Advice for Ph.D. students
Thursday February 14, 2008
Economics prof EclectEcon recently gave this advice to a soon-to-be first-year Ph.D. student in economics. In my personal experience as someone struggled in my first year as a Ph.D. econ student, I agree with every point:
RE: "Some schools (but not all) have profs who seem to think it is some measure of their masculinity to fail students and be tough on them." At some schools it is not uncommon for half (or more) of a class to have left/dropped out by the time comprehensive exams are completed. It's useful to find out what the drop rate of a school is before you attend. When I was at University of Rochester, a number of us believed that freshwater schools such as Rochester, Chicago, Northwestern had much higher "weed-out" rates than coastal schools such as Berkeley and Yale. I have absolutely no idea if this is true, but I recall hearing it quite often. Of course, it's possible that students at Yale believe their school weeds-out more students than Rochester.
RE: "Get the old exams!" This is a must. Not only get the old exams, but do the questions on them many, many times. I once did very, very well on a Macro final exam that I didn't have any business even passing. The reason? One of the two questions on the exam was identical to a question asked on an exam three years prior. I knew the answer to that question like I knew my own name, so I aced that question and completed it in 1/5th the allotted time - which gave me a big time advantage when answering the other question.
More Resources for Ph.D. students
Let me add a few things:A couple of additions:
1. Some schools (but not all) have profs who seem to think it is some measure of their masculinity to fail students and be tough on them. If you have selected one of those, and you find that out ex post, you have little choice but to suck it up and tough it out (or drop out). Usually there are cooler, more rational folks around who won’t let them fail everyone they teach.
2. Get the old exams! Study from the old exams! For some courses, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why so many of my classmates were getting such high grades. Then they told me about the old exams that had been floating around.
3. Study groups! I had some dynamite study partners in grad school. We complemented each other beautifully, and we all gained from it. But choose study partners carefully to make sure you get something out of the effort.
4. Read all the papers the prof has written on the topic of the course, even if the papers are not on the course reading list. Egomaniacs that they/we are, they/we teach from these papers and ask about them on exams. I once had a prof who was lecturing almost exclusively from his own papers. When I asked him about it, he replied in shock, “Why are you reading those papers? They’re not on the reading list.” I guess he had never had a student do more than the minimum.
5. Don’t give up on subject. I had one course in which the prof (citing a book review in the old AER) pointed out that in one place the number of equations didn’t equal the number of unknowns. After the course was over, I went through my text to make sure I understood what he had been teaching. For the life of me, I couldn’t see an error in the text, so I went to see him about it. It turned out the math had been edited in the second printing of the text. My doing this showed him I was a serious scholar.
6. Being buddies with profs is not a bad thing, but do NOT expect it to help with grades, reference letters, etc. Performance matters.
I realize you have a sense of foreboding when you read a piece like the one to which you linked. Let me assure you that it is mostly correct. Life in grad school can be unpleasant. One particularly bad year (bad admission decisions, bad profs) many years ago, we had nearly half our first year class drop out. I didn’t blame them.
But most schools have fixed these problems.
Nevertheless, much of grad school is like a test of your desire and stamina. Learn from it, because once you become an assistant professor it’s just more of the same.
RE: "Some schools (but not all) have profs who seem to think it is some measure of their masculinity to fail students and be tough on them." At some schools it is not uncommon for half (or more) of a class to have left/dropped out by the time comprehensive exams are completed. It's useful to find out what the drop rate of a school is before you attend. When I was at University of Rochester, a number of us believed that freshwater schools such as Rochester, Chicago, Northwestern had much higher "weed-out" rates than coastal schools such as Berkeley and Yale. I have absolutely no idea if this is true, but I recall hearing it quite often. Of course, it's possible that students at Yale believe their school weeds-out more students than Rochester.
RE: "Get the old exams!" This is a must. Not only get the old exams, but do the questions on them many, many times. I once did very, very well on a Macro final exam that I didn't have any business even passing. The reason? One of the two questions on the exam was identical to a question asked on an exam three years prior. I knew the answer to that question like I knew my own name, so I aced that question and completed it in 1/5th the allotted time - which gave me a big time advantage when answering the other question.
More Resources for Ph.D. students
Comments
You say “Get the old exams! Study from the old exams.” As an undergraduate, I have been told thats a form of cheating. Is it not at the graduate level?