read a given journal, you can always ask. Most likely you will get different answers from different people, according to their own relationships to that journal's readership, but that's alright. Just decide who you believe and carry on.
Intellectual leadership
The steps for making contact with people that I've been describing obviously do not exhaust the social skills that are necessary to get along in the professional world of research. But they do provide a necessary foundation -- the basic strokes of the professional combustion engine. Having gotten your network going in this way, the obvious question is what to do with it. Well, maybe you do nothing with it. Having people to talk to about your research might be plenty. But if you'd like to do good in your field, or do well in it, or both, you'll want to try organizing something: a workshop, a journal issue, an e-mail discussion list, an approach to a funding agency, or whatever. Later sections will discuss these activities in more detail. Right now I want to introduce two important concepts related to them: "emerging themes" and "consultation".
Most everyone regards the notion of an "emerging theme" as hype, and no doubt I will be thought cynical for explaining it, but it's tremendously important anyway. Research, of course, is about new ideas -- and not just individual new results, but whole new fields of research and whole new ways of doing research in a given area. New ways of doing research rarely spring full-blown from any individual's head. Rather, somebody who has been keeping up with many different research projects starts to notice a trend -- a direction in which a substantial number of research projects are all headed. Perhaps it's a previously unnoticed analogy among various new concepts; perhaps it's a metaphor that makes sense out of a range of seemingly unrelated results; perhaps it's a pattern that appears to underlie the work of several different groups; perhaps it's a method from another field that several groups have been importing into their own field and have independently found useful or necessary; or perhaps it is a widely shared dissatisfaction with the old intellectual frameworks that is now starting to take form as a new framework. If you want examples, simply look at the titles and introductions to any edited book, any special issue of a journal, or any workshop. Fame and fortune justly attach to the people who notice such things, put names on them, and gather together the people whose research appears to fall within them. These people are the shamans; their role is not to create something out of nothing, but to help the community become conscious of new understandings that have been taking form below the surface. Such people have four qualities: (1) their own research is an instance of the patterns they are noticing (unfortunately, this is usually a prerequisite to being taken seriously in the role of pattern-seeker), (2) they care enough to actually think about other people's research (this quality is in short supply, thus creating abundant opportunities for those who possess it), (3) they communicate intensively enough with other people to actually keep up-to-date with them (this is where e-mail helps), and (4) they are smart enough to notice the patterns in the first place (this is sometimes the least important factor). You can work wonders if you cultivate these qualities.
As a practical matter, you'll work these wonders through consultation. Research people, especially in academia, generally insist on being consulted beforehand on any matter that affects them. Consultation is the fundamental protocol of all academic life -- both within institutions and within disciplines. So, for example, if you have noticed a hot new theme emerging from the research in your area, you should not immediately announce a workshop or a mailing list on the topic and expect people to flock to it. (In general, never try to organize a group activity just because you think, in an abstract way, that it would be a nice idea. It doesn't work that way.) Instead, you should decide who the affected parties are and communicate with them. One way to get started on this is to write a (short or long) survey paper that describes the pattern you see emerging, puts a name on it, sketches in a sympathetic way how various projects (your own and others') seem to fit within it, explains what can be learned by looking at things this way, extracts a set of axioms or principles or methods or organizing concepts, and outlines some suggested lines of future research. Another approach is simply to write a paper that explains your own research in terms of the emerging pattern and then, as a secondary matter, explains how the other projects fit in. And a third approach is to attempt to organize a workshop or other small-scale professional meeting around the theme you've begun to articulate.
To do this, write a draft announcement for the meeting that explains its unifying concept -- the emerging theme. Clearly label it as a draft. Then -- and this is consultation -- send this draft individually to each of the ten people whose participation in the meeting is crucial. Include a cover letter/message soliciting their perspectives and their guidance. (The phrase "I'd like to ask your advice" causes miracles the world over.) Ask them if they think the time would be ripe for such a meeting, and ask them if you have articulated the emerging theme in the best way. Do not present anything as a fait accompli. When you get responses back from these people, take the responses seriously. Modify your draft to take them all into account. Rewrite it from scratch if necessary. Get lots of advice and really listen to it (even if you don't follow it). You will probably fail at this process once or twice before you succeed, but more importantly you'll learn what it's like to internalize other people's opinions -- the basic mechanism of socialization into a community. And remember that consultation, like most things, works much better if you have gone through the six network-building steps I've described above, at least with a majority of the people involved.
This whole consultation process probably sounds like a lot of work. Many people even regard it as a thankless sort of "dues" that they must pay to their field. This is not so. Engaging in consultation is a powerful act. It changes your whole way of seeing the world. You learn to notice the conditions that make action possible, and you become able to internalize others' thinking without giving them power over you. As a result, a whole landscape of possibilities will become visible before you -- a landscape that most people never see. It is a good idea, therefore, to organize professional activities in your field. It does require a lot of initiative, but it does not necessarily require a vast amount of work. The key is to delegate. If you are willing to lead -- that is, to take the initiative to define, consult, oversee, subdivide, and keep track -- then lots of people will be willing to take responsibility for one piece of the larger whole. If this doesn't happen -- that is, if you can't get people to commit to narrowly defined jobs -- then that's a sign that you have misjudged how much energy really exists around the theme you have identified. Either rework that theme through another round of consultation or simply abandon the whole project and write down the lessons you've learned from it. Don't force something to happen if it just won't. Lots of good ideas will never happen; your job is to find the ones that can happen.
When a new theme does emerge to organize the research of a community, often someone will complain that they had articulated that theme themselves some years before. Usually, however, that person had not done the hard work of talking to everyone, internalizing their perspectives, and building consensus around a particular formulation of the theme. That is what I am encouraging you to do.
Having identified an emerging theme and organized a meeting of the community around it, the next step might be to edit a book. You may not think of yourself as the sort of person who does book deals with publishers, but it's not that hard. Here is a simple method. Identify a senior member of the emerging community who is decent and well-connected, with whom you have good rapport and who would be regarded as an honest broker by everyone involved. Approach that person and say this:
I'm thinking it be might time for an edited book about this emerging theme. Here's a rough draft of a proposal for the book. Likely chapter contributors would be A, B, C, D, and E. I'd like to propose that we edit the book together. If you can help with the diplomacy of recruiting the authors then I will do all of the logistics. Don't use those exact words; hopefully you'll know this person well enough by now to find words that are comfortable for you. In any case, you have just signed up for a lot of work: iterating drafts of the proposal through consultation with the most important authors, dealing with the publisher and copyeditor, keeping track of all the manuscripts, sending reminders, cajoling people to offer comments on one another's draft chapters, drafting an introduction to the volume, writing your own chapter, preparing the index, managing your overcommitted coeditor, and fighting the half-dozen fires that will erupt along the way. It's work, but it's worthwhile. If you go through this cycle even once then you will truly understand how the world around you works. You will also have a book on your vita. Of course, you won't know how to do much of the work you've signed up for. How, for example, do you find a publisher? Asking advice from the people in your network is part of the process. If you take the initiative, and if your emerging theme has enough energy behind it, then people will be happy to help.
That being said, here is some more advice for would-be book editors. You should organize the project in a loose way, for the simple reason that one or more of your chapter contributors may flake out on you. Everyone from the publisher to the people who review your book for academic journals will insist that all of the chapters fit together to make a coherent whole, and this is a good ideal to the extent that it is practical. Don't try to organize an edited book unless you do honestly think that the chapters will work together. But make sure that the book will still work if one or more of the chapters fails to materialize. Realize, too, that some people can't write, or can't make deadlines. One reason to build your network is that you can find out ahead of time which potential authors are good to work with in these ways, and which ones will cause you a lot of headaches for very little payoff. When you discuss the project with a publisher (or, more precisely, an acquisitions editor who works for a publisher), keep in mind that publishers only eat when they sell books. As a result, they always have a mental calculator going in their heads that tells them how many copies of your book they can sell. You can't trick these people, so have an honest conversation with them about how the book works as a business proposition. Who would buy it? Publishers are generally unenthusiastic about edited books these days, in part because they are less likely to be reviewed by large-circulation magazines and journals, much less newspapers. So you have to make a clear case that your project has a lot of social energy behind it, and that the topic you have identified is right on the verge of exploding into a major intellectual movement of the sort that sells books. Most academics find it hard to think in business terms about their publishing projects, so swallow your pride and let the publisher instruct you in the matter. Maybe a project or two will fail before you learn to see the world through the publisher's eyes.
If the book project goes forward, you'll be negotiating a contract with the publisher. Don't make it complicated. An academic publisher won't be making much money on your edited book, and you're probably not famous enough to be negotiating for special terms. The only hard question you'll face is how to distribute the royalties. Should the people who contribute chapters get any of the money? How much? It is common not to mention money when dealing with the chapter authors, so that the book editors pocket it all. This is not an unreasonable procedure given the work that's involved, and the publisher may not want to deal with the complexity of paying a percentage royalty to each chapter author anyway. Another approach that's a little more fair is to pay each chapter author a fixed honorarium that's basically a share of an advance. In most cases, however, you'll find that the authors are surprised to be getting anything. So don't worry too much about it.
When you do build your professional network and identify your first emerging theme, a voice in your head may tell you something like, "well, if you thought of it then it must be obvious; surely you are the last to know". And since the task of initiating activities such as the ones I've described can look like a steep mountain when you're doing it for the first time, you might be tempted to assume that it's not worth the trouble. You'll think, surely someone else will beat me to it. When you hear these voices in your head, pay close attention to them. They don't want you to succeed professionally. Why? Are they trying to protect you from the pain of failure? Or do they just think that you've been destined to fail since they day you were born? The fact is, if you've built your professional network, and if someone in that network already has activities under way around the emerging theme that you have identified, then you are likely to have heard about it already. Of course, as you progress with your organizing you might learn about other activities that are related to yours in one way or another. In rare cases an existing activity will render yours redundant. It happens. But much more often, the existing activities will be off at an angle from yours. In that case, you will want to have a friendly conversation with the people who are organizing them. Perhaps you will decide to join forces, or perhaps you will articulate the way in which your respective activities are complementary. (You will find that "complementary" is a useful word.) You can then decide whether and how to redesign your activity to bring out more clearly its unique contribution.
Those, then, are some of the rudiments of intellectual leadership. (I will return to the subject later on.) Many people don't want to be leaders because they associate leadership with abuses of power. It's true, many leaders do abuse power, and if you lead then you will acquire power that you will be tempted to abuse. But real leadership does not require you to manipulate people, and a community of well-informed and confident people cannot be manipulated. So even if you can't imagine yourself as a leader, I hope that you will organize something, just once, so you'll understand how it works. Focus on articulating shared values and you'll be fine.
Norms of humility
I have been advising you to promote your research and take a position of leadership in your field. Many people flat-out refuse my advice, however, on the grounds that self-promotion is either inadvisable or literally wrong. Those people are not entirely mistaken. They are referring, on one level or another, to the norms of humility that operate in most areas of social life. Suppose that you stood up in public and said, "I am exceedingly intelligent" or "my research is of very high quality". The audience would be incredulous, and would openly treat you as a jerk. Even otherwise pleasant people can become quite nasty when you violate these unwritten rules. Norms of humility thus place extensive constraints on your public persona, and you will have to learn an elaborate phraseology before you can engage at all effectively in professional conversations.
Here, then are the phrases that you need:
* Say "we" rather than "I", as in "we discovered such-and-such". "We" can refer to your research group, or to the people who have joined themselves into a particular workshop or intellectual movement.
* Mitigate your expressions of opinion by saying things like, "I personally think that ...", owning your opinions rather than asserting them as truth.
* Give credit to others. In explaining this article, for example, I typically say that "NotN includes good advice accumulated from dozens of people over many years, and I want to get it into the hands of every PhD student in the world". This statement is true -- NotN does include advice accumulated from dozens of people, etc. I could have emphasized my own originality, but what purpose would that serve?
* Don't crow about your successes. Yes, of course your paper made a big splash at the last conference. But why talk about it? The success will speak for itself, especially with the people whose opinion you most care about.
* Deflect praise. If someone says something positive about you and your work, you should calmly take the first opportunity to acknowledge it. Say this: "I appreciate the kind words". Or this: "Whether my work has such-and-such merits you've mentioned is for other people to decide". Notice that these formulas are mandatory: if someone praises your work in your presence, and you don't deflect the praise, it is as though you uttered the praise yourself. Strange but true. So you should not let any praise go by without deflecting it.
* Emphasize the intellectual reasons for your work, not the personal reasons. If someone asks you, for example, why you chose a certain direction in your research, you probably know enough not to say, "so I can get tenure". Instead, your answer should refer honestly to the way in which research such as yours might hope to make the world a better place. Have such answers already rehearsed so that they will be ready when the time comes. The commonalities that you have articulated in your conversations with others will help a lot.
* Recognize that some social puzzles have no good answers. If you are invited to a conference that you just don't find worthwhile, or are invited to a collaboration with someone who you just don't respect, then you are stuck. You don't want to say yes, you don't have any honest way to say no without making yourself seem superior, and you don't want to lie. "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I can't" is probably the best you can do.
As you evolve a professional persona, you will learn many formulas like these, each of them adapted to a recurring problem of professional life. In each case, you will have to struggle with the feeling that you are being fake. Listen to the formulas that other people use in similar situations, and do the best you can.
Recognizing difference
These concepts, I hope, further illuminate the complex structure of professional relationships within the institutions of research. As with any social system, the point is not that some infinite power imposes this structure on us from the outside, but rather that we recreate the structure ourselves every time we interact with another person. And these numerous local accomplishments are all the more remarkable given that, structures and systems notwithstanding, people really are different from one another. If you are carrying around an overly rigid view of institutions and their workings (say, for example, the view you probably got from your experiences of undergraduate education) then you might not even notice the real and rewarding work of exploring the differences between yourself and your professional acquaintances. The skills of recognizing human difference -- not in the abstract, but concretely, within particular interactions and particular relationships -- are growing more important as research communities in all fields lose their national and cultural boundaries.
A common mistake is (usually unconsciously) to use networking skills to seek out people who seem identical to you, either by ignoring the differences, putting easy labels on the differences, or blowing the differences out of all proportion. This might have worked alright when research worlds were heavily segregated by gender, culture, discipline, research "school", and everything else, but it doesn't work now. Just about everyone is being forced, for example, to reflect on different national traditions' remarkably different ideas about the relationship between theory and evidence. And we are likewise learning to develop professional relationships with people who don't already speak the same disciplinary language that we do -- it no longer suffices to detect potential allies simply because they talk the same way. Nobody yet knows how the practices of professional networking might evolve under the pressure of these increasingly prevalent types of professional difference. My sense, though, is that e-mail is poorly suited for the initial stages of establishing a shared context for discussion between people with different cultural or disciplinary backgrounds. If this is true then my emphasis on careful mixing of electronic and face-to-face communication takes on new importance.
A problem that often arises when talking with someone from a different intellectual tradition involves "results". What counts as a "result" in your field? A theorem? A policy prescription? An experimental outcome? A newly theorized concept? As you start talking to people, you will be surprised to discover just how diverse the various fields' conceptions of a "result" can be. People who have been socialized into a given school of thought will habitually search anything they read for the specific type of "result" that they are accustomed to. Even neighboring subfields of the same intellectual tendency within the supposedly same field can fail to communicate because they are trying to discover incompatible types of "results" in one another's work. This failure of communication can be calamitous. Each side may perceive the other to be doing poor work -- or, literally, no work at all. They may even accuse one another of hiding their conclusions. Emotions may become strong, and serious conflict may result. In many cases the conflict will be ongoing, and (sub)fields may have developed elaborate and nasty stereotypes of one another. These stereotypes can be hard to puncture because they are expressed in the metatheoretical shorthand that each field has developed for its own discussions. The neighboring (sub)field, for example, may be said to have "no ideas", where the word "idea" has acquired a complex history of unarticulated baggage that automatically rules out anything that does not fit that particular group's ways of working and talking. Or, to take another example at random, qualitative fieldwork methods might be disparaged as "anecdotes that don't really prove anything" -- not a good way to think if you're going to start a professional relationship with an anthropologist! Needless to say, you'll want to anticipate this problem and defuse it before it damages anyone's reputation or messes up a potential relationship. This may require you to overcome your own disciplinary socialization, which has almost certainly included a lot of taken-for-granted invidious distinctions that mark certain "others" as intellectual barbarians.
Getting a public voice
Although the institutions of research tend to focus your attention on the other researchers in your field, your research interests probably have a broader importance to society. (I realize that some parts of mathematics can't be explained to a general audience. But that's the exception.) As you develop your professional voice, I hope you will also consider developing a public voice, that is, a voice that normal people outside your research community can understand. This includes speaking to community groups, writing for newspapers and magazines, being interviewed by the media, testifying in legislative hearings, circulating commentaries to a broad audience on the Internet, or simply being able to discuss your field with normal people in social situations.
Some of these situations are relatively tractable. For example, if you announce a discovery and a science reporter asks you to explain it, you will probably be able to find plain language for it. That situation is relatively easy because it's your own personal research topic. You've promised that you'll make it interesting, a professional reporter has decided that you'll succeed, and you give more or less the same speech that you give to people informally at conferences. Even easier is when someone else makes a discovery and you are asked to comment on it. You say, yes that person is a serious researcher, and yes that discovery sure sounds important, though of course much more work will be required before we are sure.
Or perhaps you want to start a sideline of popularizing work in your field. Unless you are a real popularization prodigy you wouldn't want to make popularization into your major line of work, because that is an entirely different and exceedingly competitive profession that requires extreme amounts of networking in entirely different worlds from your own. But writing popular works as a sideline can be lucrative, personally satisfying, and a public service, if not necessarily in that order. Stephen Jay Gould's monthly magazine columns about biology, which have been collected into a long series of successful books, are perhaps the prototype.
If you want to write these sorts of popular works, you face several sorts of challenges. One is that all of your academic colleagues believe that it's their job to help you get tenure, and so they will all discourage you from writing such works until that happens. I know of one department, an extreme case I'll admit, that actually put in writing a policy that non-academic publications will be counted against a candidate for tenure. But if you write easily, I personally see no problem of spending a day a month, as Gould did, writing that sort of thing, and if you publish enough refereed journal articles then only the crazies will hold it against you.
A second challenge is that wide-circulation newspapers and magazines prefer to publish work by people they know. The solution to this problem is actually easy: start an Internet mailing list and Web site to circulate your popular work. Your circulation will be low at first, but your work probably won't be very good at first either, so that's okay. As your work gets better, people will pass it around and your circulation will go up. If your work is good then it will definitely get circulated to the editors who should be publishing it. Part of their job is to look for new talent.
A final challenge for the popularizer is simply coming up with a steady stream of topics to write about. You can probably come up with a few topics just from your own research, but if you want to write regularly then you will need to cultivate the right sort of intellectual life. Popularization is really for people whose reading and thinking are not confined strictly to the latest research reports by their micro-specialized peers, but who naturally spend a reasonable percentage of their reading and thinking time ranging more widely into the deeper meanings of the field. If this kind of breadth comes naturally to you, or if you take the trouble to cultivate it, then it's particularly important that a wider audience get the benefit of your effort. The writing will come hard at first. But as you start writing regularly, something good will happen: you will find yourself spontaneously rehearsing phrases that relate the ideas to the world of a normal reader, and before long you will establish a kind of pipeline back and forth between the professional world where you present your research papers and the public world where normal curious people are concerned about the things that normal curious people are concerned about. Columns will take form almost spontaneously in your head, and you will write them down. So don't be disheartened by the difficulty of getting the process started. It will get easier.
What's really hard is when you are called upon to address yourself to different issues than the ones that organize discussion in your field. Any sphere of debate, whether scholarly or political or anything else, has an "issue agenda" (also called its "problem set"): the questions that are consensually considered to be on the table right now, and that everyone is expected to address themselves to. The people in your field probably have a consensus about which issues are important right now, and you have probably learned how to talk in a way that addresses those issues. Problems arise when the broader public, or more accurately the pundits and politicians in the media, have a different issue agenda. A reporter will call you on the phone, perhaps having gotten your name from your university's PR office as an expert in a certain field, and will expect you to address the issue that happens to define public discourse. You will find to your surprise that you aren't able to speak to that issue, for the simple reason that your day-to-day professional life has rarely required you to do so. You might select from your repertoire whatever standard spiel falls in the general vicinity of the reporter's question, only to be told, politely or not, that you're heading off at some weird academic angle to (what the reporter regards as) the real issue.
The solution to this problem is, first, to understand it, and second, practice. You simply have to figure out what the issue agenda is and come up with something to say. As a voice in the public sphere, you will be expected to have a "message": a single line that responds in some way to the issue agenda and that epitomizes the larger collection of things that you have to say. (My own "message", in case you happen to care, is that radically improved information technology is causing the ground rules of every institution in society to be renegotiated.) You should also be prepared to answer some standard questions, most particularly what implications your argument has for public policy. This would seem like an obvious question, since that's what the sphere of public debate is all about. But unless your research area is directly related to public policy, your professional training has taught you how to address research agendas, not public policy agendas. So give the question some thought and rehearse some answers before you get caught flat-footed.
It helps if you understand how the public sphere works in practice. Political philosophers often have an idealized picture of the public sphere in which citizens get together and engage in deliberation, or in which public intellectuals spin an elite sort of public philosophy. This idealized picture is almost entirely false. In reality, the public sphere is itself a sprawling professional network with its own meetings, gossip, rivalries, and the rest of it. At the center are journalists, by which I mean not just day-to-day working reporters but a broader class of professional writers who make their careers largely by building extensive networks within the field they report on. Many of these figures go on to become semi-intellectuals in their own right, for example by publishing serious books or starting institutes. Also at the center are foundations, many of which specifically intend to shape public debate by building networks and publishing reports that are designed for maximum coverage in the media. Some foundations regard themselves as nonpartisan, and spend their money flying people to resorts to debate the issues of the day. Others are aggressively lean and mean think tanks that exist to argue the positions of their funders. If any money is at stake then the players will also include lobbyists and other professional advocates.
Scholarly researchers such as yourself are definitely part of this picture, and do get invited to the talking shops where the real work gets done. As you establish a public voice in your area, you may get swept into this world. You will develop a network outside your research field, and you will have to decide how much time and effort you want to invest cultivating it and pushing your own public agenda through it. Understand that this is not the research community whose rules I have been explaining. Even though most of the people are decent and serious, it is a different world that runs on its own rails. They don't use formal peer review, methodology is often weak, sophistry is widespread, sound bites are important, and the essence of the game is shaping the evolving issue agenda. Because everyone is assumed to have a public persona, you won't be sending people your publications unless someone asks for them. On another level, though, the similarities to the research world are strong: you succeed by building networks, the glue that holds relationships together is the values that you share with people, and the way you get things done is by articulating emerging issues within the collective thinking of that particular network.
Last comment. Although normal rules of etiquette will largely suffice for your dealings with the world of public debate, it will help to keep in mind that people in the non-profit sector (meaning, outside of universities and corporations) who are funded by foundations have a very fragile existence. If networking is important for your career, it is ten times more important for these people. The way they feed their families is by defining an issue, building consensus with the relevant foundation people, and finally being invited to write a short grant proposal that gets them the money. This is a long-drawn-out process, and it requires continual upkeep. When you are dealing with such people, therefore, you should take special care not to be seen as encroaching on their issue-territory. Being an academic, you may not feel like you are competing with them. But they don't know that. So even a stray comment about how you're interested in a certain topic, or wrote a comment on a certain subject, can be misinterpreted as announcing an attack on their foundation funding. Your life is easier than theirs.
A final point
Before you get too comfortable with the relatively advanced skills I have described in this section, I hope you will take a moment and remember what it was like not having a clue about professional networking. Fix this memory firmly into your mind, and bring it back any time you're working around junior people. Cut them some slack, explain to them what's going on, and hand them a copy of "Networking on the Network".

2007-06-04T03:20:00.000-07:00

Application Deadlines for LL.M. Programs in the United States

Short list of upcoming deadlines for programs beginning in Fall 2007

For prospective LL.M. students looking to study in the United States, here is a short list of application deadlines for programs beginning in the Fall of 2007.

The 20 law schools listed below were chosen based on the most-viewed university profiles.

NYU - Foreign-trained lawyers: December 1, 2006; US-trained lawyers: April 1, 2007.

Harvard - December 1, 2006 (strongly encouraged by November 15)

UCLA - February 1, 2007

Columbia - December 15, 2006; "Early Review Program" November 1, 2006.

Fordham - Fall 2007 deadline not yet announced (Applications for 2006 were due May 15)

USC - March 1, 2007

Berkeley - December 15, 2006

Georgetown - "Early Action" foreign lawyers: November 15, 2006; US Lawyers, January 5, 2007

Stanford - December 15, 2006

Cardozo (Yeshiva University) - June 15, 2007

San Diego - July 1, 2007 (Fall admissions)

Illinois - February 15, 2007; encouraged as early as possible after January 1, 2007

Vanderbilt - March 31, 2007

Penn Law - December 1, 2006 “Early Notification” deadline; January 1, 2007 for other LL.M. and LL.C.M. applications

Yale - LLM: December 1, 2006; recommended as soon as possible after September 1, 2006.

George Washington - Non-U.S. law school graduates: March 15, 2007; U.S. law school graduates: June 1, 2007 (Fall semester)

Texas (Austin) - February 1, 2007

Hofstra - June 1, 2007 (Pirority Deadline)

Hawaii - March 1, 2007

Michigan - January 3, 2007

Please note that deadlines sometimes change and often vary due to the variety of postgraduate programs being offered.

All prospective students are advised to double-check the deadlines as soon as possible before applying.

Interview Tips Part 2

2006-09-02T04:10:00.000-07:00

FOLLOW UP AND STAND OUT. Follow up the interview with a "thank you" letter. Not only will such a letter remind the interviewer of your existence, but will also help you stand out from within a large pool of candidates. You may also look at this as a follow up interview in which you get to do all the talking!
BODY LANGUAGE IS IMPORTANT. Make sure to have positive body language throughout the interview. Good eye contact, good posture, moderate body/arm movement and an air or enthusiasm are extremely important.
DON'T' REVEAL EVERYTHING. Although you should be talking about yourself to a great extent, make sure you don't overdo it! Take care not to launch into tirades about irrelevant or negative aspects of your life and personality. Be careful not to bare your soul and express negative feelings or ideas about others (unless specifically asked). Try to be as congenial and diplomatic as possible.
OK, SO YOU'RE NOT PERFECT. If an interview points out a mistake or a negative quality about you, try to show him/her a positive perspective of the same thing. In such a situation you should be challenging, but not rude or stubborn. If, despite all discussions, it seems that the interviewer has got you cornered, don't hesitate to accept or own up to your mistakes. However, don't miss the opportunity to express how you've learned from the mistake and are now a better, more capable student.
RELAX BUT CONCENTRATE. Your demeanor during the interview should be one of relaxed concentration. You should tune out any "noise" inside your head and concentrate on the moment at hand. This concentration on the present will also help you avoid distractions, nervousness, or self-doubt.
PREPARE, YET BE SPONTANEOUS. Act spontaneous, but in actuality be extremely well prepared for the interview. The interviewer should not get the impression that you are reading a previously-rehearsed script. This is done by memorizing the points you intend to mention, but not memorizing the actual words. For example, you may decide beforehand that when they ask you about the reason why you want to join their college, you will start out by mentioning the fact that the particular college has one of the most qualified faculties (or anything else you may want to point out). However, the words you choose to say that should be coming naturally and spontaneously. In short: rehearse the content, but not the words.
SELL YOURSELF. If the interviewer does not get around to asking you questions which you think are extremely relevant, go onto them yourself (diplomatically). For example, if you want to mention your exceptional GPA but are asked about extracurriculars, you may respond, "I feel that ECs are extremely important for a student and I have participated in my fair share of ECs (mention them here), but I still feel that academic performance is a critical factor behind success and that is where the bulk of my effort has always been concentrated, which is reflected in my GPA, which was in the top 1% of my school..."
KNOW WHERE YOU ARE GOING. Leave home with the address of the admission office or off-campus site, a contact phone number, and a good set of directions and map
BE FLEXIBLE. Give your interviewer a firm handshake, maintain eye contact, and follow his or her lead. Sometimes you will be asked first if you have any questions, other times the admission interviewer will take the initiative with questions. Remember: Try to be flexible!
SUMMARIZE HOW THINGS WENT. Make a mental (or written) list of what you learned about the college. Do this as soon as you finish the interview, so that the facts are fresh in your mind. This information will be helpful weeks or months later, when you wish to compare prospective schools.
AVOID POPULAR CONCEPTIONS. If there is a popular conception of the school (Princeton is isolated, Dartmouth has too many fraternities, Harvard has too little student-teacher contact), don't ask about it. Your interviewer will have heard the same question ten billion times. Save this question for your tour guide or for other students you meet while on campus. You don't want to seem off the wall by asking bizarre questions; but even more you don't want to sound exactly like every other boring kid who was in there before you. Challenge yourself to come up with creative and interesting questions and ones that you are curious about the answer.
PRACTICE FOR YOUR INTERVIEW. Before the actual interview, practice. Many of you have probably never been formally interviewed. OK, maybe there was that interview to work at the Gap over the holidays, but did they really ask you questions that made you think about yourself and your future? Sit down with one of your parents, a teacher, or a friend (who can do this without cracking up), and have him or her ask you real, thought-provoking questions. Then answer them honestly and seriously. Allow your "interviewer" to critique you and listen to what he or she has to say. Maybe he or she will point out that every other word you used in your response was "like": "Yes, like, I really thought that this campus, like, was beautiful. It reminded me, like, of the Italian countryside, like, I went there on vacation this summer."

Interview Tips Part 1

2006-09-01T04:37:00.000-07:00

We have compiled many tips on how best to prepare and perform during your college admission interview. Good luck.

STAY CALM. Prepare by practicing with friends and formulate a few questions to ask. Dress for the occasion. Follow up with a thank-you note.
MAKE AN APPOINTMENT. Although most admission offices will be accommodating to students who would like an interview without an appointment, in order to ensure that someone will be available to sit and talk with you when you visit campus, it is always best to call ahead and make an appointment.
DRESS APPROPRIATELY. When you are picking out an outfit for an interview, keep in mind that you're not going to the prom and you are also not going to your friend's house to play football. You'll want to wear something like what you might wear to dinner at a nice restaurant.
BE YOURSELF. Don't worry if you're not the star scorer on your soccer team, haven't gotten all A's during high school, and were never the class president. Colleges are looking for a well-rounded, personable student who can share candid stories about his or her experiences. The questions are meant to help you tell colleges who you really are as a person and a student. Just be honest and answer the questions as best you can. If the interview is going well, you won't even feel like you are answering questions; you'll feel like you're just having a conversation.
MAKE EYE CONTACT. It may be awkward and you might be nervous, but it's always best to look at someone in the eye when you are talking with them. Making eye contact shows that you are listening to the admission counselor and that you are serious about your answers to their questions. Besides, you won't find the answers on the ceiling or out the window, so why look there?
TAKE YOUR TIME. If an admission counselor asks you a difficult or challenging question, he or she is only trying to dig a little deeper to learn more about your personality. Sometimes questions are intended to be slightly more challenging, so take your time answering them. It is perfectly okay for you to say something like "Oh, I need to think about that one for a minute," rather than blurting out something like "I don't know. No one ever asked me that before." Admission counselors don't expect you to have immediate answers to all of their questions, so take your time to ensure that you are answering their questions with thoughtful answers.
TURN THE TABLES. It's always a good idea to have some questions in mind that you want to ask the counselor at the end of the interview. Not only does asking your own questions show that you are truly interested in the school, but it also allows for you to interview the counselor and find out what his or her experiences have been like at the school, either as a student or as a staff member.
DO YOUR HOMEWORK. Read the information the college has sent you. If you have not received admission literature, consult the college guides in your school or library or on the Internet.
HERE ARE SOME TYPICAL INTERVIEW QUESTIONS. Why are you considering this college? How did you come to include us among your choices? What makes you think this college and you are right for each other? Where else are you applying and why? Which is your first choice? What do you hope to major in? Why? If you were the principal of your school, what would you change? What are your plans for the future? What do you expect to be doing ten years from now? What have you liked or disliked about your high school? What would you like to tell us about yourself? What newspapers and magazines do you read? What books not required by your courses have you read recently? What television shows do you watch? Tell us about your family? How do you spend a typical afternoon after school? Evening? Weekend? What extracurricular activities have you found most satisfying? What are your strengths? Weaknesses? Do you have any heroes, contemporary or historical? How would your best friend describe you? If you could talk with any one person, whom would it be and why? How do you feel about Terrorist acts? Legalizing drugs? Globalization? What events have been crucial in your life? What is the most significant contribution you have made to your school or community? What is the most important thing you have learned in high school? What do you want to get out of your college experience?
THE MAGIC QUESTION. There is always one SINGLE question behind every question you are asked: "Why should we accept you?" Be sure that every response you make, regardless of the question, ends in answering this question.

Get a welcoming handshake in minutes with 'instant' admissions

2006-08-27T04:07:00.000-07:00

Getting accepted into Newbury College this fall could take about as long as watching your favorite sitcom. Instead of filling out a lengthy application and waiting weeks for a reply, students can take advantage of the school's "instant admissions" option. Applicants meet with an admissions official–either at the college's Brookline, Mass., campus or their high school–who reviews their transcript and test scores and asks them a few questions about their academic interests or extracurricular activities. Applicants then get a thumbs up or thumbs down, usually within a half an hour.

Virtually unheard of 20 years ago, "instant" or "on-site" admission has been adopted by a host of state schools over the past decade, including William Paterson University of New Jersey in Wayne and Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. Now, private colleges like Newbury and DePaul University in Chicago are jumping on the bandwagon, too. For schools, the advantage of this quickie service is that it ups the percentage of accepted students who choose to attend. Students given a welcoming handshake during an interview are more likely to attend the university than other admitted students, says John Fraire, dean of admissions at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. For their part, high school seniors get a big reduction in stress. While they may be offered admission as early as the fall, they usually can wait until May to give the school an answer. Julia Pravlochak, 18, didn't wait that long, however. When offered a spot in Western Michigan's freshman class last fall, she immediately accepted. "I had the best smile on my face," she says.

Going with an instant-admission interview does not appear to increase or lower your chances of getting in. At Newbury, for instance, the regular and instant-admission applicant pools both have acceptance rates of about 80 percent.

"Don't see this as drive-through admissions," warns Sal Liberto, assistant dean of admissions at Newbury. Call the college ahead of time and ask what you need to bring, he says. Newbury requires a personal essay, for example; Western Michigan does not. Also be sure to practice your interview with a guidance counselor or parent. If you got an F in sophomore English, you should be able to explain why you received the grade and how you've improved. If you can't, you might flunk instant admissions, too. -U.B.

How should I answer questions about where else I am applying?

2006-08-26T04:06:00.000-07:00

Don't, say many high school counselors. "Full disclosure is not in the student's best interest," says Judith Williams, a college counselor at the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pa. The reason is that the information may be used against you. While some schools just want to figure out what college criteria matter to you (all the schools on your list have strong journalism programs, for instance) so as to better market their campus to you, others want to assess how likely you are to attend if admitted. That's potentially a problem at colleges attempting to boost their yield, the fraction of admitted students who ultimately enroll. Such colleges may preemptively reject (or wait-list) top candidates with more popular schools on their lists.

So what to do? Some counselors suggest answering with a few similarly competitive schools from your list or stating that you are still undecided. Willard Dix, college counselor at the University of Chicago Laboratory High School, usually recommends leaving the question blank (on the application) or declaring yourself uncomfortable with the question (in an interview). "I don't want to put kids in the negative position of lying or prevaricating," he says.

Don't be surprised if an interviewer pushes for an answer. Mark Geyer says a Tufts University alumni interviewer asked four or five times what other schools he was applying to. He tried to evade the question, he says, but the interviewer persisted. The experience left Geyer with "a sour aftertaste." Although he was admitted to Tufts, this fall he enrolled at Harvard in Cambridge, Mass. But for the most part, colleges will let unanswered questions slide. "I respect a student who says they prefer not to answer," says Michael Frantz, vice president for enrollment services at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

Should I include other extras with my application?

2006-08-25T04:06:00.000-07:00

If you have a special talent that can be captured in a portfolio, you should consider sending that material to the admissions office–particularly if you've received recognition for it from someone other than your mom. Smaller colleges especially welcome extras. "We really want to know as much about each candidate as possible," says Paula Mitchell, director of admission at Ithaca College in New York. Ithaca freshman Genevieve Conklin sent slides of her paintings to emphasize that, although she didn't plan on majoring in art, she devoted considerable time to creating it. Many big state schools don't have the time to examine your works of genius, however, so find out the school's policy before dropping your creative output into the mail.

If your talent–in student politics, for example–won't fit in a portfolio, include a résumé in your application, says Pam Proctor, president of College Application Consultants in Vero Beach, Fla. On the résumé, you can detail what you accomplished in each of the activities listed on your application.

I know an alumna (or a CEO or a senator). Should I ask her for a recommendation?

2006-08-24T04:05:00.000-07:00

Additional recommendations that shed light on your abilities or personality can bolster your chances but only if written by someone who knows you well. VIP recommendations that say merely that Joey or Jill mowed the lawn and seemed like a nice kid don't help.

Jeff Lee, a freshman at Duke University in Durham, N.C., used a recommendation from his boss at a medical technology company in Rockville, Md., to spotlight the skills in market research and event planning that he had developed on the job. "Getting a recommendation from a boss shows what potential you might have in the workplace as opposed to what your capabilities are as a student," says Lee, who plans to major in economics.

An endorsement from an alumnus who is a friend or mentor can also be influential. "We want recommendations that say why a student would be successful at Juniata," says Michelle Bartol, dean of enrollment at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pa. "Alumni can write those types of recommendations because they know the school."

Quantity, however, should not be confused with quality. Emory has instituted a three-recommendation limit. Most other schools say they rarely want more than four recommendations total–and definitely not the 14 that filled one applicant's folder at Wake Forest last spring.

I got into some trouble at school. Do I need to 'fess up on my application?

2006-08-22T04:04:00.000-07:00

In a word, yes. If a college asks whether you've ever been suspended, expelled, or arrested, you should come clean about your misdeeds. Admissions officers want to ferret out the nasty characters who could harm other students or cause legal headaches down the road, so youthful high jinks don't worry them much. Charges of assault, drug dealing, and academic dishonesty, on the other hand, will be closely scrutinized.

The key here is to demonstrate that your brush with authority led to personal growth. Writing a thoughtful explanation of what happened will help, but if the infraction is serious, a special trip to colleges to explain yourself in person may be in order. Soon after one Florida high schooler was expelled when marijuana was found in her car, she arranged a meeting with officials from the New College of Florida in Sarasota to describe what happened. The student had already signed up for drug counseling and taken steps toward earning her GED. Joel Bauman, dean of admissions and financial aid, was impressed: "She confronted the problem head on and had done things to make up for it. That takes courage, integrity, and character." The student was admitted.

Whatever you do, don't lie. "If a student has falsified their answer [to the discipline question], I have no problem pulling the rug out from under them," says Christopher Gruber, director of admission at the University of Richmond in Virginia. The likely leaks? High school counselors required by school rules to report infractions to colleges and teachers who inadvertently mention in a recommendation letter how much Johnny has matured since he burned the gym down junior year.

Learn to dance with admissions: I heard that "showing interest" will help me get in. How do I do that?

2006-08-21T04:35:00.000-07:00

By Rachel Hartigan Shea and Ulrich Boser

Challenging course load? Check. Decent test scores? Check. Eloquent essay? Check. Strategy for dealing with the admissions office? Uh-oh. You thought you'd done everything within your power to get into your dream school. But in fact, there's still one more subject you need to master–the etiquette of dealing with the folks in the admissions office. We asked admissions officers and guidance counselors for advice on handling such unusual–and awkward–social situations as reporting your own bad behavior or answering questions about where else you plan to apply. Among the things we found out: Confessing to a silly sophomore suspension won't derail your application, but listing all of your other college choices might. Read on for more surprising tips:

I heard that "showing interest" will help me get in. How do I do that?

Rory Gavin used her car. After she was wait-listed at Wake Forest University, the 17-year-old drove 12 hours from her home in Massapequa, N.Y., to Winston-Salem, N.C., to pay the school a second visit–and to demonstrate to the admissions office that she was still eager to attend. She was one of the first to be admitted off the wait list last May.

Colleges want to know how much high schoolers want them. It gives them a better handle on which applicants will enroll if accepted, preventing the expensive error of too many, or too few, students come fall. As a result, many schools will record your every contact with the campus. If you order a video tour of Atlanta's Emory University, an admissions officer will note the request in your application folder. E-mails to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, will be logged into a database. Most institutions naturally construe a campus visit as a sign of serious interest, so you should be sure to travel to the schools that top your list–and let the admissions office know you've stopped by.

But don't, as Stevie Wonder sings, just call to say I love you. With every contact you should be either updating admissions officers on recent achievements or seeking information about the school that you cannot find in the brochures. Ask how many students stick around campus over the weekend, for instance. Or ask about the closest mosque or Methodist church. Don't go overboard, however. "So many kids make the mistake of being overly aggressive," says Tom Parker, dean of admissions at Amherst College in Massachusetts. "It does more harm than good."

Will admissions officers think I'm a pest if I check on my application?

Depends on what you mean by "check." Trying to find out whether you've been accepted before decisions are released will most definitely irritate admissions officers. But checking that your application is complete could stave off disaster. Katherine Nuckols, a sophomore at Elon University in North Carolina, didn't realize until March of her senior year that the College Board hadn't sent her SAT scores to the colleges. She had to postpone higher education for a year and go through the whole process again. The second time around, she says, "I was that annoying person who called every single day." She ended up getting into all of the 12 schools to which she applied.

Application Process: GPA, GRE, Resume, Statement of Purpose, Recommendation Letters, Writing Sample

2006-08-19T03:37:00.000-07:00

a. Time management is crucial here. Do a backward timeline scheduling so you know what you need to do in order to have all materials ready for mailing before the deadline. Find out when GRE dates are and how long your professors need to write you recommendation letters.

b. Your GPA is an important criterion in admission. Try to have at least a B - GPA. Schools may toss out application below a certain GPA unless you’ve made other efforts for them to consider even reading your application (good words from professors advocating for review of your application b/c other parts of your application are stronger). Some schools will cons ider GPA of one’s major versus one’s overall GPA.

c. Many programs require at least a general GRE test score. Other programs require the general and a discipline specific GRE score.

Make sure you take the right tests that the programs required.
i. There are study groups for GRE. If none exists, form one!
ii. There are expensive classes to help you prepare for the GRE as well.
iii. The test is now computer-based. Go to http://www.gre.org for more information and to sign up and obtain a CD to practice for the exam.

d. Sometimes, department or program requires a resume. A one or two-page resume can be a quick documentation of your achievements. This can also help you in writing your statement of purpose, too.

e. The Statement of Purpose is ve ry important!
i. You want to demonstrate to them that you know what you’re doing. Your experience has prepared you for their program.
ii. Their program meets your needs. You meet their needs in becoming a stellar student whom they can brag for years.
iii. Provide information about your uniqueness, achievements, abilities, goals, and determination to finish graduate school.
iv. Write many, many drafts. Have many proofreaders.

f. You want professors/employers who can write you a STRONG letter of recommendation. Some professors don’t like to say no and may end up writing you a lukewarm letter, which is not to your best interest.
i. If you have choices to choose from, pick people who are prominent and respected in your field.
ii. Consider if your recommender has a positive relationship with the institution you are applying. It could work against you.
iii. Ask your potential recommender if they are willing to write you a strong letter and let them know when it’s due. Then, give a draft of all pertinent application information to your recomme nder at least a month in advance of the deadline .

g. Writing samples allow the admission committee to have a better idea about your writing and analytical abilities. Many programs now require that you submit a writing sample if not two. Writing samples are basically papers you have written in your undergraduate classes.
i. Consider the program you’re applying to and send the most appropriate/relevant writing sample.
ii. Before you send the paper, have several people proofread it. Make sure it’s a paper you’re proud of and had earned a good
grade. Use this paper to illustrate your skills in your statement of purpose.
iii. It would be even more appealing to show that you have some research interests for grad school already by providing a writing sample that is about your research interest.

SECTION 8. How to Get Tenure

2006-08-10T16:04:00.000-07:00

A professor once told me that getting tenure is like not getting hit by a train. What she meant is that what matters psychologically is the prospect of being denied tenure. Coming up for tenure is extraordinarily stressful for many people, and this stress causes many people to distort their lives and their research in an attempt to second-guess a tenure process that they do not experience as rational. My goal here is to explain the process of getting tenure in a way that relieves the stress and makes such distortions unnecessary.

The first concept you need is deep tenure -- the kind of tenure that derives from an extensive network of relationships within your field. People who are starting out in their first job as a professor often misunderstand their relationships with the other faculty in their department. They are looking for some kind of community among equals, and they are often surprised to find their colleagues investing most of their attention in the outside world. The junior faculty feel that they need to work closely with the senior faculty who will decide their tenure cases, or at least they will invest effort in politicking those senior faculty in an attempt to influence the eventual decision. Much of this effort is misdirected. Of course, senior faculty do exist who ignore junior faculty or treat them callously. But you should understand that a department of a research university is not the sort of village that Tocqueville idealized. Instead, it is more like an alliance of entrepreneurs, each of them moving and shaking in the larger world as well as within their departments.

Once you understand your department in those terms, the question of tenure changes. Getting tenure in your department is good, but more important is getting deep tenure: a thoroughgoing integration of yourself and your career into your field as a whole. I have already explained most of the process, which is nothing but publishing, articulating commonalities, networking, identifying emerging themes, organizing activities, and so on. Once you obtain deep tenure, your university would be foolish to lose you. And if your university does in fact fumble your tenure case, deep tenure means that you are nearly certain to have another good job waiting for you somewhere else. If you put enough effort into networking, and if you shift your psychology away from your department and toward your field as a whole, then the process of getting tenure will be much less distressing. You will be less likely to engage in excess politicking of your immediate colleagues. And you will be able to relate to your colleagues as fellow movers and shakers rather than as neighbors in an idealized village. In particular, your independent standing in the field, because of your widespread network, will increase your autonomy and make you less open to manipulation by others.

The best news of all is that getting tenure and getting deep tenure are more or less the same process. Here is how it works. When you come up for tenure, or for any other career review, your tenure case will be decided by people who lack deep knowledge of your research area. Therefore -- and this is a basic mechanism of the university on all levels -- they will necessarily seek out evidence of your research accomplishments other than your own estimate or theirs. One common measure is where and how much you have published in peer reviewed venues such as refereed journals and scholarly publishers. So of course you should publish a lot, with your main emphasis on those kinds of outlets as opposed to nonacademic publications and unrefereed chapters in edited books.

More important than publication, though, will be the letters that your department will get from senior people in your research area. For that reason, your tenure campaign should be very much organized around those people. This means networking, very much as I have described it above, but with a more systematic approach. It couldn't be simpler. Make a list of the twenty people whom your department is most likely to get letters from. These will be senior people whose work is widely known, and who are known themselves as the leading figures in particular areas. Make sure that every important aspect of your work is covered by this list. Then set out to build strong professional relationships with every one of those people in the ways that I have been describing in previous sections. This is easier than it sounds. By the time you come up for tenure, you may have had three or four conversations with each person on your list. That may not sound like much. But if you have been working the process in the right way then that will be plenty. When your tenure case approaches, your university will probably ask you for a list of suggested referees, and you should discuss with your colleagues which names would work best on your list. You can also ask the individuals involved whether they would be willing to write a letter if they are asked. (You don't have to ask them, though. They understand perfectly well how the institution works.) The specifics can be complicated here, depending on how your university's tenure process works. For example, your department might be obligated to write to several people who are not on your list, in which case you might want to restrict your list to the people whom your department finds less obvious. But the relationships with likely letter-writers will be the most important element of your tenure case in any event. And as you do develop relationships with the twenty people on your list, make sure to explain those people to the people in your department who do not know your field well.

Getting a distinct identity
Closely related to deep tenure is a second element, which is getting a clear and distinct professional identity. When your university is deciding whether to give you tenure, they want to make sure that they are evaluating you, as opposed to evaluating your thesis advisor or the people you have collaborated with. If you have worked closely with your advisor, or if your dissertation and related work will sound similar to your advisor's work, then you will need to get a distinct identity. Start research projects in different areas from your advisor, explain your work in different language than your advisor uses, and find ways to clearly mark off your work from your advisor's, for example by explaining your new work as a clear step beyond the work that the two of you published together. You don't just want to have different research results than your advisor -- you want a clearly distinct research agenda.
Establishing a distinct professional identity also means limiting the amount of work that you coauthor with your peers and with other people who are more senior than you. This is unfortunate, of course, but the institution needs to evaluate you as an individual. Work that you coauthor with your students is not a problem, since the committees will assume that you were the intellectual leader in the project, and you can coauthor some work with senior members of your department, since they will be able to explain your distinct role to the people who review your file.

To have a clear and distinct identity, finally, you need to be able to explain your research agenda. Your explanation should not sound like anyone else's, and it should convey a clear sense that a great deal of useful research can be done by following that agenda in the future. To explain your agenda in a clear and distinct way does not mean that you should devalue the work of others before you. To the contrary, you should articulate a historical narrative of the research that you are building on, so that everyone can understand precisely how your work is different from what has come before. Giving credit to others should not detract from your own identity.
Organizing around an emerging theme

The most basic way of getting a distinct identity is to articulate an emerging theme in your field. In other words, you don't just want to set an agenda for your own research -- you want to catalyze a social movement within your field by organizing activities among the people whose research fits the theme. I have already discussed the basics of this process in Section 3. Now, however, organizing around emerging themes has become crucial to your career. So let me explain the process in more detail.
When you are conducting and writing about your research, and especially when you are writing about how your work complements that of others, you should continually brainstorm emerging themes. Work them out in your notebook, and in your conversations with others in your field, until you find one that works. Let us consider an example. Suppose that you are conducting research on a group of biologists who use the Internet to collaborate in new ways. If you are not thinking clearly, you might assume that the particular group you are studying is unique, and that none of the themes you are identifying in your research are relevant to the research of others. After all, the people you are studying probably are unique in many ways. If you have developed the custom of searching for emerging themes, though, and if you are networking and reading other people's work, then you will notice that other researchers are also studying groups who collaborate over the Internet. You might then coin a phrase such as "distributed collective practice" to describe the larger category that your own project shares with these others. More precisely, you might fill your notebook with dozens of phrases, one of which, in this case "distributed collective practice", will sound especially felicitous.

"Distributed collective practice" happens to be a real example of an emerging theme, and you can find the proceedings of a workshop on distributed collective practice by searching the Web with Google. As emerging themes go, "distributed collective practice" is especially well-designed. It has several properties. First of all, it sounds good. It has a nice poetic gallop to it. Just as importantly, each of its words -- "distributed", "collective", and "practice" -- has a meaning for the researchers, so that grouping the three words together combines things that are deeply familiar in a way that is striking and new. The phrase is also quite general. It brings together the community you want -- that is, a community whose members, while diverse, share a substantial number of ideas and values. For example, you may have been studying biologists in your research, but in devising your emerging theme you have chosen to reach out toward all collective practices, not just biology and not just science. Likewise, you may have have been studying people who collaborate on the Internet, but you have chosen to generalize your emerging theme so that it applies to all distributed activities, not just ones that happen on the Internet. And so on.

Of course, you could have articulated your emerging theme differently. You could have said "Internet knowledge production" or "information technology in science" or "social networks and institutional change". Each of these formulations could very well identify an emerging theme around which a new research community could coalesce. But you chose the formulation that identified the particular community that you found congenial and that was ready to be identified. How did you know that a community was ready to be identified using that particular phrase? Because you know many of the people individually. You have conversed with them, read their work, perhaps participated in joint activities with them. You have worked to articulate commonalities with them, some of which may have grown directly into potential emerging themes for a larger group. You have internalized their thinking to some degree, and you can anticipate to some degree how they will perceive things. Having articulated your best guess at the theme that is emerging in their work, you have also consulted with them in the manner that I described in Section 3.

You should try to generalize your emerging theme as much as possible -- "distributed collective practice" as opposed to "biologists working together on the Internet". This is crucial. In articulating an emerging theme, you are claiming a certain territory, and you might as well claim as much territory as possible. I have already mentioned that your research papers resemble patent applications, and the same thing goes for your emerging themes, whose claims should stretch out in every direction until they collide with the claims that have already been made by others. The point is not that you actually own all of the resesarch in that territory. You are not claiming intellectual property in any official sense. Other people will get credit for the results of their own research within that territory. You are, however, claiming credit for noticing the general theme, articulating its significance, mapping its issues, organizing the people who are working within it, and setting the agenda for future research within it. Having done this, you will be identified as a leader. And being a leader is the best, most reliable way to get deep tenure.
Organizing activities around emerging themes teaches you a deep lesson about the profession of research: research means doing something new, and the research community, when it is functioning at all, is thoroughly dynamic, always changing, always fluid. In getting tenure, your job is not to break into an existing network. If some existing institution tries to exclude you, ignore it. Your job is to build the new institutions that will organize the research community for a new generation of researchers. It's not hard. You just have to do it.
Your department's tenure process

Having discussed deep tenure on the level of your field as a whole, it is now possible to think clearly about the tenure process within your own department. It is entirely reasonable for you to ask your departmental colleagues what are the criteria for tenure. Go ahead and ask several of them, preferably ones who are both closest to you and central to the department's social networks. When you do this, you will discover the phenomenon of folk theories about tenure. For example, you might be told that you need to publish two books, or that you need to place an article in such-and-such journal, or that writing for nonacademic publications actually counts negatively at tenure time rather than counting as zero or as a slight positive under the heading of service to the community. You might get well-meaning advice to postpone this, that, or the other aspect of your professional life until after you have gotten tenure. You will be torn: half of you will find these folk theories to be ridiculous, which of course they are, and the other half of you will start frantically rearranging your whole career to conform to them. Once you gather these theories and start pondering them, ask around about whether, when, and how they are applied in practice. You may find that every one of your senior colleagues has a different folk theory in mind. Or you may learn that faculty meetings to discuss tenure cases are actually organized around one or more of these folk theories, so that they have become institutionalized. In my view, you should only change your plans slightly to accommodate the folk theories. The most important thing is to publish high-quality research in refereed journals and book series, the second is to get deep tenure in your field, the third is to build professional relationships with the faculty in your department, the fourth is to teach reasonably well, and the fifth is not to stress out about it. That's it.

Whatever you do, ignore the folk theories that you hear from untenured faculty members. Untenured faculty members simply do not have the information that they would need to theorize the process. Don't get into any alcohol-fueled sessions of mutual sharing of uninformed theorizing about tenure. Don't discuss tenure with people who say things like, "there is a hierarchy, and you need to recognize it and be deferent toward it". Don't validate anyone else's negativity. Don't overinterpret stories about the reasons why other people failed to get tenure -- you will probably not be hearing the whole story. And don't take sides in factional politics. Just calmly articulate commonalities with everyone and have pity on people who project their psychological dramas onto the professional world around them. If powerful people in your department try to force you to join their clique rather than someone else's, your answer is always the same: articulate commonalities. They more they lean on you, the more you should work with them to articulate commonalities. Articulating commonalities is always a useful activity. It builds your intellect, and it builds relationships. It cements political alliances without precluding equally strong political alliances with everyone else. And it is perfectly honest.

If you are going about it right, then, the process of getting tenure is basically the same process as building a community for yourself by networking and organizing activities. You should be able to explain clearly to yourself how every action you perform in your daily work life is part of the process of getting tenure, in addition to the more direct and immediate benefits that it provides to you and others. As a faculty member, you will find that your life has more moving parts than it did when you were in graduate school. You will laugh as you look back on all the times you complained about not having enough time to read. The key to managing all of your diverse involvements as a faculty member is to make every action serve multiple purposes. Get assigned to committee work that helps you with your teaching. Do your teaching in a way that helps you get necessary reading done. Organize workshops that help you to write grant proposals. Supervise student projects in ways that fill in pieces of your own research agenda. Travel to meetings where you can do several kinds of business, as well as letting you advertise your work in the field. Don't automatically say yes to everyone who wants you to do work, and don't jump at every opportunity that comes along. Get used to the idea that your networking and organizing activities will cause numerous opportunities to arise, and get used to the feeling of calmly declining opportunities that don't fit with your long-haul plan. This may all sound self-serving, but it's not. If you define your intellectual agenda in an expansive way then lots of people -- students, colleagues, other people in the field -- will be happy to work with you in ways that directly benefit your career. Once you do establish this positive pattern, you will be able to work with everyone on the basis of mutual benefit.

Departmental politics
In giving you all of this positive-sounding advice, I do not mean to imply that the tenure process is entirely apolitical. Nothing that involves human beings is apolitical, for the simple reason that politics is the practical art by which people get along. So, for example, remember to consult with your colleagues on everything you do. I have already introduced this concept of consultation back in Section 3, in the context of how to organize a workshop. The principle generalizes, and much of your time as a junior faculty member will be spent consulting with people whose plans may be affected by your plans.
Let us consider a commonplace example. You decide that you are going to be a hero by organizing a seminar series. You do a lot of work to invite speakers, publicize their talks, show them around campus, introduce them to people in your department, tell them about all of the excellent research that you and your colleagues are doing, and so on. From your perpective, you are helping the department by bringing in all of these outstanding people. But other people do not share your understanding. They are not aware of your plans or the reasons behind them. What they see is not a good citizen helping everyone to be better networked in the field. What they see, instead, is an endless, random series of requests for money, room bookings, claims on people's calendars, logistical details, A/V equipment, and so on. They will try to explain this randomness as best they can, most likely by imagining you to be a selfish taker. Instead of being a hero, you have become a goat.
What happened? The answer is that you did not consult. At the very beginning of the process you should have made a list of the people who were affected by your plans, and then you should have run your plans past each of them individually. Get their ideas, concerns, relevant information, good and bad precedents from the time before you arrived, and so on. At a minimum these conversations will cause others to be informed about your plans. More likely you will also find your plans changing as your colleagues raise good points that you hadn't thought of or heard about. You may even find that your plan is a bad idea, or that someone else is already doing something closely related to it. By consulting with people, you will get more career benefit from the activity than you would have simply by organizing it on your own. Furthermore, nearly all of the potential downsides of the activity will go away.

The principle of consultation generalizes much more widely. For example, you should never raise an issue at a faculty meeting, much less bring a major conference to your campus, without having consulted about it beforehand. With whom? With the people who are most affected by it, and with the people whose central location in social networks will enable them to anticipate responses you will get and what buttons you should avoid pushing. You should not think of consultation as a kind of arbitrary homework, or as an obstacle you are required to jump before you can get the things you want. Consultation is itself the most direct way to get what you want, and its relationship-building benefits are often more important than the benefits of the activities you are trying to organize. It is one more way that you are knitting yourself into the community.

In my opinion, consultation and articulating commonalities are the only two principles you need to participate effectively in the politics of your department. Consult and articulate commonalities with everyone in your department and you will be fine. It will be helpful, though, if you understand some of the pathological patterns that people get into. One of these is mistakenly called "loyalty". It is quite strange. The faculty in a department are basically stuck together on an island. Most of them have tenure, and relatively few of them will ever change jobs. So they have to get along. The right way to get along, as you know by now, is to work continually at articulating commonalities. But some people don't know how to do this, or else they choose to invest their effort in other things. So instead they create a kind of false solidarity. Let us say that one faculty member holds a strong opinion that a certain technology is ineffective. The other members of the department may not care very much about the matter, and so for the sake of "loyalty" they will adopt that strong opinion as well. Through this process, the department will evolve a peculiar belief system that consists of the idiosyncratic beliefs of its members. The effect will be especially striking when a new senior faculty member is hired: everyone will adopt a strange new opinion overnight, corresponding to the idiosyncracies of their new colleague. Please do not join in to such dynamics. Just articulate commonalities with everyone involved. Say "we" and "us" when you explain those commonalities to others, and perhaps your colleagues will develop more constructive ways of signaling their solidarity to one another.

Enough about departmental politics -- what about campus politics? If you want to get tenure at your university, doesn't it make sense to cultivate a widespread network in other departments, and especially among senior administrators? Probably not. The process of getting deep tenure might lead you to network with people who happen to reside in other departments on your campus. Certainly those people might be easier to reach, face-to-face anyway, other things being equal, than people who live on different continents. But if people in other departments don't fit into your campaign for deep tenure then, almost by definition, you have little reason to contact them. The same thing goes doubly for senior administrators. If you are involved in university governance activities then you will probably want to choose specific governance issues that concern you, network around them, identify emerging themes that pertain to governance of the university, organize activities around those themes, and so on. Those activities certainly will bring you into contact with senior administrators. If you really want to be involved in university governance before you get tenure, go ahead. But most people wait until after they get tenure, for obvious reasons.

If you do want to build intellectual networks around campus, here is a very straightforward way to do it: organize panel discussions. The process should make perfect sense to you by now. First, find a few people in other departments whose work relates to yours in some way. You can identify those people by asking your colleagues. Articulate commonalities. Choose one of those commonalities to be the topic of a panel discussion. Consult with everyone involved about both the theme and the logistical details such as time and place. Sign up a half-dozen speakers including yourself, three per panel plus a discussant. Consult about who the best discussants might be. Confirm everyone's participation. Prepare a neat, legible, plain-text e-mail announcement. Put a phrase like "please forward this to everyone who might be interested" at the top. Send the announcement to your department's general-interest mailing list. Ask the other speakers to do the same. Rehearse the daylights out of a simple, low-key fifteen minute presentation of your work. None of this is hard, and yet most campuses have a shortage of people who are willing to do it. It's probably not crucial to your tenure case, though.

SECTION 9. Your Career

2006-07-25T16:05:00.000-07:00

Once you get your dissertation finished and start on a tenure-track job, you probably have forty years ahead of you before retirement, maybe less if you've had an earlier career. That might seem like a long time. But plenty of people get themselves stuck in negative career patterns that prevent them from making good use of the time. This section sketches several theories of your career. I didn't invent any of these theories; I have heard them all repeated many times, in many forms, to where I am not certain who invented them. I don't necessarily endorse them, but they are all useful in some cases. (If you begin your research career late in life then you will have to adjust each theory accordingly.) At the end of this section, I will present my own theory of your career, which I call iterative alignment.
Types of creativity
Creative people, it is said, go through a characteristic trajectory. When they are young, their work reflects an intense, labor-intensive type of energy. They do not have much accumulated knowledge to build on, so their work expresses pure genius instead. Later in life, though, they change gears. They have built up a great deal of momentum, and they use it for larger, longer-term projects.
The structural theory
When you are young, you are located on the periphery of the research community. As you go along, however, you build a community around yourself. As the previous generation retires, you find yourself at the center. This gives you an ability to set agendas that you didn't have when you were more peripheral. Of course, if you have a fixed belief that you are peripheral then you will probably never acquire that ability. But if your beliefs are positive and you act on them, then you have a better chance.
The constraint theory
This theory is concerned with ratios of risk and reward. When you are a junior faculty member, it says, you should follow fashion, choosing topics whose importance is already well-understood. That way you will get the maximum reward with the minimum risk. When you are in the middle of your career, you should build new institutions, thereby legitimizing the research fashions that the next generation of junior faculty can follow. Instead of catching a wave, you are making waves. And when you are toward the end of your career, you should work on blue-sky topics that will eventually coalesce into new institutions through the work of the mid-career faculty behind you. That is the theory, anyway.
Formulas for a research program
Study how various successful researchers evolve their research programs. You will notice patterns. One such pattern pertains to famous researchers' relationships to their advisors. Often an advisor will write an important paper that sketches a new research area in a programmatic way, without developing the full-blown theoretical machinery that is required to generate a large number of results. One of that person's students, however, will perceive the significance of the new idea, and will draw together all of the literature and social networks required to generate the results, thus leading to large numbers of well-cited papers and a successful career.
The university's theory
The university as in institution is fueled by the peer review process. You are always being reviewed, and you are always reviewing others in turn. From the university's way of thinking, junior faculty members should be relieved of most reviewing duties. They will probably be drafted to referee journal papers and the like, but it is only after you receive tenure that the most onerous reviewing duties begin. The higher you ascend in the promotion ladder, the more likely you are to end up on committees to review tenure candidates, research programs, teaching programs, and whole departments, laboratories, and universities. Many senior faculty members complain about these burdens, and you should avoid this complaint by actively volunteering yourself for the duties that most interest you. That way you can decline the others.
The senior faculty's theory
When you are a new faculty member, senior faculty members often perceive you as raw material for their institution-building activities. You will find yourself being recruited into one activity or another. I have already advised you not to be recruited into anyone else's agenda; go ahead and participate in workshops and other activities if they help you build relationships, but confine your political clique-joining to articulating commonalities with everyone.
In mid-career, senior people will evaluate you in terms of your leadership qualities instead of their own narrow agendas. So it's a good idea that you didn't join any cliques but organized new research communities instead. The strongest leaders will also be those with the broadest, most capacious intellectual reach, and it is toward the end of your mid-career phase when this breadth will be tested.
Finally, senior people evaluate one another based on their ability to network beyond their own field. It is one thing for a biologist, for example, to network among other biologists. But to have a real effect on the largest institutions (the university, the funding agencies, the corporate world, the public sphere, and so on), a biologist also needs to network with humanists, artists, engineers, social scientists, and administrators of many sorts. And networking, once again, means choosing people strategically, articulating commonalities with them, articulating emerging themes, organizing events, and so on.
Iterative alignment
The theories of your career that I have described so far are useful enough. In my experience, however, a more useful theory is the one that I call iterative alignment. To understand it, suppose that you are someone who feels that your current position in the institutions of research doesn't fit with your own intellectual agenda -- "my work isn't welcome", you hear yourself say. Perhaps you are a graduate student whose department's faculty don't care about your research topic. Perhaps you are a new faculty member whose colleagues don't care about your research topic. Perhaps you are a mid-career faculty member in a field whose senior members don't care about your research topic. In each case, the problem is a misalignment between you and the institution. You haven't yet had the opportunity to choose your colleagues and build the institutions that you need to realize fully the potential of your work. Many people overgeneralize from this situation. They say, "it's all about connections, and the insiders have the whole situation rigged to their advantage". This kind of overgeneralization is a big mistake. It wrongly pretends that a temporary situation is permanent, and in so doing it tends to make the situation permanent.
How do you fix a problem of misalignment? By this point, it will not surprise you to hear that the solution lies in networking. One purpose of networking, so far as your career is concerned, is to manufacture a closer alignment between you and the institutions around you. If you are a student whose faculty don't care about your research, then indeed you will have to meet them halfway for a while. If you are a junior faculty member in a department where they don't know or care about half of the twenty people in your field who ought to be writing letters for you, make a list of thirty people that includes both your twenty and theirs. In the meantime, build networks. Get lots of interviews and lots of good job offers. Then get a job that is better aligned with your research interests. Notice that it is a two-way street: the process of alignment doesn't just mean forcing the world to fit with your pre-existing research interests. Rather, the process of dialogue, articulating commonalities, and internalizing the ideas of others will change your research agenda, and your networking, organizing, and institution-building activities will help create an institutional niche within which you can be supported in conducting research within that agenda. By iterative alignment, I mean that each step forward in your career improves the alignment by an incremental degree. One step might get you more sympathetic colleagues. Another might create a journal for you to publish your research in. Another might ensure a flow of research funding. Another might build a widespread network of researchers who consider you a leader in their overall movement. And so on. Each increment of alignment, though, happens in the same basic way: networking, articulation of commonalities and emerging themes, and organizing of activities. That is the basic cycle.
A common misunderstanding is that iterative alignment, or the research community generally, requires you to give up your dreams, conforming to someone else's agenda in order to get along. That is not true. Iterative alignment is a two-way street, that is true. You will change, even as you build and rebuild the institution to fit with yourself. But the fact that you are changing does not itself imply that you are conforming to some alien agenda. If you are doing it right then you are changing simply because you are growing, having better and better ideas, and realizing more and more of your potential. This is a critically important intuition: every time you spontaneously notice an emerging theme -- that is, every time that you go through the cycle of reading people's research, networking with them, articulating commonalities with them, and noticing a theme emerging from all of those conversations -- you are also noticing an aspect of yourself. Someone else who went through the same cycle would probably notice something different -- not because the situation is arbitrary, but because the situation is filled with potentially valuable research directions. When you notice an emerging theme and then organize activities around it, you are knitting yourself into the community. This process of knitting is what iterative alignment is all about. You align yourself and the institution by iteratively, incrementally knitting yourself into it. You should do work that is aligned with who you really are. Why? Because that way you are more likely to notice the entrepreneurial opportunity that the institutions are presenting to you. If you simply conformed to some arbitrary agenda, then you wouldn't have the same intuitive grasp of the ideas. You would probably get stuck in a low orbit that corresponds to the first, least aligned setting in which you happened to have a job. In this sense, the institutions of research are calling forth a certain honesty from you, and you need to have the courage to approach the cycle of iterative alignment in that spirit.
The theory of iterative alignment generalizes everything that I have said already in this article. In producing your dissertation, for example, I argued that you were really producing yourself as a member of the research community. That is an example of iterative alignment: aligning yourself with others by knitting your research topic into the existing literature and the people who wrote it. Articulating an emerging theme and organizing a workshop around it is also an example of iterative alignment. And so is the process of getting deep tenure with your research community. In each case you are choosing carefully the people you want to associate with, and you are using language creatively to articulate commonalities with those people and internalize their ideas. Iterative alignment, then, is a cycle whose details vary depending on where exactly you are located in the institutions at a given moment. And when you achieve perfect alignment, there's a sense in which your career is complete. You have knitted yourself fully into the institutions and communities around you. Your personal agendas align perfectly with the agendas that have been institutionalized for the benefit of others. Your own innovations and accomplishments have been fully incorporated into those others' work. The good you've done is now distributed throughout the people who have come after you. And you can now retire, knowing that you have made your fullest possible contribution to the field.

Graduate School - Is it right for me?

2006-07-19T12:08:00.000-07:00

Students often assume that graduate school is the next logical step after completing an undergraduate degree. Whether
and when to continue your education is an important decision, since graduate or professional school requires a
significant commitment of time, energy, and money. It also means turning down other opportunities that may come
your way during that time. There are, however, specific questions you should consider before applying:
• Why do I want to go to graduate school?
• What will I gain by attending?
• What will I give up by attending?
• Is this the right time for me to apply?
Helpful Hint: The graduate school application season is during the fall
Is graduate study right for you?
Graduate education is very different from undergraduate education. To be successful, you must be self-directed,
intellectually curious, hard-working, flexible, and committed. You will have a closer relationship with faculty than you
had as an undergraduate, and you will rely on your fellow students for ideas, criticism, and stimulation. On the other
hand, you will have less of a social connection to your peers and less social time in general. Graduate school is designed
for people who enjoy researching one topic in depth. If you cannot find satisfaction with extensive writing, researching,
and intellectual discussion, graduate school is probably not the place for you.
In addition, think about what you want from graduate school to be sure your goals and the purpose of graduate
education match. For some fields, a graduate degree is crucial, while for others, it will not help you advance to a higher
level on its own. Graduate school is NOT the place for you if you simply cannot decide what else to do with your life.
There should be some purpose. Education for its own sake is a valid reason, but delaying inevitable decisions about
your future is not.
Is now the best time for you to attend graduate school?
If you know that you want to pursue an academic career, now is the best time to start. A doctoral degree typically takes
5 to 8 years of full time study, so there's no time like the present. Now is also the right time if you are entering a field
that requires an advanced degree for credentialing or to gain entry-level positions. However, there are some fields that
value work experience as well as an advanced degree, and they may want you to have that experience first. For
example, most business schools expect that you will have 2-3 years of work experience before they will consider you
for admission. Work experience enriches the classroom experience, making classroom conversations more relevant for
you and your peers. Explore your field to determine when they recommend furthering your education. The last two
reasons for delaying your graduate education may be the most important. If you feel burned out after four years of
college, or if you are unsure of your future career goals, it is best to take some time to work and reflect before making
this commitment of time and money.
Should I pursue a master's degree or should I be applying to doctoral programs?
Remember that the doctorate is intended for those who want to pursue a career in university-level teaching and/or
advanced research. Even if that describes you, there may still be reasons to apply to a master's program first. If you
have not had a strong academic career, you may need to enter a program through the master's in order to prove that
you are capable of serious, doctoral level work. The other instance in which a master's program may be necessary as a
first step is if you are changing fields. You will develop a solid base in your new discipline, as well as prove your
dedication to that field.
Junior and Senior Class Center Tips on...
Graduate School - Choosing and Applying
Choosing Graduate Schools
When beginning to make a list of potential graduate programs, keep an open mind. In graduate school, a good
university may not equal a good program. You may find that the best program in your field is located within a less
prestigious university. The best source of information about graduate school programs is Columbia faculty members in
your field of interest. But before you talk with them, do some preliminary research in the Center for Career Services,
the library, or on the Internet. Look at professional journals in your field to find where the cutting edge research is
being done. Contact professional associations to see if they evaluate programs. Then, set up an appointment to talk to
a Columbia faculty member about your list. When making your final decision, you will want to consider the curriculum,
faculty, the quality and number of students in the program, the university's location and facilities, and availability of
funding.
Applications for Graduate School
You can request application materials via e-mail or by sending postcards to the schools. More and more schools are
encouraging students to complete applications electronically. Please refer to the specific Web sites of the schools for
more details. In addition to the basic information, most applications will require GRE scores, a personal statement, a
transcript and letters of reference. Each is discussed below.
Graduate Record Examination
GRE's are required in support of most graduate school and fellowship applications. This three-hour General Test,
designed to measure verbal, quantitative, and analytical ability, is very similar to the SAT you took in high school.
Graduate school catalogues usually indicate whether a school requires the General Test, Subject Test, or both. The
general test is offered on the computer only. Although in theory, you can schedule the test at your convenience,
computer times can fill up at peak times. Many graduate schools require that you take the GRE by October or
December, so plan ahead. Subject tests are offered on specific dates. For further information, visit the GRE Web site
at www.gre.org.
Personal statements
Unlike undergraduate institutions, graduate schools will expect you to have clear direction and goals upon entering a
program. Therefore, their essay questions will be more focused. The most important piece of advice about writing
these statements should be obvious-be sure that you answer the question that is asked on the application. It is quite
possible that you will not be able to use the same essay for multiple applications. You should be prepared to make a
case for why you will fit with a particular program, and what you will be able to contribute to a department, rather than
just what you hope to receive.
Letters of recommendation
Graduate schools usually require two to three letters of recommendation. These should be academic letters, and you
should have at least one from a professor in your major. If you are changing departments, it is imperative you also have
a letter from someone who is teaching in that department. It is wise to begin acquiring recommendations as early as
possible so that they are in your file when you begin applying to graduate schools (generally November through
January). It can sometimes take professors a long time to complete a recommendation and they may need a gentle
reminder of their commitment to you. The earlier you start, the more assured you will be of meeting application
deadlines.

How many schools should I apply to?

2006-07-19T12:00:00.000-07:00

How many schools should I apply to?

Have a range of choices:

If you feel you have excellent prospects consider applying to fewer schools with more assurances of being accepted. If you feel you have average to limited prospects you may want to apply to a larger number. Some will be "safety-nets" which you are confident you will be accepted to and others will be ones you hope will accept you.

Do not sell yourself short. You may have features that your hoped for school is seeking. Speak with your advisor and with faculty members in your field of interest about the conventional number of applications sent out. Ask the reasoning behind this number.

Cost:
How much are you willing to spend on the application process? Costs can be hidden and can rapidly add up. Do some budget work estimating and totally the costs versus the amount you are willing to spend.

Costs in addition to application fees:

—academic transcript request and financial aid fees,

—fees associated with the processing of financial aid forms,

—fees required for GRE,GMAT, LSAT, MCAT exams and for test reports, photocopying expenses and postage costs, and

—interview and campus visitation costs.

Regardless of the number, be sure to apply to schools which complement your academic background, fit your graduate school needs, and will aid you in reaching your career goals.

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Completing the Application

Generate a list of the attributes to present to those deciding admissions. What are your prominent attributes which secure your acceptance into a particular graduate program? Study the prerequisites of each program. Match them with your attributes. Be prepared to reflect these matches on your application.

Important tips

Review application materials and make note of deadlines.

Duplicate your blank application to use as a rough draft.

Have supplemental material such as transcripts, resume, and test scores on hand.

Read the application thoroughly before entering information.

Follow the instructions carefully.

Respond to the items in an accurate and concise manner. Pay attention to detail.

Don't"mass produce" applications. Although some information is repetitive from school to school, applications vary. Address the unique aspects of your qualifications for each program.

If not applying online, type or have a professional type your application. The application is an example of your quality of work. The form should be neat and legible.

Thoroughly proofread your application. Check that all the necessary information is complete and accurate. Have someone else review the application for misspellings and typos.

Make a copy of the completed application and keep it on file.

The Personal Statement

A personal statement (or statement of purpose or personal essay) is required by just about every graduate program. It should indicate where you have been, where are you going, and how your experiences have prepared you for where you are going. It requires requires time, thought and frequent revisions. Personal statements are seldom longer than one page or three hundred words although in some cases additional forms may be added. If you were reviewing applications, would you welcome a lengthy essay?

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Academic Transcripts

Official copies are required for any post baccalaureate school. If you have taken coursework at multiple institutions, you likely will need academic transcripts from all (including those abroad). The Web site for the Records and Registration Office may have an online system to request forwarding to the schools applying to. If not, call or write for information including fees required.

Letters of Recommendation

Most graduate or professional schools require two to five confidential letters of recommendation. A faculty member in your department is usually regarded as the best reference, but letters from professionals in the field you are entering are also effective. Supervisors from internships and volunteer experiences are other good recommenders. Select people who can judge your past performance and character in a fair and accurate manner.

Contact those you think will give you a positive, accurate recommendation. Say, "I'm applying to______, could you write a positive letter of recommendation?" Tell the person your plans after getting the graduate degree and describe why you are interested in your chosen field. A copy of your personal statement and resume will give your recomenders a clearer concept and they will be better able to tailor a recommendation for program. Tailored recommendations are more persuasive than "canned" recommendations. Remind the recommender of your accomplishments so they can cite specific examples.

If your application materials include forms for recommendations, give these to your recommenders along with stamped and addressed envelopes. Request that the recommendations be completed and mailed by a specific date. Check with them a couple days before, to verify that the person is on track. Note whether the schools want the recommendations sent directly by the recommender or included with your application. Follow up with a thank you note. You may need their help again.

Additional Requirements

Additional items may be required with the application. Note any audio, visual, or written samples of your work required to be submitted. If you have questions regarding appropriate submissions, speak with a contact person in the program. Don't assume. Check.

Meeting Deadlines

Generally, applications should be forwarded ten to eleven months before the semester you wish to enroll. Give yourself plenty of time to request recommendations, request transcripts, prepare your statement and additional requirements, and complete your application. After sending all requirements, make follow up phone calls to verify arrival of materials at the institutions and the completion of your admissions folder. Make copies of all correspondence and not just on a computer or disk. Keep notes on all phone calls including the name of the person spoken to. Maintain

Grad school? Think again

2006-07-19T01:01:00.000-07:00

By Christine Hucko
The Pitt News (U. Pittsburgh)
05/17/2006

(U-WIRE) PITTSBURGH - Two years ago, after I had already signed on the dotted line to attend graduate school, I came across an article that read as a warning to unsuspecting students like me.

The article was a friendly reminder that graduate school is not for everyone and that there are some serious things to consider before signing up for another two or three years of schooling.

Even though I broke several of the author's "rules" concerning the reasons not to decide on graduate school, I shrugged it off and thought, "What does he know?" The answer to that question, in retrospect, is "A lot."

With that in mind, after putting in two years of graduate school myself, I thought it was time to re-evaluate this columnist's arguments and add a few thoughts of my own.

The article implied that students should not consider graduate school based on reasons such as the following: "I have no idea what else to do with my life, so I may as well go to grad school," "Drinking beer until dawn and getting up at noon is awesome, I should try to extend this lifestyle for a few more years" or "If I don't have a master's degree, I will never find a decent job."

Granted, attaining further education is not such a bad thing if you can't figure out what to do with your life. And it's hard to argue against the beauty of having incredible flexibility with sleep schedules and such. Also, earning a master's degree just might land you a higher paying, more prestigious job -- if that's what you're after.

However, these rationalizations should be carefully weighed against the realities of graduate school. As the saying goes, "The devil is in the details." Perhaps the illustration, included with the article I read, told the story best.

Pictured on the page was a young man, bent over, with a look of utter exhaustion on his face and at least five books stacked on top of his hunched back. If that image is not enough of a fair warning, here are some other points to consider:

As a graduate student, you will likely be expected to thrust yourself into a topic at 90 mph. Your eight-page paper on the abolition of slavery as an undergrad will probably pale in comparison to the 30-pagers that will be expected of you on much more narrowly focused topics.

And speaking of papers, the American university system does not adequately prepare students to write research papers -- I can say this with some authority having spent time at three different institutions as an undergrad. As I painfully discovered at one point in my academic career, a research paper should not be confused with a book report, a few pages slapped together with excerpts from wikipedia.org, or the like.

But students should not take it personally -- the instruction on how to compose a paper properly just isn't there. So feel fortunate if you had an undergraduate professor who took the time and energy to explain the real research process to you.

In some cases, classes called "seminars" consist of as few as five other students. In these classes, you may be expected to read a book or two a week. And with a class this small, it's hard to hide behind the answers of your fellow students. If you don't do the readings, it shows.

Also, although I cannot speak for all graduate programs, I found that many of the professors in my program had no mercy when it came to attendance, grading and participation. In other words, your chances of success triple when your butt is in the chair and you say something.

Be wary of the folks who tell you that graduate school is a breeze. They just might be the same people who sat next to you in calc class and aced every exam with minimal effort, while you pulled all-nighters to get C's.

The decision to attain an advanced degree is one that deserves serious consideration. While I personally do not regret going to graduate school, there have been many times during the past two years when I wished I would have heeded the warnings of others beforehand. So before you sign up for another two years, at least give it a second thought.

SECTION 7. Advising Others

2006-07-16T16:02:00.000-07:00

Once you get a job, and probably long before, your status in the community will quietly shift: you'll no longer be the disoriented student at the bottom of the totem pole, and others will be coming to you for advice. That's particularly true if you've been building a network, organizing professional activities, and projecting a sense of purpose in your career. Perhaps you are not yet anyone's official dissertation advisor, but you are an advisor in an informal sense, with a chance to do good and a risk of doing harm. You need to see the situation coming, because being in a position to give advice can evoke strange reactions. If you have any latent tendencies to be an empire-builder, power freak, meddler, or know-it-all, now is when they will come out. It will take a little time before you get comfortable with the role, so in the meantime here are some concepts and rules.
* Figure out whether you are being asked for advice at all. Often people who have troubling situations just want to talk about them, either to sort out the situation emotionally or just to rant. Maybe you're just supposed to sit there and say nothing, which if you're like me will be good for you. It is very common to hallucinate that you are being asked for advice when you are not. Giving unwanted advice is a serious and widespread character defect. It is a good practice, therefore, to ask "do you want advice?" or "are you asking for advice?". Don't make it sound like you are bursting with advice that you can't wait to spill out. If the answer is "no", shrug and say "okay" and be done with it. Regardless of the answer, the situation will be clarified in both of your minds.
* Decide in advance whether you are qualified to give people advice about personal matters, or just about professional matters. Most people are terrible at the former. In either case, be clear in your own mind whether the matter is personal, professional, or a combination of both. People's situations usually have both aspects, especially early in their careers before they have themselves all established and compartmentalized, so you may have to say things like, "well, that's a personal aspect of the situation that I can't really help with".
* Understand the different structural situations that might cause the person to need advice. The hardest and most important case is when the person is just entering into a new institutional setting (such as the early years of graduate school) or else making the transition to a very different location within the institution (such as when starting their first faculty job). In that case, what's really needed is a general orientation to an unfamiliar landscape. You're inside and they're outside, and they're still clueless. Your major obstacle is that you've forgotten what that clueless feeling is like. Try to remember, though, because your job is to provide the person with a way of looking at things. Try to explain, concisely and in plain language, the logic of the world they're entering, so they can see what's going on around them. Provide a sense of proportion. "Is this situation normal?" "Can this be done?" Another possibility, very different and much easier, is that the person understands the unwritten rules of the institution just fine, and needs advice simply because you know particular facts. Perhaps you are acquainted with particular individuals and can provide advice about dealing with them. Explain what those individuals care about, what concerns they are likely to have, what misperceptions are liable to set them off, what agendas they have going on, and so forth. Yet another possibility is that you're being asked for guidance, either step-by-step instructions or an intuitive sense of proportion, on a specific process that you have been through, such as organizing a workshop. Figure out what kind of advice you are being asked for, confirm your understanding with the person, and then advise accordingly.
* Realize the limits of your expertise. Learn to say "I don't know" without feeling insecure. Practice phrases like "I'm at the edge of my expertise here, and you might want to talk to X or Y who has done more of this than I have". Learn to detect the feeling inside yourself when you cease knowing what you're talking about and start making things up instead. Notice how good it feels to know what you're talking about, and how good it feels to refrain from making things up.
* Clarify the situation. Make sure you've got the facts before you start issuing directions. The person you're advising may not even be clear as to the nature of the situation, and you may well find yourself turning up important facts that completely change the picture. This is particularly true when you're being asked to help impose order on chaos, as for example when the question is "What should I do with my life?". Understand whether the crucial facts are about the person asking for help, about some public situation such as a bureaucratic process, about third parties, about technical machinery, or whatever. Some situations are clearer than others, and when the situation is unclear you should settle down to extended elicitation of facts. Decide whether you should be asking directive questions (that is, questions that presuppose that you know what the real issue is) or semi-directive questions (that is, questions that are fairly vague and are really aimed at getting the person talking so that you can listen to their language and the way they're talking). An example of a directive question is, "have you registered for the course?"; an example of a semi-directive question is, "how did you decide to take the course?". Sometimes it's useful for the person to wander around exploring different aspects of the situation, and sometimes it's not. It's up to you to discern the difference.
* Find out what's behind the question. People often don't know how to ask their question, or because they don't understand their situation they are asking the wrong question. If a graduate student asks you how to start a journal, for example, you can probably guess that the question is wrong. Even when the question is right, you usually want to know what motivated it. So unless the question is really clear-cut, don't launch into an answer until you have elicited the broader background that motivated it. Maybe your advice will be to ask other questions.
* If the person is having trouble with a decision, find out if they know what they want to do with their life. I've mentioned that "what should I do with my life?" involves imposing order on chaos, and you can hardly believe how true this is until you start talking to people about it. Some people tolerate the chaos perfectly well, and they are happy pursuing what interests them from day to day or year to year. Other people, however, live in a constant state of distress because of it, and those people need help. When people can't decide what to write their term papers about, for example, I find that they are actually uncertain what their life is about. Just ask them: "what do you want to do with your life?". They will probably shrug and giggle. They have no idea. I believe that someone who is living in that kind of chaos is incapable of learning, and so I regularly turn conversations about term paper topics into conversations about career plans. I don't require anyone to make any irreversible commitments, but I do urge them to come up with a tentative plan that they can explore through their term paper. The same principle applies to many other decisions. Now, some people don't want a plan for their lives, and insist on living in state of permanent chaos. That's their right, but it's also my right to tell those people nicely that I don't know how to help them.
* Cultivate your powers of finding things interesting. If you are like most of us, you will need to learn how to distinguish your own interests from other people's. If someone is looking for direction, the worst thing you can do is to foist your own direction on them. Most such foisting is unconscious: you may not intend to manipulate anyone into following your own path rather than theirs, but if you have sewn yourself into the narrow world of your dissertation then you may not even recognize that other paths exists. Get used to the fact that some people want to make money, and that other people are interested in research methodologies that are quite different from your own, and that still other people are much more interested in theory than you are, or much less. Most people couldn't care less about the research literatures that fascinate you, and that's okay. In advising others, you have an opportunity to expand yourself by searching out and articulating a vision of greatness for someone else's life. You have to start by believing that everyone, including the person you are advising, is capable of making a tremendous contribution to the world. That tremendous contribution is inside them somewhere, it's trying to get out, and if you are advising someone who is looking for direction then your job is to identify that tremendous contribution and get excited about it. Figure out what the person is interested in. Elicit bits and pieces of their interests, then offer various alternative directions that they could pursue, and ask them which alternatives strike a chord. The process is like tuning a radio: you are going to fiddle with the dial until the person's tremendous-contribution-in-the-making comes through loud and clear. Share that person's excitement, and enthusiastically preach the importance of their vision. Their path won't always be easy, and your articulate and persuasive confidence will help keep them on track. In particular, you can help them by acting as a translator between their world and the professional world that they want to join, explaining their vision to them in professional-sounding language. Sell them their own lives. And whatever you do, don't go around discouraging people, or telling them that they can't cut it. Your question should be "what does this person down-deep care about?", because that is where their greatest contribution will lie. It's not your job to go around trashing people's dreams, because you're not that smart.
* Don't try to tell people what to work on. If someone is looking for help identifying a research topic, your advice should remain on the level of process, not substance. Research topics are extremely personal, and a topic that interests you is not likely to interest anyone else. You can mirror back someone's topic in an interesting way, but you can't devise a topic from scratch. What you can do, however, is to offer a few potential topics as probes into the person's interests. You can say, "okay, just to help me get a sense of your interests, let me just make up a few topics off the top of my head, and you can tell me which ones are more and less interesting, and why". Note that you are deliberately downplaying your own investment in the topics you suggest.
* Try not to offer evaluations. Only rarely will anyone ever ask you, "how good is my writing" or "how good is my research". If you think you are being asked for an objective evaluation like this, stop and think. Either you are really being asked, "should I change careers?", in which case you should explore that question in the thorough way that it deserves, or you are being asked, "what are some specific ways in which I can improve my writing/research?", in which case you can treat the question very narrowly and positively without offering any kind of overall assessment.
* It's not about you. In offering advice to someone else, you may be tempted to use your own experiences as examples. Don't. Stories about your life will not communicate anything useful. If you have learned any lessons from your experiences, then that's great; you can explore how (and whether) those lessons apply to the particulars of the other person's life. But leave your life out of it. This rule has only one exception. Often someone will be distressed because they're going through a crisis that lots of people go through. You can help them feel better by saying, "yeah, I know, I went through that; lots of people do", and leaving it at that -- just a few words.
* Don't be a jerk. Many people use "frank advice" as an excuse to be obnoxious. Have a caring purpose. This means saying things because they are going to help someone get a clear understanding and their own direction, not just because they are true.
* Understand which words belong to you and which belong to the person you're advising. For example, if you are serving as a bureaucratic authority (e.g., an instructor in a course) then it is your job to understand and adjudicate the meanings of the relevant bureaucratic words. On the other hand, if the person is telling you about their life, or about a world that you are not a part of, they will often introduce words that you do not control, and whose full meaning you can probably never know. I'm not just talking about five-syllable jargon words, but ordinary simple words that might or might not carry special connotations for particular people. Don't try to take control of such words. Don't presuppose that you know what they mean, and do not try to impose your own meaning upon them. Nothing kills communication faster. Instead, incorporate those words into questions aimed at eliciting a fuller picture of the situation. For example, if the person says, "I want a meaningful job", you have no idea what "meaningful" means to them. But you can ask a question like, "what would a meaningful job be like?", or "who comes to mind that has a job that's meaningful in the way you'd like?". This can get condescending if you do it wrong, but once you have the concept of not legislating what "meaningful" means you'll figure it out.
* Be a mirror. Make clear what you know and don't know. Check your understanding by saying, "let me check my understanding by trying to explain that back to you in my own words", doing so, and saying, "is that right?". This is called active listening, and it accomplishes many things, such as preventing you from saying dumb things, eliciting any further information you might need, and tactfully showing the person how well they are expressing themselves. Own your perceptions and feelings by saying things like, "my sense is ..." and "I perceive you as being unclear on ...". Emphasize the evidentiary basis of your comments by saying things like, "I hardly know you, so what I'm saying is based only on what you've told me and on the impressions I'm getting here". It may sound like a platitude, but it's not. It makes clear that you do not have a magical ability to read anybody's mind, and that you understand your limitations.
* Know your feelings. Let's say that you're listening to someone's problems and you start feeling angry (or sad, or confused, or itching to get out of there). Although I don't want you to engage in psychoanalysis or start talking about your feelings in a way that would take the focus off the person you're advising, it will be useful if you can notice the feeling and start to identify it. The first step, which is harder than it sounds, is actually becoming aware of the feeling. If you're feeling angry and you start yelling, then that's a good sign that you're acting on the feeling rather than consciously observing it. Once you become consciously aware of the feeling, try to locate where in your body you are feeling it. Is it in your stomach? Your jaw? Take a moment to feel the feeling, and ask yourself whether the feeling is familiar. Is this something you commonly feel? Once you get a fix on the feeling, you can ask yourself some questions about it:
(1) Whose feeling is it? When giving someone advice, it's common to feel that person's feelings instead of your own. Either you are feeling a natural empathy, or else the person is unconsciously trying to shift their own feelings onto you. This is especially common with feelings of confusion, and if you become confused while giving someone advice then you should definitely stop and consider whether it's your own confusion or theirs.
(2) Is the feeling rational? That is, are you angry (sad, frightened, confused, etc) about the actual, real situation that's happening there in the room, or has something about that situation poked an emotional wound that you're carrying around from an unrelated situation? For example, if you are advising someone who is being oppressed, you might start to get angry (or whatever) because you're unconsciously calling up memories of your own unresolved experiences of being oppressed. Feelings from unrelated situations are rarely useful, and you should try to file them and return to the business at hand. Deal with them later on your own time.
(3) Who is the feeling directed toward? You might be angry (or sad, frightened, confused, etc) toward the person you are advising, for example because the person's actual agenda is not to get advice but to manipulate you. If so then you'll have to decide whether to proceed, and how. Or you might be angry (etc) toward some third party that the person is telling you about. In that case you need to file that feeling for later and proceed in a rational, analytical way, since your job is to be useful, not angry.
Once you have identified the feeling in these ways, you will have to decide what to do about it. The point, again, is not to launch into extended psychological discussions. You probably don't have the training for that. You could simply explain that you're having the feeling and what you think is causing it. You can even say that you're mentioning this precisely because you want to stick to rational analysis of the situation. Or you can simply use the feeling as a source of data as you decide how to proceed with the conversation. In any case, the simple act of identifying the feeling will make you less likely to act irrationally on it.
* Take a different approach when advising someone who is distraught. A person who is acutely emotionally upset (failed an exam, might get thrown out of school, whatever) is temporarily incapable of rational thought. That's not their fault, and you shouldn't blame them for it. To the contrary, you should accommodate their situation by not doing or saying anything that demands rational thought from them. Don't try to explain things or solve problems. Don't say "I know how you feel". Just listen for a while. See if you can make yourself into a container where they can put all the junk until they are in a position to process it. When the time comes to put the pieces back together, have them walk through the facts of the situation. Simply saying the facts, without any attempt to evaluate or change them, is the first step to reestablishing rational thought. Concreteness is important. Watch for any tendencies to blur the facts with hazy language, or to speak in abstractions. Watch for attempts to conflate logically unrelated situations into a big ball of distressing emotions. These are defenses against dealing with the reality. Also watch for attempts to conflate simple statements of the facts with extra, additional judgements about what those facts imply -- such conflations are a very important sign that the person is not dealing with reality yet. Of course, maybe it's not time to deal with reality yet, and that's not for you to decide. But if it's time to reason about the situation, then you can do a service by keeping things on a rational track. Prioritize. Ask questions that will let you distinguish between issues that really need to be decided right now and issues that can wait. Don't get sidetracked worrying about facts that have no bearing on the issues that need to be decided first. Once you've reestablished the rhythms of rational discussion, you can resume applying the rest of the strategies I've presented here.
* Be clear whether the situation calls for you to offer specific instructions. Usually it does not. Everyone has their own path, and you probably can't have enough information to know what course is actually best, given the full context of their life. It is important to understand this, because otherwise you are likely to get yourself too committed to the solution that happens to occur to you. Some people just want reactions, perspectives, options, issues, and reassurance that they're not crazy. They can figure the rest out for themselves. Other people want detailed instructions. You'll have to figure out who wants what.
* If you start to suspect a hidden agenda, stop, and don't continue until you have clarified the situation. Some people want advice so they can blame you if your advice, which they plan on following in only the most narrow way, doesn't work. Some people pretend to want advice so they can resist it. Some people are really there to get you to say that they are right and someone else is wrong. Most people with agendas will never admit them, and it probably won't do any good for you to accuse them of anything. But if you determine that your time is not being used in good faith, simply say that you don't know how to help them. And let it go.
* If you find yourself pressuring, manipulating, or arguing, then something has gone wrong. You can state your views, but let go of your desire to control anyone. Other people are responsible for their actions and have to make their own decisions. You can give them factual information and state your own opinions (e.g., by saying "my opinion is ..."), but trying to control them won't help and will probably cloud their thinking. If their decision affects you then you are not giving advice but negotiating, which is extremely different. If you are actually negotiating then this must be made clear all around. Recruiting someone to join your research group or department, for example, is a kind of negotiation. Likewise, you should realize if you have any conflicts of interest, for example when the topic is whether the student ought to be working for you. Sometimes the conflicts are not obvious, and in that case you should obviously disclose them. But if your interests really aren't affected, then realize that and let go of needing to fix the outcome.
* Giving advice is often iterative. You'll offer advice, but your advice will cause other facts and issues to surface, such as the reasons why your advice won't work. That's fine. Just start another round of clarifying the situation. And once you understand that advice is iterative, you'll be more likely to frame your advice in a conditional way, like "okay, how about if you ..., would that work?".
* Talk in usefully medium-sized units. Don't give long speeches. If your advisee is filling up with comments or resistance as you talk then your talking isn't doing any good anyway. If they seem to want to talk, stop talking, because they aren't listening. By the same token, if your head fills up with things to say while the person is talking, make notes. Then just say the one that's most important. It's okay to say "hang on, I need to keep notes to keep track of this". If you can't get around to saying everything that you want to say, you can always follow up with an e-mail letter if necessary. Or you can just forget it. You don't need to present a complete, seamless picture. Just say enough to get the person thinking on their own again, then stop. You can check understanding with something like "is this making any sense?". This is better than "do you understand?", since it puts the blame on you and doesn't presuppose that you are making sense. An even better question is, "do I understand?", since that's a more common problem anyway.
* Get to the point. Don't start into a philosophical speech whose connection to the issue at hand is not going to be revealed until it's almost done. If you do have to explain an abstract concept, say so first: "I guess to explain this I have to introduce an abstract concept, okay?". The person you're advising is focused on their problem, and they don't have the attention span for anything whose relation to the problem has not been made clear. Concisely explain your thought processes.
* Don't ask questions unless you want to know the answers. Don't ask "quiz questions" whose answers you already know. Making someone read your mind teaches all the wrong lessons.
* Practice explaining things. When you see someone pursuing their career in an admirably effective way, stop and figure out what they are doing. The concepts in "Networking on the Network" should help. Then pretend that you are explaining the admirably effective strategies you are seeing. Rehearse the actual words that you would use to make these strategies comprehensible to someone who still feels clueless. If you do this consistently then your rehearsals will come back to you automatically some day when it's your turn to give advice. You will also start to notice analogies and patterns among the various admirable strategies you observe, and this will help you to develop your own concepts.
* If you find yourself giving the same advice over and over, write it down. This happens a lot when you're dealing with lots of people who are all in basically the same situation, such as students in your class. Most of them will never ask you for advice, even though most of them need it. By writing your advice down, you save everyone's time and spread the benefits of your wisdom to more people. Then keep adding to your emerging how-to every time a new issue comes up. That's where this article came from. Not only that: every time I see a student feeling bad or getting into trouble, I ask myself whether the necessary advice is in this article, and if it isn't I add another sentence, paragraph, or section.

Who should go to graduate school?

2006-07-07T22:20:00.000-07:00

Who should go to graduate school? Where and why should they go? What is graduate school? This note is a biased answer to some of these questions. Keep in mind that the answers are provided by a person who believes that education in general is a wonderful thing, has no regrets about going to graduate school, and feels it led to an employment position that almost ideally suits his ambitions and temperament. This article addresses some of the preparations that should be taken by students planning to go to graduate school, but provides only the basic details. I do not pretend that it is a substitute for personal advice, which I strongly suggest you obtain before making such an important decision.

Who Should Go to Graduate School?
My answer to this is easy: anyone with an interest in furthering his or her education in the mathematical sciences. An undergraduate program in mathematics only introduces you to the basic areas of the subject; it is not intended to provide a working knowledge of mathematics any more than an undergraduate premedical program intends to give a person a working knowledge of medicine. The discipline of mathematics is so broad that you will be only able to sample it in the ten or so courses that are required beyond calculus. If you want to be a productive mathematician in education, research, or applications, you must continue your study. The same is true for statistics and to a slightly lesser extent for computer science. In the latter discipline you can usually find professional employment with only a Bachelor's degree, but you will likely be doing rather routine programming.

Graduate programs in the mathematical sciences (by this I mean to include pure mathematics, applied mathematics, statistics, and computer science) differ from undergraduate programs in at least two major ways. First, an undergraduate program is designed to provide you a well-rounded education in the arts and sciences as well as introduce you to your discipline. In graduate school the program concentrates only on subjects that are felt to be relevant to your discipline. The second difference involves finances. Students generally pay for their undergraduate education, but most graduate students in the mathematical sciences do not.

Who Pays?
The common device for avoiding the cost of graduate training is the Graduate Assistantship. The assistantship requires the graduate student to perform tasks for the university in exchange for a tuition waiver and a modest salary. The tasks for the beginning graduate student usually involve either teaching or grading papers. A more advanced graduate student may receive an assistantship for helping a faculty member on a research project. The duties might also include computer programming or consultation, particularly for graduate students in applied mathematics or computer science. Whatever the task, the assistantship is generally designed to require about 12 to 15 hours per week of the graduate student's time. The stipend that is given to the student in addition to the tuition waiver varies from institution to institution, but is generally on the bare subsistence level, approximately 25-35%, for the academic year, of what the student could obtain from a full-time job in industry. Summer support is often available for students in PhD programs, but seldom in MasterÕs programs. While this stipend may seem to be a pittance, suppose that the assistantship requires about 13 hours of work per week for the 9-month school year and that the stipend is $9,000. Then on a 40 hour per week basis this would translate to approximately $36,000 per year. In addition, the assistantship provides a tuition waiver. It isn't, then, that the assistantship does not pay well, it is rather that you are paid a reasonable salary for the amount you work, but you don't work much.

How to Choose a Graduate School

I will assume that you have some broad idea of your area of interest, for example, pure mathematics (like real analysis or abstract algebra), applied mathematics (like differential equations or numerical analysis), statistics, or computer science. This is all that is expected of a beginning graduate student. Once you have a Master's degree you should be able to refine your interest within the category you have chosen so that you can determine programs and advisors that have strengths in your area of interest.

You should take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). This examination comes in two parts. The first part tests general ability in three areas: verbal, quantitative, and analytical. This part is very much like the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) that is given to high school students. The second part of the examination is in your chosen subject area, for example, mathematics or computer science. To see sample questions and get information about testing dates, sites and registration consult the GRE webpage at www.gre.org. You should plan to take the GRE no later than December in your senior year, since it takes about two months for schools to receive the results and some graduate programs make their original decisions by the middle of February. You must study if you are taking the subject examination in mathematics; it is difficult and can be intimidating, even for good students, especially if they have not done sufficient preparation. Particularly review all your calculus, the theory even more than the techniques, and talk to faculty about problems in other mathematical areas.

There are a number of sources that you should consult to obtain information about various schools and their programs. First and foremost is your undergraduate advisor. The person who guided you through your undergraduate mathematics program should know your abilities and interests. This person will likely be writing letters of reference for you and should be kept aware of your plans. If you don't have a faculty advisor in mathematics, quit reading at this point and find a faculty member who knows you, is interested in you, and is willing to discuss your plans for the future. This is priority one.

Each December the American Mathematical Society publishes a booklet entitled Assistantships and Graduate Fellowships in the Mathematical Sciences. This gives a summary of the graduate support that is available in the mathematical sciences in the United States and Canada. It also gives, in summary form, information about the programs such as the number of students awarded Bachelor's, Master's, and Doctorate degrees, the areas of research for the Doctoral students, the amount of work required of graduate assistants, and the duties that the assistants perform. The booklet lists virtually all the mathematics programs and many of the statistics and computer science programs as well. There are advertisements from many of the larger programs and a listing of stipends that are available for supported travel. In all, this is an excellent place to start your search for a graduate program. Any mathematics department should have a copy that you can look at and perhaps borrow, but it is so useful it is certainly worthwhile to have your own copy. It can be ordered from the American Mathematical Society, www.ams.org.

A similar resource, entitled Graduate Assistantship Directory, is published for Computer Science programs by the Association for Computing Machinery. Fittingly, it can be consulted online at www.acm.org.

There is a book called The Gourman Report that annually rates programs in all disciplines. There are several online ratings of graduate programs as well (e.g., www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/beyond/bcphd-htm).Take these ratings with a grain of salt and remember that a program that produces students who are excellent in research may or may not produce students who are excellent in teaching.

How do you use all the information that these sources provide? The best answer to this is to be insightful. You want to choose a graduate program that will educate you well, give you the confidence you need to succeed in your chosen field, and help you find a position that is commensurate with your training and abilities when they have decided to release you to the world. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, you want to choose a program where the faculty will respect your abilities and treat you as the apprentice mathematician you are. You should be aware, however, that all too often students enter graduate school full of confidence, only to become filled with self-doubt when they hit some mathematical walls in their first graduate courses or when they take their first exams. Often it is the most talented undergraduates who go on to graduate school, so for many students this will be the first time they have been challenged by their peers and their classes. Always keep in mind that you have a lot to offer the world, and that if things get rough at times it may not be because of your abilities. A program in which the faculty does not have sufficient self-confidence and maturity can sometimes make the hurdles to the PhD unrealistically high.

To help pick a reasonable program you should probably do a little data analysis. For example, to determine the schools that have unrealistic graduate expectations, you might compare the relative percentages of graduates to students receiving support. To determine which schools do a good job of finding positions for their graduates, find out who the PhD graduates were in the past five years and then find out where they presently are. You can determine the graduates by looking in the library at the Dissertation Abstracts. The Combined Membership List of MAA, AMS, and SIAM ( www.ams.org/cml) should tell you where these graduates are presently located. An indication of the type of training a school is providing might come from looking at the research grants awarded to its faculty and recent graduates.

Finally, talk to as many of your professors as you can. Especially consult those who are actively involved in mathematics and who seem to be in contact with faculty at other institutions. Be sure to talk to those faculty who have recently completed graduate programs. Ask them about their experiences, and see what advice they have to offer.

Recognize that this is one of the biggest decisions of your life. When you have narrowed your choices to a few, make an appointment and visit them. Talk to the faculty to see if they are truly interested in students. If they are not interested in you at this time it is unlikely that they will be interested in you later. Talk to as many graduate students as possible, first year through dissertation. Try to determine if their experience has been rewarding, and if they know what is going on in the mathematical world beyond their own institution. The more-senior students should have had worthwhile teaching and seminar presentation experience, and the dissertation students should personally know some experts in their area in the world at large. If you are a woman, talk to female graduate students to learn about the environment for women. There are many other things that I am sure you can think of to help you make your decision. After all, you are in mathematics which is the discipline of rational problem solving.

Requirements

A graduate student on an assistantship will usually complete a Master's program quite easily in two years . A full-time load for an assistant is generally three courses per term. In most programs there is also a thesis option that reduces the course work requirements by about 15-20%, but requires a substantial, but not necessarily publishable, paper that is written according to rather rigid guidelines. Almost all Master's programs also include the requirement of a comprehensive examination at the end of the program. This examination usually covers about half of the course work in the program and is used to determine whether the student has the comprehensive knowledge of the discipline that would justify the designation of "Master." Students generally dread the examination, but it is uncommon, although not unheard of, for a student to fail to receive a Master's degree because of the examination. There is almost always a provision for re-examination if the student fails to perform adequately on the first try.

With the Master's degree you can become a professional mathematician and usually expect to command a starting salary of up to 20% more than you would if you started with a Bachelor's degree. You might even be able to direct your own research projects, but a research position normally requires the PhD.

The only true requirement for the PhD is the demonstrated ability to conduct substantial research independently. There are hour requirements, examination requirements, and often even a foreign language reading requirement, but these are all designed to provide the student with the broad working knowledge of the subject area that will serve as a base for the research work. Let me not mislead you regarding the examinations, however. In order to begin research work the student must have a research advisor. To ensure that advisors spend their time productively, the student must be formally admitted to the PhD program. This generally requires passing one or more of a series of examinations that are designed to eliminate the unlikely candidates. The examinations may be written (perhaps 3 examinations each about 4 or more hours long), oral (commonly 2 or 3 hours with 3 or 4 faculty as inquisitors), or, not infrequently, a combination of the two. The examinations are designed to test the basic knowledge of the student and also to see if the student can attack a new problem in a reasonable way. In contrast to the Master's examination, it is not uncommon for even a good student to fail to pass the PhD examinations the first time. In fact, the first set (and at some schools the only set) of examinations is usually given after the first two years of graduate work so that a student who does not pass the examination on the first try can leave with a Master's degree. Students are commonly given two or more tries at the examinations, and, when the examination is written, they can sometimes repeat only those parts they previously failed. The precise examination procedure varies from school to school, however, so you should check carefully the procedures at any school that interests you. Whatever the specific procedure, there is generally great rejoicing when the candidacy examination has been passed, accompanied, quite often, by a party and restrained decadence.

Graduate Study in Psychology: Letters of Reference

2006-07-01T17:31:00.000-07:00

1. Develop good relationships with your professors. Try to get to know 3 or 4 on a fairly close basis. Some graduate schools want 3 letters of reference, some want 4. Graduate schools know what a generic letter sounds like, so you want your professors to know you a little bit better than "oh yeah, that kid who sat in the front row of my class who got an A-."
2. Get the most prestigious faculty you can to write your letters. It really helps if the people on the admissions committee at the school you're applying to know one of your recommenders. If you're applying to a cognitive psych program, for example, try to get a well-known cognitive psychologist to write one of your letters. Unfortunately, academic psychologists are as swayed by hearsay and "who you know" prejudices as anyone else--if you have a good recommendation from someone who is respected, you have a huge advantage over someone with similarly good qualifications who was not recommended by a well-known psychologist.
3. It is best to ask professors for letters in person. Try emailing them and setting up an appointment, then politely ask them for a letter at the appointment. Some professors consider it very rude to ask for a letter by email, so be careful.
4. Remember that by asking for a letter you are asking the professor for a big favor--you should approach it as such. Writing thank you notes after the fact is a good idea.
5. Once you're ready to apply, give your recommenders your resume and any other information you have that you think might help them write about what a great person you are and how much potential you have for grad school.
6. While all of your letter writers don't have to be faculty, it's a really good idea to have the majority be professors--psych professors, that is. You might have, for example, an English professor do one of your letters simply because she can attest to your writing ability, but most of your recommenders should be psychologists--graduate students or college or university professors--people who know what graduate school is about and have some idea about whether you really have what it takes to be successful there.
7. While it's not essential, try not to have all male or all female recommenders. Some people might believe that a mix of letters from both male and female recommenders indicates that you work well with both.
8. If you're applying to some type of mental health program (e.g., clinical, counseling, social work) and you've had a job in mental health, it's a very good idea to have your job supervisor write one of the letters. I wouldn't recommend more than one letter from your employment, though: most recommenders should be college or university faculty.
9. Give the professors writing your letters very brief and clear instructions, and make sure you provide all of the envelopes and postage they need. (It is pretty impolite to ask someone to write a letter for you and then not provide the postage.) When they're done, send them a thank you card--they've done you a big favor (well, assuming they wrote you a good letter, anyway).
10. It is very rare that someone will write you a bad letter--many professors will simply tell you that they don't think they can write you a good letter (or more likely, don't have time, etc., etc.). If a professor hints at the fact that they don't think they have much to say about you or that they have a few concerns, they might be trying to tell you that they don't have the very best impression of you. It won't hurt to ask a professor directly, "Do you think you can write a positive letter for me?" If you're astute, you should be able to figure out whether you really want a particular person to write you a letter or not.
11. Finally, go ahead and tell your professors that your deadlines are earlier than they really are, and then give them the letters about 6 weeks before you tell them they're due. When I applied to grad school, I told one professor that the deadline was December 1st (the actual deadline was January 15th). I gave him the letter in the middle of October. Guess when it was finally mailed? The middle of February! And from what I hear, this happens a lot more than it should.

Fewer foreign students coming to U.S.

2006-07-01T10:15:00.000-07:00

By JENN STEWART
Scripps Howard Foundation Wire
March 28, 2004

- Each year, thousands of foreign graduate students come to the United States in pursuit of the American dream. Often, they are inspired by democracy and motivated by capitalism.

For many, in 2004, the dream is fading.

More than 90 percent of American colleges and universities report declines in the number of applications they received from foreign scholars for next fall's classes, according to a report published this month by the Council of Graduate Schools. Colleges reported admitting 32 percent fewer foreign graduate students than for the current academic year.

After earning two degrees in New Delhi, Ram Mohan left everything behind in 1989 and came to the United States to earn a doctorate in chemistry. His traditional Indian, middle-class upbringing taught him "the single most important thing one can possess is a solid education."

"I think the main reason was, and still is, that this is the best place to pursue a higher education," Mohan said. "Hard work pays, and if you are good there is nothing that can stop you in this country."

Mohan, an associate professor of chemistry at Illinois Wesleyan University, said that without his education at the University of Maryland he would probably still be in India where "there is less opportunity."

No one can tell for certain why foreign students are deciding against an American education, but there are many theories.

One of the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide hijackers was living in the country on a student visa. Since then, the dynamics of coming to the United States have changed.

"The problem here is that it is very difficult to ask people that don't show up why they didn't show up," said Peter Syverson, the Council of Graduate Schools' vice president for research.

The council worked with international student advisers and graduate admissions officials and found three major reasons: the difficult process of obtaining a visa, the perception that the United States is not welcoming to foreign students and the rising costs of higher education here.

The report showed that the most severe drops in foreign applications were from the countries and regions that usually send the most students: China, India and the Middle East. Of the universities polled, 85 percent had fewer Chinese applicants and 69 percent had fewer Indian applicants.

The report also found that the programs most affected by the trend were engineering and physical sciences.

This may be partly attributed to the Visas Mantis program, established in 1989 to screen students applying for programs that the government believes might contribute to the illegal transfer of sensitive technology.

"The mechanics of getting to the U.S. ... are much more difficult," Syverson said. "We hear that more than any other reason, just the visa process."

Any student wishing to study in this country is required to obtain a visa. The process begins with an application and an interview, which many students had been able to bypass pre-9/11. After a review, the U.S. consulate decides either to award a visa or require a Mantis check by the FBI and the State Department.

Meanwhile, other English-speaking countries are reaping the benefits.

In Australia, for the current academic year, international student enrollment at both the graduate and undergraduate level increased 16.5 percent, according to the Australian Government International Education Network.

The United States saw growth of less than 1 percent for the current academic year for graduate and undergraduate students, according to a report published by the Institute of International Education.

"I think, basically, Australia is coming forward as a premier destination for students," said Carri Orrison, manager of information services at the Australian Education Office at the U.S. embassy. "It took a couple of years."

Syverson said he fears that the repercussions could get worse.

"If the U.S. is no longer the place that international students want to come to, will we miss the best and the brightest? Will we be hurt by that?" he said.

How to Contact Faculty Members

2006-06-30T17:23:00.000-07:00

Contacting professors at the schools in which you are interested is probably the single most unique thing about graduate school admissions. Though Andrea Average never would have considered this, it is an extraordinarily valuable experience. Many positive things will emerge from your efforts, including your own evolving recognition of the application process as essentially interpersonal, not impersonal as it most often is viewed.

As a practical matter, you probably should hope to contact at least one professor at each school to which you are thinking of applying. With seven to ten schools, this is still quite a lot of letters, but after the first is completed the rest will flow relatively easily.

First, do your homework. Check through the brochures of all the schools you are seriously considering. Using the faculty listings and research interests as a guide, check whom might you be especially interested in working with, or under. Even if this professor does not end up being your advisor, you will have engaged a important collegial relationship, and gained useful information as well. Certainly it won't kill you to be wrong about whom to choose, but you might as well be right.

Next, go to the largest library available. A large regional library will do, but a strong university system is even better. You are going to be doing a small bit of research on each of these professors for whom you haven't got sufficient information. Check especially through such things as The National Faculty Directory and the Directory of American Scholars. You don't need a great deal of information, but seek useful tidbits. For instance, working with a professor who won a significant award in your field is going to help increase your reputation for having worked under her. Perhaps peruse books or articles by selected professors -- but realize that a personally interesting professor might write extremely turgid articles, so weigh this impression lightly. The primary goal is information sufficient to glimpse the professor's interests and to make an intelligent, informed presentation in your letter.

As far as the letter itself, you will first need to explain who the heck you are. Don't begin by apologize for writing or being interested in their program; you are grateful for their time of course, but remember that this is saving both you and the institution the hassle of a possibly unnecessary application. Discuss their research interests and why you are particularly interested in their program; the more specific you can be, the better. You'll probably also want to know whether they would be available as an advisor next year, or some such thing pertinent to your decision whether to apply to this school. Send a copy of your résumé: it will readily introduce them to you without having to come right out and say how great you are, and will allow them to judge your qualifications for the program. It's best to find out now if they think you might be overmatched by the competition, and for you either to respond or to change your plans accordingly.

Then wait several weeks for a reply. These are busy folks, after all, and no one gets awards or recognition or higher pay for responding promptly to prospective graduate students.

When you do get a response, be happy. This is a momentous opportunity to gauge your candidacy and to correct any mistaken impressions. If they loved your credentials, thank them; or if, as is likely, they were wishy-washy, you can reinforce the more positive aspects. You can then choose either to continue the correspondence, or wrap it up and let them know how much you appreciate their help (you do, don't you?). Whichever it is, you now have someone on the faculty who at very least will recognize your name. You've also got a name to mention in your personal statement, indicating both your enduring interest in the program and the maturity of your decision to apply. And you probably understand the school or department a little better. It was an effort well spent.

UK Graduate school ranking : Architecture and building

2006-06-29T17:07:00.000-07:00

Cambridge 90.17 5 10 6 10 4 10 3
2. University College London 84.00 4 10 6 10 3 9 3
3. Reading 82.63 6 9 6 9 4 7 2
4. Cardiff 82.04 5 n/a 6 10 3 9 1
5. Loughborough 80.50 5 9 6 10 4 7 1
6. Edinburgh 79.33 6 10 2 10 4 10 3
7. Sheffield 78.80 5 7 5 9 4 9 2
8. Salford 76.67 4 7 6 10 4 6 3
9. Brighton 76.50 5 8 5 10 5 5 3
10. Manchester 75.83 5 8 5 10 3 7 2
Newcastle 75.33 4 8 5 10 3 8 2
12. Liverpool 75.17 5 6 5 10 3 7 3
13. Nottingham 75.00 4 9 4 10 3 9 2
14. Bath 74.17 5 6 3 10 4 9 3
15. Heriot-Watt 73.77 5 4 6 8 3 8 2
16. Glasgow Schl of Art 73.33 4 6 5 10 3 8 2
17. Glamorgan 72.97 4 4 6 9 5 5 4
18. Oxford Brookes 72.00 4 4 6 10 3 6 3
19. Napier 71.77 3 10 6 8 4 5 3
20. Coventry 70.83 3 6 6 10 5 4 3
21. Queen's Belfast 70.67 6 5 4 10 3 7 1
22. Gloucestershire 70.57 4 8 6 7 4 5 3
23. East London 69.83 3 5 5 10 1 7 6
24. Westminster 69.30 4 4 5 9 4 5 5
25. Dundee 69.17 3 5 5 10 3 7 3
26. North-East Wales Institute of HE 68.33 4 4 5 10 4 5 3
27. Central England 68.30 4 6 5 9 3 5 4
28. Kingston 68.17 3 5 5 10 4 5 4
29. Lincoln 68.17 5 3 5 10 3 5 3
30. South Bank 67.67 4 3 4 10 5 4 6
31. Derby 67.63 4 5 5 9 4 5 3
32. Luton 67.27 4 5 6 8 4 4 3
33. Edinburgh Col of Art 66.83 3 6 4 10 3 7 3
34. West of England 66.63 4 5 5 9 3 6 2
35. Portsmouth 66.47 5 6 5 9 2 5 2
36. Kent Institute of Art & Design 66.33 4 5 4 10 3 6 3
37. Liverpool John Moores 66.00 4 5 5 10 4 4 2
38. Leeds Metropolitan 65.97 4 8 4 9 4 5 2
39. Uni Col Northampton 65.67 2 3 5 10 6 5 3
40. Plymouth 65.63 4 4 5 9 3 6 2
41. Huddersfield 64.80 3 5 5 9 3 5 4
42. Abertay Dundee Uni 64.63 2 7 5 9 4 5 3
43. Northumbria Uni at Newcastle 64.50 3 4 5 10 4 5 2
44. APU 64.17 3 5 5 10 2 6 2
45. Robert Gordon 62.83 3 4 5 10 3 5 2
46. Sheffield Hallam 62.77 5 4 4 8 4 5 2
47. Strathclyde 62.60 4 4 5 8 3 6 1
48. Central Lancashire 62.50 5 9 1 10 4 5 3
49. De Montfort 62.05 n/a 3 n/a 10 3 5 4
50. Glasgow Caledonian 61.77 3 6 4 8 4 6 2
51. Greenwich 61.60 4 6 3 8 4 5 4
52. Manchester Metropolitan 60.46 n/a 3 n/a 9 3 6 3
53. Bolton Institute of HE 58.33 4 3 3 10 5 3 3
54. Swansea Institute of HE 56.67 2 4 4 10 2 5 3
55. Wolverhampton 56.30 4 4 3 9 3 4 3
56. Ulster 55.67 4 4 2 10 4 5 1
57. Nottingham Trent 51.50 3 6 1 10 3 5 2
58. Southampton Institute 41.90 2 5 1 7 4 3 3