I'm a first-generation graduate student. Here is a thread of things I didn't know when I started my program. 1/
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I didn't know that citing your undergraduate thesis was a bad idea and would get you ridiculed in a department workshop. I thought I was signaling experience and skill development. 2/
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I didn't know how specialized academia is and that there would be no expectation to take core courses in all subfields of my discipline or to know anything about subfields other than my own. I assumed the opposite in a seminar discussion & got an "oh honey" look from the prof. 3/
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I didn't know that service work was devalued and something I’d be taught to actively avoid. My department now has an informal rule against first-years serving on committees…because of me. 4/
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I didn't know that I wouldn’t learn any "factual" information unless it was about the math behind a statistical tool. If I didn't already know how the IMF worked, no one was going to teach me. That ship had sailed. 5/
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I didn't know that logistic regressions were things. I told a professor I could "run a regression" (which was true, for OLS) without knowing there were different kinds. 6/
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I had never seen the word "endogenous" before. 7/
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I didn't know that side jobs were a universally acknowledged but unspoken truth. I calculated my budget for my first year, gulped, & wrote a prof about the availability of grader positions. I was told there would be "no time" for such things. (You make time.) 8/
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I'm sharing these things, some of which still embarrass me, to let you know that you are not alone if you also don't know these things, or others. The people who know all the things? They went to R1s or have academic family members. 9/
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Replying to @AnnaMeierPS
I’m sorry but I neither went to an R1 for what I research (and we don’t classify universities outside the US like that) or have family members with more than a bachelor’s degree, and I knew much of these. No one should be shamed because they don’t know but 1/
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those who do know are not people who are necessarily any different than you. Like whether it was just searching up stuff or asking others in my cohort or people who were also thinking about grad school, or once I was there asking people what the situation was 2/2
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Replying to @AdmiralHip @AnnaMeierPS
Plus, this is not going to be universal across disciplines, universities, countries, programmes...much of what you are saying doesn't apply not only to my experience as a Canadian studying in Europe but to other Americans I know in grad school.
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Replying to @AdmiralHip
Hi, I never said my experience was universal! I am sharing what I personally went through, and it's seemed to resonate with many people in similar situations. I'm glad you've had a different experience.
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