Further Anti-Advice to New Faculty, and an Advising Question, Revised

 Addendum, Part A: I regularly get people into good PhD programs in my field and many of them, as well as those whose dissertations I directed or was on, now hold good jobs and high ranks. My advising question, below and now in red, has to do with the social sciences. I am still soliciting advice on it. Please scroll down to the next red portion of this post.

My students are brilliant. You should see them now compared to last week, it is amazing. I told them that yes they would be able to understand a difficult text. Then I told them that yes they were getting the idea. Then they started getting the idea quite well.

So it is in that spirit that I offer anti-advice to new faculty. What if instead of saying, gird your loins, because this is going to be hard, you said march ahead with confidence, because this is going to be fun and easy? I do not think this is a bad idea, because people already know that certain kinds of work are hard. They are already banking on it, and I am not sure repetition of it does any good. Do you need a special plan beyond the general plan of responding to CFP, RFP, and always making progress on something and pushing through to finishing and sending it out … just as we always did?

Further Anti-Advice to New Faculty

1. Writing is fun, and publishing is easy. When your graduate advisor told you it was so difficult, who knows what she meant. Do not let people convince you that just because you now have a PhD, you have lost your skills. Just carry on. On a 60 hour week, with a 30% research assignment, you have 18 hours for research and writing, and you can get a lot done in that time. Don’t let your graduate advisor ruin it by telling you you will never make it only working that much, and so on, and so forth — great things have been done with that amount of time and you can do them.

2. Teaching takes time. Reduce stress by giving yourself time. When your graduate advisor told you not to put time into it, who knows what she meant. You don’t want to have teaching issues because it inconveniences others. So, drop the fear and guilt you may have had inculcated in you in graduate school about time spent teaching and give lively, pleasant, relaxed classes. On a 60 hour week, for example, if your designated teaching percentage is 60%, that is 36 hours, which is 12 hours total time per course on a 3 course load, 18 on a 2, and 9 on a 4. Take all that time if you need it, enjoy yourself, and don’t feel guilty at all.

3. Service is great and through it, you find out how the university works; you also make valuable contacts outside your department. Don’t turn it down. If it is 10% of your contract, that is 6 hours on a 60 hour week, do as much of that as you see fit, and do it right; it will make you competent and win you pleasant and useful friends.

Coda: We are supposed to work a 60 hour week and it is realistically 60-70 at the beginning in a high teaching load place because of the unfamiliarity. But, it shrinks, and if you can find a way now to shrink 60 down to 40, following your percentages of course, then that’s good.

Question: You who teach in more competitive graduate programs than mine, what do you expect of an applicant’s writing samples? I just told someone to send in some papers ze had written for courses, like that. Ze wanted to undertake a large research project — ze does not realize how large and how ill conceived it also is at this time —  and I couldn’t say it was ill conceived, that would be too negative, so I said:

Look, that’s a thesis proposal not an undergraduate writing sample, and I don’t think it’s necessary to do it, but looking up the bibliography for it will be interesting, yes, and if you do it despite my saying it is not necessary, be sure to cite the following people at the institutions to which you are applying, because they work on that topic and will be interested in your project, and you are making good choices of programs if that is the project you want to work on, but you cannot send a writing sample on that topic to those people if you do not cite them and some of the people they do, because you will not look current, for one, and they may feel slighted, for two, and they will wonder why we did not warn you, for three.

Is it not still true that a writing sample for graduate school can still be just a good senior paper, and yes I do mean good, as good was for senior papers at institutions much fancier than where I am now … or am I behind the times? Is it now necessary to undertake a whole research project to create a writing sample for graduate school, and am I simply the only one who does not know it?

Addendum, Part B: I should have said that this person is going to graduate school in a social science, not in literature. I know the answer to this question for people going into literature, but the social sciences seem to be different. Ze wants, essentially, to submit a thesis/dissertation proposal at the time of applying to the PhD.  And according to this post, in some fields you have to arrange for a dissertation director by mail, before you even start your graduate program. That is in Anthropology and I have heard similar things about Psychology. Yet to try to do that in my field, and to my knowledge any humanities field, would be detrimental. Yet I do not wish to advise this student in a way inappropriate to hir own field.

Axé.