tips – Christopher S Rose

Undergraduate Survival Guide: How to Read an Academic Article or Book

This post takes its inspiration from something I’m working on in one of my upper division courses this semester, which is guiding a group of History majors (and a couple of willing History minors) who are on the cusp of graduating through their first real research project. Like most undergraduates, they’ve written papers for which they’ve done research, but they haven’t done an actual research paper before and I am slowly coming to grips with the fact that there’s not a lot of great stuff out there to guide them through it.

So, as I did with the Grad School Survival Guide … I’m writing some of my own.

From my end (professor), it goes like this: I assign an article or part of a book in a class, and I ask my students what they think of it, and I get blank stares. And like many of my colleagues on the junior ends of things, I get a little frustrated.

What do you mean you don’t have any thoughts on the book?

And then I start thinking about one of the things that I admitted in the post I wrote for what eventually became the Grad School Survival Guide, that this is something:

I had to learn how to do on my own
I didn’t actually learn how to do until I was in graduate school …
… the second time.

So, let me turn this around and imagine that I’m a student being handed an article by a professor who then proceeds to ask me what I thought of it.

The, um, font was pretty?

And the reason for this is that you have to change the way you think about what you’re reading, and also how you approach it.

Now, I’m talking mostly about books here, but if you have an article, keep reading. They’re structured similar to the way that books from academic presses are.

Where books come from and why it matters

You see, when two books love each other very much … (OK, OK, dad joke.)

When you first get to university, you probably encounter the corporately produced textbook. A lot of these are going open source (which I’m not against), but in the liberal arts (and some other fields), you’ll eventually get assigned a book that almost always has a Catchy Title: followed by one, two, or three things that make the title very long.

We’re not here to talk about textbooks, or I’ll be ranting all day and we’ll get nowhere. We’re here to talk about the other books you’re more likely to encounter in an upper division class. The ones you’re asked your thoughts about.

These fall into two categories, which often look very similar: books published by academic presses (these are almost always named for a university, plus a couple of others like Routledge or Bloomsbury), and books published by popular presses (these are names you’ll recognize: Doubleday, Knopf, Penguin, Random House, etc.).

There are different flavors of book: the most common is the monograph, so-called because it has a single author. You may also come across a book jointly written by more than one author, in which it’s not clear who wrote what, or an edited volume, in which each chapter is written by a different person.

Academic presses

For most academics (people with Ph.Ds), the gold standard from our perspective is putting our research out with academic presses. There are many reasons for this, and they are not relevant here. The biggest difference between a book from an academic press and a popular press (other than the cost) is that most books from most academic presses (yes, I’m adding qualifiers so I don’t get loads of comments) go through a process known as double blind peer review. (Most articles in academic journals go through the same process).

This is a process where I, an author, send my manuscript to the publisher who sends it to two reviewers without any information that identifies me as the author. The reviewers read the manuscript and give feedback to the press (“is this book worth publishing?”) and to the author (“this area seems weak, can you find more sources?”) The publisher then sends me their feedback without telling me who they are (hence, the double-blind aspect).

So, academic books have been reviewed (theoretically) by someone who knows something about the subject being discussed and has told the press that the book is worth publishing. The flip side–and the reason I’m telling you about the different kinds of presses–is that most authors don’t actually include “this book was peer reviewed” in their introduction. Occasionally you’ll see a reference to the “anonymous reviewers” in the list of people the author thanks in their intro, but that’s about it.

Popular presses

Popular press books are also reviewed prior to publication, but the process is different. Some academic authors send their manuscripts to them, just structured for a different audience (more on that in a bit). In other cases, the press might seek someone out who knows about a topic they’re keen to publish on, sometimes quickly (hence the number of books that appear after elections and major events–these are solicited by publishing houses because they know people will by them).

Review at popular presses isn’t always blind, and it may also focus more on publishability (“is the book readable and understandable?”) than it does on the quality of the content in the way that an academic press might. This is not to say that books published by popular presses are better or worse (and if your professor assigned it, it’s probably for good reason), but it is something to keep in mind, especially if you’re doing a research project and wandering through the stacks or doing an online search for suitable material.

I have a book in my hand. Now what?

Nearly all academic books have the same structure:

Presentation of argument
Historiography
Plan

This will almost always be in the introductory chapter (which, depending on the press, may be titled “introduction” or Chapter 1). In books published by popular presses, however, the historiography section may appear in the notes.

Academic articles will have a presentation of argument and a historiography; they may be ordered differently, and usually they don’t have a plan because they’re not long enough.

Let’s look at what each of these entail:

Presentation of argument

This is where the author offers their thesis or argument. This is the key difference between a survey book or a textbook and an academic book, and why your instructor has different expectations of what you’ll get out of it: rather than a recitation of facts, the author has compiled material to support their thesis, which is an evidence-driven argument that is presented in the rest of the book.

In the early part of the introductory chapter, the author will give background information, and, in the typical style you learned in high school, will begin to narrow their topic before the thesis statement appears. It will look like:

[Name of book] argues that …
In [Name of book], I explore … by …
a definitive statement that is followed by a lot of persuasive language (“will show”). These are a little harder to find, but you’ll notice that the progression of information stops and there’s a lot of discussion about this sentence.

This is the sentence you want to identify, highlight, write in the margins if it’s your book, etc. This is what the book is actually about. Everything else in the book is the author’s attempt to demonstrate the accuracy of this statement.

Historiography

Shortly thereafter, you will see reference to other scholars, authors, books, and articles. It’s probably not the most interesting section and you’ll be tempted to skip it. If you’re engaging on a research paper or project, though, you really shouldn’t because this section will tell you who else has written on this topic and how the book you’re reading fits in with them: agreement, disagreement, filling in a gap, answering a question posed, etc.

In a book from a popular press, this section is more likely to appear in the notes section at the end of the book, rather than within the text itself.

Historiography, as the name suggests, is specific to the discipline of history: it’s the study of how people have written about history.

The technical name for an in-line (meaning: it appears within the text itself, rather than as an appendix) historiographical section is a literature review. If it’s appended to the end, and shows as a list of books with notes about each title, it’s an annotated bibliography. These two terms are not discipline-specific to history, although their structure and format can differ in other areas of study. If you have to write one, ask your instructor for guidance.

Plan

The plan section is one of the most important sections of the introduction, but it is also the section most students skip right over. This is actually a mistake.

The plan outlines the book, chapter by chapter, and is where the author lays out how they’re going to structure the presentation of evidence in support of their argument. In Chapter 1, I’ll do this. In Chapter 2, I’ll do that. And so on.

This is actually very important if you’re expected to present part of the book in class, because you’ll want to be able to explain how your chapter follows the ones that come before, and sets up the ones that come after. You shouldn’t have to figure it out for yourself!

The rest of the book

I’m not going to cover the mechanics of reading, but a word to the wise: if you’re covering an entire book in one or two class sessions, it’s not likely you’ll be asked to recite data covered on page 84. The discussion is most likely to cover the book’s argument and how well the author did demonstrating their point.

And you can read accordingly: efficiently and quickly. Generally you want to read the chapter introduction and conclusion, and read the first and last sentence of each paragraph; if you don’t understand the progression, then skim the paragraph itself.

Pay attention to the flow of the argument, and don’t be afraid to take note of logic leaps or things that don’t entirely make sense. These are good starting points for discussion in class.

Practice, practice, practice

The easiest way to get used to identifying these parts of a book is practice locating them. Go to the library, pick up a few random titles, and see if you can do it. The more accustomed you become to identifying these structural elements, the easier it will be to get what you need out of a book quickly–and correctly–and also to have an answer when your professor asks what you thought of the reading.

Grad School Survival Guide

Writing Your First Book Review

pile of books — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I wasn’t actually intending to write about this as part of the Grad School Survival Guide, but I sat in on a seminar yesterday to discuss a colleague’s new book and the idea came up. I hope the students don’t mind me using our conversation as a jumping off point (I won’t name them, at any rate), and for borrowing a couple of ideas that were circulated.

The issue that came up toward the end of the discussion is that these students, most in their first or second year, were feeling a bit intimidated about writing critical book reviews because they didn’t feel like they had enough grounding in the subject matter, and also they were afraid of offending senior colleagues in the same field.

I’m not going to dismiss these concerns, because they’re certainly understandable, and, when I offered my own advice to them I admitted point blank that I knew exactly where they were coming from.

Writing a book review for a seminar, a graduate student journal, or pretty much anything else is, first and foremost, going to require a lot of the skills I covered in my post on how to read for graduate school. However, as a graduate student it is also one of the easiest ways to start racking up publications credits early in your career.

The standard format of a book review in the humanities (and be sure to check the standards for your discipline, as well as the specific requirements of any venue through which you plan to publish) is that it should be between 1,000 and 1,200 words; that it begins with a paragraph describing the book, goes through chapter by chapter in subsequent paragraphs, and then wraps up with one or two concluding paragraphs. (This guide from San Jose State University is very good at breaking it down.)

What the students I met with yesterday were struggling with–and, again, I am familiar with this struggle because we all struggle with it–is how to transform this basic format from a summary into an actual review.

Critique vs. Criticism

One of the classic tactics that early graduate students often adopt to overcome this hurdle is to bludgeon the book to death with over-the-top criticism that questions the legitimacy of the author’s birth, educational credentials, choice of car, and worthiness as a human being consuming oxygen and food resources that, the review implies, could be better spent on, say, perpetrators of genocide serving out life sentences at The Hague.

The problem with this approach is that much of the substantive criticism of the book tends to revolve around the reviewer’s assertion that they wouldn’t have written a book on this topic the way that the author did. In short: the reviewer isn’t reviewing the book for what it is, they’re criticizing the text based on what they think it should be.

First and foremost, this is both unfair and somewhat unprofessional, and says more about the reviewer than it does about the material under review. Don’t be this person.

Also, resist personal attacks. At no point should an author’s credentials come into play unless the author is completely unqualified to write the book they’ve written–and even then … an academic book has made it through the proposal stage, blind peer review, and editing, so someone out there who knows this field has decided the book has some merit. If the book didn’t go through peer review (i.e., is self-published or from a popular press), that changes the calculus, but still — personal attacks on the author are petty and weaken your argument. Stick to the text.

This is where the difference between critique and criticism comes in to place. Critique should be somewhat constructive (“the author did this well, but their argument could have been strengthened with field work or more archival sources”). Criticism, on the other hand, tends to be much more dismissive of the idea that the text has any merit (“this book isn’t worth the paper it’s written on”). Even if you happen to be of the opinion that the book isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, you’ll get much further and be taken much more seriously by engaging with the argument presented, taking it on its own terms, and outlining the issues with it.

Where To Begin

I referenced the How to Read Post above for a reason: in that post, I offered some suggestions for thinking critically about a text, and one of the easiest places to begin is to locate that section late in the introduction of the book where the author lays out their argument and their plan for the book (which you’ll need for an academic book review regardless), and evaluate how well they did.

For example, in yesterday’s seminar, one of the students observed that the author had a tendency to drop what seemed like the beginning of an interesting story that had the potential to illustrate a point … and then abandon it and move on. This is an astute observation, and would be a good point to raise in an review.

It’s also common in first books that come out of dissertations. The author has spent so much time working with the material that they start to think some of their illustrations are common knowledge and don’t need to be fully fleshed out. (This is also a sign of a cursory editing job).

When you’re writing your dissertation you’ll probably experience this once or twice. I literally had moments of despair because I ran across a book that used some of the same sources that I did–and therefore “everyone already knows this” and “I’m not doing anything new.” (They don’t, and you are.)

Here are some other things to take into account:

What methodology or theoretical approach is the author using? Is it presented in a way that makes sense? (A lot of historians in particular are allergic to theory and only introduce it at the end in a “I have to do this” sort of way. Does it show?)
How is the author contributing to the historical literature? What conversations are they contributing to? How might someone who works on a different area find the book useful?
Does each chapter have an argument? Is the argument fully supported? How does the chapter contribute to your understanding of the overall argument of the book?
Do the chapters flow from one to the other? (In a book where each chapter is a different case study, they should still fit together somehow in the end).
What sources does the author use? Are there sources you might have expected to see that aren’t there? Conversely, are there sources that you didn’t expect to see that are?
Is there anything that just seems off? Can you articulate it? (For example: the illustrative stories that went nowhere mentioned above; jarring declarative statements that seem to come out of nowhere and aren’t backed up — if something just seems odd to you, don’t just dismiss it out of hand as being a result of your lack of familiarity with the topic.)

Critiques don’t have to be negative

It is often easier to write a review of a book you didn’t like and, as mentioned above, one of the knee-jerk reactions among beginners is to search for something wrong with a text and turn it into a straw man that you can use to frame the rest of the review.

That said, while “critique” has something of a slightly negative connotation, it is actually a neutral term. Remember to point out things that the author does well–a mix of positive and constructive comments helps demonstrate that you have approached the book on its own terms.

When all else fails, take a look at reviews of books (one of the students in the seminar yesterday mentioned Goodreads, which I’ll admit I haven’t looked at in years). While everyone loves to circulate the fire-and-brimstone type reviews that throw lightning bolts at texts, you really want to get a feel for more nuanced reviews.

In particular, spend time reading reviews that are mostly positive–a lot of students struggle with these because they don’t want to come off as fawning or sycophantic; learning how to write a positive review takes some practice, but you also shouldn’t scour a book for something negative to say just because being fully positive is too challenging.

The more you write reviews, the better you’ll get at it!

dissertation, Grad School Survival Guide

Transitioning from Research to Writing

It’s time for another installment of the Grad School Survival Guide.

You’re home from your research year. You’ve been all over the place, and have thousands of photocopies and scans and lots of great material!

So … uh, now what?

This column is going to be one of those ones where I tell you what I wish I had done, rather than emphasize what I did.

What I did was this: I came home, worked another month at my job, quit, went to Mexico for two weeks to visit in-laws for Christmas, came back and started prepping my first adjunct class at a university nearby (not the one where I was working on my Ph.D.). It was the following summer before I even started working with the material I’d brought home and I’ll be honest: my memory isn’t as good as I had hoped it was.

Here’s what I wish I’d done instead.

adult blur business close up — Photo by Nguyen Nguyen on Pexels.com

Don’t worry about writing yet.

We all have this fantasy that we’re going to get off the plane from research and immediately start writing our dissertations. Some of us probably set out for research with the expectation that we were going to get a bunch of stuff written while we were doing research.

In my experience, writing while doing research is minimal, and being able to compose those beautiful paragraphs right after research … let’s just say there’s a reason it takes a while.

In other words: if you’re sitting there thinking that you don’t know where to begin, you’re in the majority. Breathe.

Go through everything you collected

Unless you are an absolute superstar and heavily annotated every document you photocopies and scanned (in which case you don’t really need my advice), you probably did so-so on this.

Even if you did a decent job, you probably did what most of us do: your understanding of what you collected is based on which archive you got it from. Now, obviously you don’t want to forget this because it’s important information that you’ll need, but more than that you’ll want to know what everything you collected says.

In order to get excited about writing, you need to both simultaneously go through all of the stuff you collected in order to synthesize it, and gain a bird’s eye view in order to start seeing the linkages in the material. This sounds tedious (I won’t lie, it can be), but it can also get your brain cells firing up and ready to start composing text.

Here’s where you start.

Whether you use post-it notes, an Excel spreadsheet, the notes and keywords function in Zotero, or some other program and system (I would suggest doing it electronically rather than pen and paper as the search function is going to be a key factor in making this useful), start going through and giving your documents a closer read and collecting useful data.

I suggest that at a minimum you’ll want to track:

Names (sender, recipient, subject of the document, any other key personnel you think you might want to search for later)
Dates (the date it was authored at a minimum)
Places
Title (if the document has one)
Subject matter — (this doesn’t have to be super detailed: “Letter from H.C. [High Commissioner] to Interior Ministry re: sale of onions in 1917” is fine.)
Connections (see below)
What I Need (see below)

If you have multi-document PDFs (for example: if you scanned a box or file that all has the same file number and you want to keep them all together), create internal bookmarks for each sub-component so that you can easily locate a document within the larger file. I’ve lost hours scrolling up and down looking for one-page memos lost within a 90 page PDF. You’ll thank yourself for this later.

As you do this, you’ll start to notice trends and connections between documents. This is where you’ll want to go back and add items to your “connections” category — whether it’s “compare to [document reference]” or noting that the other half of the story is contained in a file you found somewhere else, or whatever you need it to do.

I also kept a running note of What I Need–I used this for two purposes. First, I used it to write notes to myself to do a little research in areas that I just didn’t know very much about. If the document referred to an incident or event or person that I didn’t recognize but seemed important, I’d make a note.

I also used it to record articles or books I knew were out there or things I wanted to review (“I know Gallagher discusses this in her book — revisit.”).

The biggest and most important piece of advice I have is this: NEVER EVER TRUST YOURSELF IF YOU FIND YOURSELF SAYING “I’LL REMEMBER THIS.”

You won’t.

Write it down.

Starting the writing process

At some point–hopefully–in all of this, you’ll find yourself with a story you want to tell. Start telling it. Open up a word document, and write it out (don’t forget to cite things!)

At this point, don’t worry about linear writing — none of the chapters in my dissertation were written straight through from beginning to end. Start writing things down as they come to you, and as they interest you. It doesn’t matter if it’s not very good and you’ll never show your adviser — at this stage in the game, what you’ll want to get over is the oppression of the blank document staring back at you from your computer screen.

In the early stages you’ll have a bunch of paragraphs that don’t link together — that’s fine. You’ll have stories that have a beginning and a middle but no end, or an end with no beginning — that’s fine too.

Potters don’t throw a lump of clay down and create beautiful vases immediately — they do a lot of molding and shaping and sometimes if it sucks they smush the clay back into a lump and start over. Writing is the same way.

What you want in this beginning stage is to get a feel for what you have in your documentation and what stories you’re excited to tell right up front. Let the structure of the document form around it. Don’t worry about whether it’s what you set out to write at the beginning–that can all come later.

Believe me, you’ll get plenty of practice in the months to come!

dissertation, Grad School Survival Guide

My Research “Year”

Full confession: this isn’t the next entry I planned for the Grad School Survival Guide, but I had a bit of writer’s block and decided to just jump around to the next subtopic that inspired me. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to include this, but ultimately decided “what the hell.” Let me tell you about my research “year.”

I am a historian of Egypt, and I had planned to do most of my research in Egypt, maybe with a visit to the British National Archives (as I work on Egypt during the colonial period) and/or one or two collections in France. I applied for a Fulbright Scholars grant to spend 2016-17 doing research in Cairo, and was elated when, right at the end of the fall 2015 semester, I got word that my name had been forwarded to the Fulbright office in Cairo for approval.

So elated, in fact, that it didn’t occur to me to have a plan B.

Two months later, an Italian graduate student from Cambridge University named Giulio Regeni was found murdered in Cairo. Things moved very quickly from there. In mid-March, I got notice that the Fulbright program in Egypt was being canceled over security concerns. There was no consolation prize; no offer of funding if I decided to do research elsewhere–it was just gone.

I tried for a bit to figure out if I could somehow do research independently in Cairo when a friend delivered the bad news that the Egyptian National Archives hadn’t been granting research clearances to foreign scholars–she’d been there for six months and hadn’t gotten approval. Not only that, but she described the atmosphere in Egypt as “tense” and said that she’d pretty much kept to herself the entire time she was there.

This is when I realized that all of my Plans B had involved what to do if the Fulbright didn’t come through and I needed to figure out how else to fund research in Egypt. None of my Plans B involved the idea that Egypt would go offline entirely and that I would need to both come up with a funding plan and an alternate research site.

Emergency Plan B

London was a natural alternative work site: I knew there was material in the British National Archives as I’d been there before, so I began planning an independent, self-funded short (six-week) research trip for the fall of 2016. I also took a look at Geneva, where the League of Nations archives are housed (at the United Nations). I knew I wouldn’t need very long in Geneva–maybe a week or so.

My initial plan was to engage in a short trip up front and make a return trip–or additional trips–once I knew what I could gather in which place. I did this mainly because I had been planning for some time to step down from my full time job at the end of the year to facilitate research and writing, and I wanted to use up my vacation time — I figured if I wasn’t going to have a research stipend, I could at least still collect a paycheck while I was traveling. (I did have an insane amount of vacation time to use up.)

So, I used frequent flier miles to book a six week trip to London, and found a cheap ticket from London to Geneva sandwiched into the last ten days.

Do neither as I said nor did

So, let me explain what I did wrong.

I scheduled the week in Geneva at the end of the trip.

I know why I did it. I had already booked an AirBnB in London (nonrefundable) and a plane ticket to and from London using frequent flier miles. I would fly to Geneva on a Sunday afternoon, be there for the week, and then … for reasons I am still not sure of … I decided to spend the weekend and following Monday in Geneva, fly back to London on Monday night, and then home to Austin on Tuesday. I’m sure there was a reason I scheduled it this way, but I can’t remember what it was.

Here’s why this was a bad idea.

I know London. I’m like London. I’m comfortable in London. I have friends in London. At the time, I had a niece living in London, and my husband made plans to come over for a week to visit. English is also my first language, so communication was a non-issue.

I had none of this in Geneva. I’d never been to Switzerland. I didn’t know anyone in Switzerland. No one planned to come visit me. I can’t speak French (I can read French, and I was still foolish enough to think that this would somehow help me understand the spoken language. It didn’t.).

I had no idea how unbelievably expensive Geneva was. I mean, I thought London was expensive. I had no idea. Geneva is more expensive than Tokyo, y’all. More expensive than Oslo. It’s ridiculously expensive. I spent $30 on dinner my first night: an entree at a Chinese restaurant (the only place open near where I was staying; everything is closed on Sundays) and two 100 cL glasses of their cheapest red wine–I know the measurements because the glass had a line on the side to indicate how much to pour.

So what it comes down to is that I had a little over a month in London, living a nice life where I had a support network, knew where things were, knew how things operated, things were familiar and then, after a month of this, I flew to a city where I knew no one, had no idea how things worked, and everything was in French (except the TV stations in my apartment, which were all in German for some reason). And I knew I wasn’t going to be there long enough to really want to put a lot of effort into changing that … and it sucked.

Had I put Geneva at the beginning of the trip, when I was still fresh and excited, I would have had a different mindset entirely. Then, slightly tired, I could have gone to London and settled into my comfort zone much easier than I had it working in the reverse order.

Self care is not “silly”

The other mistake that I made is that I had worked myself very hard in London. I’m not saying this to brag, I’m saying it as a cautionary tale.

Six days a week I was at an archive doing work. Usually from about the time they opened in the morning until the time they closed. I was there for almost two weeks before I left the apartment to go somewhere other than an archive or the grocery store around the corner.

IMG_4551-2 — It’s not supposed to be this hot 😥 (I’m not wearing hair gel. It was 33/92 degrees that day).

One day, there was a power failure at the British National Archives, and they sent everyone home. I used the chance to go to a larger grocery store and stock up, then went home and decided to take a nap … and found myself feeling guilty.

I’m paying to be here.
I’m wasting money not being productive.
I should call the archives and see if the power is back.

I did this for almost five weeks. I allowed myself one day off when my husband came over but otherwise he hung out with his niece during the day and we met up when I was done in the evening.

Hence, by the time I got to Switzerland, I was exhausted.

Unlike the flat I had rented in London that was well located to a main shopping street, I’d found a place near the UN in Geneva that wasn’t convenient to much of anything else. The nearest supermarket was a 20 minute walk (a bit far when carrying heavy things in plastic bags). It was also very cold at night, and the heat in the apartment I rented for the week had two settings: on (sauna) and off (freezer). I sleep better when it’s cold, but there weren’t enough blankets to use, and, even sleeping in a hoodie and sweatpants, I froze at night.

My lack of selfie game is way stronger than your selfie game.

By my last day there, I was clearly getting sick. This almost certainly impacted my impression of Geneva – lest anyone wonder, I know the issue here was me.

The last day I spent in Switzerland was torture. I’d booked a late afternoon flight back to London in case I wanted to have the day to do more research, which I didn’t. I had rented a car for the weekend (I tell people that the most fun I had in Switzerland was the day I went to France), so after checking out of the flat I literally drove around looking for things to do all day while popping medicine for the cold I was clearly developing.

I went to Lausanne and realized I had no interest in walking around the old city when I discovered that it involved hills and more physical energy than I had to spend. I spent $20 on a sandwich and Coke (I said Switzerland is expensive). Then, I finally gave up and drove back to Geneva and turned the car in.

I spent three hours in the British Airways lounge at Geneva Airport. Flew back to London. Got to my overpriced and microscopic airport hotel room around 10 pm. Didn’t have dinner, but I wasn’t hungry. Turned around and went back to Heathrow at 6 am. Flew home to Texas. I know these things happened because somehow I made it home, but I have little memory of it.

I was sick for the next several days.

The point, dear readers…

The reason I wasn’t sure about posting this is that it does appear to be a long “my life sucks” post, which really isn’t what I wanted it to be.

So, here’s the thing. Self care is not “trivial.” Wanting to take a day off, or work five days a week instead of six or seven, is not only fine, it’s a matter of health.

If you don’t know anyone in town and your fellowship doesn’t give you a built in community, try meetup.org or one of the fancy apps the kids are using these days.

Go see a movie.

See what lectures are being given at a museum.

Go shopping.

If you’re homesick and it makes you feel better, go to McDonald’s. No one has to know. (And it’s fun to see what they have in foreign McDonald’s.)

And most importantly: listen to your body.

If you need rest, rest.

If you just can’t, ask yourself what will happen if you don’t for a day.

Don’t be me. Don’t put so much energy into being productive that you forget to take care of yourself.

And you can quote me on that!

academia, Grad School Survival Guide

The Research Year: Funding (or: how to reconcile what you said in your grant proposal with what you actually want to do)

Okay, I’m back! Easing into the Grad School Survival Guide, I want to address questions that have come from a couple of friends and readers who have asked some variant of the following question:

I wrote a grant proposal to work in a collection, and I said I was going to work on topic x, but now that I’ve been out and about and am starting to construct my dissertation, I realize it’s really going to be more about topic y. What should I do when I get to the archive?

Bearing in mind that the hard sciences work in a completely different manner, and that I am speaking to your average humanities/social sciences person here, and also assuming the “change in topic” you’re worried about is more akin to “I wanted to look at the history of medicine, but I realized I’m doing more of a social history through a medical lens” than “I was doing British History, but I’ve switched more to botany,” you can probably relax.

The fact is that, especially at the level of completing a doctoral thesis, what you actually produce is almost certainly never what you set out to write (mine sure wasn’t. And the project that I proposed in my application to the history program is now so embarrassing I can’t even bring myself to describe it). This happens to everyone. In fact, you should probably be worried if this doesn’t happen to some degree.

Funders are looking for assurances that their money isn’t going to be wasted by someone who wants to look at a handful of documents one morning and then spend the rest of their “archival visit” hanging with friends in New York City. That’s why they ask about your overall project, its research goals, and want to see what you think you’re going to find in the collection before you even get there.

And this is an important step in the process — I mean, I did once read a grant proposal wherein the applicant proposed working with material in a language they had never studied and gave no indication of otherwise being able to understand.

However, if your project is well-described, you have a reasonably academic approach to your topic, and you’re clear about why the research is important to achieving your goals, you’ll at least be in the running. Applications will be ranked, and maybe you might not make the cut, but you’ll be on the list instead of in the “Write back and ask if this applicant is pulling our leg” pile.

When it comes to most smaller grants, like those given by organizations to facilitate research in their collections, I’ve never heard of a funder pulling out someone’s grant narrative and saying, “You said you were going to work on [very narrow subtopic x] but you didn’t address it here, and we were so looking forward to reading your book when it comes out in ten years and we’ve all switched jobs and/or retired.” (Sorry, was that too on the nose?)

Anyone who’s worked with doctoral students will understand that research projects mature and change. It’s the nature of the beast.

Having said all of the above: Rule number one is: when in doubt, ask before you undertake your trip or start spending the grant money. It’s always better all around to be up front and honest.

If you’ve read the fine print and are thinking you may have to hide the fact that your project has morphed, you should contact the grant officer and discuss your concerns. You never know when you may need to work with a particular collection or organization again, and there’s no faster way to burn bridges and get yourself (and possibly your department or institution) blacklisted than misspending grant money.