How to Be a Happier, Stronger, More Excellent Grad Student

This fall I’m teaching our introduction to graduate studies lecture course. Again. This time around it’s been reconceived as the School of Media Studies’ featured lecture series. I’ve confirmed several great speakers, and I’ll be posting the lineup soon.

All the invaluable-but-oft-resented “professionalization” material — the how to read/write/develop methodology-like-a-grad-student, all the “being a good academic/professional citizen” tips — has been extracted and transformed into web resources. By me. This is what I’ve been up to for the past several weeks. Well, this and tennis lessons — which I’m totally rocking, by the way.

Some of these resources have been (dramatically) adapted from material I created for previous classes. Other material is brand new. I’m hoping it’s all of potential interest and use to grad students — my own and others’; here, there, and everywhere; past, present, and future (I’ve gone too far…).

We’ll be posting these on a wiki on our school’s website and allowing others to amend. But what follows are the “ur-texts.”

I’ve got guides for:

• Identifying Your Interests and Establishing a Research Plan
• Finding Sources: Where to Look, and How to Decide What’s Worth Your Time
• Reading Effectively
• Resource-Management, Note-taking + Abstracting
• The Literature Review / Mediagraphy
• Forms of Scholarship: Writing (or, “How Not to Write Like a Grad Student!”)
• Forms of Scholarship: Multimodal
• Engaging with Presentations + Asking Questions
• Conference Tips
• A Sort-of Manifesto for Graduate Students in a Praxis-Based MA Program Who Have Just Completed Their First Semesters and Are Embarking Into the Great Beyond (or, SMGSPBMAPWHJCTFSAEIGB, for short)