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.