What's wrong with graduate students?

My own input on Sharleen's and profgrrrrl's posts on the subject, which started out as a comment on profgrrrl's post, and then sort of just snowballed into a blog entry.

Let me say a bit about my own graduate school experience. I failed my qualifying exams. Failed them. Because I was so ambitious, trying so hard to impress, that instead of just summarizing what I knew and why I found it interesting, instead of just talking about the subject, I flailed about trying to come up with some insanely impressive original theory (on a qualifying exam?!?) and just ended up sounding like I had no fucking idea what I was talking about. Obviously, I recovered. I did know my shit. But I was trying so hard to impress that I couldn't just relax and say what I knew.

I think graduate school is a really weird place. On the one hand, we want and expect grad students to be adults, to act collegial. On the other hand, we have a lot of power over them. Think about our own faculty anxiety about not being smart enough, not measuring up, what if someone knows that we flubbed that, why are we blogging anonymously? Then multiply it exponentially. Grad students feel that everything is riding on their ability to be "good students," a position that's the exact opposite of being "good independent collegial thinkers." We want the impossible from them. And often it's the smartest, savviest, most intuitive students who sense our impatience (which has nothing to do with them, and is probably more a generalized impatience with our own jobs, especially those of us who are junior faculty), and get nervous about it, and then panic and stop being able to think.

My own approach (with grads and undergrads) is to spend a lot of time articulating their anxieties for them. Like, with my graduate students, on the first day of class, I said, "ok, this is my first grad class here, and I'm not sure what the standard format for graduate presentations is at this institution." And they said, "neither do we!" So I laughed, and told them what I thought a presentation should do, and why. No one ever did that when I was in graduate school, and it sucked to try to guess, and it sucked more to have to listen to godawful presentations, and it sucks most of all to be teaching a class where students are giving godawful presentations and eating up all the seminar time and no one is learning anything. And I've talked with them about publishing anxiety, and about how to grade efficiently. They aren't my TAs, but apparently the person they're TAing for hasn't talked to them about grading and time management (!!!). My own graduate institution excelled at training TAs: there was a summer training program, and a first-semester seminar that was all about pedagogy. I've passed on what I learned there to my own graders and grad students. It was invaluable.

But most institutions don't have that sort of thing. Mine doesn't. It sucks. Students are put in the position of having to infer our expectations because we don't always spell them out. Now, part of this is because our expectations seem to us obvious: obviously a presentation should summarize the material and offer points of entry between it and the other things going on in the class. Obviously a qualifying exam is simply meant to show that the student has more or less mastered a defined area of work. Obviously it's insane to spend more than fifteen minutes per paper/exam when grading a class of 100: just do the math!! It is really fucking hard, on our part, to infer the paranoia of graduate students (even though we've all been there ourselves), because the paranoia and defensiveness of graduate students knows no bounds. Graduate school is a bottomless pit of paranoia and defensiveness. And, as we aren't therapists, we can't, in the end, overcome all that; students will just have to get therapy on their own. (I'm serious, actually. When undergrads ask me about advice for graduate school, I usually tell them to get a good therapist.)

But I think we can try to articulate the unwritten rules, even when (especially when) we think they're obvious. And grad students, for their part, need to screw up the courage to say that they don't know the rules, to raise their hands on the first day and say, "can you tell us what you expect an effective presentation to do?" or to set up a meeting with their thesis advisor (after failing my quals and being in therapy for a year, I figured out this one on my own) to ask, "at what point do you want to see drafts of my work? What kinds of comments do you give? What things do you expect me to do on my own, and what things do you expect me to ask for help with?" We get busy, and we teach so many students, that we sometimes forget that they don't all know this shit (none of them do). But it's really, I think, the heart of academia. All we do, whether in teaching or in publishing, is state that-which-is-obvious-to-us in ways that are clear enough to make them suddenly appear obvious to others.