One of the most exciting aspects of grad school is the opportunity to engage with senior scholars in your chosen field. For grads of color, this can also be an opportunity to meet one of the few professors in your field that not only shares your research interests, but […]
The academic job offer is the moment you’ve been waiting for; after working for who-knows-how-many-years, you’ve finally been invited to take a real, grown-up place at the academic table. Once you get an offer, you may be tempted to say “yes” right away-after all, negotiating the academic job market is a harrowing, stressful process which […]
“Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts”.
-Arnold Bennett
During the Fall 2012 semester I was diligently working on my annotated bibliographies for my comprehensive exams, a task that often takes a full year of preparation if not longer. My goal was […]
K.D. Shives is a pursuing a PhD in Microbiology at the University of Colorado. She can be found blogging about microbes on her site kdshives.com and on Twitter at @KDShives.
The dreaded written comprehensive exam. Many graduate students will have to pass some form of comprehensive exam at some point in their program.
This can […]
I’ve done a number of bootcamps and workshops on managing your digital identity and learning different social media technologies. While I find that grad students are fairly quick to learn the tools and have the intuition required to figure out a lot of the problems, there is one problem I see repeatedly: grad students […]
In the grand scheme of grad life, teaching responsibilities loom large. Teaching is an important part of the professor’s mission and learning to teach every student well is a rewarding process that hopefully begins with your first class. In academic spaces, mentioning the word “inclusion” to grads and faculty has eye-turning effects. Some […]
At the most recent conference of the Association for Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), held last November, representatives from several academic presses and scholars who had recently published monographs based on their dissertations held a roundtable dedicated to giving current grad students tips on what they should prepare for if they intend […]
Right now I am right smack in the middle of writing my dissertation proposal. Talk to any graduate student at this phase of the process and they will groan in recognition of the long slog it seems to be. At this point in my writing I have successfully organized my closets and my bathrooms have […]
You’ve selected an interesting conference in your field. Your abstract, and then your paper have been accepted. You have prepared your presentation, and you’re ready to go.
All you need to do is pack your bags and head to the airport, right?
Conferences are incredibly busy events, and traveling to conferences can […]
Back in October I wrote a post on GradHacker about using checklists in research and as promised, I’m updating you on how I’ve integrated them into my data collection. In January I began to collect data for my thesis (yay!) and had the goal of using checklists […]
