Go back and read about Tip 1. Don't argue; just do it, and don't come back to this section until you've completed your inventory and set your boundaries. Done? Good for you. You're ahead of where I was when I started applying to graduate school.
I asked but didn't listen, and I regret it to this day. Dr. Flanigan told me, point blank, that I wouldn't like the department I ended up in. Too rigid, he said. Too big and impersonal. Too full of itself. He was absolutely, positively, 100% correct in everything he said.
These people know the players in the field. They know the schools. You don't. What's more, your favorite professor is unlikely to steer you wrong or to pretend to more knowledge than s/he has; there's no profit in either. Two cautions, however: don't let them feed you Misconception 2 (which you may hear in the form of "Oh, you'll be all right wherever you go"), and don't let them steer you into a field you're not sure you want to be in (especially if it's theirs!).
The How to Succeed in Graduate School manuals don't like this advice. You'll get inbred, they'll tell you; you won't get a broad view of your field.
In these days of the Internet and the global academic conference, this is ridiculous. It's even more ridiculous to suggest that any department—or any two departments, or any three departments—can give you a broad view of your field; all fields are too big for that.
If your professors want to keep you, you are giving up a treasure beyond price if you go elsewhere. You are giving up people who know you and your work, like both, want to see you succeed, and want to be your mentors and advocates. If you give this up in favor of trying to impress a bunch of strangers in a strange new department, you are being abominably stupid. Moreover, you are familiar with the professors, know something about the department and its politics, and already live in and understand the campus and surrounding area. These are all valuable things. I gave all this up—no fewer than three of my undergraduate professors asked me to consider staying for graduate study—for no reason at all, and it was just plain dumb of me.
The How to Succeed in Graduate School manuals will also tell you to look up the research done by the departments you're contemplating joining. I used to think this was absurd: just because they're doing cool research doesn't mean you will. And just because they do cool research doesn't mean they're a department you'd want to send a dog to, much less yourself. (If they're all off doing cool research, who's doing the teaching and advising?)
Then I rethought the matter, and another misconception sprang to mind:
No, it doesn't.
Because I have fairly catholic tastes in study—I'll study anything once, or even more than once!—I didn't have my nose rubbed in this. Plenty of other grad students have; from what I've read, it seems to be a pretty common complaint of students leaving grad school.
It makes sense, really. Professors are, as I have pointed out, very jealous of their status, and they like to believe they got where they are by being Experts on All Things Important. Therefore, if they don't study it, it's Not Important, and their students shouldn't study it either. Moreover, students with different interests threaten them, force them to think that perhaps there are a few Important Things they should know but don't. They don't like that.
So I now believe that it is important to take a look at what the professors in a department you're thinking of attending are up to. What you come up with may well represent the limits of your permitted studies.
Think I'm kidding? Sorry, I'm not. A friend of mine from my ex-department recently had a visionary dissertation proposal (involving SGML text analysis using the Text Encoding Initiative's DTD) shot down. It was a damn good idea. It got shot down because the department should have been using SGML and TEI years ago, and hasn't been. I suspect they feel rather stupid about it (as well they should). Petty reason to shoot down a dissertation proposal, but there it is.
(Thanks to Carrie Leonard for pointing this out.)
Lots of TAships, research assistantships, or project assistantships might be nice—grad students do need to eat. A nice campus is always a plus; if it's in good surroundings, so much the better. And everyone knows about the reputation game.
You absolutely must not, however, make a decision based on these essentially trivial factors. (Yes, even money is trivial. No matter where you go, it'll cost. Your job in the first place is to make sure the money spent is worth it.) Frankly, the most trivial factor is reputation; most academic department rankings are based on criteria that make no difference whatever to your graduate experience, and do not consider criteria that are utterly crucial (such as attrition!). You MUST consider the people in the department, first, last, and always.
Person Number One is your advisor. You'd better find a good one. Bad advising kicks more grad students out than anything I know. (Yes, the advising I received in graduate school was abysmal.) You need to be able to get along with this person, both socially and intellectually. This person needs to know and understand the rules (both written and unwritten) of the department, and it's better if s/he is occasionally willing to break them for the sake of an advisee.
Much has been written about "mentoring" relationships. Read it, absorb it, and consider it when you are considering departments. You will need a mentor. If the department doesn't have one for you, go elsewhere; it honestly is that simple.
Person Number Two is, believe it or not, the departmental secretary. Good ones are a blessing. Bad ones can get you in trouble or make you miserable as quickly as the most evilminded professor.
Person Number Three is less important than One and Two, but should still be taken into consideration: the department chair. Expecting management ability from these people is setting your sights too high; they're academics, not managers. If you see management ability, that's good. What you should expect, though, is an essential benignity underlying the chair's attitudes and actions. You do not want to see signs of contempt, dismissiveness, anger, hypercompetitiveness, favoritism, or bitterness in this person; s/he sets the tone for the department.
The hype you get from the graduate school will set new lows in utter unhelpfulness; I guarantee it. Ignore that stuff. Toss it. It's garbage. Take, for example, the hype from the University of Wisconsin regarding TA salaries. It'll happily tell you what someone with a 50% appointment earns. It doesn't tell you at all that no first-year student, and only a minority of continuing students, can GET a 50% appointment. (Not even in my ex-department, which was and is perennially desperate for TAs.)
I think it's best to visit, myself, but even a significant telephone interview is better than nothing. What's more:
Departments want applicants. They want enough applicants so that their acceptance rate is low enough that they don't look desperate. So of course they're going to cajole, brag, wheedle, bribe—they don't have their claws into you yet! My department made a big deal about how they were going to try to get me a fellowship (and they in fact did so); that didn't stop them from treating me like a disposable diaper (dump crap into it and throw it away!) while I was there.
Graduate students know the score, and they usually don't have too many reasons to make the picture rosier than it is. Avoid, however, being assigned a "guide" by the professors who's the only student you end up talking to. In all likelihood, this person is either brownnosing, self-deluding, or too terrified to tell the truth (or a combination of the three!). Always try to talk to more than one student, and try to get in at least one impromptu conversation. If you can listen in at a grad student hangout like a TA office, so much the better.
Here are some suggestions for questions you should ask, and the answers you should be listening for. They probably aren't the typical questions prospective grad students ask. That's all to the good; the people you talk to are less likely to have canned answers.
Don't even THINK about leaving without this information.
I don't know that there are no good big departments in the world, but I do believe quite strongly that the smaller your department, the better off you are likely to be. Do not enter a department whose graduate courses regularly contain more than 25 to 30 graduate students from that department (departments that offer courses that appeal to students in other departments may well be all right, however). You will not receive the individual attention you need and deserve.
Most graduate departments will not be able to give you this information offhand, because they don't compile it... because they don't want to know. Still, you should NOT leave without pressing very hard for an answer to this question. If the department can't or won't give you an estimate, they are very likely hiding something—or they don't care, which is worse.
A zero attrition rate is suspicious, and it becomes more suspicious the larger the department. Perhaps some department somewhere has hung onto all of its graduate students, but I've never heard of it. Another suspicious sign is a large attrition rate unilaterally attributed to "personal reasons" on the part of students. That's horse manure. The department is burning them out and blaming them for it.
What you want to hear is "Yes, students occasionally find that they have to leave, for personal reasons or because they find we don't suit them. We make every effort to keep our students, and here are some examples of what we have done..." If students leave to transfer to other institutions, that's not so bad; at least the department hasn't completely burned them out on academia. If students are leaving and the department doesn't know or care why or what happens to them, that's bad. Go back and read my refutation of Misconception 3; these departments are living proof that it's not true.
Avoid at all costs departments that offer a ton of undergrad courses taught by TAs. This includes most English departments, most Spanish departments, and many behemoth science and math departments. The larger the university, the more likely it is to have this sort of graduate department. The trap here is that these departments need TAs, at any cost, and they are far more interested in finding TAs than in educating future professors. If your research interest is in these areas (you poor thing), try a similar but less crowded field (substitute Comparative Literature for English, for example) or look for a related or interdisciplinary department (like a Hispanic Studies department if your interest is Spanish). Or simply find an English or Spanish department at a smaller school.
Answers you do NOT want to hear:
The answer you want to hear is, "Temporarily, I or anyone else can advise you until you're on your feet in the department. Within a semester or two, you should gravitate to someone you can choose on a more permanent basis." If the continuation is "Let me introduce Dr. So-and-so, who is teaching a course you might be interested in, and has expressed a desire to meet you. Hey! Dr. So-and-so! C'mere!" you're on to something good.
Watch for discomfort in the person you are talking to in response to this question. If you see any, it is probably an indication that there is some nasty infighting going on in the department. Possibly there has been an adviser/advisee scandal of some kind, ranging from an insulted ex-adviser torpedoing the ex-advisee's career to sexual harassment by an adviser to any number of other nasty possibilities.
If the answer you get is "Our students never change advisers," run for the hills. This means that anyone who gets a lousy or just incompatible adviser ends up run out of the department. No adviser can make all of his/her students happy; there will always be mismatches, and a mature, decent, considerate department will recognize this and allow for it.
This is an example of a good policy, from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:
Every graduate student must have an official faculty advisor. New students are usually assigned to the chair by default, unless they come with the intention of working with a particular faculty member. By the end of the first year, students must decide who they would like to work with, and must ask that person if they are willing to serve as advisor. [various bureaucratic stuff snipped] All permanent faculty members in the department (including affiliated faculty but excluding visiting faculty) may serve as advisors. Faculty from other departments may not serve as official advisors, even though they may co-chair committees.
Every faculty member has the right to refuse to become a student's advisor. Every graduate student has the right to choose any faculty member as the advisor, so long as the faculty member agrees. Students should also feel free to change advisors at any time, without fear of offending a faculty member.
My ex-department didn't bother sending me a reading list for the master's exam. Since I graduated college in December and did not enter school until the following August, I could have spent several months making inroads into that long list. I didn't learn about the MA exam file until well into my second semester of graduate school. I didn't know enough to ask for these things. Now you do. So ask.
Really sharp departments and colleges will have something. If what they have is good, give the place a gold star; they care about their students. If all you get is a "Guide to TAing," watch out! this is a sign of a department that doesn't give a damn about anything but staffing its undergraduate classrooms. If they don't have anything, they're typical; you may be able to do better, but you probably shouldn't completely write off the department. The best guides are written by students; if such a guide exists, and hasn't been censored or driven underground by faculty, it is generally a sign of a pretty good department where people like each other.
This should be an easy, fun question for a faculty member. Look for enthusiasm, knowledge, delight in a promising student or two.
Beware of "the department made me teach this class". This is deadly for several reasons. The department is probably full of friction and power-mongering. The courses that no one wants to teach are probably the introductory/survey courses that graduate students desperately need to pass exams—you do NOT want those taught by low-prof-on-the-totem-pole-who-would-rather-be-elsewhere.
Moreover, if low-prof is teaching survey courses, it often means that the course requirements are out of step with department staffing, and nobody cares enough—or the department is too rigid—to revise the requirements or the course list. Talk about deadly! You can end up in a situation where a course the requirements say you need to be eligible to take exams hasn't been taught in seven years! (Don't laugh. It happens. And a department rigid enough to end up in such a situation is highly unlikely to waive the requirement for you on grounds of mere common sense.)
If you get a patronizing smile and a "I don't advise [new] students," do not enter this department; this is another dead giveaway for low-prof-on-totem-pole advising. Obviously, "I advise all of them!" is another such giveaway.
The professor should know exactly how many students s/he advises, and be able to name all of them. Be alert, if you can, for name mispronunciations or other indications that this professor doesn't know diddly-squat about his/her advisees. S/he won't trouble to learn diddly-squat about you, either, and your adviser is the one person you MUST have in your corner if you are to survive. Also watch for a professor who quickly changes the subject to students in his/her classes, or dissertators for whom s/he is on the committee, rather than his/her ordinary lower-level advisees. This professor may be a dandy teacher, but s/he is probably a lousy adviser.
You want to talk to a range of people, all the way from first-year students to dissertators, if you can. That will give you the most comprehensive overview of the process, and a fair diversity of viewpoints, all the way from the starry-eyed newbie to the seasoned workhorse.
The faculty may have lied to you, or they may be clueless. The students will know. Listen, also, to their tone of voice when they talk about students who left. If they're dismissive and scornful, they're in the clutches of Misconception 2, and it may be a sign that the climate in the department is all about dog-eat-dog. If they're sympathetic, and show an understanding that these things happen and it's not necessarily anyone's fault, that's good. If they're typically envious, even covertly—the department is a hellpit; run for your life!
The actual answer to this is less important than the subtext underlying the answer (although remember the names anyway; can't hurt). "She's really funny," or "He's really nice," are not sufficient; if such superficial comments are all you hear, you can be pretty sure that there is a wide communication divide between students and faculty. You want to hear that the professor went to bat for a student, and prevailed. You want to hear that the professor teaches well, assigns useful work, and grades it fairly. If you hear that a professor regularly holds formal or informal discussions, enjoys talking to students about the field, can often be found with students, has helped many students get published or get through exams—you've got a live one, pursue it!
Again, ask as many people about this as you can, and average out the vibes you get. People who are unhappy with their advisers will probably be willing to tell you about it; people who are happy will be delighted to.
You want to hear about two types of exams: normal class exams, and MA exams and Ph.D prelims.
LISTEN CLOSELY! This is important stuff! Of course students will bitch about exams; if it sounds like the normal kvetching that students have been doing since schools began, that's fine. Beware, however, of consistent and repeated complaining about exams that are so difficult as to be unfair, exams that "everybody flunked", and—believe it or not—exams that are too easy.
Why is this last a problem? It's a problem if the professors are too lazy to write and grade exams that test your knowledge fairly and adequately. This indicates that they are also too lazy to prepare you decently for the exams that (assuming adequate performance in classwork) are the SOLE ARBITERS of whether you get a master's degree and whether you are permitted to write a dissertation. Students won't complain about too-easy exams, but they should; MA exams, prelims, and quals are not easy, and a professor who lets you slide through a class and later fail a milestone exam is not doing you any favors.
Try to get copies of exams if you can. Read over them, and see what you think.
Regarding milestone exams, try to get a handle on how many students pass them, and why students fail. When I took MA exams, seven others took them with me; six of us passed. Do you like failure chances of one in four?
What you are listening for here is signs of grad-student exploitation for faculty benefit. This happens a lot; it's one more thing that everyone in academia knows about and no one discusses.
(Brief interjection: My father has spent a lot of his academic career in physical anthropology working on ways to measure and analyze various objects via computer imaging, which is more accurate and faster than human measurement and analysis. When he talks to his colleagues about his systems, though, what he typically hears is "But what will I make my graduate students do, if they don't measure artifacts?" That should tell you something ugly about the professorial mentality.)
"S/he made us do this..." is a very bad sign, nine times out of ten. (The tenth time, the professor has picked a valuable project that students just don't like. Use your judgment.) If you hear this, ask if the research is being published, and by whom. If the professor is sole-authoring the publication, or if it will be published with the students' names in the professor's pet publication mill that nobody else has ever heard of, his/her students are getting royally screwed. Don't be one of those students!
Run, don't walk, away from a department if you hear that the entire purpose of a particular class appears to have been doing a project that a professor can then publish. That is beyond the pale—YOU are paying tuition to take those classes, and you are NOT doing it in order to slave away at the professor's gruntwork. This is not "work experience," this is not "a valuable introduction to research"—this is slave labor, and a blatant cheat.
You do want to hear that students have published papers that they originally wrote for someone's class. That's an excellent omen. If the professor actually helped polish the paper for publication (without insisting on being listed as author), that's even better.
A typical answer will be "None," and it's a bad answer. Another very bad sign is a student committee with no power, or a non-voting student representative on faculty committees; the faculty is playing a cynical game of tokenism. I don't really know whether there are any graduate departments without these problems. If you find one, it's a keeper.
Most of these questions are also suitable for research and project assistants. You shouldn't limit yourself to talking to TAs, especially if you think it's more likely that you'll be an RA or PA.
I said this once, but I'll say it again: do NOT believe the rosy TA wage reports you get from the university. They are highly likely to be distortions. Try to get a look at someone's actual paycheck. Before the tuition waiver went into effect at my ex-university, students teaching one class and taking three (a typical load) were taking home $65 a month; I myself was taking home $250 a month because I was only taking two classes at the time.
(How did this work? Simple. All TAs had to pay in-state tuition. This tuition was withheld from after-tax money, so not only were we not seeing money that went for tuition—essentially, the university paying itself using TAs as conduits—but we were paying taxes on money we never saw!)
For comparison, my rent at the time on one of the cheapest one-bedroom apartments anywhere was $420 a month. And all this time, the university was bragging that its gross TA wages were tops in the Big Ten.
(Incidentally, if you don't know the difference between gross and net wages, and can't make head nor tail out of the description I just gave of the UW's erstwhile TA payment practices, read a personal finance book. You won't survive grad school if you aren't money-savvy.)
Whatever answer you get, decide whether YOU can spend that many hours and still get by academically.
At a minimum, you should be getting health insurance. If you are not, go elsewhere.
TAs at universities with unions do better than TAs at universities without them. Just how it is. The union at my ex-university was frequently a highhanded pain in the butt, but we would not have had health insurance or a tuition waiver without it. Beware of the university that is actively union-busting. They're doing it because they're happy to risk the bad PR in order not to be forced to manumit their slaves.
Loud bursts of laughter at this question are obviously a warning sign. At the very least, you are owed photocopying for classes and a department-maintained stock of enrichment material.
A lot of departments will shove a brand-new grad student up in front of a classroom with a textbook and (maybe) a prayer. Don't be that student. You need some sort of practical orientation, geared to what you will be teaching and doing, that goes beyond a "Tips for TAs" manual (although several of these manuals are in fact quite good, and you should read any one you get).
You want to hear that you will be observed while teaching at least once per semester, and you want to hear that a specific faculty member is responsible for keeping an eye on the TAs, because you WILL need someone to back you up with the occasional obstreperous student. (In my experience, there is exactly one of these—no more, no less—in every class.)
You will be asked questions at any interview you set up. Be ready for them.
If you have one, say so, loudly and proudly. Don't try to suck up by mentioning the pet area of the prof you're talking to; you may well have to live up to your words. If you get a response that indicates that your area, whatever it is, isn't highly respected in this department, FIND ANOTHER DEPARTMENT. You won't change anyone's mind, and you won't be allowed to do what you want. I absolutely guarantee it.
If you don't have an area, that's okay (although it may be a sign that you aren't sufficiently committed to graduate school; think about it). Mention a few interests, and gauge the reaction, as above. Then, ask what the interests of the faculty are, and listen closely to the answers. Is there somewhere in this department that you could fit in? Better if there's more than one place.
If you think they're trying to pigeonhole you, though, you might be wiser to go elsewhere, find someplace where you can work out what you want to do in relative peace.
One of the biggest lies in graduate school is "We only take Ph.D aspirants." My ex-department used that line; didn't stop a lot of people I knew from exiting, MA in hand. It makes absolutely no sense. No graduate student signs any legal contract forcing them to go on after they finish a master's degree, and in actual fact, a great many leave then.
Feel free to lie right back, if you don't want a Ph.D or you aren't sure. Smile and say sure, you're going to go on.
Better yet, put the onus on the department. I highly recommend saying something like, "If I am satisfied with my experience in this department as I earn my master's, I will certainly continue." Watch their jaws drop; they won't have thought that it's up to them whether you go on, or that they have any obligation to make themselves worthwhile to you as a student. That thought, however, is one you definitely want to plant!
I haven't finished this yet. I hope to go on to talk about the actual experience of graduate school: how to keep your nose clean, how to stay away from the abusive or abandoning professor, how to pick your battles and how not to lose them, what to do when despite all your precautions you end up in serious difficulties, and so on. I originally intended to finish it before putting it on the Web, but that annoying little thing called "having a life" got in the way, and when I came back to reread this I thought it was valuable enough to post on its own. So here it is.
Link back to the beginning of Straight Talk about Graduate School.
Curious about my personal grad school story? You can read about my encounter with graduate school, if you like.