Making the Most of Your Time in Graduate School

Shawna Lipton
Sep 5, 2018 · 3 min read

Read Like an Academic

Reading great quantities of material in a short amount of time means you have to be efficient. Unless you are reading Marcel Proust, you do not need to read every sentence with fastidious care. If you are reading an academic book focus on the introduction and seek out key passages. Take notes in the margins of your immediate thoughts and reactions. You can always come back and do a more thorough reading if the text turns out to be important for your scholarship. For a class, you only need to come prepared with a few questions, comments, and excerpts to discuss. If you try to read every word of every text you are assigned with the same amount of focus you may have issues with time management. This is also important when you are conducting independent thesis research. Read the abstract and first paragraph, if the article doesn’t actually relate to your work, move on.

Take Good Notes

I cannot stress enough the importance of good note taking. Whether you use a program like Zotero, or develop your own system of reference management, keep track of all your sources. You will be frustrated later if you cannot find where you read a certain idea or concept that could be crucial to your work. This will also help you avoid plagiarism, and make compiling your bibliography much simpler. Taking notes while you read a text will speed up your writing process since your notes can form the basis of a first rough draft. If you don’t take notes while you read the first time, you may end up having to do all your research twice, which eats up time you can’t afford to lose when you are working under a deadline.

Seek Out Opportunities

Look for scholarship opportunities, writing competitions, internships, and calls for papers for journals and conferences. Graduate student conferences are a great place to start. Your instructors may share such opportunities with you, but it is good to be proactive and seek them out yourself as well. If you seize these opportunities while you are still in school you may be eligible for travel funds to reimburse you for your costs.

Professional Practice

Although you are still a student, you should begin presenting yourself as a professional while in graduate school. Every email correspondence, tweet, and post is a reflection of you. It is important to become aware of how you are presenting yourself to the world. Maintain a public facing professional website or online portfolio, and try to keep anything you would not want future employers or students to see private.

It’s Ok to Say No

Unpaid internships, committee work, tutoring a classmate, pet sitting for free, or watering a Professor’s plants when they are out of town can all be thankless jobs. You don’t have to do them. As a graduate student you may find it hard to say no when people ask you to do things, but it is important for you to set boundaries and be protective of your own time. The day can easily fill up with tasks that distract you from your work or prevent you from taking time for self-care. You must prioritize what you spend your time doing and that means you simply cannot do everything.

MA in Critical Studies Students at PNCA

Written by

Chair of the MA in Critical Studies Program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art http://pnca.edu/criticalstudies

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