- Is Graduate School Really for You?: The Whos, Whats, Hows, and Whys of Pursuing a Master’s or Ph.D by Amanda I. Seligman
The decision-making process required for becoming a graduate student is daunting and complex. Is Graduate School Really for You?: The Whos, Whats, Hows, and Whys of Pursuing a Master’s or Ph.D. provides an engaging and interesting reading experience for anyone who would like to learn more about many of the intricate details associated with the graduate student experience. The book is framed with pre-graduate, current, and continuing student lenses. Conversational content translates complicated experiences into poignant reflective vignettes. While the back cover endorsements tout the book’s ability to “eliminate guesswork,” my research and practical experience lead me to believe this is an overstatement of appreciation. Graduate education is too vast, idiosyncratic, and mysterious to eliminate all questions.
Seligman covers major themes in her book’s eight chapters. Topics like financing a graduate education, expectations, coursework, and academic culture equip the reader with knowledge of commonalities of experience across graduate education. In this way, it cuts across disciplinary lines and could serve as a general resource for graduate school/education at an institutional level. That is to say, this work would be a well-positioned resource at a centralized graduate school or an institutional-wide graduate student center. Readers who are interested in a granular discussion of a graduate-level specialization, however, may find that this book offers surface-level content without discipline-specific details.
The question technique used throughout the book attempts to facilitate trust with the audience. The first two chapters address very basic concerns about exploring an individual’s capacity for graduate education. Chapter 1 is a very matter-of-fact response to the question posed by the book’s main title. It is very helpful to begin by cutting to the heart of the matter. Many students consider graduate school the next logical step, take the leap to enroll, and then find out that the experience was well beyond anything they imagined. Chapter 2’s pragmatic approach to crunching the numbers explores the challenging task of funding graduate school. These beginning chapters demystify the graduate school process.
Chapters 3 and 4 cover an array of topics focused on the academic experience. It is refreshing to see a comparison between graduate and professional schools in simplistic terms. I find the presentation of the differences between graduate and professional schools illuminating—usually an understated quality of the graduate student experience because of a general lack of integration of student experience. The investment of time in memorizing knowledge versus finding out how to reshape knowledge is a key distinction, and Seligman’s discussion of this difference provides meaningful insights about why the professional and graduate student experiences are unique.
One concern I have about Seligman’s academic discussion is her use of the term “new knowledge.” It is suggestive of the commercialization in higher education; and connotes newness of knowledge [End Page 413] as a commodity when, in fact, what is deemed to be newness of knowledge is an advancement of research built upon previous work. The term “newness of knowledge” may be misjudged by aspiring graduate students who may not consider the value of previous work. I don’t think there is new knowledge, per se. I think graduate school can advance, reform, or reshape knowledge. The term “new knowledge” seems idiomatic and belies what actually occurs in graduate school. Graduate students move discussions of knowledge forward; knowledge is not created although it is often expanded on the basis of previous work. While I understand why Seligman uses the term, I think that it is being used in a way that can be misleading about the graduate academic experience. “New knowledge” implies that information did not exist before, when the existence of knowledge attained in graduate school is predicated on a student’s awareness of previous expertise...