Your first semester/quarter of graduate school will suck

In an earlier post, I argued that you shouldn’t go to grad school. Assuming some of you assholes completely ignored my advice, in this installment I will explain what happens when you do go to grad school because it’s never too late to decline an offer of acceptance.

Everything is different, and that is terrible

I should start by saying that I like first year grad students. They’re shiny and new and they don’t know what they’ve done to themselves. They’ll often talk about post-modern theory and how excited they are to be among their intellectual peers or some bullshit that everyone else just silently judges them about. Some of them are shy and downright Bambi-esque, which, I add in the most condescending manner possible, is adorable. Every year, I meet the first years and give them some advice that they never listen to, and then I wait about seven weeks. At that point, I walk around my department, just looking for the looks of panic. Around then, there’s always someone at the end of their rope, completely overwhelmed because grad school sucks, especially at the beginning.

Starting at a new school sucks because everything is different, particularly when you first make the transition from undergrad to graduate work. I can only provide examples from my own experience, but I’m sure you’ll find that your first year in grad school will be unhappy for its own reasons.

My university is on the quarter system, which means that everything is ten weeks long and does not correspond well with the schedule of any other students in the world. To begin with, this is why my grandmother will never, ever, ever understand why I don’t visit home until June or why I’m still sitting on my ass in September.

“I’m not sure what you’re doing with your life, but I’m pretty sure it’s because you hate me.”

– the subtext of every phone conversation I’ve ever had with my grandmother

Effectively, we do everything that classes at normal universities do in sixteen weeks, but we have to do in ten. But it’s okay because our classes are longer and we meet more often! This means that there’s no time for adjustment because you begin a quarter and by the time you notice, it’s halfway done and you haven’t started working on your term paper. All the research and writing that most students would have to do is suddenly crunched into a space so short that there’s no time to actually think about it, you just do it.

It’s difficult for anyone to adjust to the quarter system, especially grad students who have to do ten times more work than undergrads. This is particularly true because many new grad students have been at the top of their classes their entire career and may have never had to put in serious hours to get top grades. In fact, that's why they're in grad school. But there’s a bit of a shock when a new grad student discovers that they have to read a book or two a week for each of their classes, which they have trouble doing because they literally don’t know how to read.

I imagine every discipline has a different way of approaching reading, but in history, typically all we’re interested in is the argument the author is making, the evidence they use, and how this argument fits with other arguments in the field. If a history grad student is doing their job correctly, they will read the introduction, conclusion, a review of a book, and then look at a bit of the evidence that the author uses. The whole middle part, you know, where all the history is? Yeah, we ignore that. There are about seven people who want to read any particularly book in its entirety and soak in all the detail that the historian who wrote it spent their life collecting, while the rest of us casually decide whether we buy the argument without actually reading the book. It's our little contribution to making dedicated professionals feel like they've wasted their lives.

This approach feels deeply wrong to new students and anyone who isn’t jaded by years in the academy, so they rebel and actually try to read the whole thing. First off, everyone hates the guy who read the whole book because they’ll bring up an obscure point that no one cares about, so don’t be that guy. Second, first years drive themselves mad trying to slug through all of that material and it will do them precious little good because most professors don’t care about that crap. But if you happen to have one who does, just quit because it’s not worth it.

Perhaps the biggest adjustment that many graduate students have to make, unless they’ve prostituted their souls to the Devil, is that they have to learn to teach. Suddenly, after years of being the smartest kid in the class, who always had something to contribute and was oh-so-self-assure about their cleverness (Jeremy!), new grad students have to stand in front of a class and actually spew forth some crap about their subject matter in a way that tricks new students into feeling like they're learning something. After spending a dozen years watching other people teach and lecture, you’d think that they would have some idea about how to teach. You would, of course, be mistaken.

I distinctly remember standing in front of a class for the first time and having no idea what I was supposed to do. To be fair, I had received a bit of training from the university, which required me to attend three days of instruction on teaching prior to being in a classroom. Each day consisted of four sessions of about an hour each where, I swear to God, something was said about pedagogy, but I have no idea what and I didn’t really care at the time either. At least two hours of that was spent informing me that I was not to sleep with my students, which would have been a complete waste of time, except that I got to hear someone from HR say, “You shouldn’t have a relationship with any of your students, but if you do, wait until the quarter is over. And if you can’t wait, inform HR immediately.” That is literally the only thing I remember about all of the training I received before I started teaching. Almost all teacher training is done in the field, which is a euphemism for "they send you out into the wild with no idea what you're doing and hope that you won't kill someone while they're legally liable for your actions," which, of course, why most pedagogical instruction is on how not to get (the university) sued.

“OH! That’s why 90% of my professors were terrible at their jobs!”

With your newfound insight into how to teach at the university level, you'll start teaching your own class, or, more properly, you'll lead discussion sections wherein you're supposed to go over the readings that the real professor (the one who actually lectures) assigns. Now, having discovered that your own classes required a lot of reading, you will be shocked to discover how little your students will be willing to do given their miniscule workload.

I remember during my first quarter in grad school, a professor assigned a 1,500 page book that I had to read in a week and was only available on two hour closed reserve at the library. I had to spend half the night huddling in the basement of the library with a book large enough to kill a toddler during a tornado, and then turn around the next morning and try to coax toddlers to read 30 pages a week. The upside is that I remember both the Manchu conquest of China in the 17th century and the first time I killed a man just to watch him die very clearly. 

Very few students truly appreciate that their instructors have to do all the reading that they do, and do it ten times better. We have to read the same material for every class, but we read it more thoroughly and more times than they do; for every hour they spend writing a paper, we spend approximately ten trillion hours grading them. Every instructor has to figure out their own way to make it through stacks of papers. My first year, I decided to make a game of it: I kept track of every incompetent use of a rhetorical question. After filling up a sheet of paper, I gave up this game and took up my current grading technique: I keep a bottle of grading whiskey in my cupboard, and I never drink to remember.

That's a graduate student sized bottle of booze, but he's at a party, so clearly he's doing it wrong.

 But even with all of these adjustments, you can’t slack off because…

Your relationship with your professors actually matters this time

Remember undergrad when you did half the reading and then made one comment that kind of made sense and your professor was pleased because your semi-competence dulled the unending pain that is instructing undergrads? Yeah, that’s not going to work anymore. Part of the reason that ever worked is because professors tend to have a lot of students at the lower levels and they're willing to take the smallest accomplishment as a sign of competence. As you advance classes get smaller, so the professors will know everyone in their classes personally and have a better idea of the work they're doing day in and day out, especially because you will end up taking classes with the same four professors for most of your graduate career. These four professors will be on your generals/comprehensive exam committee, so you have to have a good relationship with them or you will never complete your PhD program.

It might not look like it, but this guy derives sustenance entirely from your tears.

 Sure you can sit in a graduate seminar and not say anything and beg off whenever the professor asks you a question. Unlike undergrad where you only needed to impress an instructor enough to give you a decent grade, however, in graduate school your committee members will become the basis of your career, and if you piss even one of them off by doing something stupid like never doing the reading, it can seriously hurt your entire career, or at least make your life sincerely miserable. These professors can actually refuse to sit on your committees (though it’s rare), which they can use as leverage to make you do almost anything they want. I have a friend who had written half a dissertation that his adviser disapproved of, so he had to scrap it and start again because his committee would never let him defend it. A grad student’s job is essentially to impress their committee members, which means that you’re going to try your damnedest to keep up with all the reading and think deep thoughts, but until you get used to the workload (and, more importantly, how to go about it), eventually you will be overwhelmed.

But no matter how overwhelmed you become, there’s one person you must never let down: your adviser. Your relationship with your adviser is one of the most important things in all of graduate school and maybe your entire career. Your adviser should be a wise, experienced hand who can help direct you through your program. They should be a leading expert in your field and specialization, and use their connections to make your entire life easier. Figuring out what your relationship with your adviser is going to be for the next twenty years is tough, but if you fuck it up, you might as well quit. I only know a handful of people who switched advisers during the middle of their degree: for one it went brilliantly and everything in his life was better; for another, things got better but it added half a decade to his completion time; but for a third the adviser divorce is still too painful to discuss. I don’t have a joke for that last one; it was just really terrible.

By the way, speaking of divorce…

Your spouse/partner will resent you

Of course, if you’re married or go to school with a significant other, you will have a companion who won’t challenge you intellectually (unless you’re into that sort of thing) or try to curb stomp you because they don’t like your face (presumably they already like your face otherwise you may have a problem unrelated to grad school). There is a downside, however. Unless your partner is also starting a graduate program or they have a job they instantly love, you’re going to resent the hell out of you.

Many universities are located in places where people specifically do not want to go, which is why the land was cheap enough to waste on high learning instead of corn. You might be willing to go to these places that civilization forgot, but is your partner? Really? No matter how supportive they seem to be of the move to begin with, eventually your spouse is going to resent the fuck out of you for dragging them all the way to Ithaca, New York where there’s nothing but colleges and water features. 

They have a world-class university and the best word play they could come up with is

“Ithaca is Gorges.” On the other hand, that sure is a pretty gorge.

                                               

 The worst part is that they’ll eventually realize that this is the first in a long series of relocations to places they don’t want to be based on where you can get a job. You might think you can hold out for an awesome post in New York or San Francisco, but your career options are limited and someone has to teach in Alabama, and knowing how well you plan your life, it'll probably be you. At least for a while, I should say, because as an academic you're going to have to relocate many times. You and your spouse are just going to have to figure out how to live in several of the many hellholes that 19^th century assholes decided would be a suitable place for a university.

Take Yale, for example. Its founders seem to have decided to locate their university at the intersection of beautiful architecture and surprisingly high street crime. I promise you, New York City is not as accessible as everyone told you at visitation day.

Or Dartmouth, which is an Ivy League school, even though you don’t think it is. Well-known fact: no one of any consequence has ever gone to Dartmouth. If they had been consequential, they wouldn’t have gone to Dartmouth. Some would argue that the previous statements are rhetorically begging the question, but if you're one of them, you probably didn't go to Dartmouth because Dartmouth alums don't know what that means.

If somehow you get over the stress of your first year and absolutely love graduate school, you'll still have to deal with a partner who hates the fact that they have to live in the middle of nowhere and who is essentially relying on you as a meal ticket when you seriously have no chance of making real money in academia. Just remember Doctor Strife’s Law: If you love something, something else will ruin it for you.

Or someone

Corollary to Doctor Strife’s Law: Even if something is ruined,

it probably won’t blow up because that’d be awesome.

 But at least those of you who are married have someone because otherwise…

You won’t know anyone

If you go to grad school stag, unless you stay at your undergrad or go to your hometown for grad school, you’re going to have to move to a new city and won’t know anyone. Sure, you've probably done that before for college, but there are two big differences: instead of an incoming class of thousands, there will be a small class of first years in your department and you’re old enough that you won’t want to put up with the bullshit involved in meeting new people. My university has a massive history department, with over a hundred grad students on campus any given year and an annual incoming class of about 25-30. So, I had two choices: meet new people somehow (no one ever manages to do this) or hope that I got along with my fellow first years.

Now, I absolutely fell in love with some of my starting class, and we remain close friends to this day, but maybe one of them is the type of person I would typically have hung out with in other circumstances. My friends consisted of: a former gymnast whose idea of a pick-up line was “So, can we just make out already;” a dynamic Ivy League go-getter who knew Paul Kennedy’s preferences for port (Paul Kennedy is a historian who no one has ever heard of, but is important because he wrote a book no one reads); a woman who, when I first met her, was talking about how much better the club scene was back home; and a nerd whose social activities consisted of playing board-based role playing games and claiming he had a girlfriend in Canada (they subsequently married, but you wouldn’t have heard about it because it was in Canada).

Our personalities were so diverse that we should have been able to summon a cartoon super-hero with our nerd powers (I would have called him Captain History, and I would have loved him best of all, but his existence would have gotten me beaten up, and deservedly so). I distinctly remember one night at a bar when my super-nerdy friend commented that we drank a lot in grad school, which prompted me to say, “Unless you’re going out without me, that is your second beer of the week.” It turned out, for him, that was a lot of drinking, whereas the rest of the table started wondering if he was a secret Mormon. We were all somewhat out of our social comfort zone, and aside from our unbearable whiteness, the only thing we had in common was our subject of study… though one of us was Spanish, which is kind of like the Olive Garden of diversity.

“Soup and non-offensive white bread for everyone!”

I feel like Olive Garden should be paying me for… something here.

At this point, I feel that I should explain how this group of people came together. At the beginning of the year, our department used to have a reception in the faculty club that everyone attended specific because there was an open bar (now we have a picnic where we can bring our families, which means I have to stand around with people I work with, but without booze and with small children). I literally walked up to a group of people because I had seen one of them once before. We spoke briefly (like ten minutes) and because it was the most fulfilling human contact I had had with other human beings in two weeks, I suggested we should all get lunch together because I was so desperately lonely. Random permutations of that group (based on who was in town) continued to meet for lunch once a week for five years and formed the backbone of my entire social circle. 

You pretty much have to make friends in your incoming class, but the adjustment to new types of people is stressful, particularly when you basically have to find a friend among a small group of people because you will not meet anyone outside your program unless you take classes in other department or have discernible social skills.

One of these is more likely than the other

Having friends in grad school, however, is essential to making it through any program, and, in some cases, it is literally the only thing keeping grad students from hanging themselves with their shower curtain.

This kid knows what I’m talking about

 Your very presence may cause tension

There are two ways for to attend grad school: either you teach for the university or you have a fellowship, which is when someone (the university, government, private foundation, etc.) pays your tuition and gives you money to study. Fellowships are great because they mean you won’t have to teach for a year and someone is giving you money for what you would have done anyway. For incoming students, fellowships are typically offered to the most promising students as a way of enticing them to a specific university.

 
Given that the university considers these students the best, you’d think they’d do better than all the schmucks who have to teach (we already discussed why that’s world-destroyingly soul-crushing), but year after year, in my department teaching assistants have a higher retention rate than the fellows. Pretty much everyone agrees that it’s because the TAs are required to spend time in the communal grad student offices, are forced to work with other grad students in their teaching duties, and are generally more socially connected. The fellows, on the other hand, sit alone in their apartments, reading and slowly descending to a pit of madness of their own creation.

The issue of who gets a fellowship and who has to teach can sometimes be tricky, especially because after five years of grad school, on the whole I'm not convinced that people coming in on fellowships are really any better than those who had to teach their first year. Ever year, amazing and deserving grad students get passed over for fellowships, but that doesn't make them any less deserving or lovable... I keep telling myself.

First years are almost no one is petty enough to make any distinction between these two groups and holds grudges against someone for getting an incoming fellowship when they didn't. It's not like TAs and fellows are the Jets and the Sharks, with the Sharks getting paid to do nothing while the Jets had to work their way through school. Sure, I've witnessed some snap-based combat in grad school, but it was almost always in the medium of "Yo' mamma" jokes.

"Yo' mamma is so dumb she went to a state school!" "This will not stand sir! To fisticuffs!" "Indeed! Now, how exactly do we go about this?"

 There are, naturally, exceptions, like me because I'm a bad person. When I first started, I couldn't figure out what fellowship students had that I didn't. Half of my friends in my first year had fellowships while I was stuck teaching, but one of them was not like the others. I met this one woman at the reception I mentioned above, and I commented that I hadn't met her before at any of the teaching orientations. She said she was on a "diversity enrichment fellowship," which is to say, a fellowship for minority students. I was perplexed because she was easily as white as I, so I mustered up the courage and asked what ethnicity she was, to which she cheerfully responded that she was Spanish.

Now, to be clear, I generally approve of affirmative action, and this woman proved to be brilliant and she absolutely deserved a fellowship, no question in my mind. But Spanish, as in from Western Europe, and minority did not go well together in my mind. Incredulous, I said, quite rudely, "Yes, well, in that case, I'm a minority as well, I'm Irish." My new friend became quite excited and exclaimed, "Me too!" At this point, I felt entirely cheated because, being Irish-German, I got screwed out of a fellowship because my father chose a woman from on the wrong side of France. By the way, my Spanish is better than my Spanish friend's.

These petty divisions abound in a place where funding decisions seem entirely arbitrary, and every new student that's added to the department essentially means that funding will not go to a more advanced student who just needs another quarter or two to finish their dissertation. In fact this is a large part of the reason that I say your choices of friends are largely limited to incoming students; the established students already have friends and kind of resent incoming students on general principle.

In other words, good luck because everyone already hates you before you even show up for your first day of class.