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Juggling the demands of higher ed

By on February 9, 2012 in Christ, Christ and the Academy, The Purpose of Education, What I Wish I'd Known About Graduate School with 0 Comments

If you haven’t had the 3+ hours necessary to watch the Youtube video of the Vanderbilt Town Meeting (1/31/2012), then I recommend this 6 minute and forty second highlight video

At present I don’t have more to add to Prayerful consideration & Discussion: Vanderbilt Town Mtg. (2/2/2012), except to encourage you to gather with friends to process through your thoughts and then share your response with the Admissions office, Advancement/Alumni Office, and Chancellor’s Office. Two responses I have particularly appreciated:

Vanderbilt should not meddle in religious-group decisions (Ben R. Chamness, resident bishop, Nashville area, United Methodist Church)

At Stake: Religious Liberty (Alec Hill, president, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship). For more from InterVarsity in general visit www.intervarsity.org/campusaccess.

Quite frankly, part of the reason that I don’t have more to add at this time is because of restraints on my time, which brings me to this popular picture.

The Struggles of College vs. Grad School

Continue Reading…

What I Wish I’d Known: Managing Time and Having a Life In Graduate School

By on August 30, 2011 in Life in the Academy, What I Wish I'd Known About Graduate School with 0 Comments

Guest blogger Hannah Eagleson concludes her series What I Wish I’d Known About Graduate School. 

Astronomical Clock (Astronomical Dial), Prague, Czech Republic

A different perspective on time: the Prague Orloj, a 600-year-old astronomical clock

Even with good coursework management strategies, semesters can feel overwhelming. Here are some more general tips for managing time and squeezing in a life beyond grad school.

1. Recognize that valuable things can be done regularly yet infrequently

If you don’t have time to meet with your accountability partner once a week, do it once a month. Once a week might be better than once a month, but once a month will probably still be helpful.

If you can’t pick up and see a movie just anytime, schedule one movie viewing a week or a month and stick to it. If you know a break is coming, it will be easier to face the daily grind.

2. Have a list of short tasks that can be squeezed into small chunks of time

Coursework often has a lot of small breaks – an hour between classes, etc. If you make a list of short tasks, like calling the library to renew books or writing a short email to a colleague, you can squeeze them into breaks that might otherwise have gone to waste. Continue Reading…

What I Wish I’d Known About Graduate School: Surviving the Workload

By on August 23, 2011 in Completing Your PhD, What I Wish I'd Known About Graduate School with 2 Comments

Guest blogger Hannah Eagleson continues her series What I Wish I’d Known About Graduate School. 

What Grad School Feels Like

Little known fact: the Wicked Witch of the East was actually crushed by her graduate school workload, not Dorothy's house.

Managing coursework is definitely a challenge. Here are a few things I wish I’d realized at the beginning of coursework. All of them eventually helped me both to get more out of my studies and to have a life outside of study.

You can’t do it all. Learn to prioritize different academic responsibilities

Most people arrive in graduate school with an impressive record of scholastic diligence. Grad students are usually the people who turned in extra credit assignments, attended optional events, and engaged in academic correspondence with their professors during summer breaks. All of those habits will help you in graduate school, but they also have an unfortunate tendency: they give the illusion that every single assignment can be accomplished as well as one would like to accomplish it. For many people, this is simply not true in graduate school. If you are taking 2-3 graduate courses which expect you to read one book-length primary source per week and critical articles, and you are also carrying a one or two course teaching load, you probably will not be able to read every word of every assignment and also sleep. I found it depressing to realize this, but graduate school in the humanities is probably going to entail some skimming. It’s crucial to decide on a few central priorities for a semester and focus on them. It’s still important to work hard in courses that aren’t central to your interests, but you probably will have to skim some readings.

You can still do it well. Pursue your interests diligently.

When I started my Ph.D., I was frustrated because it seemed that I didn’t have time to do anything well. I felt guilty when I didn’t get every word of every assignment read, and I wanted more time to process everything. Over time I did discover a few tips for giving long-term thoughtful attention to things while still being a productive member of each seminar. Here are a few things I learned: Continue Reading…

What I Wish I’d Known: Balancing Life and Graduate School

By on August 16, 2011 in Completing Your PhD, What I Wish I'd Known About Graduate School with 6 Comments

Graduate School Blues

"Graduate School Blues" by ChilLX1 via Flickr - a U. Chicago student simultaneously writing finals and reading for next term...during Christmas "break"

Our guest blogger Hannah Eagleson continues her series What I Wish I’d Known In Graduate School. 

As promised in my last post, here I’m talking about some things I wish I’d known (or just done!) early on to balance my life and my graduate work.

1. Make worship central

Graduate school can feel exhausting and terrifying. The pressure of continuing to produce and trying to impress professors and colleagues can make school seem like the defining aspect of one’s existence. I desperately needed to engage in corporate and individual worship as a reminder that my life and work are defined by God’s Kingdom. In the wake of burnout, it helped so much to recognize that any good thing that happened in my academic career was a result of God’s grace. That’s not to minimize the importance of hard work, but to say that it needs to take place in the context of seeking God’s Kingdom and recognizing who He is. Continue Reading…

What I Wish I’d Known about Graduate School: Intro

By on August 9, 2011 in Life in the Academy, What I Wish I'd Known About Graduate School with 0 Comments

We welcome Hannah Eagleson back for a second guest blog series, following her Summer Quotation Series. I’m going to be taking a few weeks off from writing for the blog in order to focus on fundraising, so Hannah will be taking my usual Tuesday slot for the next few weeks, with a new series “What I Wish I’d Known about Graduate School.” Thanks, Hannah! ~ Mike

P.S. In case you don’t read PhD Comics, you might not have seen this trailer for the live-action movie. ~ Mike

Paul Graham, a programmer and writer who does a lot of work with startup companies, once wrote an essay for high school students called “What You’ll Wish You’d Known”. When I finally finished my Ph.D. in the very different field of English this spring, I realized how much I could have used a similar essay for graduate students. So this series of blog posts, in a similar vein, tries to summarize things I wish I’d known at the beginning of graduate school, or in some cases things I did know but didn’t implement very well. Continue Reading…