Category Archives: Academia

#scio12 traces in real life: sketch notes from my department meeting.

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One of the highlights of ScienceOnline 2012 for me was getting to meet Perrin Ireland, a graphic facilitator who specializes in science communication, and to see her in action. Before the conference, Perrin had emailed to ask if she could “live scribe” the citizen science session Amy Freitag and I would be co-moderating, creating a visual record of the content of our discussion with markers on foam core boards as the session unfolded.

Of course, we accepted the offer, because how could we not? (Stills of Perrin’s work from our session and others can be seen in this post.)

Perrin also offered a Science Scribe 2.0 Workshop (which I missed, because one can only be so many places in a time), in which she taught participants how to create these visual records (“sketch notes”) and then turned them loose to practice these skills in other conference sessions. Here’s a slideshow with examples of their work.

Michele Arduengo participated in this workshop and gave a vivid (and illustrated) account of it on her blog. This was enough to embolden me, the Tuesday after the conference, to take sketch notes of our start-of-the-semester department meeting.

They are not nearly as visually arresting as the sketch notes that Perrin’s apprentices created at ScienceOnline. However, I did observe that being alert to how I could make my notes (of pretty mundane academic and administrative stuff) more visual seems to have gotten me to pay more attention to the meeting as it was happening — to look for unifying themes or recurring motifs, for example. And, it left me with a set of notes that, more than a week later, makes the big issues and small details easy to remember … which means that, potentially, my notes will actually be useful in a few months, too.

In which too much grading plus Mel Brooks leads me to ponder the nature of crowd reactions at scientific presentations.

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Fair warning: I have been grading for the last several days, and grading makes me silly. This post may give you a sense of just how silly.

Last night, during a brief break in grading, I caught the last half of Young Frankenstein on TV.

Dr. Frankenstein’s presentation of the Creature to the public, under the auspices of the Transylvania Neurological Society, is one of my favorite parts of the movie, not least because Dr. Frankenstein is so very quotable. “Please! Remain in your seats, I beg you! We are not children here, we are scientists!” and “For safety’s sake, don’t humiliate him!” are just two exhortations that I can imagine getting some good use in scientific presentations.

Also, when Dr. Frankenstein’s presentation of the Creature goes off the rails, members of the audience start pelting both scientist and monster with what look to be cabbages.

Which led me to notice that there are not too many scientific presentations nowadays at which audience members throw fruit or vegetables at the presenters.

Possibly this is a reflection of the current direction of scientific work — focused on findings so unsurprising (at least in a global sense) as to be unlikely to elicit strong reactions from those hearing them. Or, maybe scientists are channeling their disbelief and outrage to private channels, say, by fuming about presentations in lab meetings when they’ve returned from the conferences at which they’re presented, or saving the worst of their aggressive outburst for when they are the third reviewer.

On the other hand, maybe it reflects the limited supply of fruits and vegetables available at most venues for scientific presentations.

Your better complementary continental breakfast spreads can be counted on for apples, bananas, and oranges, but not so much for cabbages or overripe tomatoes. And, some conference venues (like the San Diego Convention Center) don’t really have free food so much as places to buy snacks — snacks which tend to be pretzels or muffins or cookies, items not traditionally hurled to register one’s disagreement with a research presentation.

Are warm pretzels too delicious an item to hurl at one’s fellow scientist to register one’s disbelief? Do muffins not fly well enough, nor generate sufficient force at impact? Or is it primarily a matter of the cost of these items that makes them unappealing as instruments of peer review?

Maybe this calls out for an economic analysis?

In the event that you had a cabbage handy, given the relative scarcity of cabbages at scientific meetings, would you tend to keep it rather than throwing it just in case the next presentation turned out to be even worse? And wouldn’t there be something like an opportunity cost associated with holding onto the cabbage, given how much room it would take up in the conference tote bag?

Really, someone should investigate this. But not me, because I still have grading to do.

Things I cannot do.

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To my students, during finals week,

I regret to inform you that I cannot

  • Tell you within an hour or two of your handing me your final exam what your grade for the course will be (as I need to grade about 130 of these exams and you will note that not all of the items were multiple choice),
  • Grade your answers on the basis of what you meant rather than what you wrote (especially on the items that were multiple choice),
  • Tell you, as you’re handing me your final exam, whether the exam grades will be curved, or if so, what the curve will look like (see above about the number of exams to be graded — and then entered into a spreadsheet to run the stats),
  • Reassure you that your participation will contribute positively to your final grade if you have attended class meetings so seldom that your face rings no bells for me at all,
  • Create an extra-credit assignment just for you to counteract the negative effect of your having blown off all the graded assignments besides the midterm and final exams (since it would be unfair to do so without offering your classmates the same opportunity, and since I’m already working on the very edge of what is possible just to grade the non-extra coursework to submit grades on time).

This whole exam thing, and the larger grading thing, is supposed to be about evaluating what you have learned during the semester.

I have done my best to make the material accessible and maybe even interesting. I fully recognize that it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. And, having been a student myself for a lot of years, I understand that life sometimes unfolds in ways that make it hard to focus on school, to come to class meetings, and to get the assigned work turned in.

Among other things, college can teach us that we’re not always going to get straight A’s (or, necessarily, passing grades) during semesters we can’t get it together to do the school work.

If you earn a low grade, that doesn’t make you a bad person.

And, if I give you the grade you’ve earned, that just means I’m doing my job. I don’t always enjoy it, but that’s how it goes.

In which the faculty member glimpses her future.

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One of the facts that seems sometimes to escape the notice of university faculty (especially early-career faculty) is that a sizable proportion of university administrators used to be regular faculty members. Fortuitously, my early encounters with administrators kept underlining this fact for me.

When I started my appointment at my university, the Associate Dean of my college was a member of the Philosophy Department. He wasn’t teaching any courses for the department then (because Associate Dean-ing was a full-time gig), but he was very much connected to the culture of the department. And, the fact that he ran the weekly meetings of the College Curriculum Committee (on which I was the representative for my department) meant I got to see first-hand how, as an administrator, he helped facilitate something like a culture of the college from the different departmental cultures that informed the committee members as they dealt with matters curricular. Getting those different interests to play well with each other, for the most part, would have been a much harder job for someone without experience living in a department and trying to get the daily work of that department done.

As an aside, I suspect that some readers will react with horror to the idea of a first-year faculty member being assigned committee work, especially on a college level committee, rather than being left to get the teaching assignment and research activities under control. My department has a policy of assigning committee work to all regular faculty, partly because there is a large amount of important committee work to be done (i.e., impacting on the well-being of our students and faculty, and on the resources on which we depend) relative to the number of regular faculty members. And, spreading the committee work around as we do is part of how we get a three-course load (while the university’s standard per semester is four). Practically, serving on this college-level committee in my very first semester on the ground helped me understand the culture beyond my own department — and a lot of the nuts and bolts of getting things done at this particular university — much faster. That was a help. It also helped me make friends in other departments, which often comes in handy.

Anyway, as events unfolded during my first few years here, I was in a position to notice faculty members rising through the ranks of administration. When we got a new university president, my college’s dean became the university’s provost. The faculty member who chaired the chemistry department when I was hired became Associate Vice President of Graduate Studies and Research for the university. Other chemistry professors of my acquaintance (what is it with the chemists) became associate deans in undergraduate studies and student support units. (What is it with the chemists and administration, I wonder?)

One of the things I learned is that it is really, really helpful to have people who understand the challenges of teaching and conducting research, especially in times when resources are scarce, involved in making the plans that will shape how teaching and research go forward. The administrators who have been faculty members are committed to actively involving people who have a stake in the decisions in the decision-making. Sometimes this means the decision-making takes more time and effort, but it also seems to result in policies that actually work. That is a good thing.

A danger, though, in working closely with administrators (something I, for one, might have done less of were they not people to whom I could relate because of their origins in the faculty) is that you start seeing how important the administrative work is in supporting the core missions of teaching and research. More than this, you start imagining strategies that could effectively address the persistent problems you’ve started to notice in achieving some particular goal you care about. You develop insight into how to fix things, and also, if you’ve been blessed to watch effective administrators at work, insight into how to get people with distinct interests to work together effectively to pursue common goals.

At first, you freak the hell out when your dean uses phrases like “untapped administrative potential” to describe you. After a while, you stop freaking out and start making peace with the idea that at some point, you will probably step up and try to do what needs to be done. And, you will do it not because it is your ambition to be an administrator, but instead because you care about your department, your college, your university, your colleagues, your students — because you are part of the community and you want to help it be as good as it can be.

That’s how they get you.

I think I have some time, though. I have a book to finish writing. I have kids’ soccer to coach, something that doesn’t lend itself to the long official business hours administrators seem to work. And, I would need to work out how to dress like a responsible adult rather than a graduate student trying to look like a grown-up.

But my sense is that my future may hold more business hours and more grown-up clothes. And, because this university community and what we do matters to me, I’m okay with that.

A question for the hivemind: delivering something good for you in a way that might be bad for you.

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Despite the dawning of the End Times (at least as far as our semester is concerned), I was able to find time for a chat with a colleague yesterday about a currently amorphous project that is staring to take shape. It’s a project that’s being spearheaded by other interests, but my colleague has been approached to take on what may be a significant role in it, and he’s thinking it over. So, much of our chat had to do with the potential of the project along various trajectories it might take — lots of “what if” since, as mentioned above, it’s pretty amorphous right now.

Anyhow, one of the tentative aims is to improve kids’ skills in and engagement with a particular broad subject area where the general perception is that kids need better skills and engagement. The tool to achieve this would be games that the kids would play on their own time (so it wouldn’t gobble up valuable class time; I guess you need that to get kids ready for the high-stakes standardized tests and stuff). And, the research driving this strategy has, apparently, focused a lot on the neurophysiology of how kids interact with games to identify the features a game ought to have to get kids addicted to it.

For both of us, this seems like a red flag.

So, the question: Do you think it’s a good idea (where “good” equals ethical or some other relevant value; feel free to specify it in your answer) to build kids’ skills and/or competencies by means of a delivery device that is explicitly designed to be addictive? (In case it matters, we’re talking about children younger than 13 years old.)

Does it matter what the actual skills and/or competencies are?

Does it matter whether the designed-to-be-addictive delivery method might itself be more attractive to the kids (and the adults they eventually become) than the various real-world venues in which the application of these skills and/or competencies are taken to be important?

Lay it on me.

From the cave of grading remote base: apparently stable patterns.

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I’m one of those people who is rather less confident about the existence of universal regularities in our world (and this has at least as much to do with the research component of my misspent scientific youth as it does with Hume and Popper and the whole problem of induction).

Nonetheless, if I had to bet money on certain patterns being stable features of my world, here’s where I’d lay my chips:

  • Not coming to lecture more than three times in the part of the semester preceding the midterm will be highly correlated with not doing well on the midterm. (My lectures seem to add value; who knew?!)
  • Not actually address the question that has been asked will be highly correlated with earning very few of the available points.
  • Using many, many words in the space available to answer the question (especially if they don’t engage with the question) is less likely to earn points than using fewer words that present a clear answer.
  • The ability to use a sanctioned cheat-sheet on the midterm means I’ll see a sizable proportion of papers (maybe 33%) where students have simply recopied on to their test papers every single thing they put on their cheat-sheet about philosopher X, regardless of what a question is asking them about philosopher X. This strategy seems to make it hard for the students using it to notice when they have “lost the plot” in their answers.
  • In at least 10% of the papers, I will encounter the phrase “solve science” and will need to pause for a facepalm or a headdesk.
  • That rascal DrugMonkey will put up a post to which I want to respond before the end to my grading is anywhere in sight. (Seriously, am I the only blogger with grading who has an angel on one shoulder and DrugMonkey on the other?)

Musings from cave of grading remote base.

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Casa Free-Ride, the location for the primary cave of grading, is currently abuzz with hammering and sawing and other noises, not to mention colder than usual on account of the removal of a ceiling and a bunch of obsolete insulation. So, I have decamped to a local cafe that has tables, heat, free wifi, and food and drink, establishing a remote grading outpost until it’s time to move in a soccer-ward direction.

I have always operated under the assumption that, if I’m going to occupy a table at a cafe to plow through grading (or writing, etc.), it is appropriate to purchase food and drink. (Today’s purchase: large coffee and chocolate truffle cheesecake.) The food can be a useful carrot (though not a literal one) to help me press through the task at hand: get through grading this section of the exam on 30 more papers and earn three more bites of cheesecake.

But, such a grading strategy carries with it the risk of getting chocolate truffle cheesecake on the papers being graded.

Indeed, in my grad school experiences with industrial scale grading (largely of exams for general chemistry and first term organic chemistry), there was nearly always some sort of food in play while we graders were marking the hundreds of papers we had to mark.

And, since solo-grading makes my mind wander, I’m now wondering what kinds of conclusions students might draw from the various and sundry stains that accompany the check marks and comments on their returned work. What might they make of

  • Coffee (cup ring)
  • Coffee (spilled)
  • Red wine
  • Tequila-scented salt crystals
  • Orange smudges consistent with Cheetos or Doritos
  • Smeared Cheez-Whiz
  • Pizza grease
  • Bacon grease
  • Chocolate
  • Creme Fraiche and/or raspberry coulis
  • Cigarette ashes
  • Singe marks and/or holes burned through the paper
  • Fish scales
  • Blood

I haven’t returned papers with each of these extra additives, and students seem not to comment (to me) on the odd coffee or chocolate stain on an exam paper.

My hunch is that they cannot detect the presence of tear stains at all. But maybe empirical research is in order here?

A Possibly Useful Tip on the Process of Writing a Dissertation

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Fair warning: if you joke around about dissertations with someone who has written more than one, that someone is likely to share a Possibly Useful Tip on the Process of Writing a Dissertation. But, possibly it will be useful.

It started when, after passing his Ph.D. oral exam, Eric Michael Johnson tweeted:

“ I passed! Now there’s just a little matter called the dissertation. This is the first I’ve heard of it. Are those hard?
ericmjohnson
October 18, 2011
“ @ericmjohnson If someone tells you the 2nd dissertation is easier, she’s lying.
docfreeride
October 18, 2011
“ @docfreeride You mean, you can’t just copy and paste from your first one?
ericmjohnson
October 18, 2011
As it turns out, you are often better off not copying and pasting from an earlier draft of the same dissertation.
In the process of writing a dissertation, you spend a lot of time grappling with a theoretical approach, or an experimental design, or a concept — whatever kind of intellectual heavy-lifting your subject requires.  Then, you need to use words (and sometimes also graphs or charts or other visual representations) to communicate what you’ve been grappling with to an audience that probably hasn’t been grappling with it as actively as you have.
What I found (in dissertation #2, the philosophy one) was that my grappling generated a lot of words on the page, and that the generation of those words was crucial to figuring out the stuff I needed to figure out.  However, not all the words on the page advanced the goal of communicating what I had figured out to an audience not already in my head.
My very smart advisor, noticing that I had become too precious with some of the elaborate examples that had helped me crystalize my own view as I revised draft N to draft N+1, gave me a writing tip that made all the difference to the task of communicating that view.  He said, “For the next draft of this chapter, start a brand new file. You are not allowed to copy and paste anything.  Whatever you want to carry over from the last draft verbatim you need to retype.”
I followed that advice and lo and behold, my chapters became quite a bit shorter and quite a bit clearer, simultaneously.  However, I’m pretty sure that the longer, less clear drafts were a necessary step on the way to get to the optimized final form.
Happy disserting, Eric!

College students face a crummy future: Occupy Wall Street inspires campus activism.

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Inside Higher Ed reports that college students across the U.S. have been staging protests in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations:

In true Occupy Wall Street fashion, the campus protesters didn’t have any specific demands. Instead, they spoke out against the general issues that have long plagued students: high debt, rising tuition, the privatization of public education and uneven distribution of wealth.

At the State University of New York at Albany walkout, about half of the 300 or so protesters managed to secure an hour to express their concerns to President George Philip in an open forum in the administration building. He reportedly agreed with some of their qualms, but upset many when he told them, “I’m not giving you back my pension.” The president of the New School, David E. Van Zandt, meanwhile, issued a supportive statement that encouraged students “to devise peaceful, practical solutions to longstanding problems of inequality.”

The article considers how many students at various campuses did (or did not) walk out of classes or turn up for demonstrations, and why that might be (e.g., it’s easier to indicate on Facebook that you’ll attend an event than it might be actually to attend it — especially with midterm exams looming). Still, in an age where we old farts tend to shake our heads at student apathy, there seems to be growing a palpable sense of discontent that may bubble into action. From the article:

Lettie Stratton, a St. Lawrence senior, said that regardless of who turned out to protest, many could relate.

“Our overall goal was really just to create a dialogue and get people talking about what matters to them,” Stratton said. “As students, we’re part of the 99 percent,” she said, referring to the Occupy Wall Street slogan describing the vast majority of the American population who aren’t super-rich. “Crippled with student loans, we’re already behind before we even have a chance to set foot in the real world.

“I think a big part of this is speaking out against ignorance and realizing that 99 percent can make a change. We also want to make sure that it doesn’t stop today – we want people to keep talking about it. It’s not just like, ‘Oh, the protest is over, so let’s go back to doing nothing.’ ”

For those of you who aren’t dealing with college students on a daily basis, it is important to recognize the context in which students are raising these objections. These are not the perennial student gripes about not having a plan for what to do after graduation, or not being able to find a job immediately after graduation that feels like a career, if not a calling.

As much as the economy has not been improving for those of us who are not CEOs, it has been even worse for college students.

It’s not just that the so-called “job creators” have created precious few jobs, but that employers are now explicitly seeking to hire job applicants who already have jobs. (The logic of this strikes me as of a piece with banks that only want to lend money to people who already have money.) The young people who went to college to prepare themselves to enter the work force are, of course, less likely to already have jobs (since they went to college to acquire the skills and credentials and such to get jobs). In most cases, the jobs they’re working while they are students are not the jobs they hope to be working for the rest of their adult lives.

Basically, we have a generation that has been urged to go to college because it was purportedly a reliable route to a middle-class standard of living. No one warned them that the middle class might be squeezed nearly out of existence.

Depending on your views about the point of a college education (here’s how I described mine five years ago, in the shadow of the dot-com bust), you might extend special sympathy to the students who opted for the “prudent” route of selecting some practical major that helped them acquired a focused set of skills and credentials that could plug them right in to some existing career path. They might have wanted to major in something less practical, like philosophy or history or English (or even a more theoretical science), but they wanted to know that they’d be employable immediately after graduation.

The lack of even such well-defined jobs must make recent graduates feel pretty cheated.

Well, we older people might reply, at least they (or their liberal arts major compatriots) got the enrichment of a college education, which is something a lot of working stiffs (and unemployed folks) never get. Indeed, you might expect me to say something like this, given my earlier defense of “impractical” majors:

A job is nice. So is political power, a fancy chariot, hangers-on. But you can have all these things and still not be happy or fulfilled. And, if your happiness depends on having such things, you’re pretty vulnerable to sudden reversals.

So how can a human find fulfillment that isn’t all about having lots of stuff, or a high-paying job, or a top-rated sit-com?

Well, what do you have that’s really yours? What is the piece of your life that no one can take away?

You have your mind. You have the ability to think about things, to experience the world, to decide what matters to you and how you want to pursue it. You have your sense of curiousity and wonder when you encounter something new and unexpected, and your sense of satisfaction when you figure something out. You have the power to imagine ways the world could be different. You even have the ability (the responsibility?) to try to make the world different.

This is what I think a college education should give you: lots of hands-on experience using your mind so you know different ways you can think about things and you start to figure out what you care about.

I still think a college education should give you experience using your mind in lots of different ways, and that this does impart skills (although broad ones, not just narrow ones) that can be of use in the workplace as well as in life.

However, I also wrote:

There is always the danger of going overboard with the idea that the life of the mind is the only life that matters, which could be used as an excuse to get people to pipe down about truly horrible material conditions. And, a mind is not invulnerable to certain kinds of threats, whether natural or man-made. Still, I’d rather have a supple mind than a whole bucketful of skills so specialized they might only be useful for another six months.

Now, we have a situation where even the most practical majors cannot count on employment at graduation. We’ve created an economy where people who have taken all the prudent steps to enter the world of work — often while assuming significant debt to earn their degrees — cannot find jobs!

(Even at public universities, student debt is a big deal. When state budgets get tight, student fees go up. Cutting instructional staff means fewer sections of courses students need to graduate — which means more years in school and more term bills to pay. Plus, more and more of those courses needed to graduate are being shifted outside of the regular academic calendar to summer sessions and winter sessions. These special sessions don’t receive the same level of support from the state, so students have to pay a lot more to take the same classes in them — essentially, privatizing some of the instruction at public universities.)

It strikes me that we, as a society, owe college students and recent college graduates more.

We should want our government, and our society more broadly, to take care of its members (including its youth) at least as well as its banks.

It is reasonable for the youth to want people in government, in the private sector, in the media (hello corporate ownership) to hear their voices, their grievances, and their hopes for the future even if they can’t spare thousands of dollars to make campaign donations, or to incorporate.

If Mitt Romney is right that corporations are people, what he didn’t mention is that many of them are legal persons that suck — sucking all the attention of our policy makers, all the best tax benefits, all the reflexive good will of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, what have these legal persons done for young people lately besides jacking up the interest on their student loans and the fees on their debit cards?

Young people are entitled to their anger and frustration, and they are reasonable in recognizing the need to go outside normal channels to get the attention of those with the power to change things. I’m hopeful that this leads them to pursue some concerted action when election time comes around — to hack our system and start dismantling the structures that currently ensure that no matter which of the two major parties wins, the corporations can keep on keeping on.

So … where do the faculty stand in all of this? Where should we stand?

I think we need to be committed to delivering the highest quality education we can to our students given the resources we have. (We do have to recognize, though, that with the resources we have right now, we may not be able to deliver the education we think our students deserve without hurting ourselves.)

We need also to be honest with our students about how crummy the economy is, and how dismal their job prospects may be.

Further, we need to do what we can to change the conditions that make the economic future our students face so very dismal. That responsibility doesn’t belong solely to the people teaching college students, though — it belongs to the generations who came before them, especially those who were able to parlay a college education into a middle-class existence.

(We also owe it to people in our society who don’t go to college to provide conditions for them to live decent lives … but at least they’re not laboring under the expectation that their education is a ticket to economic stability.)

Some of us have seen already that the folks at the top of the power pyramid will try to play students and faculty off against each other — to make it look like a forced choice between delivering promised pensions to faculty and raising student fees, for example. We owe it to ourselves and each other to resist this zero-sum-game framing that exempts administrators and corporations from sharing sacrifice in meaningful ways.

Philosophers may have a well-earned reputation for corrupting the youth, but we have no interest in eating our young. We must find a way to go forward and build a society that has room for us all.

* * * * *

If you want to support the younger generations of our society in a tangible way, please consider donating to a project on my DonorsChoose giving page. Even a few dollars can bring a public school classroom closer to providing the kind of engaging math and science education that our kids deserve.

Advice for the new grad student.

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This post was prompted by an email from a friend who is about to start graduate school requesting words of advice (or warning). After I replied to that email, I noticed an excellent post by Prof-like Substance that may also be helpful to newbie grad students, so go read that, too.

The ordering of this list has less to do with importance than the order in which these occurred to me.

The financial stuff (written assuming a graduate program in which the graduate student receives some sort of financial support):

1. Find out the schedule to pay fees for the term (as well as what the prevailing policy is on late payments), and get ’em in. (Even though the part you have to pay as a grad student is likely less than the support you’re getting in terms of tuition reimbursement, etc., late fees can snowball.)

2. Find out the schedule for your RA/TA paychecks (assuming you’ll have some sort of stipend) and check them religiously to make sure they are neither smaller nor larger than they’re supposed to be. Why you do not want to be paid too little is obvious. But, it’s also a hassle to be overpaid, because eventually someone who’s doing the accounting will discover the error, and you will have to write a check to pay the money back. If your too-big paychecks have gone unnoticed by you except to the extent that they have let you buy fresh vegetables to eat with your ramen noodles, you may not have extra money sitting around when you need to fix the error if it has gone on for awhile.

3. If you’re in a situation where you’re paid a lump sum at the beginning of the term, find out whether you need to pay estimated taxes (since there often isn’t withholding from the lump sum). You do not want to have the IRS on your ass while you’re studying for quals.

Integrating into your department and university:

4. Find out which functionary in your department knows how all the gory details of registering for classes, getting an advisor, filing the right paperwork for candidacy, getting paid, etc., work and who is disposed to share this information with new grad students. Cultivate this person’s goodwill, regularly.

5. Cultivate grad student friends from outside your department. They will help you figure out which features of life in your department are weird and which are typical of graduate programs in your university. They will also help you maintain something resembling perspective. (Plus, they might know some good, cheap places to eat meals.)

6. Locate the library stacks where dissertations from grad students in your department are shelved. From time to time, browse a thesis or two to absorb the local expectations about format, the appropriate level of detail for literature background and description of materials, methods, and results, etc.

7. Make it a habit to attend the public portion of thesis defenses in your department so you become familiar both with the format of the defense and with the approach of the faculty in your department (collectively and individually) to grilling the candidates. (This may help you develop a short list of faculty you’d be happy to have on your own committee.)

8. When shopping for a research group, spend as much time as you can with the grad student members of your prospective group. Go to group meeting (to see how they interact with the boss and with each other). Arrange to drop in while they’re doing research-like activities. Trust your gut about whether this is a social setting that will suit you.

9. Research advisors who already have tenure are often (but not always) more open-minded about the diversity of effective work habits of grad students than are research advisors who are trying to get tenure.

10. Have fun! Grad school may be a means to an end you are pursuing, but it will also eat up at least a few years of your life. Those years ought to be enjoyable as well as productive.