Professional Development

Welcome to UW! You are receiving this tip – the first in a series – either because you work with me or because you have some interest in education and may work with me in the future. Feel free to opt out (let me know if you do not want this unsolicited advice) or forward as you see fit. These tips reflect things I wish someone had explicitly told me early in my graduate student career. Five technology tips for you today.

1) You need this to get access to journals and other good stuff through the library when you are not on campus.

2) Choose a citation manager now and start using it as soon as you write your first term paper. This will save you a tremendous amount of time in the long run. I started using EndNote my third or fourth year of grad school and now have about 3,300 entries, organized by keyword with abstracts and hyperlinks to articles. Happy to share that database with you if you like.

3) Choose an text editor and learn how to use it. I use a text editor (emacs) to write code for Stata. Emacs is probably not the best one anymore but it does what I need it too and I am not willing to incur the transition costs to learn a new editor. You can get guidance on what editor to use from SSCC or more senior grad students if you are not already using one. Again, learning how to do this now saves a tremendous amount of time later. Key features for me include recording keyboard macros to perform repetitive tasks and cutting and pasting columns of text.

4) If you do not yet use an electronic calendar now is a good time to start. I prefer google calendar. Others use outlook which is now the official UW calendar. As an added bonus, some very relevant calendars are available via google (Education seminar (ITP)), Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) which will be available soon). I usually maintain a calendar for the Center for Demography and Ecology (CDE) as well.

5) Consider using a password manager. This is a secure way of storing passwords and will generate passwords for you if you like that are very difficult to crack (i.e. not your pet’s name). I use lastpass but there are others. Each of these things (at least 1-4) pays off like any other investment over the lifetime of use. The earlier you learn to use these things the greater the payoff.

Graduate school looks kind of like college. You have a pretty unstructured life, go to classes at certain hours, read and write stuff, drink lots of coffee/tea in the day time and have ample opportunity to level out with lots of beer/wine in the evening. This all takes place in a lovely environment with recreational athletic facilities most adults pay lots of money to enjoy. You can enjoy free or heavily subsidized music most weekends. You don’t earn much money but probably more than you did in college. Plus you still get spring break and summer vacation in addition to various dead people’s birthdays off.

Don’t let all of this fool you. Graduate school is a totally different beast. You started your career the day you showed up here for visit day. You may not choose to stay in this line of work, but for the time being you have committed yourself to a professional preparation program focused on giving you the skills you need to be a successful researcher and teacher (in that order and with a big gap between the first and second). Here are some things to be aware of when you think about how to make the most of graduate school.

1) The fact that you are here shows that we believe that you have the necessary skills to succeed in a program as demanding as ours. And we’re usually right. It does NOT mean you have skills sufficient to succeed in this line of work. We believe you will succeed if you choose to invest the time and effort- that last bit isn’t supposed to be scary. But writing a good term paper, earning excellent grades and performing well on the GREs only gets you in the door. The hardest parts of the job, I think, are coming up with good research questions, framing or pitching a paper well, crafting the argument and just being persistent. The methods may seem difficult now, but they are comparatively straightforward in most applications. It’s a marathon, not a 100 meter race. All you have done so far gives you a solid platform from which to build. What I do and what you have done, however, are still pretty different.

2) You don’t actually get spring break and summer vacation in addition to various dead people’s birthdays off. The calendar says you do but it’s not true, not if you want to succeed in this line of work. You should expect to work 40-55 hours a week all year round. Of course you should take days off here and there, maybe even extra time for the holidays that are central to you and your family for religious or other reasons. But this is a job (for some of you more literally than others), it’s not college.

3) You do indeed have time to go out drinking, partying, etc. You do not necessarily strike me as the types who do that a lot but a word of caution nonetheless – this is not college. Missing class is most definitely not OK, nor is showing up too wiped out to participate. And be mindful of the social networks for both present and future — faulty and fellow students. Don’t make an ass of yourself.

4) On the other hand, missing class because you are going to a conference is completely acceptable for students and faculty alike, so long as it’s only a couple a year. If there’s a talk you really want to attend that is scheduled during class, I suggest you check in with your professor. This is about TRAINING, and class is one important form of it, but certainly not the only form.

5) If you are inclined to take advantage of the excellent athletic facilities at your disposal you should definitely do that! It’s a benefit of membership. Same with music, theater, etc. Grad school is a great time to take advantage of your scheduling flexibility to enjoy life. I used to bike around Lake Monona almost every day before lunch, go see stuff at the Terrace and the Harmony, have a subscription to a string quartet series at the Union theater, etc. Working 50-60 hours a week (roughly what I think I did in much of grad school) still leaves a lot of time for other stuff.

Bottom line: treating graduate school more like professional a job and less like college will substantially improve your chances of success.

Jobs have some set hours, productivity and behavioral expectations.

Graduate school only looks like college; it’s not really.

I expect my students to attend at least one brown bag seminar each week. These are lunch time colloquia that feature a mix of internal and external speakers. I suggest that you attend a sampling of seminars this semester—ITP for sure, but also think of CDE. There are others—IRP, race/ethnicity, SPAM, fem sem, etc. Today I want to talk about why this is important from the first year on.

1) Science is at its heart about a COMMUNITY of scholars sharing an understanding of the right questions to ask and the right ways to go about answering them. Like the rest of social life, it is structured by norms and beliefs, fashions, fads and history. Scientific communities are broad and extend across the campus, nation and world. YOUR life as a member of this community begins here, in the department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin. This is where you tap in to that huge network of understandings, ideas, methods and people. The brown bag is one of the primary venues where this occurs.

Everything else I have to say follows from this.

2) The brown bag is a wonderful place to gain exposure to current research in the fields in which you are or may be interested. In part because we are a great university we have great internal speakers and bring in great external speakers.

3) No, you won’t get everything that people say. There will be days when you feel lost and wonder if the language of discourse is really English or some academic dialect that includes a smattering of English prepositions and articles just to give the illusion of familiarity. But some of even the most dense presentations will come back to you in the future, some of the questions you raise in your own mind or with your peers will set you down a productive path and some of the questions members of the audience ask (and speakers’ answers to those questions) will shed light on the topic.

4) People in the brown bag model academic behaviors. Take note. Feel free to ask me or others what we think of presentations, questions and answers. [I will tell you now that lots of people’s slides suck and if you ever sheepishly say ‘you probably can’t read these numbers’ during your own talk while showing a power point slide in 12 point font I will throw fruit at you.] The quality of the exchanges here is about as good as it gets in my experience. In fact, the hardest job talk I ever gave was my practice job talk in the demography seminar about 11 years ago.

And that was incredibly helpful, in part because this community is seriously engaged in improving one another’s work and learning from one another. I have never seen anyone on this faculty take someone down for sport; people are critical, but for all the right reasons and with genuinely good intentions. On the other hand, some of my closest friends think I am naive. I’ll let you judge, silently of course. 😉

5) Faculty notice your presence. This admittedly matters more to some faculty than to others. For better or for worse, it matters to me. To be honest, it annoys me when faculty do not show up. See (1) above.

Having said all of this, there is nothing wrong with being an occasional visitor to some brown bags and a regular in others. I would like you to attend the demography seminar and ITP this semester when you can (Ellen needs to attend ITP as a condition of her funding). Your interests may take you to other brown bags too– race/ethnicity, social movements, gender (AKA fem sem), IRP to name a few. Sample as you see fit, but maintain regular attendance at ITP and at least one other. I am a regular at ITP and dem sem and a more occasional visitor to IRP.

Starting to some extent on visit day, and in earnest this past week, you started to develop the social networks that will sustain you throughout your career. I want you to enjoy getting to know both faculty and fellow graduate students, but also to be conscious of the reputational capital you are building and the reputational costs you can incur if you act like an ass. I do not expect you to fall into the latter category- honestly- but want you to be aware.

In the near to medium term the network ties that will be most important, in my opinion, are the ones you build with faculty. We are the people most likely to mentor you, employ you and co-author with you over the next 2-6 years. We talk to one another about you. If I am impressed with a student and know he or she needs funding I will put the word out to my friends. And the same goes for my friends- they’ll inquire with me on a student’s behalf. When it comes time to write letters of recommendation for funding (graduate fellowships) and jobs, we’re the ones you will turn to, so we should have something good to say about you. And something detailed to say about you– not a generic ‘she’s a great student’ followed by a summary of your transcript and a paragraph on that paper you wrote for one of our classes.

In the long term, however, the most important networks you will cultivate are those among fellow graduate students. I am not trying to inflate your egos, but you are among the most promising graduate students in our field in the nation- one of the biggest draws of working here for me . That means your peers are among the people most likely to populate the upper tiers of academia, funding agencies and association bureaucracies in the coming years. They are going to be your best and most critical reviewers when you submit articles or book manuscripts; they are ultimately going to edit the journals in which you (and your future students, if you pursue an academic path) seek to publish. Your fellow students will be among the people with whom you collaborate and co-author. They may also be among your closest friends.

Bottom line– be nice, respectful and generous. Help one another out; give your peers and faculty the benefit of the doubt until they really screw up (and even then you may want to give them another chance). A little good will goes a long way.

WARNING: I do not want this to stress you out. I do, however, want you to be planful from your first weeks of graduate school on. Too often students do not consider the state of their CV (that’s resume in our world) until the year before they go on the job market. That’s a lot like not thinking about what sort of grades you need to earn and what classes you ought to take to get to the college of your choice until spring of your junior year of high school. By then most of that story has already been written.

The most important section of your CV is going to be the publications section. Ideally, you will have at least three or four published pieces when you go on the job market, whether for an academic post (which is my default assumption) or some other research job (which is NOT necessarily a backup option but could be your preferred career path — more on that another day). At least 1-2 of those articles should be first authored. It would be great if one of those first authored pieces was in a major journal (ASR, AJS, Social Forces, some might say Social Problems) and one in either a top second tier journal (Social Science Research, some might say Social Problems) or top field journal (Sociology of Education, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Demography, Signs, Journal of Marriage and the Family, etc.). Gone are the days when “I am a book writer” was an adequate answer to “why do you have so few/no publications on your CV?”

The publication cycle is long. The life of the grad student publication is as follows:

1. Write the paper (a difficult job in itself)

2. Get faculty feedback on the paper (perhaps in a seminar, perhaps not)

3. Rewrite the paper.

4. Get faculty feedback on the paper.

5. Rewrite the paper.

6. Submit to a journal.

7. Wait 3-4 months for reviews, hoping for the revise and resubmit (aka R&R).

8. Review and outline the R&R or rejection comments. IMPORTANT: ‘Rejection’ is the word for ‘Revise and submit somewhere else.’ It is NOT the word for ‘give up’!

9. Get faculty feedback on the comments, your outline of those comments and your plan for responding to those comments.

10. Execute your plan and revise the paper.

11. Get faculty feedback on your response.

12. Resubmit.

13. Wait 3-4 months for the response.

14. EITHER go to 8 for another round OR celebrate your success.

Between waiting for journals and faculty you should plan on about 5-6 months between submission and resubmission if you drop everything and focus on the R&R as soon as it hits your desk. Realistically, add a month. Two R&Rs is not at all uncommon, sometimes followed by a conditional acceptance. That can mean 14 months to two years from the day you submit your article to the day it is accepted for publication.

What does all this mean for you? From the day you start graduate school you should be thinking of interesting topics and research questions. I do not expect you to have a paper by the end of this year (thought that would be great). I DO expect you to have a clue about a couple of research questions you’d like to pursue by the end of this year so you can write one or two of those papers next year. You may even find you can write the front end of a paper, or at least get oriented to one, in a seminar this year (hint: I am teaching strat in the spring).

After you finish reading this, open a document in your word processor. Title it “research ideas” and write down all the ones that come to mind. Save it some place you’ll be able to access it from anywhere — dropbox, cloud, whatever you use. Any time you have a thought about research ideas/directions, no matter how simple or ill-developed it may appear, add it to that document. Go.

“The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.” – Albert Einstein

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” – T.S. Eliot

You’re not going to get much in the way of quotes from me, but these are both pertinent to today’s question: where do good research questions come from? Posing a good research question is among the hardest things we do. A common misperception among graduate students, and a particularly dangerous misperception at the dissertator phase, is that your project should or could change the field. Sit down. Ready? You are very unlikely to EVER change the field. Could happen – and good for you if it does (assuming you do not change it for the worse)- but imagine if every single dissertation changed the field. Yuk. We’d have nothing but a remarkably scattered set of ideas and findings. Furthermore, have a little humility. Others of us have been working hard at this for a while. Chances your new idea fundamentally displaces the work we’ve been doing are pretty modest.

The vast majority of what we do is what Thomas Kuhn called, “normal science.” We tinker at the edges. We work in a research tradition, or across traditions, trying to ask the sorts of questions that incrementally improve our understanding of the world and/or expand the theoretical space in which we engage in our research. In the words of Einstein, we try to look at “old problems from a new angle.”

How do we do that? Here’s where I take Eliot to heart- and think you should too. Substitute ‘researchers’ for ‘poets’ and you get the idea. There is almost nothing new under the sun, and that’s O.K. Once you embrace the idea that incrementalism, not scientific revolution, is what you want you open up a tremendous range of possibilities. Take Devah Pager’s important and agenda setting research on The Mark of a Criminal Record. She combines existing theories of racial inequality and discrimination with a method she took from an older literature on housing and lending discrimination (in particular, the audit method). After a lot of hard work– voila! A couple of bar charts that set the research agenda for a lot of people moving forward.

My dissertation: Take John Logan’s work on two-sided logit models and labor markets, combine that with existing literature and data on college choice and voila- a stream of work conceptualizing and estimating how institutional and individual preferences lead to and/or reduce stratified patterns of college attendance.

My friend Doug Miller, a labor economist at UC Davis, once likened the research enterprise to a toy where you turn the head, torso and legs to make different creatures. Think of the head as the theory, the body as the data and the legs as the methods. Pager took the head from sociology and labor economics, the legs from Housing and Urban Development studies of redlining and had to collect her own data. I took the head from social strat and education, the body from NCES data and the legs from Logan’s work on two-sided logit models. If you look around you can see this pattern in the literature.

So where do good research question come from?

1) read broadly in the social sciences and take really good notes. Insights from one field (cultural sociology) may help inform another (macro economics). Be a mature poet; steal ideas from other fields. Steal methods from other fields. With attribution of course, but you get the idea.

2) question everything. Your questions about individual pieces of research will help structure your inquiries. Recurring questions across a literature provide clues about where you should work next.

3) This is hard: look for the holes. Think not only about what IS asked but what is ASSUMED, FORGOTTEN or NEGLECTED. You can get a sense of the holes only by really knowing the literature. Even then it’s tough. That’s why I like writing review pieces. The more exposure to ideas and methods you get, the more angles you can accumulate, the more insights and ideas you can rip off to apply to your own work.

Part of the joy of being in the university is the embarrassment of resources we have available to us to get our research done. I have to say that thanks in large part to CDE, we are especially fortunate. Here are a few you should all know about.

The library: Interlibrary loan generally does a terrific job of getting materials to you quickly, particularly in the case of article and chapters you cannot access from home. HINT: you can request up to 50 pages a day of stuff we have in our own library and save yourself the trouble of going there, finding it, copying it and bringing it home. I am pretty sure this is true for students but know it is true for faculty.

My most favorite databases: Web of Science: a citation index. Enter an article and get most of the other stuff that cites it Social science citation index and ERIC (education stuff) used to be favorites too, but these have been eclipsed by the article search on our libraries home page. Both of these, to some degree, have been replaced by google scholar which has all sorts of cool capabilities, including searching for scholars, articles, and other sources citing those articles. You can also screen by date. You can also learn stuff about your professors. 4th floor factoid: Marcy Carlson has been cited 3,019 times. Cause she is a bad ass.

SSCC: TONS of useful stuff for those statistically inclined, including training opportunities (sign up for Stata for researchers if you have not done so already and wish to be employed!) and the SSCC knowledge base which has a ton of useful information on computing. Plus their statistical consultants and help desk are both excellent services you should take advantage of. Don’t be shy. They are here to help you. And me.

Staying on top of things: Jack Solock and Charlie Fiss do a terrific job of culling working paper, publication and media report of important advances in the social science in general through a blog they maintain. They do the same for aging research in particular. If you subscribe to nothing else in this section, the general social science blog should be the one.

NBER working paper series is a collection of pre-publication working papers by economists anointed by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Lots of relevant labor economics stuff (which is like sociology, but usually with better identification and worse theory). You need to register to receive these.

If you are interested in higher education, Inside Higher Ed is a great resource. They have a free ‘subscribe’ feature at the bottom of their web page and will send you daily updates.

You are all probably much more tech savvy than I, but in case this one slipped through the cracks: dropbox. Box (supported by UW). Cloud. Whatever you use, you should synch the important files on your machine with some remote storage system. One of the undergrads with whom I worked a few years ago lost a bunch of stuff when her hard drive crashed. She didn’t have to. The advantages to something like dropbox are:

1. All your work is backed up

2. It is available to you anywhere. On your laptop, at work, at home, on your phone. AND you do not need to be online to have it so long as your machine has synched (true of dropbox- not sure about others).

3. It’s very easy to share stuff with other people.

4. It’s free- unless you want to put your music and/or photo albums on there, in which case you may run out of (free) space.

I keep all the things I am currently working on in dropbox. Research, instruction, service. My EndNote library lives on dropbox. Anything I might want to update in the next few days is on there. I use the public folder to share documents (for example, some of the job announcements I disseminate through the ASA sociology of education listserv). Check it out if you have not done so already.