Emerging Scholars Blog

InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network

Advice for Entering Graduate School

Beginning Well at the Start of a New Academic Year

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Photo by BROTHER LONG Foto 🏕️📸 on Pexels.com

One of the elements of the scholar’s journey is dislocation. Every few years, and sometimes more often, you find yourself beginning a new year in a new place. Dislocation can be disorienting and can bring out some of our worst coping mechanisms. Do you know what those are for you?

Whether you are beginning your first year of graduate school, or beginning a Ph.D program at a new school, or a post-doc, or a first-year faculty position, you are likely experiencing dislocation–new place, new responsibilities, new community, new colleagues, and the need to make new friends. Even if you haven’t moved, chances are there are new elements in your life–qualifiers, proposals, job-seeking, grants, new courses to teach.

One of the methods people use to navigate on a journey is setting your course by fixed points–stars, our GPS, or even landmarks whose location is known that also enables you to determine your location and course. I’d like to suggest a few “fixed points” that may be helpful when we are beginning a new year and especially so in a new location or position.

1. Jesus. (You knew that was coming!). Are we clear above all that all of our lives, including our scholarly work is for Jesus? Is he the goal or telos of our work? Are we consciously pursuing our work to know his pleasure upon our lives? Are we aware of the distractions and temptations that may lure us away from Jesus?

2. Attention. On a journey we don’t simply look once at a fixed point and then start walking. We regularly check our directions, read our maps, check our GPS. In our Christian journey, the wonder is that we not only live toward Christ, we journey with him! The point of scripture reading, prayer, and other spiritual practices is attention to Jesus, who is on the journey with us as a guide. Unfortunately, the pressures of the day sometimes tempt us to forego time with Jesus. One of the best helps for many has been to have a protected time in our day, or even multiple such times, when we given Jesus our full attention.

3. Community. One basic piece of advice often given to hikers is to never go out in the woods, particular in unfamiliar territory, alone. A stumble and twisted ankle makes for a challenging hike with a friend, but a much more serious situation alone. Sometimes friends recognize a blaze or waymark we miss. If you are new to your campus, have you searched to see if there is a graduate or faculty group that you can join? If that doesn’t work, InterVarsity can connect you with one.

I suspect none of these fixed points are new to you. Most fixed points aren’t, but that makes them no less helpful for the journey, especially if you are in a new place. 

Grace and peace to you in your scholarly journey this year!

[This article first appeared in Scholar’s Journey, the monthly newsletter for members of The Emerging Scholars Network. Not a member? Just click the “Join” button at the top of this page to become a member of ESN. And the best part? Membership is free!]

For those beginning graduate studies, ESN offers a great, curated collection of articles in our “Graduate School Survival Kit.”

Remembering the Sabbath (Growing Spiritually in Academic Life Series)

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Photo by mikecogh

In our goal of supporting early career Christian academics, we like to crowdsource short tips on important ways of thriving as we follow Christ in the university. This fall, we’ve launched a new series of tips on growing spiritually in academia. Physics researcher Bob Kaita brings us a meditation on Sabbath today, adapted from a brief encouragement he shared with the Princeton InterVarsity Graduate Christian group at the beginning of the semester. We hope it will encourage you whether you read it now as we approach Thanksgiving break, or in future as a semester kicks off. 

 In sharing thoughts on prospering in your life as an academic, I’m not going to tell you to work hard. You wouldn’t be reading this if you needed reminding! [Read more…] about Remembering the Sabbath (Growing Spiritually in Academic Life Series)

In Transition? Find an InterVarsity Campus Group

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It’s that time of year when many people are moving from campus to campus, starting new endeavors, and trying to find community in new places. If you’re in transition now and looking for a Christian fellowship where you’ll be moving, check out InterVarsity’s handy Chapters page, where you can search the whole United States for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA fellowships, including graduate and faculty chapters.

If you’re looking for a fellowship outside the United States, the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES) is the international movement that InterVarsity USA is part of, and you may be able to connect with a local fellowship by contacting IFES.

Even if you haven’t arrived in your new location yet, it’s worth getting in touch with a Christian fellowship ahead of time. You may find that local Christian fellowships are willing to help with practical questions like where to live and how to find roommates, and many groups have fall kickoff activities they’d love to welcome you to in advance. For some of the Emerging Scholars Network’s resources on transitions visit Advice for Entering Graduate School, Graduate School Survival Kit, Graduate School Journey, posts tagged transition, and posts tagged transitions (including a recent series by Christian Brady and another by Scott Santibanez).

Praying God’s blessing upon all our readers and the next steps they are taking this summer/fall. God is present with you each step of the way.

To God be the glory!

Letter to My Self, Starting Graduate School

Historian Ryan Wilkinson, PhD finished and starting a tenure track job in the fall, writes a letter to himself at the beginning of graduate school. We hope it’s a great encouragement, wherever you are on your academic journey. 

Dear Me,

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. Hmmm? What do I mean?

Well, let me give you some examples. You’re going to spend an entire Spring Break working on a seminar presentation, and then discover that everything you did all week was wrong. Oh, and there’s the time when you’ll lose a month’s research to malware. You’ll get a paper back with three words of feedback: “Very disappointing, Ryan!” A professor will suggest that a misplaced diacritic accent in a foreign-language citation halfway through a paper casts doubt on your fitness for this career path. Your first article will be rejected when you first submit it. You’ll spend years noticing other students outperforming you, getting grants and jobs and praise sooner than you, and just seeming smarter than you. When it’s all over, you’ll spend years on the tenure-track market, wondering if it will all pay off.

Now, hang on; it’s going to be ok.

Many of these disasters will turn out for your benefit. You will have professional triumphs, and they will tend to grow out of earlier problems. You will do good work, and you will be proud of it. You will publish. You will accept a tenure-track job. But make no mistake: this path is not for the faint of heart. Think long and hard about why you’re doing this. There are plenty of things you could do instead, and you’ll need to know why you should keep going. A decade from now, you’ll be smarter, and you’ll be done, but you won’t be any more valuable than you are today—and you won’t be any more valuable than the bus driver who brought you in this morning. Graduate school will not make you significant.

The good news is that you don’t need it to. On the other hand, I’m really glad you chose this path. If you give up prematurely, you’ll be hearing more from me—and I won’t sound as friendly! The path ahead is a gift and a treasure worth all the pain. It’s the right path for you; you can even think of it as a kind of priestly service.

Now, I get that you don’t fully understand that yet. In fact, I know that you’ve been wrestling pretty deeply with doubt, even though you rarely admit it. You have a lot of questions about God and the Christian life. Frankly, you’ll find even more questions here. In coming years, your training will expose you to some disturbing things—things difficult to reconcile with old beliefs. That’s ok. You have questions; go ahead and ask them. God is big enough to handle them. Proceed carefully, and prayerfully, but don’t fear new ideas. Sometimes, you’re just going to have to be ok not having things figured out.

I think this may surprise you, but in the next decade you will find answers—answers that satisfy you deeply, that enrich and revitalize your trust in God. A decade from now, the biblical gospel looks bigger, more beautiful, more complex (sometimes, more terrifying), more powerful, more reliable, and more relevant than you know today.

In the coming years, you’ll have access to one of the world’s great theological libraries. Use it. Anabaptists and Arminians and Calvinists; Catholics and Eastern Orthodox; agnostics, atheists, etc., etc. They’re all in there. I’m going to challenge you now to engage your faith with the same level of rigor and energy that you pour into your academic studies. You won’t regret it.

But intellectual enrichment can be dangerous without balance. The only way to thrive in graduate school is to thrive as a human being. Ask God for wisdom. Stay in fellowship, no matter what. Engage the church off-campus; this will help correct the limits of academic vision, which are very real. Serve others. Cultivate hobbies, without guilt. Maintain spiritual disciplines. Take time to tend your heart in every season. Spend time silent and alone, and listen to yourself. Ask yourself what you really want in life, and take your honest answers seriously. You think that silence, rest, prayer, and reading scripture are duties; you’re going to learn that they are instead the way to cultivate the life you actually want. When you let business get in their way for long, you will always diminish yourself.

Look for God in your discipline, too. It offers insight into how God has ordered the story of his creation. As a historian, you’ll see the beauty of human culture in ways you never expected. You’ll see the scope of evil and suffering more clearly than ever before. Reading over two millennia of history in depth as you prepare for your general exams, you’ll choke on the horrors that men routinely visit on each other. You’ll weep—yes, weep—over the tyranny of death. You’ll learn to fear more deeply. But God’s remedy will loom larger, and give you courage. You’ll read the judgments and promises of the prophets with a new and urgent hunger.

Not all of your insights into suffering will be vicarious. For several more years, you’re still going to struggle routinely with deep anxiety. For several more years, you and your wife will bear the sorrow of childlessness. You will have children—wonderful children—but you’ll also face unusually severe sleep deprivation. You’ll wonder how to comfort your wife after a miscarriage during the busy first week of a teaching semester. And you’ll grapple for years with wounds that other people’s sinful choices carved into your family. In the coming decade, your heart will sometimes break more painfully than you ever believed it would.

But listen: don’t be afraid of the future.

A decade from now, you are happy and often joyful, weathered but okay with it, going places but somewhat content with sitting still. Christ values you and he will not abandon you. Life is going to hurt sometimes, and sometimes your graduate studies will only add to the pain. But you will learn and grow and become more whole through it all.

Put each thing in its proper place. Graduate school is a gift, and it will shape you, but it must not define or own you. Be present with yourself. Serve your family; strive for excellence in your work. Take lots of healthy risks. Be honest and vulnerable, and don’t be afraid to suffer or to fail. As you face the future, there is only one guarantee—but it is more than enough:

Christ will be with you in everything, and it will be well.

Image courtesy of Kaz at Pixabay.com

Finding A Graduate Program in the Social Sciences, Part 1: Getting Started

black businesswoman photoThinking 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 Kateri’s own graduate school search story here, or explore her suggestions on finding mentors or her reflections on inhabiting transitional time well. 

When you are thinking about going to graduate school and do not know where to start, the process can feel intimidating. Yes, applying to grad school is an exciting, but a daunting task; I hope these tidbits are helpful for you! Part 1 will include information about consulting professors in the field you are interested in, looking online for the best schools for your area of study, what you should do when you find a school you are interested in, and lastly organizing all the information. Part 2 will include information about the application process, tips for the interview process, and lastly suggestions on picking the right school.

1. Consult Professors at your school in the field you are interested in.

When I first started thinking about graduate schools, I was thinking about social psychology PhD programs, so I first consulted professors who had social psychology degrees and asked them about schools in the subject area they knew. Consulting professors is an awesome way to start since they are in the field. When applying to PhD programs, you also want to contact major professors at the schools you are looking at to see if professors are doing research on topics you are interested in. It’s good to meet with them as well if possible.

2. Look online to find the best schools in the area of study you want.

The U.S. News and World Report education website is great for more mainstream programs: http://www.usnews.com/education . At this website you can look up all different types of programs all around the country and see their rankings. This is a great place to find schools in your area of study and where they are located. For more non-traditional and extremely specialty programs such as mine (Clinical Counseling in Expressive Art therapy), a simple Google search is your best option to find very specialized programs because there will not be too many options.

3. What to do when you have found schools you are interested in?

After you have found schools you are interested in you want to contact those schools to get on their interest email list; specifically, the department you are interested in. Next I suggest to research the programs on the school’s website to see if they offer what you want. You might want to make a trip out to the school if possible to get a more hands on and personal look at the school and program; that way you can ask questions in person. If you make an information trip out to the school, I would do that first before applying and contacting an admissions counselor. If you want to apply to the school, get in contact with the admissions department. This is important because they can assign someone to you, and you can have a personal contact person to ask questions whenever you have them. Also getting an admissions counselor assigned to you allows you to have a guide to that school’s particular admissions progress.

4. Organize all important information

After you have found the schools you are interested in, one helpful way to organize all the information is to create an Excel spreadsheet. Some of the important details you may want to write down are:

  1. Does the school require an online application or a paper one?
  2. What are the application materials needed: How long is the personal statement? Do they need transcripts from all schools attended or just the school you graduated from? How many recommendation letters? Does the school require the GRE scores? Does it also require GRE subject tests? Is there an average score they are looking for? Do they require any special projects?
  3. What is the application fee? Often if you contact the admissions department they will offer an application waiver if you ask!
  4. What courses are they requiring? Have you taken all the courses or do you need to take something beforehand? Or do they offer conditional acceptance and you can take required courses after being accepted?
  5. Do they require a resume? Are they looking for anything specific on the resume?
  6. Cost of tuition and do they offer scholarships or not.
  7. Lastly, when is the application due?

Please look out for Part 2, where the graduate application tips continue! The second part will conclude with tips on completing the application process, followed by suggestions for the interview process, and ending with making your final choice on which school to attend. Applying to graduate school is a very long process, but with God on your side, anything is possible; including successfully applying and attending graduate school!