"Graduate Students Are the Worst"

    Today, looking for a certain article on graduate student life, I entered the words "graduate students" into my Google search bar. As I typed g-r-a-d-u-a-t-e- -s, the Google instant results feature displayed its predictions, and to my surprise, first on the list after "graduate students" was the clause "graduate students are the worst." I laughed, and then showed it to my husband, and he laughed. Curious, he told me to click on it, and we discovered, for the first time, 30 Rock's 2008 clip that declared graduate students the worst people of all time.

    The clip is four years old, and has about half a million views on Youtube, but I had honestly never seen it or heard about it before today. (Not a faithful 30 Rock viewer, even though I think the show is great.) When Liz and Jack exchange the comment simultaneously like it is an accepted fact, it made me laugh, for sure, but why? Liz and Jack's joke is funny not just because it is at the expense of graduate students but also because they are using the stereotype of grad students to make themselves feel better about their own shady, semi-despicable actions and incompetency. But why grad students and not, say, 7th graders, or lawyers, or the guys who compete on the Bachelorette?
   Consider now this quick compilation clip from The Simpsons:

Okay.... so, does everyone hate graduate students? Are grad students the worst?
    After I did a quick search, I found that the clip and others like it have been commented on by bloggers and commentators before. Mike Spry's essay shares the same title, "Graduate Students are the Worst," so I thought I would read his op-ed through for a few more laughs. But Spry's essay goes beyond the self-deprecation and self-preservation of functional graduate school humor and delivers a sharp criticism of what graduate education has become, and what it turns its students (including himself) into. "Grad students aren't bad people," he says, just "humorless," reductive, useless, self-absorbed people. In other words, "the worst."
    Spry's essay comes from a place of experience -- and not a positive one. Clearly, he has found fulfillment in other environments in life that he never found in or as a result of graduate school. But what do writers of 30 Rock and The Simpsons mean by their jokes?
    For me, I see these TV jokes as an extension of the self-deprecating line of humor that graduate students themselves have created as a means of pre-emptive self-preservation. (Think of "Piled Higher and Deeper" comics, "When In Academia" tumblr, and the famous xtra normal cartoon "So you want to get a PHD in the Humanities.") What do you guys think of Liz Lemon's joke? How has "grad school humor" affected you? Does it alleviate anxieties and give us affirmation of community sharing in some of the same experiences?  Does the self-deprecation provide us with a means of self-defense? Does it secretly hurt our feelings?

Insight from the Presidential Debate: Preparation vs. Inspiration

 Hello on this lovely, though overcast, fall Saturday in New York City!

       So, with this October's gorgeous weather, post-season baseball, football Sundays, spooky haunted houses and Halloween candy in the grocery store aisles also comes a month of………Presidential Debates! 

Photo from justjared.com

        Of course, I had a lot to say about Wednesday night’s debate, and I experienced a lot of emotions while watching it -- but one of the non-political aspects I thought might be valuable to discuss about the debate was the general sense that Obama's preparation wasn't up to snuff. In the days since the debate, it seems that it is universally accepted that Romney “out-prepared” Obama for the debate. At first, it was irritating to me that preparation, and, in turn, a lack-thereof, could become such a factor in the debate when it should be, idealistically, that these two men actually stand for real policies backed by ideas that they believe in and understand, and, therefore, should not so much as stumble when presented with an argument against those policies and ideas.

        But then I thought about it more, from the perspective of my own career as an academic professor and graduate student, and I began to change my mind.

        Every time Obama wasn’t looking up and meeting Romney’s eyes, or the camera’s lens, I could almost feel through the TV that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I usually get when I know I am unprepared. It is the same emotion that fuels those naked-at-school nightmares.

        My husband always says that preparation outweighs knowledge, skill, talent, charisma, and intellect. Wednesday night’s debate serves as evidence for this claim.

        As I watched the debate, and then watched the commentary from the pundits, I thought about my experience with being prepared versus being unprepared. Yes…as a graduate student, I’ve learned the hard way that preparation is essential for success, and that it is especially crucial for oral performances. But I actually don’t want to write a blog on how to prepare for an oral debate, exam, or presentation. I do, however, think Obama’s performance in the debate provides us with an opportunity to discuss how important preparation is for success in almost anything you do -- in graduate school, and in life.

        I began to think about the fact that, no matter how well I know my own material, and believe in my argument in my dissertation, it will come across as a senseless disaster if I don’t rehearse my argument and practice fielding questions about it -- questions that may come in forms and from directions I hadn’t anticipated. And I will say to myself, man, I KNOW this stuff, backwards and forwards! Why am I goofing it up? But preparation for defending it means that I know it from more ways than backwards and forwards – it means you are prepared from any direction.

        The same thing happens with teaching. Do experienced, gifted, talented, charismatic teachers need to prepare for class for it to go well? You may at first say, no probably not. But the truth is that preparation makes anyone better, period. Can these individuals sometimes wing it? Can grad students sometimes wing it in class, or in a reading group meeting, without being prepared? Sure.

But it all changes when the stakes are higher.

       Your body actually reacts differently when there is more at stake. "Winging it" for orals exams, for a teaching observation, for a job-talk or an interview, is unthinkable, because preparation puts you not only at a mental advantage but also a physical advantage. Proper preparation relaxes your body and brain in a way that promotes a better performance. So after preparing properly, not only do you know your stuff well, but also your body KNOWS you know your stuff well, and it lets you do your thing of being your amazing, talented self.

     So that is my ultimate conclusion and insight – that there is something physiological that happens to promote success when you prepare yourself well enough.  What do you all think? Let me know, and keep tuning in to Grad.Life for more thoughts on what we can learn from the Presidential debates!

Don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page!!! Until next time, Liza 

Topic of the Day: The 5-Year Plan

Hello Readers!
   I hope this Tuesday finds you well! I am actually blogging today from an airplane -- whoohoo! I love in-flight wifi!!
   Since I have recently been thinking a lot about my personal future and about how amazing and crazy life's twists and turns can be, I thought today would be a good day to broach the topic of how graduate school fits into one's life as a whole -- in other words, how it fits into, or doesn't fit into, your grand plan for life. If you are not familiar with graduate school life, or maybe if you are just starting out as a degree candidate, you should know that life does not stop for graduate school. Despite enrollment, courses, classes, papers, dissertations, comps, exams, and tuition, life, indeed, keeps occurring. I have known colleagues who have fallen in love, gotten married, bought houses, had children, gotten divorced, traveled, climbed mountains, ice-skated in national competitions, played in rock and roll bands, and achieved other typical and non-typical life milestones all while working towards their degrees. Life rolls on around us, and most of us treat graduate school just as if we would treat a regular job -- we work, we play, and we live our lives. The only thing that is different than being in the non-academic working world is that there is an ending to grad school. And even then, life doesn't really change that much.
   Immediately when I decided to write about this topic, I thought of Dr. Karen's 5 Year Plan. For those of you who don't know Dr. Karen, allow me to introduce you to her website, The Professor Is In. A colleague of mine had passed her site along to me a while back, and it provides a gold-mine of  information and anecdotes and advice that will give interesting and candid perspectives about the academic world. Dr. Karen's perspective on the 5 year plan is basically that while you can't expect to control everything in life, you can however take charge of your career and make choices based on your own personal goals. She writes, "I don’t think anybody should ever be in graduate school, or on the tenure-track, without a five-year plan," and continues:

"Some of my clients are masters of the five-year plan, and even have things like getting pregnant in there. I admire that, even while I know that 'the best laid plans…' You can’t plan for everything (or, you can, but your plans may not work out). But the core point of planning is this: that you’re taking control of your process into your own hands, and not leaving it out there somewhere, in the hands of your advisor, your department, or 'fate.' You decide when you’ll write, when you’ll defend, when you’ll publish, and so on. These are all your decisions to make."

   What Dr. Karen is sure to point out, though, is that a plan in and of itself is not going to get you anywhere. You have to stick to the plan. In other words, you have to meet deadlines. In a follow-up post, Dr. Karen asserts:

"Staying on top of deadlines is exactly what allows a person to achieve  huge life goals. Yes, I’m quoting Thomas Edison:  ”success is 10% inspiration, and 90% perspiration.”  The people who succeed in getting into the national conference are, first and foremost, the ones who actually remember to submit the proposal to the national conference, by the deadline, properly formatted. One of the most important outcomes of the 5-year plan is that you never miss a submission deadline for a conference or a funding opportunity.  As you learn of new conferences and funding opportunities, you simply add them in, without losing track of the other deadlines. You also plan out a publication schedule, and put your own deadlines for submission to journals there in the plan.  And money racks up, and publications rack up, and networks rack up, and voila, the cumulative effect 5 years later is—an epic CV that gets you an epic job offer, or tenure."

    Ok, well, yes, but never miss a deadline? "Simply" add them in? It sounds great in theory, but I think the biggest problem most graduate students have is that meeting deadlines is not at all simple. Life sometimes tears you away, even if your academic work is your number one priority. It is not always so black and white.

    So what are your thoughts on the 5 year plan? Though I may have some theoretical questions about how the 5 Year Plan works, most of my questions about creating a 5 Year Plan are entirely logistical -- meaning, what does the plan actually LOOK like? By this I mean literally how does it look? What format does it take? Is in in calendar form? List form? Do you try for a month-by-month set of goals, or set up it up year by year? Or something in between? Do you work on multitple goals at a time, or try to nail one thing down before moving onto the next? I'm sure different solutions work for different people, but I am wondering what would work for me, and what has worked for you? I'm curious to hear your thoughts!
    And another thought I always have when I revisit the 5 year plan post: how do you know if your goals are realistic? Is there such a thing as shooting too high? Should your goals be based on practical things such as making money and attaining a job with benefits, or should the goals be focused on advancing the scholarly conversation? How do you set yourself up for success with the 5 Year Plan?
   Please share your thoughts about how grad life fits into your big picture!
Until next time, Liza

Business Cards Available for GSAS Students

Hi folks! I hope everyone had a good Monday!
    Soooooooo, I discovered something cool today on the GSAS page of the Fordham website! GSAS students can order their very own BUSINESS CARDS!
    At conferences, I have always been impressed by the students who whip out a nice card when I ask to exchange contact information. I think it is the sense of direction and focus that the "business card" evokes. Not that one goes to graduate school to emulate the corporate world lifestyle, but the act of pulling out a nice business card gives off a sense of dedication to your chosen career path. It signifies commitment to academia as a career; it shows that you have self-confidence in your career path. It shows that you see yourself as a viable contributor in your chosen field.
   I have often thought of making my own business cards, to give out when attending networking-worthy events such as conferences, lectures, meet & greets, socials, talks, readings, and undergraduate alumni events. But I worried that homemade ones would further call attention to the self-perceived amateurism of my life as a graduate student that I was so desperate to hide and run away from.
   Looking back, I am sure I could have designed some decent ones and nobody would have thought twice about it. In fact, I am sure most of the ones I've collected from students over the years were probably homemade, although I certainly didn't nitpick or think about that when I received them.
  But it somehow makes me happy that we can order OFFICIAL ones from Fordham. Does it make me feel validated or legitimized somehow? Perhaps... or else I just think it is cool and functional at the same time.
  The information that you'll need to order them can be found on this page: Click Here! The deadline to order them for this year is September 15th, so I wanted to let everyone know about it! The price is pretty reasonable -- $30 for 500 -- which would be just about equal to the cost if you made your own!
Here is what they look like! They are simple but effective, and "official" looking.

Find the order form here!

What do you guys think? Will you order these? Let me know what you think!  Do you have them already? If so, let me know how they came out!

Imposter Syndrome: The Masks of Success

    A old friend of mine from college (and now a Grad.Life reader!) sent me a link to an article on a very interesting issue that haunts many graduate students: it’s called the Imposter Phenomenon.  As soon as I saw the headline to the article, I immediately recalled discussing this syndrome in my dissertation group, years ago. Our group’s advisor was listening to us collectively vent our fears about not being good enough – but as we sat and talked and sipped wine and shared our feelings of inadequacy and began to come to terms with some of our feelings, we realized that these emotions were much more complicated than some kind of low self-esteem or low self-worth (which are complicated enough on their own, believe me). The feeling we were converging on was more a fear of being “found out” – found out by those among us and above us that we had faked our way to the top of our high school and college classes, faked our way into graduate school, and faked our way through comps, and faked our way through the proposal, and faked our way into this group. It was a fear that we’d basically keep on faking it until we make it, blindly grasping at luck and opportunity and just barely scraping by, somehow tricking people, until someone finally catches us in our act of academic deception. I remember looking around with a sick feeling in my stomach, as if I was finally admitting something that had been hiding like a skeleton in my educational closet -- that the jig was up. I was ready to surrender, with hands in the air, the weight of deception and guilt off my shoulders. 

     And then our advisor intervened and calmly said, “There is actually a name for what you are feeling. It’s called The Imposter Syndrome.” He explained that it was an extremely common feeling among graduate students and professionals.

    As my advisor was explaining this syndrome to us, I felt a rush of relief flood into my heart, as the blood rushed into my face – other people outside of this room feel this way too? You mean there’s an actual pathological component to this feeling? You mean, other people have this, and feel this, and know about this? As he continued to field our questions, I looked around, my mind blown. Knowing that this feeling had a name, and had been studied by real psychologists, (although it is not officially recognized in the DSMMD as a psychological disorder), somehow did make me feel slightly better. Not less of a fraud, but perhaps a little bit more aware that my fraudulent feeling might exist in my head, rather than in reality.

    So, what is the imposter phenomenon, exactly? The imposter phenomenon, a.k.a imposter syndrome, a.k.a fraud syndrome, is a condition in which a professional unfoundedly feels as if he or she has fraudulently joined the ranks of his or her own profession, or in which a student irrationally feels as if he or she doesn’t belong among his or her peers. If you suffer from this syndrome, you feel undeserving of your success and achievements. You feel like you have slipped past the barriers, snuck in under the radar. To me, I understand it as a type of paranoia. Constantly, you feel like you will be “found out” or “discovered” for the fraud that you are. It is also the feeling of not belonging. It is dark, and strange, and very real inside the heads of many graduate students. 

    The psychologists who coined the term and first studied the syndrome emphasize the internality of this disordered thinking. Sufferers of this syndrome lack an internal sense of success – they are just unable to internalize their own success and their own merit. In other words, they feel they do not deserve their status, degrees, accolades, and that they have somehow deceived the world around them in order to attain what they’ve attained.

    In trying to tease out what might cause this emotion or pattern of thinking to arise, I tried to draw some analogies and connections to other situations and experiences. At first, I began thinking of developmental psychology, noticing that in some articles I pulled up on the topic, imposter syndrome seems to arise from succumbing to past images of oneself. A person may not be able to get around an image of herself that concretized long ago, which has nothing to do with her current status or state of being. Then, thinking about perception of oneself, I realized that imposter syndrome has some parallel characteristics to another mental disorder known as body dysmorphic disorder – in which one perceives his or her body in a negative way and makes observations that are not supported by reality. (For example, a woman sincerely believes she is “huge” when she is factually 100 pounds and 5 feet tall.)

    It’s also similar to when you first fall in love with someone, and that person falls in love with you, too, and suddenly you begin to wonder, “Why on earth does this person love me?” And you wait for them to discover your real, hidden self, and, upon the discovery, for them to get up and walk away.

     Whoah! Didn’t mean to take such a dark turn there! But it is kind of a dark issue, when you really think about it. Imposter syndrome! It sounds like the stuff of a great Gothic slash dark comedic novel set in the world of academia, exploring the psychological limits of the human being in the post-post-modern world.

     The question left for me is: what is it about graduate school specifically that creates the conditions for this syndrome to arise? Is it due to some kind of barriers put up between the students and the mentors? Is it just human nature when it comes to intellectual activities? What causes this failure to internalize one’s own success and merit? Is it indicative of low-self-esteem? Or is it something systemic in our educational and professional structure that causes someone to feel like a fraud amongst peers? Is it a combination of one’s nature and one’s environment? Who is vulnerable? More interestingly, who is not vulnerable to this syndrome?

     Personally, I deal with this feeling often, especially after reading a great journal article, or a new book in my field – it comes into my head that my ideas are inferior, and that I don’t belong in this league, that I am out of my depth – and I wonder one day, they will tell me that I need to leave – that it just hasn’t been good enough. 

    The strange thing is that I don’t feel this way in ALL areas of my life. Aside from being a grad student, I am also a singer, and I used to act in plays and musicals, and I can’t remember ever once feeling as if I faked my way through an audition, faked my way through a song, or faked my way into the cast of a musical.  I don’t remember thinking, "I’m not as talented as these people, how did I get here, I’m going to be found out…. " I just sang, and left it all out there, and accepted the outcome, good or bad. For some reason, I could always internalize my sense of achievement much more easily as a singer than as a literature student. 

   The difference is, I guess, that in academia, we rise up the ranks based on a system that we know deep in our hearts to be politicized and arbitrary, with inflated grades that pretend to be objective but are ultimately subjective. A Phd is kind of like this objective body of evidence I can point to to say, look, I’m smart and I achieved something significant in my field. But, if in my heart and brain, I know that this evidence is only an illusion of objectivity, perhaps that is why I am constantly looking over my shoulder, waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Maybe the existence of Imposter Syndrome exposes the phantasmagoric underpinnings of the academy in the first place. If ultimately there is no way to prove yourself worthy anyway, it makes sense that you would be constantly worried about being caught defenseless.

    With art, on the other hand, nothing pretends to be objective. Everything is subjective – so there is no worry about having to one day prove yourself worthy with some objective measure. You just are what you are. I sing the way I sing. I write the songs that come to me. There is no layer of wondering whether or not I have “tricked” people into thinking I can sing – because it is all subjective anyway. It is already understood by my brain and my heart that people may or may not think I’m a good singer. When my band plays at a local bar, I don’t worry about whether or not will think I am a fraud or not -- which is not to say that I don't worry at all; I worry about something more simple: whether I will be good or not.  Any worry I have about being on stage is not about any kind of deception. In fact, it's the opposite -- because when I'm out on stage, I'm not hiding behind sentences, and language, and structure, and grammar, and jargon -- I'm not hiding anything. It's me out there, raw and vulnerable -- singing my heart out. Take it or leave it. 

    Of course, I’m only an amateur singer. So maybe that’s the real difference? Perhaps for professional artists and performers, Imposter Syndrome exists as well? There are certain professional heights you may achieve – winning a Grammy or a Tony or perhaps getting into a Song Writer’s union – do you think professionals who achieve these things feel like frauds? Do they wonder if some day they will be found out as fakers? Somehow, it doesn’t seem to fit with the pattern. But maybe I am wrong.

   What experiences have you had with this feeling? Have you experienced it? Or have you been baffled by dealing with others who clearly are amazing but can’t seem to acknowledge their own competency? Share your thoughts! There is so much more to be addressed concerning this topic and others like it – let’s start the conversation!!! And thanks to Brandon C. who tossed this topic my way – if you want to see any topics covered here, let me know!