Transitioning to Doctoral Work

As we know through our lived experiences and through our trusty higher ed and student affairs scholarship, transitions (both anticipated and non-anticipated) can be stressful.  The end of the academic year is a common time to reflect on transitions as students graduate and move on to new jobs, graduate school, or some other new adventure.  Recently, I have been thinking about two kinds of transition related to doctoral education: transition out of a doctoral program into a new faculty role and transition into a doctoral program as either a full-time or part-time student.  This blog post is dedicated to the latter.

As a faculty member, one of my favorite roles is working with doctoral students to help them create their own unique experience as a scholar in higher education and student affairs.  While I have been doing this for years, first as a doctoral student myself, then as a faculty member in higher education graduate programs, recently this role has become more formal as an advisor or “major professor” to students starting from the beginning of their doctoral journeys.  A question I am frequently asked is, “what should I be doing to prepare myself for transition to graduate school?”  My first response is, “do exactly what you’re doing….ask a LOT of people that question!”  As with anything, I think that gathering as many varied perspectives as you can and learning a bit from each of those is of vital importance.  And, my contributions to that conversation include the following:

1. Read.  And Read some more.  And some more.  Read for fun.  Read for work. Read things that challenge you.  Read things that you agree with and things you disagree with.  See what you might learn.  As my advisor always told us, “Read fiction. Especially if you want to do qualitative research.  Reading fiction makes you a better writer, especially when it comes to telling someone’s story.”  So, Read.  “Ok, so what should I read?”  You’re the only one who can really answer that question, but here are some of my favorites:

• What I like to refer to as the “bell hooks pedagogy trilogy”: Teaching to Transgress, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, and Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom.  These books changed the way I thought about myself as a learner AND as a teacher.
• The Journal of College Student Development.  The Review of Higher Ed.  Journal About Student Affairs Research and Practice.  And other journals related to your research interests.  I read The Journal of Higher Education, Equity&Excellence in Education, Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, Journal about Women in Higher Education, Journal of Critical Thought & Praxis, Gender & Society, and Qualitative Inquiry.  I know I am missing a ton here…but it is a place to start!  You can sign up for eAlerts through the library or through the publisher’s website. I have alerts set to send me an email with the table of contents every time a new issue of a particular journal comes out and to send me an email anytime a new article with particular keywords is published.
• About Campus.  I read this one cover to cover.  It reads like a magazine and I can read it when I’m waiting for appointments, by the pool, or on the elliptical at the gym.
• Fiction books about college students.  I have a Pinterest board with lots of suggestions of these.  Read them with an eye toward student development theory and campus environments.  I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe is one of my favorites.  This book is directly related to my research interests about race, gender, and campus environments.
• Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America.  This book is not fiction, though I wish parts of it were.  It is a history of the construction of race in the US and provides an important context for understanding race and racism on today’s college campuses.  This was required reading when I taught Introduction to Ethnic Studies with first-year undergraduates and will be required again when I teach Diversity and Multiculturalism with doctoral students.

2. And write.  Anything.  Journal.  Blog.  Write reflection papers.  Write down your reactions to an article after you read it.  Write it in an email to a friend or just keep it for yourself.  Get in the habit of translating what is going on in your brain to a piece of paper. Cultivate your inner voice.  Figure out ways to share those thoughts with people around you.  Your contributions matter simply because they are yours and they have been lived.  Connect experiences in your work and personal life to things you are reading.  What are the connections between what you read and your experiences? What are the differences? What do you think this means? Remember, doctoral work is about contributing to knowledge, so start thinking of yourself as a contributor, not just a consumer of information.

3. Also, get on social media.  Follow some blogs of other higher education scholars whose research interests you share.  I love the Commission for Social Justice Educators’ blog and Dafina Lazarus Stewart’s blog.  There are also some great blogs about doctoral education.  One of my favorites by a PhD student in a higher education/student affairs doc program is Diaries of DAR.  Inside Higher Education also features a blog called GradHacker and you can follow them on Twitter.  Do that.  Follow scholars on Twitter.   Pay attention to hashtags of interest to you.  For example, I follow #sachat, and you might be interested in #SAGrad or #PhDChat.  Pinterest has a plethora of resources for higher education scholars and practitioners.  I use Pinterest to collect resources for class and have had several students use it to collect resources as well.  I also use Storify to collect news articles that I might want to use in different classes.

4. Figure out some potential research interests.  You don’t need to commit to anything now, but start exploring.  What questions do you have? What other scholars are thinking about things that you’re interested in exploring? Read up on this stuff.  And write down your thoughts as they come to you.  Remember, you are a contributor to AND consumer of knowledge

5. Read Inside HigherEd and The Chronicle of Higher Education daily.  Both have free daily digests.  Sign up for them.  Read the headlines, and read the articles of stories that are of interest to you.

6. Explore digital resources for graduate school.Evernote has become popular with many PhD students.  I use it for my research projects – it has become the equivalent of a researcher journal for me.  I collect articles that are relevant to various research projects on which I’m working, along with my commentary.  I also frequently jot notes to myself in Evernote – research things I’m thinking about, questions I have for faculty meetings, etc.  It syncs with all of my devices, so I can add a note whenever I’m thinking of it.  I also really like iAnnotate, which is a PDF annotator.  I can take notes on and highlight PDF documents without having them all printed out.  Some doc students really like using Kindle or another eBook reader for their books; others much prefer the print versions. Some (like me) do a combo of both, depending on the purpose/use of the book. I am missing a lot here.  There are so many options.  Explore.  Ask questions.

Those are my thoughts.  Yours? What would you add?