Some Modest Advice for Graduate Students

by Stephen C. Stearns

Always Prepare for the Worst.

Some of the greatest catastrophes ingraduate education could have been avoided by a little intelligent foresight.Be cynical. Assume that your proposed research might not work, and that one ofyour faculty advisers might become unsupportive - or even hostile. Plan foralternatives.

Nobody cares about you.

In fact, some professors care about you andsome don’t. Most probably do, but all are busy, which means in practice theycannot care about you because they don’t have the time. You are on your own,and you had better get used to it. This has a lot of implications. Here are twoimportant ones:

1. You had better decide early on that youare in charge of your program. The degree you get is yours to create. Yourmajor professor can advise you and protect you to a certain extent frombureaucratic and financial demons, but he should not tell you what to do. Thatis up to you. If you need advice, ask for it: that’s his job.

2. If you want to pick somebody’s brains,you’ll have to go to him or her, because they won’t be coming to you.

You Must Know Why Your Work is Important.

When you first arrive, read and thinkwidely and exhaustively for a year. Assume that everything you read is bullshituntil the author manages to convince you that it isn’t. If you do notunderstand something, don’t feel bad - it’s not your fault, it’s the author’s.He didn’t write clearly enough.

If some authority figure tells you that youaren’t accomplishing anything because you aren’t taking courses and you aren’tgathering data, tell him what you’re up to. If he persists, tell him to bugoff, because you know what you’re doing, dammit.

This is a hard stage to get through becauseyou will feel guilty about not getting going on your own research. You willcontinually be asking yourself, what am I doing here?