GradHacker

I've done a number of bootcamps and workshops on managing your digital identity and learning different social media technologies. While I find that grad students are fairly quick to learn the tools and have the intuition required to figure out a lot of the problems, there is one problem I see repeatedly: grad students don't understand why they should be doing it. If I had a dollar for each time I heard someone say "Well, I've got an account but I've never really used it...", I would probably be able to pay off a very small portion of my student loans.

In the grand scheme of grad life, teaching responsibilities loom large. Teaching is an important part of the professor’s career and yet learning to teach every student well is a process. In academic spaces, mentioning the word “inclusion” to grads and faculty has eye-turning effects. Some faculty and grads do not glance over to the people of difference in the room to check if in fact, they are still female, differently-abled, bilingual, working class, homosexual, non-White, Jewish, immigrant, bi-racial, or atheist; yet many do.

At the most recent conference of the Association for Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), held last November, representatives from several academic presses and scholars who had recently published monographs based on their dissertations held a roundtable dedicated to giving current grad students tips on what they should prepare for if they intend on turning their dissertation into a book.

Right now I am right smack in the middle of writing my dissertation proposal. Talk to any graduate student at this phase of the process and they will groan in recognition of the long slog it seems to be. At this point in my writing I have successfully organized my closets and my bathrooms have never been so clean. In spite of all this, I'm still managing to eke out a few pages a day and, slowly but surely, I am getting there.

You've selected an interesting conference in your field. Your abstract, and then your paper have been accepted. You have prepared your presentation, and you're ready to go.

We are proud to reveal some GradHacker swag! The gear celebrates nearly two years of building a community that shares advice and insights on how to 'hack' grad school. We have created water bottles, shirts, stickers, and pens that our authors and friends will be spreading at campuses and conferences.

Back in October I wrote a post on GradHacker about using checklists in research and as promised, I’m updating you on how I’ve integrated them into my data collection. In January I began to collect data for my thesis (yay!) and had the goal of using checklists to minimize common errors. This post will go over how I developed these checklists, their benefits, issues with implementation, and some final advice.

In grad school, wellness, defined here as the deliberate choice to harmonize the physical, emotional, social, and mental aspects of ourselves, can seem like a Rubiks cube. Luckily, there are many hacks such as apps, to help grads put it together by becoming more aware of these facets of themselves.