Year 1 Reflection
You know, for a blog on race, higher education, and spirituality, I’ve actually talked about school very, very little. In some ways, that was intentional. I just needed some time to figure things out. You don’t always know what your thoughts are on something WHILE you’re going through it. Quite frequently, your thoughts on a situation are different while you’re in it than they are directly following it. It’s like somebody asking you what you think of a movie, while you’re watching the movie. In the thick of it, we tend to only focus on a few things. On the other hand, at the end, we start to see more of the bigger picture. Either way, the last 10 months have been really full, and I just wasn’t quite sure where to start. I can almost certainly tell you I won’t be able to speak to everything here though. But I’ll try and be true to the title and at least offer a reflection.
I moved in June 2017. Much like the case of Philadelphia, I live in a mostly black community. For me, I think, that’s probably a really good thing. My dad’s a physician; I grew up in a mostly white community. I had an AP/honors track in high school, so socioeconomically (and racially), my classmates were pretty distinguished from the rest of the school. Obviously, I attended the University of Pittsburgh, which has a relatively small black student body, not unlike most state schools. I went on to work for a management consulting firm following school, and given the schools they tend to recruit from (mostly ivy league schools), my coworkers were mostly white. I guess my point is, without intentionality on my part, I probably wouldn’t interact that much with black people at all. I’m not kidding. Hence, it was great I lived in West Philly, and I think it’s great I live where I do now, too. Simply put, I’m not especially likely to go to school or work with other black people, and in the long term, I’m probably not likely to live with them, either (outside of DC, Houston, and Atlanta, there are very, very few middle/upper class black communities… more on that later). So, this is a really good experience.
I live in a dope, 3-bedroom townhouse. I like it. It’s big enough for my dinner parties (VERY IMPORTANT), and my rent is less than $300 per month, so it works for a grad student budget. The house is a bit older, and could use a face lift, but that’s okay. For what I pay, vs. what I get, it’s almost impossible to beat. I don’t quite know how people feel about coming to visit me though… it’s not the most… pristine… neighborhood. *Shrugs*.
I attend a phenomenal university, and I’m in a phenomenal program. I learned pretty early on that not all programs are created equal, even at the same university. My program is located in one of the most beautiful buildings on campus. It’s almost brand new. Other programs? Not so much (don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful campus). Students in my program get an office, as well as a computer. We have designated work space and work stations. That’s not the case for all programs. I work in the library when I don’t want to work in my office. On the other hand, some PhD students in other programs don’t have an office, so they only work in the library. Rationally, it makes sense. I’m doing a PhD in a business school. Ultimately, this comes down to money, and business schools tend to be pretty well funded (the flip side is nobody really takes business research seriously in the academy… let’s be honest, haha).
I’ll illustrate the note on money with a point. For several departments on campus, many students have to serve as an instructor as part of earning their living stipend. While serving as an instructor is great experience, it’s quite a bit of work, and it doesn’t necessarily aid you in advancing your research agenda, per se. In my program, on the other hand, nobody ever serves as an instructor. We serve as a TA, and guest lecture periodically (basically teach one class or two over the course of the 14 week semester), but that’s about it. The full focus is on research, which presumably helps students better prepare for the job market.
While we’re talking about money, I should mention there are big differences between public and private universities, too. Public schools, on average, have less money and more students. Private schools, on average, have more money and less students. You don’t have to know much about grad school to see how the latter can work really well in your favor. Between having professional development consultants, private tutors, fully funded happy hours every single week, lots of travel and professional development funds, plus a very competitive stipend (my stipend is more than some people’s salary, albeit I have a pretty competitive fellowship through the graduate school) and deep budget for research.
Beyond that though, particularly for a PhD program, the student faculty ratio is very, very important, and not surprisingly, since private schools tend to have less students, the ratio remains pretty favorable. My department currently has almost twice as many faculty as PhD students. Suffice to say there’s ample opportunity to connect with faculty to get feedback on research and further develop ideas. Sometimes, programs get so large that the ratio of students to faculty is somewhat prohibitive, and it’s difficult to get some of the mentorship you need as a PhD student.
I’ve heard this time and time before, but it’s true what they say: culture and personality matter (a lot). For a PhD program, your classes tend to be pretty small. My biggest class this year was 12 students, but that course was a core requirement for my entire cohort (hence the size). In the spring semester, once I got into more individualized coursework, my biggest class was 4 students, and my smallest class was 2 students. And classes are long… 3 hours. You get to read a professor’s personality a lot when you’re in the class with them for 3 hours and you’re one of two students. There are some faculty who do amazing work, and you’re going to be like, “Working with you would (potentially) be really unpleasant, even if you would show me some really cool things.” Similarly, there are other faculty who you’ll be like, “I don’t take great interest in the type of research you do, but you seem really invested in helping me grow as a student, and I need people like you in my corner.” These are things you can’t gather from looking at someone’s CV or their biography on a website.
Classes are tough. If they’re not tough, then something may be wrong. I should offer a qualifier before proceeding further. PhD programs tend to go one of two directions concerning coursework:
Possibility 1: “Coursework is necessary, but that’s not the reason why you’re here. So, take these classes… we’ll try and make the courseload reasonable, because we want to leave time for you to write and do work with faculty members, even as early as year 1.” In such a case, you may have a bit more breathing room while taking coursework, and you can probably start working under a faculty member pretty early.
Possibility 2: “Coursework is necessary, and plan on it being (just about) the only thing you do in your first year or two. It’ll be all statistics and research methods during the school year. You can do research and write over the summer, but basically, until you take comprehensive exams (following year 2), plan on spending 85% of your time on your coursework.” In this case, you obviously allocate your time very differently.
Thus far, I’m of the school of thought my program falls into the latter category. There are upsides and downsides. They push you quite a bit, so you do have the potential to pick up some important skills, assuming you meet some baseline level of proficiency. The downside is, in some ways, your early time in the program has the potential to be a bit less productive, because you don’t have as much time to write. Option 1, perhaps has the strengths that Option 2 has as weaknesses. One isn’t necessarily better than the other; they just reflect different orientations to socializing PhD students. These are obviously generalizations, and fall short for that reason, but this is just my basic impression.
If you’re attending a school that does Option 1, I think your experience with the coursework portion of the PhD program will be fairly different from my own. Read lots of papers, work with different faculty, and hone in on a research area, so you have some good direction post comprehensive exams and you have an idea of who you’d like to work with. If you’re attending a school, like mine, that seems to gravitate towards Option 2, I recommend giving your full attention to coursework. The exception is if you’re particularly versed in methods and theory, in which case coursework won’t be as difficult, and you’ll have more time to write. But if you’re like most of us, the commoners, the first 2 years will be a doozie. Focus on classes and remain optimistic about WHY you’re in the PhD program. It’s not to take classes… if that was the primary goal, you could have just done a masters instead. Rather, classes are just a means to an end. You’re there for research, and classes assist you in doing better research. Keep that in mind, and don’t let the fire go out.
Don’t feel married to a specific faculty member. I came in thinking I’d probably work with a particular Professor, but after 10 months in the program, I definitely have different thoughts. The most important thing, I think, for year 1 is developing relationships with faculty members where you can use them to develop ideas and get feedback. If you have that, incredible. If you don’t, make it your big priority moving forward. You’ll need people to be invested in you over the length of the PhD. While Year 1 is still early in the program, it’s not ambitious by any stretch to establish relationships with one or two faculty to help you develop research ideas or get feedback on early versions of papers. Based on some of those early interactions, you’ll have more of a sense of working styles and who you want to do research under later in the program.
Perhaps the most important lessons I learned in Year 1 are nuggets I got in conversations with one of my classmates, who’s from Turkey. He’s a very “in your face” guy. He also spent 7 (SEVEN) years in a program that’s structured to be 5 years. That happens from time to time. He graduates in a week or so, and he got an awesome job back in Europe. I’ll never forget some of the things he shared with me, along with some other students in the department.
“Everything I learned in this program, I learned after Year 3. EVERYTHING.”
In essence, he was telling us his first 3 years, including his coursework, were a complete waste of time (somehow, he still passed his comprehensive exams?). There’s a deeper story to that, but I appreciate his thoughts, because I gather that it’s never too late to turn the ship around. For 36 months straight, he floundered and struggled. He was about to drop out, actually. The Dean of the PhD program talked him out of it. He took him as an understudy, and he spent the remaining 4 years of his program working with him. He’s a great researcher now. But he assured me his first 3 years were almost a bust. That’s encouraging to me, because I look at some of the classes I’m taking, and sometimes I’m concerned I’m not learning enough (or learning anything). But the reality is, even if that’s true, for whatever reason, I can still turn the ship around later in the program. In his case, it took him a bit longer, but honestly, it’s not a race. You just want to cross the finish line and get where you’re going. But he wasn’t finished dropping 7 years worth of wisdom. He continued.
“You need to know that your progression through this program is NOT going to be linear.”
He meant a few things by that. A PhD program is incredibly unstructured. That’s both the beauty and the struggle of the program. Some people learn things in Year 2 that other students don’t learn until Year 4. Some other people learn things in Year 5 that other students knew when they first arrived to the program. There’s a ridiculous amount of variance. One obvious implication of that is comparing yourself to other students is incredibly dangerous. Even within the same university, same program, same year, etc., no two PhD students will look the same.
Case and point, there was a classmate I had that was just a BOSS in the quantitative methods class I had. I came to find out she had a PhD in aeronautical engineering. She was doing her 2nd PhD, in finance. Go figure. And we’re both in Year 1. Is that really a reasonable comparison for me? Of course not. Similarly, I was working on a paper for my Org Theory class, and I decided I was going to do an extension of the paper I did for my honors thesis. My classmate did not have the luxury of doing that. Understandably, particularly early on, my paper was far, far more developed than hers. But I came into that class with a paper already. If she compared her paper to mine, based exclusively on the paper, she would have missed out on everything that preceded the paper: an entire year’s worth of research I did for my honors thesis. Far too often though, we make these comparisons with little regard to context. I like what my classmate from Turkey said. Going through a PhD program is NOT going to be linear. The only thing that needs to happen is you get better semester over semester… but understand 1. Your journey won’t look like everyone else’s and 2. The path isn’t necessarily going to be a straight line, because PhD programs aren’t that structured.
Perhaps two final thoughts, because I could probably write about Year 1 for days.
Be humble.
Please? You will fall on your face. A lot. If you’re like me, you’ll happen to fall on your face and get your face dragged through the mud for 14 weeks straight. I know you’re talented. You’ve probably won plenty of accolades for that very reason. But be humble. You’re going to experience difficulty, especially in Year 1. And I think people who are humble and confident fair much better than the person that had this super lofty view of themselves, because their self-concept is going to be shattered. Be humble. Be confident. Expect adversity. Expect failures. But also expect to succeed more than you fail. Or at a minimum, succeeding when it matters most (for my stats class, my midterm grade was butt, my quiz grades were meh, but I got the 2nd highest grade on the final, so I finished with an A-. Look at God!)
My final point, I feel very strongly about.
You need to celebrate ALL of your small victories.
Guys, this is a five-year program (in the case of my classmate, 7 years). It’s a lot of work, it’s reasonably difficult, and there are a lot of setbacks. You need to celebrate every single victory, because you’ll have days, weeks, possibly even months, where you have substantially more losses than you do victories. Victories are a blessing. For real, for real.
I remember in my Calc 3 class, my homework assignments would legit take me 8 to 10 hours. And I would still make 60’s on some of them. Mind you, each homework assignment was only worth, like, 5% of our grade. But you better believe when he posted the grade, and I saw that 90 or 100, I was TURNT. I WORKED HARD FOR THAT. Even if it was only worth 5% of my grade. Every homework assignment. Every exam. Every paragraph for every paper. Every presentation. Every positive affirmation is worth celebrating. Seriously. It’s a long road… celebrate your progress at every step.
There’s so much more, but that’ll have to do for now. If you recently finished Year 1, or have thoughts about your own Year 1, feel free to weigh in.
Nnamdi