Advice

Advice for undergrads, fellow do-gooders, prospective grad students, young people in general (especially if you graduated in a social science degree and have no idea what to do with it). I find these articles extremely useful as I consider my own career (and a possible jump to academia).

I’ll update this site routinely as I find more relevant links, please send me stuff if you can as well!

So you want to go to graduate school? You really sure? In political science too?

Chris Blattman, “How to get a PhD *and* save the world”
No summary here, Blattman’s blog is a gold mine of advice and resources for students like us.

Thomas Benton, The Big Lie about the ‘Life of the Mind’, February 8, 2010
“Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon “the life of the mind.” That’s why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students or providing them with skills and networks that could enable them to do anything but join the ever-growing ranks of impoverished, demoralized, and damaged graduate students and adjuncts for whom most of academe denies any responsibility.”

PhD Comics
This can’t possibly be what a graduate student goes through on a daily basis…but yet, why is this comic so popular with younger PhD’s? I’ve read the whole strip, and it’s an amazing and humorous depiction of the day-to-day realities of PhD students.

So you want to work in development and save the world?

Dave Algoso at Find What Works, “Be so good they can’t ignore you”
“Yet I close with that line because it’s become my guiding career principle. In practice, it means hard work, constant learning, self-criticism, reflection, humility, and focus. The last one is especially important. I try not to get distracted thinking about what’s next. If I can focus on the task at hand, and knock it out of the park, then the opportunities will come.”

Why Dev, Career Advice from People Smarter than Me
Assortment of links on getting a job in development, graduate school, life advice.

Why Dev, Making the world better does not make you better.
“You need to enter the aid world understanding that you will have to work and deal and maybe even share quarters with some truly nasty individuals. You need to understand that you, too, may do things that are not nice, things that you’re not particularly proud of. And you need to understand that this is nothing at all about your competence as a humanitarian.”

So you just graduated in political science/international relations/other humanities, social science, liberal arts major and feel a bit lost with your career search?

The Week, America is Raising a Generation of Interns
“The permatern phenomenon points toward wider trends in the economy — namely the cutthroat competition for knowledge-economy jobs, the lack of investment in this generation, and the skills gap between what a generation weaned on a liberal-arts education is trained for and what the in-demand skills and professions are right now (i.e., not another poli-sci or English major).”

Know what you’re getting yourself into to, and how to beat the odds.

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