Matthew Wolf-Meyer Professionalization, Undergraduates

So You’re Applying to Graduate School (in Anthropology)

Applying to graduate school can seem daunting, but if you take it step by step it doesn’t need to be so. But this means starting the process early — like a year before you plan on applying — and making sure that you treat it like a job. After all, if you get into a program and finish your Ph.D., it will be your career (given that you can get a job somewhere). There’s four things to keep in mind: first, most admissions are done by committee, and not by individual faculty (although individual faculty can have strong votes); if you don’t get in a program one year, you might get in the next, if the graduate admissions committee has changed significantly. Second, the difference between undergraduate and graduate eduction is profound. Plan on working 60-80 hour weeks throughout graduate school (for very little money), and only focusing on school. And third: applications to graduate programs go up when the economy is bad, and there’s less funding for graduate students overall, which makes it especially difficult to get admitted to programs these days. Finally: there are very few jobs for anthropologists in universities; plan on keeping your options open for your career, since anthropologists can get work in any number of non-university settings.

If you’re undaunted, here are the most important things in the application process:

1) Make sure you’re applying to the right programs. Sometimes people will recommend programs to you based on reputation alone, and reputation usually lags by about a decade, since faculty move around and retire with some regularity. But take the time to see what faculty are there, and which of them are of interest to you. And then take the time to read 2-3 articles — or maybe a book — from each of those faculty. (If this sounds like too much work, then don’t apply to grad school; this is the tip of the iceberg.) And be sure to read the recent stuff: you don’t want to tell an interested faculty member that the piece of theirs you found the most interesting is one they published 20 years ago. If you can’t find at least 3 faculty that you find of interest, don’t apply to the program. Someone might leave for another job or retire, you might have personality conflicts with someone, or someone might just be over committed. You need to make sure you have enough faculty to work with in case any of these — or other unexpected events — come up. The more people that share your interests at a particular program, the more likely it is that it’s the right place for you.

2) Make sure you’re applying to enough programs. I tell people to apply to no fewer than eight programs, and as many as twelve. Part of this is because there’s a lot of competition to get into grad school these days, and you really want to hedge your bets. The other part is that it’s always good to have options. If only 25% of the schools you apply to admit you, if you’ve applied to eight programs, at least you have two programs to decide between. And until you get admitted and visit campus, everything will seem rather abstract; after visiting a couple campuses and meeting faculty and grad students, you’ll have a much better sense of each of the programs and where you want to be. Yes, it’s a huge investment — probably $1000-$1500 in application, GRE and transcript fees — but it’s an investment in your future career.

Also, be regionally diverse. Pick a couple programs on each coast, some in the Midwest and in the South. Different U.S. regions — and states — are experiencing the current recession differently, and where one state might be losing funding, another might be having funding returned to it. Most universities are in college towns anyway, so other than the weather, there’s often little difference from one university town to another…

3) Get in touch with faculty. After you’ve read a few articles from each of the faculty you’re interested in working with, send them each an email. There’s two reasons for this: first, to introduce yourself and your proposed project, and secondly, to see what kind of feedback you get from faculty. When you email people, send a brief description of your project — no longer than a paragraph — and rather than asking them if they’d be interested in working with you, ask how the project might change shape under their advising. If faculty don’t respond or respond negatively (e.g. they aren’t interested in the project), cross those faculty off your list of potential people to work with. And if they have suggestions, take them seriously and plan to incorporate them into your personal statement. If people make suggestions that don’t work for you — for whatever reason — again, cut them from your list. This should help you get a good sense of who you might want to eventually work with and what programs are right for you.

4) Get in touch with graduate students in the program. Most programs have lists of active graduate students, and you can cull that list for people with interests that match your own; you can also ask the faculty that you email for names of students they work with that you might get in touch with. Ask students about their experiences in the program, with faculty, in the city the program is located in, etc. Grad students are your best informants — both via email, and when you visit campus. And be sure to email students at various points in their careers — first or second year students, and students who are writing their dissertations — since programs can look quite different depending on where a student is in the process.

5) Your personal statement should be no more than 2 single-spaced, 12 point font pages. No faculty member is going to read more than 2 pages, unless they’re already hooked by pages 1-2. And if they are, then you can only lose them by going on for too long. And if they aren’t into pages 1-2, they aren’t going to read page 3… Your personal statement should have a robust description of your proposed project, what has brought you to the project and your relevant skills, and a good explanation for why you want to be in the program you’re applying to (with reference to faculty and their interests). Your personal statement should not start with an anecdote about how you found anthropology and how it changed your life; you’re applying to a graduate program in anthropology, after all, and the readers will be assuming that you know what you’re getting into. You should also not start with some anecdote about what you read this past summer — it should start with you (it’s a personal statement, after all).

Any good project description includes both empirical and theoretical content. You need to be able to describe a compelling project and demonstrate how it’s in conversation with contemporary debates in the discipline; what does it add to our collective knowledge? No one expects you to work on the exact project that you propose, but they do want to see what your general area of interest is and that you have a sense of how to develop a dissertation project and all that it will entail. You should also be sure to explain any language or area training that has prepared you for this proposed project; if you don’t have language or area specialties, be sure to explain how you’ll be acquiring them before your research starts.

It’s also very important to demonstrate to faculty that you’re a good fit for the program. The best way to do this is to identify faculty in the department who you’re interested in working with, and clearly demonstrating to the reader that you are deeply knowledgeable of their work. I often see personal statements where prospective students do nothing more than identify faculty based on their keywords listed on departmental websites; that’s lazy at best and insulting at worst. Since you’ve already read a bunch of faculty work, you should be able to write a paragraph or two about how your project fits in with their interests.

Your personal statement is the most important part of your application; more important than your GRE scores, your GPA, your letters or recommendation, and anything else that might be asked for. Start drafting it early, and revise it carefully. A compelling and well-researched personal statement can overcome a bad GPA or mediocre GRE scores — it happens all the time.

Here are some things to avoid:

1) Don’t plan on getting into a Ph.D. program straight out of undergrad. A lot of people think that if they take time away from school that getting back into it will be hard. But since grad school is such a different beast than undergrad, there’s going to be an adjustment for everyone. And since grad school is much more like a job than undergrad, people who come in straight from undergrad often have a much harder time acclimating to the changes than people who have been in the workforce. And, finally, some work experience will only improve your application and help you develop a meaningful dissertation project that moves beyond the sometimes insular concerns of the academy.

2) Don’t apply to programs just because they’re in an area that you want to be in. If you have a full time job that you plan on keeping while you’re in grad school, you might not be ready for grad school — or you might just look for Master’s programs in your area. Ph.D. programs are full time jobs, and you need to make sure you’re ready for them, both socially and financially. And, if you really feel like you can only live in certain parts of the country for a Ph.D. program, you might think about other career paths — getting into grad schools in an area of your choice can be hard; getting a job there is even more unlikely. Plus, living in highly desirable places for grad school (the coasts, major metropolitan areas) is a surefire way to come out of grad school with tons of student loan debt. Cost of living is something to consider, especially when any stipend or pay you’ll be receiving through your grad program is unlikely to be more than a couple thousand dollars a month.

3) Don’t plan on working with a bunch of very senior or very junior faculty; any good committee has a mix of faculty at various points in their careers. Junior faculty are usually stressed out from tenure-related concerns; very senior faculty are usually working towards retirement. Associate professors, on the other hand, are right in the middle of their careers, and should be ready for working with students. But, really, all faculty have significant publication, research and teaching burdens. There’s also the question of social networks, which is a big part of graduate school: pick faculty who circulate in different social circles (e.g. they have different research topics, come from different programs), since getting a job can be very dependent on social contacts. Lots of redundancy cuts down on the breadth of any social network. So people working with a diverse committee of people at various stages throughout their career is one way to ensure a bigger social network.

4) Don’t put all your eggs in the graduate school basket. At the same time that you apply to graduate school, apply to jobs (or plan on staying in your current job). In some cases, you might find that your options for graduate school aren’t very appealing; in other cases, you might decide that you don’t want to live a graduate student life of poverty. And, if you don’t get admitted anywhere, it’s good to have something to fall back on. When you get around to applying to grad school again, more life experience will only make you a better student in the long run.

That’s it — although I’m probably forgetting something. If you have questions, comments or contradictory experiences, let me know in the comments and we’ll continue the conversation.

Matthew Wolf-Meyer Professionalization

From Dissertation to Book, Part 2

This is the second part in a two part series on the dissertation-to-book conversion process. Part one is here.

Once an editor shows interest in your book manuscript and asks for it, this is what you can expect from the time you turn it in to them:

First, they’ll send it out for peer review. They may ask you for a list of reviewers, or, more likely, they’ll have a sense of who they want to send it to already. Often, they send book manuscripts to authors who have previously published with the press, since they have a sense of the press’ needs. Or they’ll send it to reviewers who they’ve come to know are good reviewers. This can be a pretty slow process — from six months to a year, although many editors strive to ensure that it’s sooner rather than later. When the reviews come back, you can expect to receive fairly substantial documents — three or more single spaced pages from each reviewer (and there might be two to three of them). In addition, the editor may chime in on what he or she finds to be the most important elements of the reviews to help guide you in the revision process.

When you get these documents back, it may be time for your editor to offer you a contract. These come in two forms, advanced contracts and regular contracts. Regular contracts are that the book is now under contract to be published by the press, usually come hell or high water. Advanced contacts are like regular contracts, but they’re pending certain criteria being met. So, for example, you might need to submit a revised version of the book manuscript by a set date; in doing so, your advanced contract becomes a regular one. Advanced contacts can be precarious, and they aren’t a guarantee that the book will be published.

In order to offer that contract, the editor may need to get approval from a faculty board or some other form of oversight. This can require you to write a letter addressing the peer reviews and your plans for revision. Since these meetings often occur at regular intervals, this can take up to a month (or sometimes longer, in the summer) to finally happen.

After receiving comments, your editor will most likely give you a deadline for the revisions on the book manuscript. These can be rather flexible, and I’ve heard of everything from three months to a year. And I know of people who have taken much longer than that to return their manuscripts, with the permission of their editor. When it does get returned, it will usually be sent back to one or two of your previous reviewers, along with a letter that you prepare addressing all of the changes that you’ve made to the text. Expect another three to six months before you hear back from your editor. There may be some changes called for by your reviewers and editors, and this is the last window for substantial changes to the text. And if you have an advance contract, this is where it becomes a regular contract, and it may require your editor to get approval for that transformation.

It’s also possible around this time that you’ll move from being under the supervision of an acquisitions editor (sort of the face of the press) to a managing editor, who is in charge of the rest of the things that happen to your book as it moves from being a Word document to an actual book.

The first step of the production process is that it goes out for copy editing. Most likely, the press will pay a professional copy editor to read the entire text (including end notes and your bibliography) and correct your language. He or she will also identify textual obscurities and other issues with the text. This can take a few months, and your editor will give you a sense of the timeline. And when you get it back, expect to have anywhere between two and four weeks to complete the corrections being asked for. Once you make the corrections, the text will go back to the copy editor for final corrections.

Once the text is concrete, it goes out for typesetting, which can take a couple more months. You’ll get the galleys back to correct any typos (and there will be some), but will only have a couple weeks to do this. (A little typo anecdote: a comma was replaced with a period and it radically altered the meaning of the two sentences it was part of — so it’s important to read closely.) And during this process, you’ll also, most likely, need to put together your index. (I worked on mine while I was reading the copy edited version of the text, and finalized it with the galleys, which worked pretty well.) And then it’s off to the presses… Which can take another several months. And if you’ve ever wondered where blurbs on the back of books come from, this is when they get solicited — your editor may ask you for names, or they may use the reviewers who read the book. Finally, around this time, you’ll move from being under the managing editor’s supervision to being under the supervision of publicity and marketing staff.

In between some of this stuff, you’ll most likely need to fill out an author questionnaire that will ask you about which journals the book should be sent to for review, if there are awards it should be sent in for review for, key ideas from the book for publicity material — like catchy ideas in a sentence, and a lot of other questions regarding how to market the book and who it should be marketed to. And you’ll be asked to write a short author’s biography (about a page), and maybe conduct an interview with yourself to highlight some of the book’s content. You can see all of this stuff on the bottom right of The Slumbering Masses page at UMN press — it’s the press kit. And somewhere in all of this, you’ll be asked about ideas for the book cover, and eventually shown a version designed by the press (which you may or may not have any input in).

And then you get to sit back and wait for the reviews and royalty checks to roll in…

I think I hit everything. If you have questions about any of this stuff, don’t hesitate to post them in comments. It’s a long process — it will be about four years from the first conversation I had with my acquisitions editor to when The Slumbering Masses sees print. This is a little on the long side, but even the short version of this process can still be two to three years. And a lot of that time is just spent waiting. So it’s a good time to start working on new projects or getting other stuff done that you’ve put off. Like working on a blog…

Matthew Wolf-Meyer Professionalization

From Dissertation to Book, Part 1

This is the first in a two part sequence of posts on the dissertation-to-book process. The second installment discusses the behind-the-scenes processes that occur once the book is under contract and being prepared for publication and is available here.

A lot of recent graduates feel like the first thing they need to do once they get their Ph.D. is to turn their dissertation into a book manuscript and to get it under contract. This often means dropping everything, and working assiduously on the book manuscript and book proposal. I did; I shouldn’t have. My first book proposal was all wrong, and my thinking about the book version of the dissertation needed a lot more time to mature. That being said, if an editor gets in touch with you and wants to talk about your book, you should do it. It’s a low pressure situation: they want to know what it’s all about and when it might be ready for peer review. Chatting with them can make sure that they remember who you are and look forward to your eventual book proposal. But before you get to the proposal, here’s what (probably) needs to happen:

First, get a couple articles out for review, for two reasons: Getting feedback on your ideas from your peers (who aren’t your dissertation committee or people you’ve known in your grad program, which can often be an insular world of ideas) helps to expand your thinking about your material. And publishers want to see that your peers take your work seriously — so having a publication or two on your CV when you send it in with your book proposal is pretty important. So, really, the first thing you do out of your Ph.D. — if you haven’t already — is to get a couple publications out into the peer review process. (Check out the professionalization timeline to plot this stuff out in advance.)

Since you’ve been living with your dissertation in a pretty intimate fashion for a number of years, it’s also a good idea just to spend time away from it. Give yourself a year to work on a new project or develop some new syllabuses — you might need this time to prepare for a new job anyway, and explicitly setting it aside can be psychologically less stressful that taking that time off and feeling like you should be working on your book. When you come back to the dissertation, you might feel a little less tied to it in its current state, and be ready to mold it a little differently.

Now, when you do get back to the dissertation to turn it into a manuscript, there are some things that surely need to go: Long literature review sections need to be cut out in their entirety, although parsing them out and putting them in as end notes is a good first step, since some of this content is important to retain. Long discussions of theory needs to be cut as well — it might have been important for you to write, but it can moved into the end notes now. Incidental, orienting discussions of theory can still be useful, but for the most part, most theoretical discussions can be cut. If you have whole chapters that fall into the lit review or theory review realms, they might be excised — and with revision — sent to area studies or theory focused journals as articles.

The logic behind these cuts is to really highlight your work — your empirical and theoretical contributions to the field. And this is really critical for developing your book proposal.

Book proposals are rather mysterious things — when I wrote mine, I couldn’t find any really detailed guidelines online, and the people I asked for proposals from had proposals that were a few years old. Like anything related to the academy, the genre is in flux, but there seem to be some constants. From a few conversations with editors over the last few years, this is what I gather they should be: First, they should be no longer than 2 single spaced pages (with normal margins). One editor described them to be as ‘morning coffee documents,’ i.e. an editor should be able to read through a stack of them over morning coffee. Secondly, it needs to lead with your contribution, not some juicy anecdote (as you may have been trained to lead with). When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense: every project has at least one juicy anecdote, but not every project makes a clear contribution to the field (or they might, but authors might not be able to articulate them yet). Seeing that an author knows their contribution sets a proposal apart from the juicy anecdote types. And, third, the proposal needs very, very short summaries of each of the chapters — like 2 sentences each. The editor should walk away from a proposal having a good sense of what the book is about, but they don’t need to know all of the empirical or structural detail. And bear in mind that most book manuscripts are about 100,000 words long, give or take 10,000 words, and you may need to cut or add to get the book to that length.

Now, in thinking about your contribution, there might be some major changes to your manuscript. Many dissertations are written — explicitly or not — as case studies. They’re rather narrowly focused, and the contribution they’re making is usually to a circumscribed literature. It might not feel that way at the time, but it’s often the case. What many books need to do is realize the more general contribution to the discipline that they make. So if your dissertation was about England, it now needs to be about Europe; or if it was about sleep (as in my case), it needs to be about medicine. Most of this work can be done in the new Introduction you’ll be writing shortly… But it also needs to be captured in the proposal. More than anything else, this is the thing that I find people struggle with. And, as I mentioned above, getting some peer reviews and taking some time off from the manuscript can really help you to see its contents differently. It may also mean doing new research to expand the scope of the manuscript; so, if you’re moving from England to Europe, it may mean doing new research to be able to sustain that transition.

I often tell people that I didn’t know what The Slumbering Masses was about until I was nearly done with its second set of revisions. Which leads me to my big caveat for this entry: I didn’t get my first book under contract with a blindly sent proposal; an editor contacted me about seeing the manuscript based on a conversation he had with a third party who knew my work. He rushed the book through peer review — from my perspective, at least (I wasn’t really ready to send it out, since one of the chapters was only half complete). But I got great reviews back from reviewers that knew it wasn’t a final manuscript, and responded to their reviews in my first round of revisions. When I sent it back, it was a very different manuscript. I don’t think more than 2 pages were the same… And when it came back with more comments, I was able to turn them around relatively quickly to make the final version of the book. So when I say I didn’t really know what the book was about until the last couple months of final revisions, it was that I wasn’t entirely sure of all of the contributions it was poised to make. And once I realized them, I just had to align some of the content differently.

I should also say that I don’t know a single person who has gotten a book contract from an unsolicited book proposal. (If you have, let me know your story.) My editor asks me with some regularity if I know of any interesting books-in-process, and I send him lists of names; I imagine many people have this kind of relationship with their editors. So it’s really important to make sure that the people you know who are getting books published know what you’re working on and what it really looks like — not the five second summary they often reduce your work to.

If you have specific questions about anything related to early stage book manuscripts, post them below and I’ll either address them in comments or in a future post.