Advice

In the past few years I have seen too many short articles giving advice about graduate school. Sometimes they are titled, "Is graduate school right for you?" Or how about, "Finding the right graduate school." I've read so many of these articles *after* getting in to graduate school that it has really started to bother me. People can only give so much advice. I'm starting to doubt that the advice really helps in most situations.

The advice always goes something like this: You have to think carefully about your future and what you want out of your schooling. Consider whether or not you really want to be in school for another few years. Are you burned out? If so, grad school is probably not for you, at least right away. So think about your ambitions, and plan out some of your life. Next, figure out exactly what you want to do. If you decide on graduate school, choose a specific area of interest that you wish to base your career on. Choose something that you think you'll love doing for the rest of your life. Then go out and find professors that research in this area and talk to them, get to know them, and get them to want you in their program. Really sell yourself. Additionally, you don't want to be stuck with an advisor that you don't get along with. So get to know your potential advisors well before deciding to attend their institution. This is always a very important point. And sometimes, additionally, another point of advice is to consider where you want to attend school, meaning what part of the country, or climate, or city you want to live in for the next few years of your life. Some people think that this is an essential consideration when thinking about graduate schools, because if you're a city kid you might get really restless and bored in a small town, or if you're from the country you might get a little overwhelmed in the city. Or you might not want to live in Louisiana, or Texas, or Washington state. Some others consider this to be secondary to the education you will be concentrating on while you're in school. Theoretically you shouldn't have time for much of a life while you are in grad school, so why choose the school based on the surroundings? What does that matter? And last but not least, apply to as many schools as possible.

I've been in graduate school for an entire academic year and half a summer. I got here somehow. I think I read some of the advice before applying to graduate school, but most of it I found after applying and being accepted. After that there is not much to change. When I was an undergrad I had my advisor for a class, and she took a whole class one day to talk about applying for graduate school. I was a junior at the time, and I was already thinking about what I wanted to do in grad school, and where I could go. I found her lecture helpful, but of course it didn't address everything. My first problem was that my real area of interest - paleobotany - is researched at but a handful of schools in the U.S. So that already brought my selection down. And then, nobody was researching the kinds of things that I wanted to research. This was a roadblock when I first started looking for schools. My second problem was that I was already married. Having a significant other is a big problem in grad school. We wanted to stay together. Otherwise, what is the point of being married? So we applied to several of the same schools. But that brought our pool of possible schools down even more. Try to find a school that has paleobotanical research AND gravitiation or relativity research. It gets a little more difficult. We were just happy that we weren't trying to apply to the same departments and competing with one another for the selected spots. And the third problem was actually applying. You are supposed to apply to as many schools as possible. The more the better! Well, that adds up to quite a lot of money, when almost every application costs $50. If you're independantly wealthy, I guess you're lucky! But when you are working for your money and trying to complete your senior year at college, a bunch of expensive applications become difficult to deal with.

So, we made it somehow, right? Well, we only both got accepted at one school, MSU. I was accepted at quite a few of the schools I applied to. But we wanted to stay together, right? So here we both are. Now I'm not doing what I wanted to do, but at least I'm only in it for a masters degree. Then I'll move on. But we're here for 7 or so years while my husband gets his Ph.D. We tried to follow all the great advice, but it just didn't work out for us. But we're making it.

So, after all that, my great advice is do your best if you're looking for grad schools. You might get lucky, or you might not. But try to follow the advice, and while you're at it you might come up with some great advice of your own to share with the world.