Fake it 'till you Make it

No matter when you take a class, it seems that around November you approach the point of diminishing return. Another reading assignment. Another class presentation. And don’t forget the looming deadline of that seminar paper. No worries—you get The Scrivener! In this issue you can learn how to take your seminar paper to a conference, figure out the dos and don’ts
of a seminar class, and read a professor’s advice on applying to a PhD program. And if you’re feeling a little too tense, have we got some corny jokes for you!

            Maybe we can’t write your papers for you, but The Scrivener’s got your back this October!

On Your Way to “ABD” Land, Remember This Advice

If you envision yourself earning a PhD in the next ten years, the following advice is for you. Professor X (unless he/she wishes to remain anonymous) offers ten suggestions for making the most of your doctorate program applications and that experience on the road to the “all but dissertation” stage.

1.  Learn the Score.  Before you sign up for a decade-long stint of college poverty, school work, and opportunity cost, find out what a professor’s day-to-day life is really like.  Talk to professors about course loads and publication requirements and preparation time and the joys of grading and everything else you can think to ask.  Then ask them to tell you what else you should have asked about.

2.  Forget Grades.  Grades don’t really matter.  Not in the long run, and barely in the short run. And as long as you focus on learning as much as you can in your classes, good grades will follow. Spend your time and energy acquiring knowledge and skills, not grades. It feels like such a risk, and it cuts against how you have been taught to act, literally since kindergarten.  But it pays dividends.

3.  Learn How to Write. Real writing—by which I mean the kind that will pay dividends your entire professional career—requires the willingness to think hard, to assess evidence, to persuade, to seduce.  I learned how to write by reading well-written texts, and by hounding my professors to provide me with substantive feedback on my work.

4.  Finish the Job and Get Paid.  You should treat most class papers as potential conference presentations, and most conference presentations as potential publications.  Each additional step in the process requires more work, but you can minimize the pain if you plan on producing publication quality writing from the get-go.  And it’s not that big of a difference (the 70/30 rule probably applies here:  70 percent gets you a solid class paper; an additional 30 percent makes it publishable).

5.  Acquire Those Awkward Letters of Recommendation. Choose professors who are competent in the field, who know and admire you, and who will follow through.  It’s helpful if you have a superstar writing your letters, but honestly, how many of them do we actually have in the department?  Not many. I think that the more important question has less to do with a professor’s national reputation that with her network of connections.

6.  Apply widely. Use a multi-tier approach; you may want to apply to several Ivy League schools, a significant number of solid second-tier schools, and at least a couple of fall-back choices—the kind of third-tier schools you are confident will accept you with open arms. Your best bet is to increase the number of rolls of the dice.  It costs serious time and money to hedge your bets in this way, but failing to do so can cost even more—in lost acceptances, in lost funding, and in lost opportunities.

7. Reflect Your Potential. The people who will be evaluating your application are less interested in what you have done in the past than what you are capable of doing in the future.  Your past achievements—and past failures, for that matter—are really only important to the extent to which they can be interpreted as predictors of future performance.  This means that GPA is used principally as cutoff criteria and that your GRE subject score is—if it is required at all—typically less important than your letter of intent, your writing sample, and your GRE verbal score.

8.  Be Persuasive. Your letter of intent can make or break your application.  It is also something over which you still have complete control.  So take the time to make your letters as persuasive as possible.  Adapt them to meet the needs of the individual schools, and make them detailed enough to show that you have thought seriously about how you will spend your time, once you are accepted.

9. Show What You Can Do. Your writing sample is another extremely important part of your application.  It can reveal a surprising amount about you, including how thoroughly you have researched a given topic, how well you can write, which analytic skills you have developed (or failed to develop), which critical perspectives you favor, and which texts and issues most interest you.  Your writing sample is the most tangible measure of the quality of your mind, and it is your best defense against whatever anti-BYU or anti-Mormon bias you may encounter. Treat this essay like it is the most important paper you will ever write.  It probably is.

10.  Live Fully. Finally, a graduate school in general, and specifically a PhD program at a world-class university, really are consequential opportunities.  Not because earning a PhD will guarantee you a great job (we all know how tough the market is), but because the process can literally transform you into a new creature, someone who is better able to interpret the world, and who can—as a consequence—live a richer, fuller, more remarkable life.

Responses: Crazy Student Stories

Jessica Wiest has a student who answered every question before she finishes asking it. Usually, it’s a non sequitur. 

Actual quote: “My dad brought up my snuggie blanket for Parents Weekend.”

Kathy Cowley had a student call her the morning of a final because the police were at her apartment investigating a stalker who had been in her bedroom watching her sleep! Kathy let her take the final late.

Ryan Stewart thinks every interaction with a student is awkward.

Semenza Corner: The Graduate Seminar

Semenza offers some great Do’s and Don’ts about graduate seminars:

Do:

Participate. Semenza points out that we “have chosen to enter an elite profession, the implication being that [we] might have something valuable to contribute to it.” Say something. Say something worthwhile, that helps other students, and that helps you to clarify your own, wonderful ideas.

Work Really Hard. Semenza recommends working around 60 hours a week, all told. The editors of this publication find that may be a little extreme, but most of us can be more diligent.

Make Use of Office Hours. A certain rhetoric professor once advised your editor’s class to “become potential suspects if [he] were to be murdered” by getting our fingerprints in his office. Semenza recommends going three times a semester to talk with a professor: early in the project, halfway for a status update, and toward to then to “discuss the developing structure of the paper."

Enjoy Extra Activities. Everything from lectures to GSA socials can provide opportunities for professional development.

Don’t:

Miss a Class. Once, even the great Semenza missed a class. He dutifully called his professor to apologize for missing the class because of serious medical needs. The professor asked, “which hospital?”  A bit extreme, but the point is, class is a privilege—take advantage of it.

Take Incompletes. In addition to prolonging your education, Semenza points out that incompletes are inconsiderate to your professors and, likely, will cause them to hate you.

Do the Bare Minimum. We in the halls of academia should seek to “acquire the highest level of knowledge and expertise in relation to a particular subject matter; to consciously settle for less than your very best work is to insult the degree and the very purposes of a liberal arts education.” Wow, Semenza. Consider us inspired!

You Might be a Grad Student if . . .

• you are startled to meet people with whom you have ever discussed academic matters at a sporting event.
•  you have ever spent more than $50 on photocopying while researching a single paper.
• you look forward to summers because you're more productive without the distraction of classes.
• you regard ibuprofen as a vitamin.
• you consider all papers to be works in progress.
• professors don't really care when you turn in work anymore.
• you find the bibliographies of books more interesting than the actual text.
• you have given up trying to keep your books organized and are now just trying to keep them all in the same general area.
• you have accepted guilt as an inherent feature of relaxation.
• you find yourself explaining to children that you are in "20th grade".

Brian Jackson: The Conference Paper

S: What do you see as the connection between a paper that you write for a class and a paper you might present at a conference?

B: If you do it well, it is the paper you present at a conference, right? The hope is that at the end of the semester, you write a paper that you can walk out the door with and present at a conference. Obviously you’re going to want to revise a little, but the point is you want to go out and be prepared.

S: In what ways might you revise between class and a conference?

B: I think it is very difficult for us in our world wrapped in academese to learn how to communicate with other people orally in a way that is really engaging. So I think one of the things that you have to imagine is a flesh-and-blood audience, who, depending on the time in which you present, may be hungry and waiting for happy hour. So I think one of the things you need to think about after turning in the conference paper is revising it for style, oral delivery, engagement, enthusiasm, gaging the levels of intensity with which you present the material and just being kind to the people trying to pay attention to what you’re saying. Consider the performance; you’re not just writing a paper that’s going to disappear. You’re writing something that you’re going to get up and perform to them.

S: So what makes the best conference performances?

B: What makes it a really great conference presentation is a really cool idea and a human connection with me, in the audience. Think about those moments when you’re in sacrament meeting and someone gets up and starts speaking and everyone sort of snaps their heads up because it’s like the sun has come out of the clouds. It’s a human connection when someone makes eye contact with me, when someone cracks a joke and everyone laughs. They’re engaging the way the audience responds and they present something provocative.

S: So potty words?

B: Yes.

S: Okay. Say you’ve written a paper that is really, bang-ho...how do you find a conference that matches the direction of your research?

B: The big conferences are sometimes the ones that you want to go to the most, but regional conferences—it’s kind of cool to see how the local scene is playing out. Get your ideas addressed in a smaller, more intimate audience. I went to the Virginia Military Institute Spilman Symposium as the first conference I went to. Seventy attendees—that was it. And it was cool! I gave my presentation and there were seventy people there ready to engage with me about it. I went to the C’s [CCCC], which is the Valhalla of our field and there were only three people at our presentation, two of which I have already known and invited! So that’s kind of lame. I’m not ready to make any categorical decision about the virtue of a conference based on size.

S: So say I find a conference that I’m interested in. What kinds of moves do you have to make in your proposal that will make it interesting to the organizers of the conference?

B: I think conference people probably like to see that you have a firm grasp on what the conversation is about your subject and (I know I beat on this incessantly) that there is a gap, you are counterclaiming or that you’re asking a question. I think in addition to these two moves [starts counting on his fingers]: knowing the conversation, knowing how your argument fits in it, the third thing would be suggesting implications that actually matter to people. So those three things: knowing the conversation, knowing how your argument fits into it in a unique and progressive way, and some interesting implications of your study.

S: Because we are writing these papers for our classes, how do we link these smaller conference papers into our larger project, which may not have a ton to do with whatever that particular seminar’s topic was?

B: Gotcha. Well, I’ll tell you what I do: I think of an idea for a proposal, then write up the paper—see where this is going?—then I turn the conference paper into an article to get thrashed and rejected by a journal. That’s my method. You probably need to think about these projects for a thesis. Because it’s only eight pages and you need twenty-five for a thesis, you can think of those eight pages as a lit review of your idea, or the application of your idea. And then the next conference paper can be another part of that. You can cobble them together. I think that’s an effective strategy to prepare for your thesis.

S: Any parting words about how students should approach these papers that they write for a seminar?

B: My advice would be do not be afraid to take risks. Do not worry that you have nothing to say. Think of yourselves as explorers and rhetoricians and scholars who have something of value to say to others. Think of yourself situated in a dialogue that is meaningful to you personally and to the field itself. Focus on connecting your personal and professional and public interests in the projects that you pursue.