There is a professor in Calgary, Stephen MacGregor, about to publish a book called The Prosperous PhD… something akin to a user’s manual for graduate education, aimed at the user. I agreed to be interviewed. A couple of my quotes made the cut.
QUOTE 1: Keep your head out of your butt (don’t be a jerk) and don’t become fixated by gazing at your own navel. As a future professional in whatever small community you are a part of, everyone knows everyone, and most everyone will have cleared the bar of getting a PhD. Cooperation, leadership, taking initiative, listening, planning, follow-through, and all of the things that make any community of practice function, are all part of personal character. It does not matter how clever you are if no one can stand working with you. How you fit into a social community is as critical as how you fit into an intellectual community, so do not assume that your work is self-evidently important just because you are working on it (navel-gazing), and learn how to make the case for your contribution in ways that multiple communities, including the general public or other scholarly communities, can understand and appreciate. It’s your job to make that case; not theirs.
QUOTE 2: Successful PhDs know how to take on independent intellectual ownership of their work as a part of the cooperative and collegial scholarly community, and that big idea is critical to learn, live, and own during one’s graduate education. A few of the corollary principles from this advice include: (1) Always do your homework – from selecting your program and your advisor, to your project, to your design and methods – you are a small piece of a rich, rich mosaic of past and current work, and it pays off to know what is knowable, from the history of the students who are in the programs you are considering, to the deepest background details of how and why your own project makes sense. Everything at the state of the art represents a controversy; learn all of the stories, weigh the evidence, think clearly about how your work (it’s your degree, no one else’s) is an actual contribution. (2) Never forget that your only goal in a graduate program is to get out of it – investigate the background broadly, see where your work fits in, and explore weird areas outside of your own that might make analogical contributions; but in the end, figure out how to define clearly the boundaries of a dissertation rather than trying to define a career. Avoid mission creep in your project; you will never answer every question, nor create the work that is equivalent to a lifetime’s effort. In the end, graduate school IS school, after all. Get out. You are responsible for making the argument for your own graduation. (3) Proofreading your own ideas is more difficult than proofreading your writing – so build and embrace (internal) reflective critique along with the value that comes from having (external) smart people who will review and engage you with open, candid feedback that you shut up and listen to. (4) Live up to your potential because the “bar” of excellence is not absolute, but a sliding scale – your advisors, your peers, and your colleagues are constantly trying to figure out where your potential is to be able to set an expectation for your achievement. Do not look to someone who did the minimum to get your inspiration; just the opposite.