Looking for Christian communities in a new place? Here are a few links to help, in the US and internationally. Read more…
Letter to My Self, Starting Graduate School
Well, congratulations—you’re going to graduate school! So—this is your future self, writing from a decade ahead to let you know that you’ll have a lot of fun. On the other hand . . . it won’t all be easy. Read more…
Finding A Graduate Program in the Social Sciences, Part 1: Getting Started
Thinking about a graduate school search in the social sciences, or advising students who are? In this two-part series, Kateri Collins shares advice, steps, and checklists to help plan a search process. Read more…
Graduate School Survival Kit
We’ve gathered some of our most read and appreciated material on navigating graduate school here. If you’re looking for encouragement/grad school survival advice individually or for your campus group, check out these five options.Read more…
Inhabiting Transitional Time Well
My transition from being an undergraduate to entering graduate school was ambiguous. I simply did not know when or where I was going. Discerning my vocation was a long, but important process that took about three years that started in my junior year of undergrad.Read more…
Discerning My Vocation: A Surprise in the Graduate School Search
How do you know where to go to graduate school? How do you choose your field? Kateri Collins shares her experience. Read more…
Letter to a New Graduate Student’s Family Series
Chandra Crane shares her journey of being family to a graduate student and unpacks ways of engaging in the unique journey of having a loved one in graduate school.Read more…
Letter to a New Graduate Student’s Family, Part 3
There will be times when your graduate student needs more strength, endurance, time, and patience than what she actually possesses.Read more…
Letter to a New Graduate Student’s Family, Part 2
The nature of grad school is a weird nexus of too much information (Here are 800,000 pages. Please read them by last week) and not enough information at all (Please figure out all the Things. Please create your own efficient life schedule. Please have a Fortune 500 CEO level of organization, motivation, and enthusiasm. Here is your $5 graduate school stipend).Read more…
Letter to a New Graduate Student’s Family, Part 1
Congratulations! Your loved one is not the only one starting a new journey. You have also started grad school, and you are now working on your own program of study. You have now begun your “PhT”: your Pushed him/her Through.Read more…
Letter to a New Graduate Student
Dear New Graduate Student, I don’t know you. And yet today, I think about you and pray for you. The academic world is small and mobile enough that there’s a good chance we’ll be on the same campus at some point in our lifetimes, and yet this letter is probably the only chance I’ll be able to speak these words to you. Read more…
Faithfulness In the Preparation
When I first realized that the taking the Graduate Record Exam © was on my horizons, I trembled a good bit. As my friends burned, sold, and threw away their textbooks after finals, I ordered two test preparation books andRead more…
What Do You Need to Get Ready for Graduate School?
In the Spring a student’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of graduate school. – Alfred Lord Tennyson, more or less In recent weeks, I’ve addressed whether graduate school was a path a certain doom (no) and whether getting a tenure-trackRead more…
Is a Tenure-Track Job a Futile Dream?
Probably. Last week, I addressed the question of whether graduate school was a path to certain doom. In the comments of that post, John questioned my use of statistics to show that people with Ph.D.s had relatively good job prospectsRead more…
Is Graduate School a Path to Certain Doom?
Every few years, another publication discovers that becoming a tenured professor at a research university is hard work. Most recently, it was Slate, which ran an essay by Rebecca Shuman which, fittingly for an essay about literary study, had twoRead more…
New Vision in an Academic Desert
Monica Greenwood (pseudonym) is semi-patiently excitedly awaiting the day she walks into her first graduate seminar in philosophy. Until then, she is an undergrad studying philosophy at a state school known for its agriculture program. —————————– In contemporary America, weRead more…
Headed to Graduate School: Witness in the Academy
Thus far in two prior posts I’ve suggested that the end-point of a graduate education is to “become a person” in the Biblical sense – that is, to grow into the image of God. This holistic vision will encompass withinRead more…
Headed to Graduate School: A Time of Re-imaging
In my prior post I encouraged students who are headed toward grad school to begin their journey with a lofty end-point in mind: to grow into a person. In the Biblical sense, personhood has to do with fulfilling one’s potentialRead more…
Headed to Graduate School: Begin with the End in Mind
In my travels to campuses around the country (40 in the past two years), I meet up with a lot of students who are headed to grad school someday. Here is what I wish I could suggest to each oneRead more…