What do you do in summer as a PhD student?

[reed155]

Hello everyone!

I am about to begin my PhD program in September. While this summer I keep myself busy preparing to move to U.S. and reading some of the key works in my field, I am curious what kind of work graduate history students usually do in summer, especially when they are still at the coursework stage? Do people prepare for conferences? Try to get published? Visit archives?

[TMP]

These two are generally the most important for students in their coursework years:

 

Language study if you need to fulfill requirements or improve your fluency.

 

Read/prepare for your exams.

 

Everything else is secondary.  Your adviser wants you to get to the exams.  Stat.

[reed155]

Interesting. Thank you. In your program, when do people start taking exams? Can you choose exam fields?

[rising_star]

Depending on your field, also a preliminary trip to the archives to scout out available material and make sure your project is viable (and/or help identify a project!). Definitely language work if needed. Working on grant applications to pay for your research if you'll need that.

[TMP]

Most people take their exams between 4th and 6th semesters.  Your plan of study (including how you spend your first summer) can be discussed with your adviser.  Different advisers have different expectations and priorities.  Some of the advisers in my department believe that exams must be done before research while others carefully work with their students to accomplish various things over the course of time.  And the rest just don't care as much and give their students total autonomy.

 

Doing prelim research is also important but how soon you need to do that depends whether or not you need to hand in your prospectus (dissertation proposal) along with your exams or thereafter.  Coming up with a dissertation topic and the process of making sure it's viable through prelim research vis-a-vis your exams should be discussed with your adviser.  That's one of the major incentives of reading for your exams- you learn the historiography and what's been exhausted and what's needed.

 

It's difficult to get departmental funding as a first or second year because your research has yet to be "proven" viable and departments have in their best interests to help those further along finish.  Sometimes in your first year, you'll want to start thinking about which other departments you'd like to affiliate yourself with (in effect "poaching" their funding) and converse with advanced students where funding might be found for pre-candidacy students.

 

You generally don't think about conferences until you've got a good chunk of research done, usually sometimes in your third or fourth year (unless you've got your MA and intend to carry your MA research with you).  Publishing comes later after you've presented at conferences and started writing your dissertation.

[reed155]

TMP, thanks for such an extended and helpful response!  This is very helpful!
Rising-star: visiting archives - that's what I was thinking at the beginning, but I agree with TMP that will make much more sense after reading existing historiography.
Anyway, both of you - thanks!

[CageFree]

These two are generally the most important for students in their coursework years:

 

Language study if you need to fulfill requirements or improve your fluency.

 

Read/prepare for your exams.

 

Everything else is secondary.  Your adviser wants you to get to the exams.  Stat.

That is really program-dependent. For us, the first summer is dedicated to research for our second year project. I am currently in my country of study doing archival research.