Identity shifts in going from being an undergraduate to a graduate student
Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash
Going to graduate school gives you the opportunity to deepen your expertise in a subject matter that you enjoy. Students often expect that grad school will be similar to undergrad, but with more specialized classes that are more challenging. This is certainly true, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Your advancement in knowledge isn’t the biggest shift you will experience during graduate studies. The largest shift happens as you develop your ability to manage, well, everything; managing your sense of self, managing your curriculum, managing your schedule, managing your problems, and managing ‘up’ (i.e., managing your supervisor).
Managing your sense of self. Everyone in grad school is smart. That’s part of the requirement to get in: you must have consistently demonstrated an aptitude for course-based work and/or scholarly research. But grad school may be the first time that you find yourself in a classroom where everyone is, like, really smart. That can be jarring, especially if you have always been used to being the smartest person in class or the smartest person in your friend group. Suddenly, you may go from always getting the top marks, to suddenly being average, or even having one of the lower grades in your class. This comparison with your classmates can start to tear at your self-confidence. You may start to wonder if you were really that smart to begin with. Don’t let these doubts creep in. Instead, think about how wonderful it is to have the opportunity to be surrounded by all of these superstars who have different experiences and perspectives that you can learn from. Remember, these are the people who are in the trenches with you. They are probably the only ones who understand just how challenging graduate school can be, while the rest of the outside world mistakenly thinks you’re playing it easy, ‘just’ doing more school, rather than getting a job. Those smart people all around you are people who might become your friends for life. Together, you can provide one another with support and mentorship as you travel through the stages of your respective careers. If you can shift your mindset to see your classmates as members of your team, not as your competition, then your sense of self remains independent from them, and you allow yourself space to learn, even to fail, and ultimately, to grow and change.
Managing your curriculum. The emphasis in graduate school is to gain deeper expertise on a topic. But that doesn’t mean that you simply take more classes and learn more facts. Instead, as you learn more information in your classes, you are also being asked to consider whether such information is accurate to begin with—are these truly established facts?—and to consider where the gaps are in the field, and how you might be able to bridge those gaps. That means you will need to go beyond the prescribed readings in your classes, and you will need to develop your own curriculum, of sorts. Likewise, if your graduate program requires that you have a thesis component (whether that’s quantitative scientific research, qualitative sociological investigations, scholarly research creation, or any methodology you’ve decided to pursue), then you are in charge of establishing your own questions, deciding the right approaches to tackle these questions, and explaining how your findings or answers expand upon existing knowledge in interesting ways. All of this happens outside of the established coursework, and you are the person who is primarily responsible for it. Your challenge is to make your coursework fit within the curriculum you’ve set for yourself.
Managing your schedule. Having to manage your own curriculum means you also have to manage your own schedule. By and large, the work in graduate school is unstructured, and you need to structure it to make sure you are achieving the required program milestones in time. This may look like setting aside time each week to do the things outside of the prescribed coursework, such as: reading more of the literature you are interested in and becoming familiar with reference managers, learning a new programming language, piloting experiments, conducting surveys, developing a consistent writing practice, etc. This is particularly important during the years when there may not be any coursework at all.
Managing your problems. Problems are going to come up in graduate school. Maybe your writing isn’t going as smoothly as you’d like it to. Maybe your code isn’t working. Maybe your data don’t look like you expected and you don’t know what to do now. Your first instinct may be to just to ignore it, or to tell someone else about your problem and have them fix it. But, that isn’t what graduate school is about. If you want to truly become an expert in your field, you are going to have to develop solid problem-solving skills. If you know that your writing isn’t great, seek out your university’s writing and coaching resources. If your code isn’t working, Google, GitHub, and Stack Overflow might become your new best friends. If your data look funny, start digging into why that may be. Are there interactions with some demographic factors that you hadn’t anticipated? Did your conditions get coded wrong? Did you process the data incorrectly? You are responsible for your curriculum and your projects, which means that you are also responsible for trying to find a way through the problems that will inevitably arise. This also means that you have to ask yourself whether there are problems that exist in the first place that you may not have considered. For instance, your data may look beautiful, but that doesn’t mean it’s correct. What can you do to convince yourself (and your supervisor!) that your effects are real? Managing your problems doesn’t mean that you will always find the answer and never need help from anyone else. It simply means that you have to start the process yourself, and then when you are truly stuck, you should seek help or advice on what to do next.
Managing ‘up’. While it may feel awkward, graduate school is a time for you to learn how to manage your supervisors. Remember that your supervisors may have multiple graduate students, and numerous other responsibilities (teaching, grant writing, committee service, etc). Consequently, you need to be responsible for your progress. To do that, you need to help your supervisor understand what you need from them, and you need to get a clear understanding of what they need from you. For instance, being on top of your program milestones means that you don’t have to wait for your supervisor to check in on you; you can schedule weekly meetings with your supervisor and put forward an agenda outlining what’s been going well and where you need help. Meeting your program milestones also means understanding what timelines your supervisor needs to make sure you can get through each deadline on time. If your thesis needs to be done by a certain date, when does your supervisor want to see a first draft? How much time will the rest of your committee want with the draft? You are in charge of asking these questions, and then organizing your curriculum and schedule accordingly.
Graduate school is when you shift from being told what to do and how to think to becoming increasingly independent. It is a time that requires you to take control of how you feel about yourself, what and how you learn, and when to ask for support. This is why graduate school often feels so hard. It’s not hard because the material got more complex. It’s hard because success in graduate school requires that you evolve from being a person who follows a clearly worn path to being a person who proactively forges a new path forward for themselves. If you are struggling with the transition that graduate school requires, reach out. I’d be happy to talk with you about how to embrace this chapter.
Next week: Moving from graduate school to a postdoctoral fellowship
