《AlwaysPreparefortheWorst.doc》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《AlwaysPreparefortheWorst.doc（6页珍藏版）》请在金锄头文库上搜索。
1、Always Prepare for the WorstSome of the greatest catastrophes in graduate education could have been avoided by a little intelligent foresight. Be cynical. Assume that your proposed research might not work, and that one of your faculty advisers might become unsupportive - or even hostile.Plan for alt
2、ernatives.Nobody cares about you. In fact, some professors care about you and some dont. Most probably do, but all are busy, which means in practice they cannot care about you because they dont have the time.You are on your own, and you had better get used to it.This has a lot of implications. Here
3、are two important ones:1.You had better decide early on that you are in charge of your program. The degree you get is yours to create.Your major professor can advise you and protect you to a certain extent from bureaucratic and financial demons, but he should not tell you what to do. That is up to y
4、ou. If you need advice, ask for it: thats his job.2.If you want to pick somebodys brains, youll have to go to him or her, because they wont be coming to you.You Must Know Why Your Work is Important. When you first arrive, read and think widely and exhaustively for a year. Assume that everything you
5、read is bullshit until the author manages to convince you that it isnt.If you do not understand something, dont feel bad - its not your fault, its the authors. He didnt write clearly enough.If some authority figure tells you that you arent accomplishing anything because you arent taking courses and
6、you arent gathering data, tell him what youre up to.If he persists, tell him to bug off, because you know what youre doing, dammit. This is a hard stage to get through because you will feel guilty about not getting going on your own research. You will continually be asking yourself,What am I doing h
7、ere? Be patient.This stage is critical to your personal development and to maintaining the flow of new ideas into science. Here you decide what constitutes an important problem. You must arrive at this decision independently for two reasons. First, if someone hands you a problem, you wont feel that
8、it is yours, you wont have that possessiveness that makes you want to work on it, defend it, fight for it, and make it come out beautifully. Secondly,your PhD work will shape your future.It is your choice of a field in which to carry out a lifes work. It is also important to the dynamic of science t
9、hat your entry be well thought out. This is one point where you can start a whole new area of research. Remember, what sense does it make to start gathering data if you dont know - and I mean really know - why youre doing it?Psychological Problems are the Biggest Barrier. You must establish a firm p
10、sychological stance early in your graduate careerto keep from being buffeted by the many demands that will be made on your time.If you dont watch out, the pressures of course work, teaching, language requirements and who knows what else will push you around like a large, docile molecule in Brownian
11、motion. Here are a few things to watch out for:1.The initiation-rite nature of the PhD and its power to convince you that your value as a person is being judged.No matter how hard you try, you wont be able to avoid this one. No one does. It stems from the open-ended nature of the thesis problem.You
12、have to decide what a good thesis is. A thesis can always be made better, which gets you into an infinite regress of possible improvements. Recognize that you cannot produce a perfect thesis. There are going to be flaws in it, as there are in everything.Settle down to make it as good as you can with
13、in the limits of time, money, energy, encouragement and thought at your disposal. You can alleviate this problem by jumping all the explicit hurdles early in the game.Get all of your course requirements and examinations out of the way as soon as possible.Not only do you thereby clear the decks for y
14、our thesis, but you also convince yourself, by successfully jumping each hurdle, that you probably are good enough after all.2.Nothing elicits dominant behavior like subservient behavior. Expect and demand to be treated like a colleague. The paper requirements are the explicit hurdle you will have t
15、o jump, but the implicit hurdle is attaining the status of a colleague. Act like one and youll be treated like one.3.Graduate school is only one of the tools that you have at hand for shaping your own development.Be prepared to quit for awhile if something better comes up.There are three good reason
16、s to do this.First, a real opportunity could arise that is more productive and challenging than anything you could do in graduate school and that involves a long enough block of time to justify dropping out. Examples include field work in Africa on a project not directly related to your PhD work, a contract for software development, an opportunity to work as an aide in the nations capital in the formu
