For the last 5 years, I've worked primarily as a paralegal in the legal and insurance industries. Now that I know I'll be leaving the white-collar world for good come this fall, I'm wondering what I should be doing between now and then to re-acquaint myself with academic study. I've always been a voracious reader of contemporary novels and poems, even after I graduated with my BA in 2010, but I haven't read much that would be considered "academic" or "theoretical" in years.
I guess I'm asking for advice about preparing intellectually and professionally for a career change from office work to academia. Some have suggested that I dive into Norton Anthologies. (But I remember the nausea of reading author and chapter introductions to study for the subject exam and would really prefer not to.) Others have suggested looking at syllabi for upcoming and past courses offered by my prospective English departments.
Any advice would be appreciated! I'm just thrilled to have the opportunity to return to school after so long; it's always been an ambition of mine, and I've put it off for too long.
haha! It would definitely be okay for you to post the questions list, but here it is. Also, I'd just be honest with the programs, especially since the money they're giving you won't be enough to cover either visit individually.
-PLACES TO STUDY AND WORK
-Where do most people do their writing and reading?
-What study spaces are available? Do students get a carrel? Do those who teach get or share an office?
-LIBRARY
-What is the library system like? Are the stacks open or closed?
-What are the library hours?
-Are there specialized archives/primary sources that would be useful to my research?
-Are there specialist librarians who can help me with my research?
-FACULTY
-Are the faculty members I want to work with accepting new students? Are any of those faculty members due for a sabbatical any time soon?
-Are professors willing to engage you on a personal level rather than just talking about your work?
-Are there any new professors the department is hiring in areas that align with my interests?
-Students’ relationships with their professors – are they primarily professional, or are they social as well?
-FUNDING
-Is funding competitive? If so, do students feel a distinction between those who have received more generous funding and those who haven’t?
-How does funding break down among the cohort? i.e., how many people receive fellowships?
-How, if you don’t have much savings, do you make enough money to live comfortably?
-Are there external fellowships one can apply to? If so, what is available? Does the program help you apply for these fellowships? How does receiving an external fellowship affect internal funding?
-If people need more than five/six years to finish, what funding resources are available? (For instance, Columbia can give you an additional 2-year teaching appointment.)
-Do you provide funding for conferences or research trips?
-How often is funding disbursed? (i.e., do you get paid monthly or do you have to stretch a sum over a longer period of time?)
-COHORT
-Do students get along with each other? Is the feeling of the program more collaborative than competitive?
-Do students in different years of the program collaborate with each other, or are individual cohorts cliquey?
-How many offers are given out, and what is the target number of members for an entering class?
-Ages/marital status of people in the cohort – do most people tend to be married with families? Are there younger people? Single people? What sense do you have of how the graduate students interact with each other socially?
-Do people seem happy? If they’re stressed, is it because they’re busy or is it because they’re anxious/depressed/cynical/disillusioned?
-Is the grad secretary/program administrator nice?
-What is the typical time to completion? What are the factors that slow down or speed up that time?
-I’ve read that there are two kinds of attrition: “good” attrition, in which people realize that the program, or graduate study, isn’t right for them and leave early on, and “bad” attrition, in which people don’t finish the dissertation. What can you tell me about the rates of each, and of the reasons why people have chosen to leave the program?
-JOB MARKET/PROFESSIONALIZATION
-What is the placement rate? How many of those jobs are tenure-track?
-What are examples of institutions in which people in my field have been placed?
-How does the department prepare you for the job search? Are there mock interviews and mock job talks?
-Are the people helping you navigate the job search people who have recently gone through the process themselves?
-If you don’t get placed, is there anything the department can do for you? (e.g., can you stay an extra year?)
-How does the department prepare you for and help you attain conference presentations and publications?
-SUMMER WORK
-What is encouraged/required?
-If there separate funding/is the year-round funding enough to live on during the summer?
-Do people find themselves needing to get outside work during the summer in order to have enough money?
-Am I expected to stay in town in the summer, and what happens if I don’t?
-LANGUAGE REQUIREMENT
-What is done to help people who don’t have language proficiency attain it? Does the university provide funding?
-What is the requirement, and by when do you have to meet it?
-Given my research interests, what languages should I study?
-When do you recommend doing the work necessary to fulfill the language requirement? (i.e., summer before first year, summer after first year, while taking classes, etc.)
-LOCATION REQUIREMENTS
-How long are students required to be in residence?
-How many students stay in the location for the duration of the program? (i.e., how many dissertate in residence?)
-How is funding affected if you don’t stay?
-Incompletes on papers at the end of the term: What is the policy, how many students take them, and how does this affect progress through the program?
-TEACHING
-What sort of training is provided?
-What types of courses do people teach?
-Does teaching entail serving as a grader? Serving as a TA? Developing and teaching a section of comp?
-How are students placed as TAs? Is there choice about what classes you teach and which professors you work with? Do classes correspond to your field?
-How many courses do you teach per semester/year?
-How many students are in your classes?
-How does the school see teaching as fitting in with the other responsibilities/requirements of graduate study?
-How do students balance teaching with their own work?
-Is the department more concerned with training you as a teacher/professor or with having cheap labor to teach their classes?
-How, if at all, does the economic downturn affect teaching load/class sizes?
-What are the students like? Can I sit in on a course a TA teaches to get a sense of them?
-METHODOLOGY
-Is a theory course required?
-What methodology do most people use?
-Where, methodologically, do you see the department – and the discipline – heading?
-Is interdisciplinarity encouraged, and what sorts of collaboration have students undertaken?
-Typical graduate class and seminar sizes
-What should I do to prepare over the summer?
-Ask people I know: What are the questions – both about the program itself and about the location – I should ask that will most help me get a feel for whether this is the right program for me?
-Ask people I know: What do you wish you knew or wish you had asked before choosing a program?
-Is the school on the semester or the quarter system, and how does that affect classes/teaching/requirements?
-What is the course load for each semester, and how many courses are required?
-What kind of support is provided while writing the dissertation? I worry about the isolation and anxiety of writing such a big project. What does the program do to help you break the dissertation down into manageable pieces, and to make the experience less isolating?
-What do writing assignments look like in classes? Do they differ based on the type/level of class and/or based on whether you intend to specialize in the field?
-Ask professors: what have you been working on lately?
-Ask professors: What is your approach to mentoring and advising graduate students?
-How long are class meetings?
-How often do professors teach graduate courses?
-Are course schedules available for future semesters (10-11, etc.)?
-Can I see the grad student handbook? Are there any other departmental documents – such as reports on the program prepared for accreditation – that I can see?
-QUALITY OF LIFE
-Prices – how does the cost of gas, milk, cereal, etc. compare to other places I've lived in?
-Cost and quality of typical one-bedroom apartment.
-What does the university do to provide you with or help you find housing?
-When (i.e., what month) do people start looking for an apartment for the fall, and where do they look?
-Is it easy to find a summer subletter?
-How close to campus can—and should—one live?
-What grocery stores are there in town?
-How late are cafes, bookstores, malls, restaurants typically open?
-What do people do to make extra money?
-Does the town have more of a driving or a walking culture? What is parking like near campus (availability, ease, cost)?
-Where do most English grad students live? Most other grad students? Most professors? Where is the student ghetto? Do most students live near each other, or are they spread out far and wide?
-How far does the stipend go in this location?
This is a great list! It's somewhat geared toward single, childfree grad students, so here are a few questions I'd add:
-What is the department's parental leave policy?
-What form of health care is available to graduate students and their families? Can they sign up for the same health insurance plans as faculty and staff?
-Are partners/spouses/children welcome at departmental and social events? Are they seen as part of the cohort?
-Where do students' partners work? (this was important when I was considering schools in the middle of nowhere, like Urbana-Champaign and Oxford, OH).
-What childcare services does the university offer?
-Where do grad students with families tend to live?
-Is there a lactation room in the building? Or on campus?
I hear you! This is my first time applying to grad school (economics PhD programs) and based on gradcafe's results and other sources, I expected to hear back from most programs around mid-February, so I had prepared myself for that and wasn't thinking much about it before then. Totally out of the blue, I got a decision from one of my programs (Ohio State) a week ago, and it has seriously messed with my head. Now I'm checking every day obsessively even though most, if not all, of my other 12 applications will stick to that mid-February timetable.
For others who haven't heard anything: if you haven't already, one thing that helped me is searching through previous years of gradcafe results for particular programs and schools (e.g. searching for "ohio state economics"). That will give you an idea of their general timetable--each department within each school notifies at a different time, and looking at historical results will give you an idea of the first wave, second wave, waitlist, etc. It's no guarantee, but it looks like most schools are fairly consistent.
teacherM7 reacted to lesabendio in Switching gears to an English PhD program