Why a Book on Graduate School?

Every semester, I meet students that are interested in applying to graduate school. I meet these students in the whirlwind of finishing their degrees, taking the GRE, writing application materials, and requesting letters of recommendation. Most of the students I meet share one thing in common: they dramatically under-estimated the complexity of applying to graduate programs. They did this through no fault of their own. Applying to schools for admission to undergraduate study is orders of magnitude less complex than applying to a graduate school. Unfortunately, many of the students that approach me for a letter of recommendation are too late. They will get my letter, but they sought help far too late in the process. They drafted their letters of application hastily, dropping in irrelevant anecdotes and needless rhetorical flourishes.

The admissions process for getting into a graduate program is labyrinthine, arbitrary, and largely obscured from most students. As a professor, I’ve come to understand this process over the thousands of work hours that I’ve completed in academia. There’s a logic to the whole process, but that logic takes time, effort, and experience to decode. I grasp the complexities of the process, but attempting to convey those complexities is inordinately time consuming. In a recent semester, I spent well over 30 hours with a single student preparing them for admission to a program, and I think that I largely failed to convey most of what I know about the process.

Time is the enemy in preparing graduate applications. Efficiency is the weapon to combat this enemy. Put simply, the process of disseminating my general knowledge about applying to graduate school in a one-on-one format is horrifically inefficient. Students are looking to me for help and guidance, but I’m hindered in the amount that I can offer. I started writing this book as a simple Google doc that I could share with students that were interested in going to graduate school. Before long, the document swelled to over 100 pages.

The internet has opened up the application process and made it a bit more transparent, but it has also contributed to an explosion of materials related to applications. The amount and quality of these materials is a significant issue. When I was applying to PhD programs, I was directed to dizzying variety of resources that my campus had provided, but the information was piecemeal, and scattered across the entire university website. When I did track down two pieces of information related to the same topic, they often contradicted each other in comprehensive ways. In one instance, a website for a department suggested that candidates should connect their personal experiences to academic work. Another department strictly forbade mentioning anything not academic. Such contradictions can paralyze a writer.

Undeterred, I sought out advice from the group I trusted most: professors. Unfortunately, the same patterns emerged. Professors often deeply contradicted each other. Some placed heavy emphasis on certain aspects of the application process while others downplayed them. There was no way for me to prioritize this information. All of it seemed on equal footing. Worst of all, it all seemed to make sense on some level, so it was impossible to dismiss obviously bad advice. I selected varying elements from the tapestry of advice available to me, and I mostly failed at piecing together effective applications.

Many, many academics are speaking from a place of blind privilege. They are used to offering opinions, and many are used to offering opinions without any form of evidence or support to back them up. Those professors are rather dangerous as they present narrow opinion as accepted fact or tradition. I’ve known several of these figures in my professional life, and they end up poisoning the well. The most dangerous part is that they believe their actions are right. They speak with conviction, and they lead many students astray.

How to Use this Book as a Student

This book is meant to be consumed fairly rapidly and along a timeline. When I give this book to my students that are interested in graduate study, I tell them to read the first few chapters over the next weekend, or as quickly as they possibly can. After that, I tell them to skim it as rapidly as possible so they get a sense of what to expect in the coming months/years. After that, I recommend returning to subsequent chapters at the appropriate time. Writing good applications doesn’t come naturally. It takes work, thought, reflection, and more work. This book is both a broad overview and a quick reference. Consult it early and often, but, as with any academic writing, you should not rely on one source.

This book covers the basics. With it, you should be able to get 60% of the way to an effective application. The remaining 40% of the knowledge and experience required to write a good application should come from your faculty. The chapters in this text will cover much of the basics, freeing up your professors to provide you with targeted feedback on your strategy. It should also save you considerable time by preventing a lot of general, random google searches for basic information about materials and processes. For example, the chapter on writing materials should help you to draft an appropriate letter of application before approaching a professor about letters of application. This means the limited time that your faculty have to give you will be spent on offering substantive, specific feedback on things you have written, not general ideas about how to approach this process.

Experience in academia is also incredibly reliant on a person’s field. A good application letter for English will look different than a good application letter for Economics. The entire process of applying to graduate schools might differ between fields. In many STEM disciplines, for instance, students apply to specific labs first. There may be standard sets of pre-requisite courses that a discipline expects students to have taken before applying to graduate programs. Despite this, there will be some similarities. This book aims to tease out some of those similarities. After reading it, you should have some excellent strategies for researching programs, planning out application processes, and creating a decent draft of a letter. Your entire process should be vetted with your faculty, and weigh their advice and suggestions against what you read in this book. This is vital training for your time in school in which you will be required to weigh competing claims and evidence.

My own training and experience is in the humanities, but, using the principles in this text, I’ve helped students gain admission to excellent programs in biology, meteorology, performing arts, ecology, and psychology. I have no direct experience in those fields, but I do have a lot of experience working with academic writing. This book is a tool. Like all tools, it has uses and limitations. Use it to build a foundation, and then seek other tools to finish off your applications.

The reason I believe in my specific approach is because it bears close resemblance to my experience as a working academic, particularly in the realm of publishing peer-reviewed research. Most academic writing is incredibly similar, and is built around forwarding claims and providing evidence to support those claims. My success with helping students enter graduate study successfully has been a result of training them to make claims and provide evidence to support those claims. That’s it. There is no grand, mystical knowledge that I posses. As a writing teacher and a writing center director, I spend much of my professional life teaching these concepts to students and faculty. The other aspect of this process is research and planning, both vital steps to mapping out a publication agenda. In that way, this is book is a primer on academic writing and publishing.

How to Use this Book as Faculty/Student Support

The initial writing for this book occurred in response to a specific curricular need. A few years ago, I was working in a department that was considering the creation of a “introduction to English studies” course. This would have been a 200-level course for students that were entering their major, and it would have explained the general subfields in English, some basic methods/research questions, and ended with some readings about different jobs and graduate schools. Faculty were asked to consider some resources that would be appropriate for this course, and massive can of worms exploded over what was thought to be a straightforward intro course.

As it turns out, each faculty member had relied on a tangled web of resources to learn about the profession and graduate school. Several faculty found their favorite resources were returning a 404 error, likely the victim of ever-shifting university websites. Some were incredibly esoteric, applying to a subfield of a subfield. Others were unwieldy, and pedagogically inappropriate, like hours-long lectures about graduate school that had been recorded by Career Services (useful, but hard to integrate into a regular course that met bi-weekly). A book was needed, but the available options were focused narrowly on medical school or law school. There was no short, affordable, easily readable text that provided a general approach to graduate school.

I wrote this text with a course in a mind. It is appropriate in length, but also focused on steps. An assignment structure could be very easily overlaid onto the existing chapters, resulting in students producing application materials if this were taught as a 1-credit seminar, or integrated into an existing capstone structure.

For student support services, this is a great resource to house and distribute. In my current role as a Writing Center director, I am often collaborating with student support services when clients are building resumes, letters of application, and resumes. We often encounter students that are interested in graduate study, and this book is a great step for exploring the application process. It’s a manageable read, and useful for distributing to students during workshops or other events where graduate school is a subject.