Next week, on August 21, I will meet with new Baylor graduate students for orientation. I am pretty certain that most will be on time. I am pretty certain that most will be attentive. This will be one of their first official graduate meetings, afterall, and they will be excited. They will also be wanting to make a good impression.
But what about three weeks from now? Two months? Deadlines will be mounting; readings will seem impossible; and emotions will be running high. New challenges will manifest weekly: how to respond when reading assignments are overwhelming? what to do when you are unprepared for seminar? what to do when a lab partner disagrees with you, perhaps even pointing out a major flaw in your method? what to do when you receive critical feedback from peers, seminar professors, or even your PI?
I can tell you what begins to happen. The desire to make a good impression, to act with respect and decorum (including in emails), becomes more difficult as the ordinary pressures of graduate school moun
t. Remembering that each graduate faculty professor is a potential letter of recommendation and/or member of your dissertation committee becomes difficult during the stress of critical comments. Remembering that the department administrative assistant is your golden ticket to a smoother graduate experience becomes easy to forget in the stress of a paycheck mix-up.
I can’t predict every stressful situation you will encounter in graduate school, but you will respond better if you follow these basic guidelines.
1.Treat graduate school like the job it will help you get. The work has to be done; class has to be attended; lab work must be finished; readings must be finished; grading must be done (regularly). Be responsible. Be reliable. Manage your time well to get it done.
2. Always show up for your lab sections (STEM). Always go to seminar (Humanities). Always complete your lab assignments and plan out your experiments. Only absolute emergencies and/or serious issues should keep you from your responsibilities.
3. Always always let your professor know in advance if you have to miss class (which you should almost never do). Always make sure your reading assignments, written assignments, lab work, presentations, etc. are covered. If you are responsible for a seminar presentation but become seriously ill the morning of, you still should have completed that presentation and be able to send what you have to your professor. There is very little excuse for late work in graduate school.
4. Treat your seminar professor with respect. You should always use their title, unless they have specifically told you otherwise. You should always respond to their emails (even if they don’t respond promptly to yours). If you feel as if they are treating you unfairly, you should go talk to them privately. Don’t accuse them of unfair treatment in the middle of seminar or a research presentation. These are the people who will help you get publications, grants, and jobs. You want to be on good terms with them, regardless of whether or not you like them.
5. Treat the graduate administrative assistant with respect. This is the person who will help you figure our your pay schedule, register for classes, deal with university bureaucracy, etc. You need them, and their job is difficult. Be gracious, be kind, be thankful. Always use appropriate titles in your emails; always say thank you to someone who has helped you; always read over your emails before you send them to make sure they are not emotionally charged.
6. Treat all faculty members, even those who do not work directly with the graduate program, with respect. Lecturers are professors too. In fact, their job is perhaps the most important in the department in regards to drawing in departmental majors. You need them. You can learn from them. They are just as important as full professors to the department community and should be valued like any other professor (which is what they are).
7. Remember you are in a shared space. Neither the graduate lounge nor shared office space is your personal study. Be respectful of your colleagues. As one STEM student said, “as long as you are clean, respectful, quiet when necessary, and never microwave fish, you should be good to go.”
8. Graduate school is hard. It should be. You will be stressed. Figure out better stress relief than yelling in seminar, shooting off emotional emails, irritating your colleagues, and/or bad mouthing professors that criticize your work. Take a walk. Moving around will calm you down and help you problem solve better.
9. Do not hesitate to ask for good recommendations (more than simply acknowledging your work). But remember to ask for them well in advance. Writing a good recommendation is hard work. Give recommenders enough time to do it well; give them reminders (they will appreciate it); and always give them the information they need to write the recommendation (they should never have to search for your c.v., for emails, for submission information).
10. Respond to emails and communicate often. I stressed in my previous post how important this is. Your graduate experience will go much more smoothly if you develop good communication skills.
11. Be proactive and take responsibility. Yes, we don’t expect you to know everything. But we do expect you to take responsibility for learning it. Carry a notebook around when you are meeting with colleagues. If you do not know the answer to a question, repeat the question back and take a note. Find the answer, if possible, and bring it up when speaking with them in future meetings. You don’t have to know everything immediately, but you are expected to be diligent and learn.