57 Ways to Screw Up in Grad School: Perverse Professional Lessons for Graduate Students

57 Ways to Screw Up in Grad School

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57 Ways to Screw Up in Grad School

Perverse Professional Lessons for Graduate Students

Kevin D. Haggerty and Aaron Doyle

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Kevin D. Haggerty is a Killam Research Laureate and professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Alberta. He is also editor of the Canadian Journal of Sociology. Haggerty’s most recent book is Transparent Lives.

Aaron Doyle is associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. His most recent book is Eyes Everywhere.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-28087-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-28090-5 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-28106-3 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226281063.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Haggerty, Kevin D., author.

57 ways to screw up in grad school: perverse professional lessons for graduate students / Kevin D. Haggerty and Aaron Doyle.

pages; cm. — (Chicago guides to academic life)

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-226-28087-5 (cloth: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-28090-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-28106-3 (e-book) 1. Graduate students—Conduct of life. 2. Universities and colleges—Graduate work. I. Doyle, Aaron, author. II. Title. III. Title: Fifty-seven ways to screw up in grad school. IV. Series: Chicago guides to academic life.

LB2371.H34 2015

378.1'55—dc23 2015002171

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Richard V. Ericson

Contents

An Introduction to Screwing Up

Who Are I?

Gendered Pronouns

Thesis vs. Dissertation?

The Screw-Ups

Starting Out

1 Do Not Think about Why You Are Applying

2 Ignore the Market

3 Stay at the Same University

4 Follow the Money Blindly

5 Do an Unfunded PhD

6 Do an Interdisciplinary PhD

7 Believe Advertised Completion Times

8 Ignore the Information the University Provides You

9 Expect the Money to Take Care of Itself

Supervisors

10 Go It Alone and Stay Quiet

11 Choose the Coolest Supervisor

12 Have Co-Supervisors

13 Do Not Clarify Your Supervisor’s (or Your Own) Expectations

14 Avoid Your Supervisor and Committee

15 Stay in a Bad Relationship

16 Expect People to Hold Your Hand

Managing Your Program

17 Concentrate Only on Your Thesis

18 Expect to Write the Perfect Comprehensive Exam

19 Select a Topic for Entirely Strategic Reasons

20 Do Not Teach, or Teach a Ton of Courses

21 Do Not Seek Teaching Instruction

22 Move Away from the University Before Finishing Your Degree

23 Postpone Those Tedious Approval Processes

24 Organize Everything Only in Your Head

25 Do Not Attend Conferences, or Attend Droves of Conferences

Your Work and Social Life

26 Concentrate Solely on School

27 Expect Friends and Family to Understand

28 Socialize Only with Your Clique

29 Get a Job!

Writing

30 Write Only Your PhD Thesis

31 Postpone Publishing

32 Cover Everything

33 Do Not Position Yourself

34 Write Only to Deadlines

35 Abuse Your Audience

Your Attitude and Actions

36 Expect to Be Judged Only on Your Work

37 Have a Thin Skin

38 Be Inconsiderate

39 Become That Student

40 Never Compromise

41 Gossip

42 Say Whatever Pops into Your Head on Social Media

Delicate Matters

43 Assume That the University Is More Inclusive Than Other Institutions

44 Rush into a Legal Battle

45 Get Romantically Involved with Faculty

46 Cheat and Plagiarize

Am I Done Yet?: On Finishing

47 Skip Job Talks

48 Expect to Land a Job in a Specific University

49 Expect People to Hire You to Teach Your Thesis

50 Turn Down Opportunities to Participate in Job Searches

51 Neglect Other People’s Theses

52 Get an Unknown External Examiner

53 Do Not Understand the Endgame

54 Be Blasé about Your Defense

55 Do Not Plan for Your Job Interview

56 Persevere at All Costs

57 Consider a Non-Academic Career a Form of Failure

Final Thoughts

Appendix: A Sketch of Grad School

The Thesis

The Program

Your Department

The People

Acknowledgments

Index

An Introduction to Screwing Up

Liam faced a problem familiar to many master’s students. He had spent months looking for people to interview for his thesis—a study of the experiences of recent Egyptian immigrants to Chicago. It was becoming increasingly clear, however, that he was not going to find enough of them to finish his research on time. What was he going to do? He planned to start his PhD in the fall.

After many days of agonizing, he hit on a desperate answer. Ingeniously, he decided to approach individuals who knew Egyptians—but who were not themselves Egyptian—and ask them to describe growing up in Egypt, immigrating to America from Egypt, and so on, by pretending to be Egyptian. We do not know exactly what was going through his head. The world will never know how he pitched this to them, or what the interviewees thought about it all: You are doing research on how well people can fake being Egyptian? Okay. Sounds worthwhile to me. Did you get a grant for this? We will never know if at some level Liam convinced himself that his approach was legitimate.

Liam committed academic fraud and got busted. But his problems did not stop there. A graduate chair learned about Liam’s innovative approach to data collection while she was evaluating Liam’s PhD application. Liam’s file had been near the top of the admissions list. But now he had screwed that up in a way that would become local legend.

As they finish their undergraduate degrees, some students think about going on to grad school. You might have always known that a master’s or PhD was in your future, or a friendly professor might have encouraged you to think about it. Or maybe you just have a deep commitment to prolonging your impoverished, three a.m. Cup-of-Noodles-eating, term-paper-procrastinating, angst-laden student years well into your thirties and beyond. For a number of reasons, more people than ever are going to grad school. This can be an excellent choice, as careers in higher education and related areas can be personally rewarding. It can also be a great opportunity to mess up your life, if done for the wrong reasons or done badly. Few screw-ups will approach the magnitude of Liam’s fake Egyptian interviews. But there will be many chances to foul things up, sometimes in serious ways. For anyone, the prospect of grad school can be daunting, as it involves committing many years to a strange new stage of education, with no guarantee you will find a job after you graduate.

Given the stakes involved, one peculiar aspect of grad school is the number of students who seem indifferent to its pitfalls. Year after year many run headlong, like lemmings, into the same blunders as their predecessors. Yet a good share of these people ignore or are even hostile toward the advice that might help them avoid screwing up.

Having repeatedly witnessed this process, we have concluded that a small group of students actually want to screw up. We do not know why. Maybe they are masochists or fear success. Maybe they say to themselves, A good day is a day where I move one step closer to crushing my dreams. Maybe they are working out deep-rooted psychological issues. Whatever the reason, our heart goes out to them. Indeed, this book will help them. It sets out a course of action that will ensure they blunder through grad school in a spectacularly disastrous fashion.

Graduate school usually involves completing a master’s degree or a PhD (also known as a doctorate). Such degrees exist, with different names, in the natural and applied sciences, humanities, social sciences, and education. A master’s degree works out well for most people who start one; a PhD is a more risky undertaking. With a master’s, you can expect to finish in a reasonable amount of time and be in a better place than where you started. If you cannot complete it, you will have endured only a couple of years of suffering. But a PhD is a much greater investment. Botching it up can cost you most or all of a decade of your prime years—and can inflict grievous and irreparable damage on your career prospects, lifelong finances, key relationships, and self-respect.

People seek out graduate degrees for many reasons, not all of them good ones. For most students, grad school is a stepping-stone to a career. With the PhD, that career is often in the university or college system, or sometimes in related fields. So, screwing up means not only making mistakes that mess up your grad school experience but also committing blunders that limit your chances of landing a good job or having a rewarding career afterward. The screw-ups we identify are of varying degrees. Some will undermine or even cut short your graduate education, while others involve less serious matters that will simply make your grad school days less rewarding and more unpleasant than they need to be.

Many students experience culture shock when they start grad school because it is so different from their undergraduate years. The shift is as big as the one from high school to university. Most parents did not attend grad school, so students cannot often ask their families for much guidance. Ideally, grad school should involve a lot of one-on-one mentoring: a professor, normally the student’s thesis supervisor, closely guides the student, allowing that student to absorb the finer points of what grad school is all about, and especially about how success in grad school is about a lot more than just completing the official requirements. Sometimes that mentoring actually happens. Unfortunately, not all professors have the time or dedication to give their protégés all the supervision they need. Also, depending on how things work in a particular grad program, the student who enters grad school may not immediately link up with a supervisor or temporary advisor, and may not have much guidance early on. In some programs, especially master’s degrees, it is normal for many students not to have found a supervisor for months, and perhaps not until the second year of the master’s. Such students are not taught enough about how grad school works until they are far along in their degrees. And some students never receive that kind of support at all.

Graduate education need not be a mystery. There are no dark secrets, and those who do reveal insider knowledge will not be shunned or cast out. The problem is that few people have gone to the trouble of spelling out and writing down the informal practices and rituals of grad school. The reason is simple. What wins the most brownie points and advances a university career the most is doing research, getting grants, and writing scholarly books or journal articles. It is not mentoring students or publishing guidance books for the next generation of scholars. Indeed, some academics frown on such writing, seeing it as a waste of valuable research time.

Things are starting to change, however, with an increasing number of books and blogs designed to help grad students. These resources can be helpful, but many of them tend to focus narrowly on a few big moments in a graduate student’s career—the thesis defense or first job interview, for example. Such moments are important rites of passage, and they certainly mark points where you can screw up in ways that can become legendary. But you will reach them only after negotiating many other potential pitfalls that await you in grad school.

In this book we provide unflinching advice about how to screw up in grad school. One key audience is those students who are contemplating—no matter how remotely—a career in higher education as instructors, researchers, or professors and who are thinking about whether and how to do a master’s or PhD to get there. Our suggestions are also relevant to those who wish to attend grad school for personal fulfillment or to gain skills and credentials to help them advance in non-academic careers.

While the university is its own world, much of what goes on inside is common to any organization. Thus, a good part of this book is actually relevant to people who might want to screw up in almost any kind of workplace—which is why we characterize what follows as perverse professional lessons.

In writing this book, we have been pushed by a desire to see grad students succeed—to help them have happy endings and rewarding careers. Having made it through grad school, shared a tiny office during our PhD years, and resolved many a mini-crisis over a beer or three, we have thought and talked about grad school survival skills for a long time. We have both published on different aspects of university life and supervised large numbers of master’s and PhD students, some of whom have won prestigious awards for their scholarship and some of whom are now professors. Each of us has also been the graduate chair of our respective master’s and PhD programs, responsible for all the grad students in the department (which can amount to a hundred or more people) and having to decide which students to admit and who should receive a scholarship, among other things. Each of us has won awards not only for teaching and research but also for graduate student mentoring as well.

Along the way we have seen many screw-ups, and we have committed more than a few of our own. Based on this experience, we will soon begin describing in detail the many ways in which to screw up. The litany of foul-ups that follow are organized by theme, tracking the grad school experience from beginning to end, starting with contemplating the decision to start a master’s degree and choosing a discipline, university, and program, and concluding with the process of finishing the PhD and hunting for a job or postdoctoral fellowship. Whether you read the book from start to finish or dip into it randomly, please read it all. Sometimes important lessons appear in unexpected places.

We shared drafts of this book with colleagues in different departments and universities and with many current and former graduate students. Those people were generous with their comments and ideas, helping us refine our portrait of grad school. We interviewed people across our respective campuses who have ties with graduate education, including associate deans, the directors of research ethics, ombudspersons, professional development officers, and staff in the Financial Aid Offices, International Student Centres, and Writing Centres, as well as the people responsible for student discipline. We frequently refer to their experiences and suggestions while taking care to avoid giving away their identity.

If you are into self-abuse, rest assured that following our 57-step program will result in a dreadful grad school experience. We obviously also hope to guide those who want to do well. Despite our focus on screwing up, we want to emphasize that grad school is not designed to ensure failure. Faculty and staff (mostly) do not conspire to find sensational new ways for you to crash and burn. Most of the people you meet actually have your best interests at heart. At the same time, they want you to be the best scholar possible, partly because someday you are going to represent them.

We know that in focusing on screw-ups we could lead some people to conclude that grad school and the academy are treacherous places. But the university is no more perilous than any other workplace. Indeed, we actually like working here. We have each had tremendously fulfilling academic careers, and we believe that many different students with the right mix of personal and professional skills can excel here. We really do not want to scare you off. Okay, maybe we want to scare you a little bit, but just to help you understand grad school and the wider university.

Both of us had the same PhD supervisor: the late Richard V. Ericson. We each met Richard at the Centre of Criminology at the University of Toronto, where he supervised Aaron’s master’s degree and oversaw a large research project that Kevin worked on. In 1993 we followed him to