Academic Advice for Grad Students

This is my best advice for grad students. I think it’s such important advice I require my grad student advisees to follow it. (Although this advice should be useful for students regardless of whether they are interested in an academic or industry job, it is likely most useful for students interested in the academic job route and probably leaves out important advice I’m simply unprepared to offer given my experiences. The good news is there will be people more qualified than me to offer that advice.)

• Take as many methods courses as you can, maybe even all that are offered in your department (and then look outside your department). I mean it, take everything: qualitative, quantitative, research design, specific techniques of data collection or data analysis, etc. (I took eight such courses in grad school.) And then do additional training outside of your university: I mean things like IQMR at Syracuse, ICPSR at Michigan and other unis, or one-off trainings that organizations and unis might offer. (These additional trainings may entail out-of-pocket expenses; you might ask your department for funds or see if the organization offers scholarships.) Grad school is the one time where you can learn new methods in a safe environment where someone is obligated to explain it to you. After you graduate, you are left with (a) going to conferences and hearing about new techniques and then reading the technical literature on that technique or (b) going to additional trainings (which will be more expensive for non-students). For most of us, the period after graduation is a slow decline into methodological obsolescence unless we diligently keep up with the methodological literature (which is exploding in size, while our own time implodes). Grad school is a precious time so take advantage of it. Bonus: methods training is useful for academic and industry jobs (this advice is evergreen).
  • For my student advisees: I require that you read my (RQSS) book (I will give you a copy), as many other qualitative methods texts as you can, and Mostly Harmless Econometrics, and if you like quant, books by Andrew Gelman.
• Take your comprehensive (comp) exam(s) seriously. Different departments have different names (and different requirements) for this hurdle, but basically it’s the (essay or oral) exam that is designed to show you competence in some substantive area (e.g., law and society, criminological theory, punishment and society, historical sociology, medical sociology, political sociology, social theory, qualitative methods, quantitative methods, etc.) so that you can move on to writing your dissertation proposal or actual thesis. I recommend that you immediately begin thinking about, designing, and filling out a “comp list.”
  • The “comp list” is a syllabus on steroids. How is it organized? Imagine you are teaching a class on your subfield of interest (e.g., historical criminology, historical sociology, punishment and society, prison sociology, prison history, law and society). How would you set up that course if you had only one class each week for 12 weeks? You won’t necessarily have exactly 12 sections, but probably somewhere around there (maybe you start with just three or five, but then build up to eight or ten and eventually 12 or more). What readings are essential on each topic? Don’t limit yourself to what is humanly possible to read in one week. Be comprehensive (but limited to the most important or the most fun readings). You should have at least 5-10 readings for each section. Once you set up the outline, you will continuously fill in more readings as you learn about them. You will also add more sections as you discover new sub-subfields. As you build this list, write memos about things you are noticing about the readings in each section. As you actually begin reading these works, keep a document with roughly one-paragraph summaries of each article/book/chapter you read.
  • How much of your comp list will you actually read?
    • A large benefit of the exercise is assembling and keeping track of the readings and seeing how the literature fits together (“mapping”). But a lot of the benefit also comes from actually doing the reading, taking notes, and reflecting/writing about how it all fits together. 
    • How much of any given article or book or chapter you read depends on your interests and how central the piece is considered. Some pieces you will want to read at least once, word for word. You might even take extensive notes. Some of these pieces you might read multiple times. For others, you might skim (read the abstract, the intro and conclusion, maybe also the lit review and discussion or maybe just the first line of every paragraph). Sometimes, you might read something “quickly” which might mean trying to read word for word but only certain parts and skipping over when you get bored. 
    • However much you read, always highlight, take notes in the margin, use checkmarks or other symbols to designate “author’s main argument,” “useful summary,” or “interesting.” You might also take additional notes on a flash card or in a notes document, but my recommendation is to take no more than one paragraph, most of which you write after you’ve finished reading, and it just summarizes the piece. If you are reading something for an article you are writing, you might take more extensive notes with quotes and page numbers and such.
  • Even as a faculty, I still refer back to my original comp exam lists and notes. A few years back, I created a new comprehensive comp list for myself with the literatures that constitute my alleged areas of expertise. It was one of the best things I did. It helps me to map the ever-expanding literature and makes it easier to look up what I need to read, engage, and cite when I’m writing an article. (As an editor, it also helps me look up who is writing in what areas–folks I can ask to be a reviewer; as an author, it reminds me of who my review my own work.)
  • One more point about the comp list: developing competency in your chosen area(s) of expertise requires both depth and breadth, and this also reflects expectations surrounding your teaching competency. Most academic jobs want you to be able to teach a large, introductory (first or second year) class on some topic (e.g., race and ethnicity, stratification/inequality, law and society, criminology/criminological theory, historical sociology, political sociology, economic sociology, medical sociology, etc.) and a smaller, advanced (third or fourth year) class on a topic closer to your specific research interests. For example, early on, mine would be Law and Society and then Punishment and Society (narrower overlapping subset of Law and Society) or Sociology of Prisons (smaller subfield than Law and Society); later, it was Criminological Theory/Criminology (called different things at different unis, but same course for me) and Criminal Justice Organizations (narrower interest course). On the academic job market, you often want a syllabus prepared for each of the two main courses you are prepared to teach (although you might be asked to teach others, particularly methods classes). Setting up your comp like a syllabus on steroids helps you create a bank of articles and books and chapters to draw from. 
  • How does this teaching stuff relate back to research? That broad intro class you need to teach is like the larger audience you’ll need to address to frame your study on your narrower interest class topic. For more on framing and writing, see my website. The upshot is the two actually work really well together, so this training model prepares you both for research and teaching (although you still have to then execute the research and teaching in practice!). In fact, some of my framing for generalist law and society articles (on narrower punishment topics) came directly from my course prep for law and society.
• Attend the colloquia in your department or around the university. This is essential for proper socialization into the profession and a useful way to keep up with some of the latest research (both methods and theories).
  • For my student advisees: If you attend our department colloquia, I want to do debriefs afterward so we can discuss what went well and what did not and why.
  • Students should find and attend other colloquia from other universities. Berkeley Sociology’s talks are live on zoom on Mondays at 2p Pacific. Attend as many of those as you can, even if you don’t like the topic. You don’t need to ask questions, you can just be a creeper on zoom. There are also some virtual talks in Europe, although those tend to be really early for us (about 6a). 
• If you can, join a reading group or a paper exchange group with grad students from other departments or another university. Expand your network. Meet other grad students and postdocs and early career folks at conferences (it’s easier with other grad students). If you need introductions, let me know. Go to socials (but never alone—see my twitter thread on conferencing). The more you can meet and interact with people outside of your program the better: people within your program all learned from the same professors, a lot of the same readings, etc.; people outside of your program have worked with different people, been trained with somewhat different readings and orientations, etc. Interacting with other people from different programs is not just fun and informative, but it is really useful for broadening your horizons and rounding out your education. 
• Seek out other faculty. You want to be well rounded and that can only happen from exposure to multiple viewpoints. Additionally, you are going to need QR, comp, and dissertation committee members (including one member who is outside the department) and you want to start thinking about that early. When I was in grad school, I regularly went to six different faculty for advice, only some of whom were on my dissertation committee. Now, faculty even more busy and, in general, you don’t want to lean too heavily on someone who is not on your committee or is not employing you as an RA or TA or who isn’t teaching a class you are taking (it’s not fair to them and they don’t really have an obligation to help if you aren’t putting them on your committee). But it is good to meet multiple faculty, both in your department and beyond (other departments, other universities). (For students I know: I can help with introductions to faculty I know from other universities.) Asking someone to coffee at a conference is a good thing to do (ask about a month ahead of time, but keep in mind they still might say no or not answer).
• Meet other grad students and junior faculty in your subfield. They become your friends, coauthors, and reviewers going forward. (Once you become a junior faculty member, if that is your path, seek out grad students in your area.) They become your friends, coauthors, and reviewers going forward. To be super strategic about it: many of the folks who are big names when you are in grad school will retire much sooner than your peers. On the nicer side of things: meeting and befriending folks makes life (grad school, early faculty years, conferences, paper writing, etc.) much better.
• Sign up for Google alerts on your name, Google Scholar alerts on your research interests, and table of contents alerts on your favorite journals as well as the top sociology journals (ASR, AJS, SF, SP). If you are in my field, you should also have alerts for LSR, LSI, PS, TC, BJC, HOJO, Incarceration, and The Prison Journal. Now a warning: TOC and Google Scholar alerts can get overwhelming so you want to develop a good system for processing them.
• Start using a citation management software. Seriously, this one isn’t negotiable. Find one you like and start using it consistently as soon as possible. Many use zotero. I use one built into LaTeX, but most people in sociology don’t use LaTeX, so I don’t recommend it unless you get hardcore into quant or work with folks in fields that use this software (e.g., econ, maybe psych, and STEM). 
• At least several times a year, review relevant websites for information about various opportunities for funding or recognition (student paper prize competitions, fellowships, travel grants, etc.) and discuss these with me. Some examples, depending on your stage in the program: LSA, ASA (sections), and ASC’s student paper prizes; Fellowships/Dissertation Grants/Post-docs from the NSF, Ford Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; LSA’s grad student and early career workshop; ABF pre-doc and post-doc fellowships; Baldy Center’s Post-doc. Apply for opportunities for which you are eligible. Submit your papers for paper prizes. Sign up for stuff. Try to get rejected as many times as possible. A lot of paper prizes don’t get many submissions, and yet winning a paper prize really sets you apart. So be a go-getter and don’t worry about getting rejected repeatedly; if you aren’t getting rejected multiple times per year, you aren’t applying to enough things. 
• The whole point of your graduate training is not to get the best grades, but to learn how to conduct (and evaluate) high-quality publishable research. But don’t be in a hurry to publish something. I don’t expect students to publish anything in their first two years. I don’t particularly want them to. I want them to spend this time learning methods, learning the literature, and honing their writing skills. In the vast majority of cases, students are not ready to publish at this stage and what they publish can be an embarrassment later (speaking from my own experience here). But many students are, like I was, precocious and want to publish as early as possible. To the extent that you assemble papers, think of them as practice and perhaps laying the foundation for something that you publish later. But your priority for the first two, maybe even three years, of your training should be learning how to do research (and you learn by doing, so do research) and (just as importantly) how to frame it for the proper audience. You can learn how to conduct research much faster than you can learn how to come up with a good research question and how to frame it properly, so make sure you are making progress on both and recognize that you can run in one area while you’re still crawling in another.
  • Note: People will often say “You can get this published somewhere.” That is not kind advice. The goal of publication should not be to get it published somewhere, but in the journals you like and you read on a regular basis. The goal is not just to get published, but to get published in a good venue. As you do your “comp list” prep, you will get a sense of which journals keep coming up with the most interesting articles in your area. This pattern will tell what journals you want to aim for. If you are really ambitious, you can also aim for the discipline’s top journals (AJS, ASR, SF, SP, plus various ASA-sponsored subfield journals). 
  • Please do not publish in for-profit journals, which are sometimes predatory (with a few subfield exceptions and options to make your article open access, you should not pay to get published). Ensure the journal is included in various databases and has an impact factor. Generally, you don’t need to run these checks, though, if you are dealing with a known journal. 
  • Likewise, with few exceptions, you should be publishing articles in peer-reviewed journals, not writing book reviews or publishing chapters in edited volumes. (In general, you should write one book review during your graduate school years, and it should be a book that is centrally located within your area of interest. You should not write such a book review until after you have finished your comprehensive exam that tests your knowledge of the literature. Read my twitter thread on writing book reviews (and see me since I have other advice I’ve not yet made public).) 
• Co-author with caution. Coauthorship is widely used in a lot of different disciplines and the number of coauthors also varies. My husband works in astrophysics where they often have dozens, if not hundreds, of coauthors. I have (occasionally) coauthored with one or two people. I have also seen papers in my field with five or six or more authors. I prefer the model of a few coauthors and I am often a little skeptical of papers with a large number of authors as we do not have strong shared norms about what amount of work should grant someone coauthorship. I take the stance (that some but not all share) that if you contribute substantially to the idea creation, analysis, and writing of the paper, you should be a coauthor. This doesn’t mean reading a paper and giving some feedback (we do that all the time and credit is limited to the acknowledgments section). Basically, there should be a substantial contribution. You can do this with other grad students. You can also coauthor with faculty on their papers where they invite you to be a coauthor because you have made a substantial contribution to the project in some way (note: helping with the data collection is not often considered a substantial contribution, particularly where it is paid; data analysis is a little more tricky and depends on if the analyses were your idea or you were following instructions).
  • Note: Faculty, including me/your advisor, should not be a coauthor on your papers; by “your papers,” I mean papers where you have come up with the idea for the project, collected the data, analyzed the data, and written the paper. Faculty, including me/your advisor, can give you feedback along the way, help you to develop your ideas, and comment on various aspects of the project and paper. That does not earn us coauthor credit. This is my job as your advisor or their job as the instructor in a class you are taking or a member of your committee. At best, it earns us an acknowledgment. If a faculty member demands coauthorship, please come to me and explain the situation so I can weigh in (there are different norms in different fields, but it’s worth talking it out with a trusted advisor). 
  • Also note: coauthorship is evaluated differently by different people. In general, if you are coauthoring with a faculty member, people will assume the paper was theirs and you have contributed a minor (perhaps a significant but still minor) part of the paper. This means it won’t “count” as much as a solo-authored paper where you are more clearly the lead (people still sometimes make assumptions about how much a role advisors played in student papers, and for good reason: there are cases where faculty have literally written parts of students papers or even dissertations, which is unethical and has these bad consequences to boot). 
  • I always recommend that you solo-author if you can and you only coauthor on a project if the other person or people were literally necessary for the paper to happen (e.g., you couldn’t do it on your own) or they make the paper better. You might imagine two people with complementary areas of expertise, where one person has useful data or a special analysis skill that helps with another’s theoretical framework, or a situation where you’re having a conversation with someone and the two of you jointly come up with an idea during that conversation and then execute that idea together. That is a great way to coauthor. 
  • I rarely coauthor with students. I prefer to work alone. The type of work I do is often too high-risk to involve students (i.e., I like to start out with big ideas and these projects don’t always pan out, so I don’t want to risk a failure while working with a student). I also need to know that the student can make a credible, significant contribution to the paper so that we can justifiably claim coauthorship. And I need to know that we can work well together. Other faculty are better about coauthoring with students (so keep that in mind if you ask to work with me), but there’s also a range so look around, ask for advice from a range of folks, and think carefully before proceeding.
• Before any public speaking engagements (e.g., presenting research at a conference or workshop, whether locally or otherwise), students should arrange a practice talk with their advisor (and anyone else they wish to invite). Under normal circumstances, arrangements should be made 5 weeks before the presentation and the practice talk should take place 3 weeks before the presentation to enable the student time to make further tweaks and practice more. (Sometimes an opportunity comes up more quickly than this timeline allows; as long as that’s not the case, give people notice if you want them to attend.)
  • For my student advisees:
    • I will attend all local presentations you give (except those aimed at graduate students only) unless I am unavailable due to teaching, university meetings, or travel. 
    • I will attend most presentations you give at conferences/workshops at which we are both in attendance.  
• As soon as you have something to put in it, you should make a CV. In addition to providing your education and contact information, list all speaking engagements (including outreach and local or conference presentations of your research), teaching experience, grants/prizes/honors, and service work. List all publications (this can wait and you are unlikely to have a publication in your first two, maybe three years, which is okay). When you have your dissertation (working) title, add that, too. As you get more publications, you can divide these between different categories: peer-reviewed journals, invited chapters in edited volumes, etc. You don’t list your dissertation as a publication even though it is published; it will be listed in its own section under education. Update your CV at least once per semester; better is to update it every time you have something to add.
• As soon as you have publications, create a Google Scholar page and check it/update it regularly (initially, this might mean once a year; as you publish more, once a month). Google sometimes automatically adds publications and you might need to remove some things that aren’t yours or aren’t real publications (e.g., speaking events, conference presentations). (I now check mine on a weekly basis, but mostly because I like to see what my citations are at—they grow slowly so every little update makes me happy.) Some folks also have ResearchGate, Linked In, or other types of pages, but I think of Google Scholar as the most common.
• As you start to figure out your research interests, develop your “elevator pitch.” The elevator pitch is a 30-second or 2-minute summary of your research. You need one for your area of expertise and research interests and one for your dissertation. The dissertation one is fairly straightforward: summarize your dissertation in 30 seconds and in two minutes. The general research elevator pitch is harder, but very important. This might include some version of “I’m a scholar of X” or “I study X.” It should also include your overarching research question or research agenda, concisely stated. What’s the difference between your overarching research question or research agenda and your dissertation research question? Your dissertation research question is one smaller instantiation of your overarching research question or research agenda. If instead you have several smaller interests, be able to link them together. 
• When you are ready to go on the job market, create a personal webpage. This should have a url with your name (you can usually get a free URL if you include the webpage company’s name in the URL). WordPress offers good templates for not too much money. Include a short description of your research interests (stated summarily as recognizable areas in which you might teach—ASA section headings are a useful indicator), your general elevator pitch, and a brief description of your dissertation (or the dissertation elevator pitch). Also include an up-to-date CV.