Synopses & Reviews
Don’t think about why you’re applying. Select a topic for entirely strategic reasons. Choose the coolest supervisor. Write only to deadlines. Expect people to hold your hand. Become “that” student.
When it comes to a masters or PhD program, most graduate students don’t deliberately set out to fail. Yet, of the nearly 500,000 people who start a graduate program each year, up to half will never complete their degree. Books abound on acing the admissions process, but there is little on what to do once the acceptance letter arrives. Veteran graduate directors Kevin D. Haggerty and Aaron Doyle have set out to demystify the world of advanced education. Taking a wry, frank approach, they explain the common mistakes that can trip up a new graduate student and lay out practical advice about how to avoid the pitfalls. Along the way they relate stories from their decades of mentorship and even share some slip-ups from their own grad experiences.
The litany of foul-ups is organized by theme and covers the grad school experience from beginning to end: selecting the university and program, interacting with advisors and fellow students, balancing personal and scholarly lives, navigating a thesis, and creating a life after academia. Although the tone is engagingly tongue-in-cheek, the lessons are crucial to anyone attending or contemplating grad school. 57 Ways to Screw Up in Grad School allows you to learn from others’ mistakes rather than making them yourself.
Review
“This is a book prospective students should buy before embarking on a graduate school career and that current students will keep close to their desks and computers. Haggerty and Doyle are knowledgeable, honest, open, and supportive. Moreover, their advice is spot-on. This is the kind of book I wish I had before starting graduate school.”
Review
“Graduate school is a high-stakes venture when you consider the time and cost invested in return for relatively meager job prospects. 57 Ways to Screw Up in Grad School provides useful advice to make a student’s time in grad school as productive and rewarding as possible.”
Synopsis
A hilarious and irreverent guide for grad students across the country, this work includes essays, lists, and illustrations all dedicated to poking fun at the graduate school experience. b&w illustrations throughout.
Synopsis
This is a book for dedicated academics who consider spending years masochistically overworked and underappreciated as a laudable goal. They lead the lives of the impoverished, grade the exams of whiny undergrads, and spend lonely nights in the library or laboratory pursuing a transcendent truth that only six or seven people will ever care about. These suffering, unshaven sad sacks are grad students, and their salvation has arrived in this witty look at the low points of grad school.
Inside, you’ll find:
• advice on maintaining a veneer of productivity in front of your advisor
• tips for sleeping upright during boring seminars
• a description of how to find which departmental events have the best unguarded free food
• how you can convincingly fudge data and feign progress
This hilarious guide to surviving and thriving as the lowliest of life-forms—the grad student—will elaborate on all of these issues and more.
www.facebook.com/stupiddecisiontogogradschool
Synopsis
Every year almost half a million people start a graduate program of some sort. For many, grad school is the critical step toward a career as a researcher or teacher in higher education. Others might be pursuing a masters or a doctorate for personal fulfillment or to obtain the skills and credentials for a career outside the academy. No matter which group you are in, this book provides brilliant and unflinching advice about how to make a disaster out of graduate school.Kevin D. Haggerty and Aaron Doyletwo veteran directors of graduate programs and recipients of mentoring awardshave seen it all, the good and the bad. Here in this funny and shrewd book they lay out the fifty-seven ways to screw up grad school
so that you can avoid them. Their litanies of foul-ups are organized by theme and cover the grad school experience from beginning to end: from how to select your university and program, to your interactions with your advisor, committee, and fellow students, to balancing your personal and academic lives, through the pitfalls of completing your thesis and hunting for a job or postdoctoral fellowship. Although the authors guarantee that following their 57 step program will result in a spectacular crash and burn, their primary goal is to breathe some life and humor into a concise, accessible, and engaging guide for students and potential students on how to navigate and ultimately succeed in graduate school.
About the Author
ADAM RUBEN spent seven years at Johns Hopkins University earning his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology. While there, he parlayed his healthy disdain for academia into a stand-up comedy act, which he has performed at clubs, colleges, and private functions from Boston to San Diego, recently opening for Dane Cook's Tourgasm at the Warner Theater in Washington, D.C. and earning second place in the Funniest Jewish Comic Contest at the Laugh Factory in Times Square. For five years, Adam has taught an undergraduate stand-up comedy class that has quickly become one of the most popular January "Intersession" courses at Johns Hopkins University and culminates in a final show open to all students. He's written humor pieces for The National Lampoon and appears weekly on Food Detectives with Ted Allen.