by Chris Dick

Created on: May 21, 2008

Although obtaining a graduate degree can seem unbelievably daunting, if you enter graduate school with the right attitude, preparation, and information you will find that it is nowhere near as hard as you thought it would be.

The first important thing that one must understand about graduate school is that you must have the right attitude. That is, most of the burden for success in graduate school is put on the students shoulders. There are very few assignments, and only a small number of deadlines. This is in fact why many people do not survive their first few years of graduate school, or fail to complete their masters thesis or doctoral dissertation. If you go into graduate school seeing it as an undergraduate does, where the only thing you get from your classes are grades, you are destined to fail. Graduate school is about pushing oneself to become an expert in a select few areas of your discipline, and a good amount of this work is done outside of formal classes.

Another important attribute of a successful graduate student is preparation. There are two skills that are absolutely necessary for success in graduate school: speed reading/skimming and time management. These two things go hand in hand, but it is important to understand the necessity of both. First, knowing how to speed read and how and when to skim is a key attribute of a successful graduate student. The amount of reading in most graduate programs (particularly in the social sciences which I know most about) is basically impossible to attain if you want to both have a life outside of school and also be able to accomplish other necessary tasks in your graduate education. The key is to understand what you need to get out of a reading. You do not need every detail of everything you read, you simply need to understand the main point of the article or book and how they tested their assertions. This will allow you to both summarize and critique both the theoretical and empirical contributions of a given paper. Second, you need to be able to manage your time wisely. Not only do you have large amounts of readings to do, but there are also class projects, outside projects, and (if you are lucky enough to be on fellowship) TA or RA responsibilities. Learning to juggle all of these responsibilities is what separates very successful and less successful or unsuccessful graduate students.

Finally, you need the correct information and an understanding of what you want to get out of graduate school. There are several

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