On not acting like a grad student

I expect that grad students on the job market this year have heard the familiar refrain: "Don't act like a grad student!" 

I was reminded of this refrain by a facebook post this week drawing my attention to this post by Monica Miller, which in turn drew my attention to this post by Karen Kelsky. Although both posts seem to me to contain some helpful material, I thought it might be good to discuss this issue here. We appear to have a lot of grad student readers after all, and it seems to me that a discussion of what does and does not come off as "grad-student-ish" might be helpful.

What, then, does it take to "not act like a grad student"? Allow me to share a few brief thoughts of my own. One passage in Miller's post really jumped out at me. The passage is this:

Many of the behaviors Kelsky describes involve a paradoxical sense that grad students tend to act both underconfident and overconfident. On the one hand, grad students are too quick to qualify their own ideas, too inclined to end each sentence as though it were a question? On the other, they’re often too willing to share their views on theory they don’t fully understand, or to be overwhelmingly negative in their comments on the work of classmates and scholars. And then there are hallmarks of grad-student behavior mentioned by Kelsky that seem simultaneously insecure and arrogant...

This passage really hit the nail on the head for me. This is exactly how I behaved and saw many of my fellow grad students behave: simulataneously over- and under-confident. How so? Here are a few common examples:

1. Stubbornly clinging to a thesis or argument, denying a good worry or objection that someone has raised "come hell or high water"...instead of admitting, "Yes, that's a good worry. I need to think about it more. Can you perhaps help me think it through."  
2. Raising -- and then repeatedly pressing an objection "until you've won" -- at a talk where it is clear that your purpose is to show that you are right..instead of presenting the worry in a friendly way as a genuine concern, and being willing to help the person work through it.

Notice a pattern? There's a certain attitude of defensiveness and one-upmanship. In my experience, if anything gives off a "grad-student-ish" vibe, that's it: behaviors that ooze a need to "prove oneself" in public. This desire to prove oneself simultaneously comes off as overconfident (viz. you're really, really sure that your objection refutes the speaker's argument!) and under-confident (viz. why the need to go out of your way to show how smart you are?).

I do not mean to blame grad students for enaging in these types of behaviors. I remember what grad school is like. There is a lot of pressure to prove oneself and "look smart" to other students and faculty. I get it. My point here is not meant to be critical so much as it is meant to be instructive: if you don't want to look like a grad student, you need to unlearn all the defensiveness and posturing, and approach people as colleagues engaged in the project of helping one another improve one another's work.

Believe it or not, people in the profession at the faculty level generally just have very little interest in all the ego-stroking. Sure, some faculty do engage in it on occasion. In my experience, it is most often "famous" people -- people with enormous egos who can get away with behaving boorishly -- though, on occasion, other people fall into it as well (and indeed, I would be lying if I said I never fell into the trap anymore myself! I just think I fall into it far less often than I used to). The point isn't that faculty never ego-stroke. The point is that they do it (in my experience) on average far less than the typical grad student.

My experience is that after grad school, here is what you will discover. The profession does have some people who are constantly comparing themselves to others, engaging in one-upmanship. But, for the most part, most people in the profession just aren't like this. By and large, the profession consists of people who realize that everyone at this level is super smart, and who are just looking to improve their work, get to know each other as friends and colleagues, and discuss philosophical ideas. The sooner you begin to see people this way, the better off you'll be. You'll feel a whole lot less insecure, a whole lot less of a need to constantly "prove yourself", and appear a whole lot less like a grad student.  

Or so say I. What say you, my fellow Cocooners?

Comments

[Shen-yi Liao]

I really appreciate the Monica Miller essay linked, and your raising this issue. It's something I feel quite conflicted about.

On the one hand, it would be good to get people toward "professional" norms that involve less aggression and less showing-off.

On the other hand, there is a sociological dimension that seems to be ignored here, even in Miller's astute essay. Many of the norms that are seen as "professional" are (more) alienating to specific, underrepresented groups of grad students. Having the right academic manners might come naturally to someone who grew up in an academic family, but completely alien to someone who is the first in her family to go to graduate school. Having the right academic manners might come naturally to someone who went to college in anglophone countries, but completely alien to someone who came from elsewhere.

I am especially skeptical of any proposal, explicit or implicit, that would penalize people for "behaviors that ooze a need to 'prove oneself' in public". Often, it is the already disadvantaged who do feel the need to prove oneself -- because that's what they've been told! (For a related discussion, see http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/programmer_privilege_as_an_asian_male_computer_science_major_everyone_gave.html .) So any such proposal would end up rewarding the already privileged, the ones who already feel like they belong and have nothing to prove.

[Marcus Arvan]

Hi Shen-yi: Thanks so much for your comment, and for raising that concern. A couple of thoughts.

I wasn't advocating *penalizing* anyone -- explicitly or implicitly -- for behaving in those ways. Quite the contrary, generally speaking, I would advocate that the profession be far more forgiving of grad student insecurities than (in my experience) the profession tends to be (and for the kinds of reasons you give).

Unfortunately, it is a fact that people are sometimes negatively judged for "acting like a grad student", and so my post was simply aiming to elicit what sorts of actions people judge that way.

Finally, I'm not convinced that a norm against behaving in ways that evince a need to prove oneself would work against disadvantaged individuals. My personal experience in the profession is that it tends to overwhelmingly be individuals of *privileged* backgrounds who behave in the kinds of ways I describe in the post (they can be more apt to "act out" in arrogant, defensive ways precisely because they are members of a privileged class). In other words, in practice, I think a norm against arrogant, defensive behavior would work in favor of the disadvantaged, not against. But again, I do appreciate your worry.

Thanks again for your comment!