Thursday, January 05, 2006

Grad School Fallacies and How to Survive Them

Lots of folks attempting to prepare you for grad school talk about how much reading is involved. Although on the face of it, this seems to be a safe statement (witness the 4 chapters and two books I was assigned on Wednesday for my classes tomorrow), it is, in fact, a lie.

In fact, there is so much reading assigned that it would be physically impossible for a human being to actually read it all. For one class last quarter (regular readers of this blog can probably guess which one), we had nearly 200 pages of fairly dense text to read, with about 12 hours notice. It amounted to roughly 20 pages per hour, assuming no sleep and some creative bending of the speeding laws. Even barring relatively extreme cases like this, it's tricky getting through entire books when they are on reserve and you only get them for 1-2 hours at a go.

Clearly, actual reading has no place in graduate study. No, grad school involves almost no reading, but rather a whole mess of skimming.

So, how to skim at the graduate level? Here are some tips:

  1. In 90% of life, you can skim pretty adequately by reading the first and last sentences of each paragraph. Sadly, grad school reading almost invariably falls into that other 10%. Pick out at least one or two mid-paragraph sentences to read too.
  2. Don't forget to read the footnotes! Sure, they are really dry a lot of the time, but they are also the place where authors tend to put that really cool factoid that they couldn't fit into the body of the article, but absolutely couldn't resist sharing. These make life worth living.
  3. If you happen across some chunk of the reading that you really are into, go ahead and read for depth. That's your designated topic for the impending discussion session. If you play your cards right, bring it up early on, and contribute a lot, you can often get away with just listening when the conversation switches to that weird French article that made your head hurt.
  4. And finally, keep an eye out for entertaining quotes to post on your blog. Such as this winner from my reading tonight:
"I am credibly inform'd, that a certain Goodwoman miscarry'd at the ungrateful and yelling Noise of a certain Deacon in reading the first Line of a Psalm; and methinks if there were no other Argument against this practice (unless there were an absolute necessity for it) the Consideration of it's being a Procurer of Abortion, might prevail with us to lay is aside."

"He sang so bad he killed my baby! Also, he made me forget that there's no apostrophe in this use of its!"

So, Lemming, care to discuss William Billings of Boston? He's a bit after your time (1746-1800), but it's the best I can do for early American music...

posted by Alison @ 11:23 PM   4 comments

4 Comments:

At 8:07 AM, Blogger Hugh held forth...
I remember the first reading list I got from Howard Mayer Brown (God rest his soul). It was a list of the topics to be covered by week, and there were around 20 books listed per week. I got this about a week before the class actually started. So, I plowed in.

Then, about 6 books in, I was spotted by a more experienced student (i.e. one who had actually taken a class) who wondered why I was reading that source. "Don't we have to read all of this?" I asked. With a smile he told me that, no, all of those were background material, that the actually list was much less than 1,000 pages a week.

That should have told me something about me and grad school. 
At 9:54 AM, Blogger Alison held forth...
Hee - I would have done exactly the same thing. For better or for worse, the OSU faculty aren't quite that organized, my Romantic prof being a notable exception. On the first day of class, he gave us a full list of required and recommended readings, clearly labeled, for the entire quarter. He is now as a god to me. 
At 2:19 PM, Blogger lemming held forth...
(heh) I'll see your Billings and raise you an artist or six. As a "mere" woman I've always been held to a higher standard than my male collegues and, so I'm told by my delightful peers, mere social studies high school teachers are smarter than I, a mere doctoral candidate who, being a woman, must be stupid. Love the ivory tower and the public school system.

Yours in feminine and uninformed stupidity,
lemming 
At 11:05 AM, Anonymous Anonymous held forth...
Grad school really ruined me for reading. I skim everything now not because I want to, but because I spent three years learning how to, and can't seem to deprogram my brain.

Good luck with all those words dancing in your head! 

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