a. The formal process:
i. The first 2 years are taking required classes and writing your Master’s Thesis.
1. You’ll probably begin your thesis research end of your first year.
2. You’ll need a thesis committee to consult regarding your research.
a. Your Thesis Committee is usually made of at least 2 faculty members who will guide you in your
master’s thesis research.
b. Once you are done writing up your thesis, your thesis will be reviewed by at least 2 thesis readers. The
thesis readers will decide whether you pass or need to rework your thesis. They will send their
recommendation to the department larger thesis committee.
c. You and your thesis committee will have a chance to defend your work and respond back to the thesis
readers. Your thesis committee members should be there to help and defend your work. Note I said
“should” because they don’t always.
d. An agreement will be reached on whether you will make minor or major revisions to satisfy the thesis
readers. If there is disagreement, there would be an arbitration committee (3rd readers) to settle the
disagreement.
3. You need to have a pass on the thesis to move on to the next stage.
4. Occasionally, the department decides that you are “not Ph.D. material” and will urge you to discontinue the
program by giving you a terminal master’s degree.
ii. The 3rd and fourth year are more classes and preparing for your field or comprehensive exams. Some programs have
two; others have 4 to 6 exams.
1. Basically, you need to demonstrate mastery of the field. They usually give you a list of books to read and a list of
questions that could be asked on the exams. You prepare yourself and file when you’ll be taking the exam. The
test can involve a whole day, several days or a whole week of typing up your answer to the questions given on the
beginning day of the exam.
2. Sometimes, the department allows you to come up with your own questions for the exam. In this case, it is a selfdesign
exam. Often times, this self-designed exam is a literature review for your dissertation project.
3. Around this time, you should consider exploring other resources and meeting other faculty outside your
department. In your dissertation time, you will need an outside faculty for your dissertation committee.
4. After taking required courses, you’ll have time for elective courses. Make sure you take classes that will prepare
you for the dissertation, to help you narrow down your topic of interest.
a. Be careful not to get stuck with taking classes after classes without seeing an end in sight. You will
always find interesting classes to take within and outside your department.
b. There are too many information out there; you cannot know everything. The point is to be able to know
the overall picture and where your work is situated in the larger picture. It is impossible to know
everything.
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iii. Your fifth-year and on involves preparing your dissertation proposal or project.
1. You need to write up a dissertation proposal and have it approved by your dissertation committee before you can
carry out your dissertation project.
a. You need to set up a dissertation committee who will guide you in your research design, execution and
write-up.
b. Pick faculty who knows something or is expert in your area of research. If not, he/she should be open to
learn new things and is able to guide you in what they know. They should want to help you in your
endeavor and not give up on you just because they are not familiar with your topic.
c. The dissertation committee usually consists of 2-3 faculty members in the department and an outside
faculty member.
i. One person will be your dissertation committee chair or 2 can be your dissertation committee cochairs.
ii. The Chair or Co-Chairs are the ones working most closely with you. They are the ones to defend
and support you when other committee members disagree about the direction of your work.
d. Dissertation committee members should know your work better than any other faculty. They will also be
the ones you most likely to turn to when you need recommendation letters as you apply for jobs.
e. Try to pick members who can give different types of feedback to your work (methodological, theoretical,
substantive, moral support, etc.). As well, they should be people you respect and can work with; they
have your interests of finishing the program.
i. Some people may be reliving their dissertation stage and won’t pass you until you have a
“perfect” and flawless dissertation. This could drag you in the program for many more years than
necessary.
2. Once your dissertation project is approved, you need to carry out the research, collect the data, analyzed the data
and write up your findings.
3. For some dissertation advisors, they want full report every week or month. For others, they don’t see you until
you’re ready to defend your final dissertation. In any case, make sure to consult them when you are stuck, and
make sure that they also feel that it’s their job to advise you through while you’re working on the dissertation.
4. Often, you’ll need to meet up with your committee members again to defend your dissertation. Sometimes, they
just need to sign off the dissertation and do not require a formal dissertation defense meeting.
5. The final passing test of the dissertation process after the substantive test by your dissertation committee is the
librarian’s formatting test. This is just tedious work of making sure your filed dissertation meets the formatting
standards and requirements of the university’s library. It may take several days to make sure your formatting
(margins, fonts, type of paper, table and figures, page numbering, headings, etc.) is correct.
b. The informal process: Things to look out for.
i. Graduate school is often an alienating process where you feel infantilized again. Do not despair, remember your goal,
persevere and look ahead. It’s also good to look back to see how far you have gone.
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ii. If you have family or plan to have one, the graduate experience may interfere with this. Some people have to plan to have
kids at the same time that they are writing their dissertation. In any case, you need a supportive partner to go through this.
iii. Be aware of egomaniacal professors, who will use you as pawns for their ego-tripping game with other professors. Talk to
other graduate students to avoid them.
iv. Beware of professors who will use you to do their grunt work but you will not learn anything from them.
v. Avoid tenured professors who are not up to date in their research and are still teaching from their notes in grad school.
vi. Beware of new, untenured faculty who are insecure and trying to prove how rigorous they are to senior faculty. Your
interest is not their priority. They may side with other professors to put you down while talk to you nicely.
vii. Avoid unhealthy competition that many grad schools foster: put other people down so you can stand on top of them.
viii. Surround yourself with friends who are supportive. Have a different set of friends, who are not graduate students, to keep
you grounded (mental masturbation can be nauseating and impractical). However, you will also need your graduate
friends to validate what you’re doing. Your family may not understand what you’re doing and think you have all the free
time in the world. (Actually you do have more free time than when you become a professor!)
ix. Find a faculty mentor and a student mentor. People you respect can help you go through graduate school without losing
your integrity.
1. A good mentor will not only teach you about the research process, writing process, and publication process, but
will also be your moral support.
2. A good mentor will guide you and work with you step by step from co-writing an article with you to encouraging
you to publish your own.
3. He/she will prepare you for professional presentation and give you feedback on your strengths and weaknesses.
4. He/she will teach you about professional etiquettes and help you meet important people who can change your life.
x. The best lessons you’ll learn will be from other graduate students.
1. Study groups will bond you and your intellectual development will be through this group of colleagues.
xi. Go to talks outside your program/department. Meet other scholars outside your field.
1. You’ll need an outside person for your dissertation committee.
2. You want to know of other resources (libraries, scholarships, conferences, colloquia) that will facilitate your
training.
xii. Stay healthy physically (and mentally and spiritually)
1. Eat well
2. Exercise regularly to avoid carpal tunnel or tendonitis. Carpal tunnel and tendonitis are real and serious problems
that are lifelong debilitating injuries. As a scholar, you will need to type for the rest of your life and so your injury
will never completely heal.
3. Make sure your work station is ergonomically correct. Use voice-recognition program to ease your hands.
xiii. Know yourself, allow yourself to make mistakes and learn from them, give yourself downtime, listen to the inner child,
never give up on yourself, and remember the light is at the end of the tunnel.

To determine if graduate school is right for you, start by asking yourself the following questions:

1. What do I want to accomplish in my life?

2. What are my short and long range professional goals?
Many careers in Computer Science do not require a graduate level degree. However, if your professional goals include management, research in a university or a national lab, or teaching at a college or university, you should seriously consider obtaining a Masters or Ph.D. degree.

3. Is graduate study necessary for me to achieve these goals?
To teach or do research at a university, a Ph.D. is almost always required. At least a Masters degree is necessary to do research at a research laboratory. Community colleges will hire teachers without a Ph.D., but a Masters is always manditory. Many companies will require employees interested in management positions to already have a Masters, or to have a plan to obtain one in certain period of time. Some companies will provide funding for employees to obtain their Masters.

4. Do I have the interest and ability to be successful in a graduate program?
Do your interests include teaching others, research, and self-motivated learning? Do you have the ability to organize your time, motivate yourself, work on large-scale projects, interact with others, and communicate ideas clearly? Have you done well in your computer science classes on the undergraduate level? If so, you probably have what it takes to succeed in a graduate program.

5. Am I willing to invest the time and money to pursue another academic program?
Actually, money is usually not an issue for computer science graduate programs. Your tuition will most likely be waived by the school or provided by the company for which you are working. In addition, most students receive a stipend in the form of a teaching or research assistanceship, which is adequate to maintain a decent standard of living. True, you may be giving up a high-paying job for a few years while you complete your degree, but a post-graduate degree will broaden your career choices, and provide you with an even higher salary. As far as time investments go, the average student is able to get a Masters degree in two years, and a Ph.D. in five to six years.

Masters vs PhD

If from answering the questions above, you feel that graduate school is right for you, the next step is deciding whether you want to apply for a Masters or PhD program.

If you feel the least bit interested in obtaining a PhD, apply for PhD programs. If later on you decide you only want a Masters, you can fulfill the requirements for a Masters and leave the program early with the Masters degree. It is much more difficult to switch from a Masters program to a PhD program. Even if you are sure you want to get a PhD, make sure you fulfill the Masters requirements along the way (not difficult in most PhD programs), so that if any unexpected events make it impossible for you to obtain your PhD, you can at least get a Masters for your efforts.

If you are only interested in getting a Masters degree, be warned that funding is more difficult to obtain as a Masters student. Since the program takes only about two years to complete, this is not a major setback (especially considering the salary boost you will receive once you get your degree). Your other option is to find a company that will pay you to get your Masters. Generally, this takes longer since you will be working and studying at the same time, but funding will no longer be a problem.

.::Grad School in Economics: Choosing classes::.

Graduate schools care much more about what hard classes you've taken and how you've done in them than about overall GPA.
If you have taken difficult classes its probably a good idea to point this out in your application essay because schools might not know what the math classes are, which economics classes are the advanced ones, etc.
Real analysis is an especially important class because it tends to be demanding everywhere, and forces you to do logical and formal proofs. Get a good grade in this class.
Taking some graduate classes can be a good thing, but be prepared. You will be at a disadvantage since the grad students will all have study groups. Try to join a study group and devote serious time to any graduate classes you take.

.::Networking on the Network: A Guide to Professional Skills for PhD Students! SECTION 3. Building a Professional Identity::.

So far I have been talking about networking at the one-to-one level. That's where it starts. But the research community is a public place, and as you become established in your field, publishing in journals and speaking at conferences, you will also develop an identity. This section describes some of the basics of building such an identity. I call it a professional identity because its workings are governed by the tacit rules of the research profession.

Socializing at conferences
Sooner or later (hopefully sooner), you will start attending research conferences in your field. Section 2 has already discussed the techniques for approaching someone at a conference that you have already written to. This section offers more suggestions for getting the most from a conference.
First, though, let me explain what a conference is. Almost any professional field will have one or more annual meetings, typically three or four days in length, sponsored either by a professional association or by an organization created specifically to host that particular conference. Most such meetings are held in a different city each year, although some smaller meetings are held in specific appealing places (e.g., Hawaii in January). In recent years many conferences have started gesturing toward globalization by (for example) rotating between the

United States

and Europe. Most conferences, especially larger ones, are held in expensive downtown convention hotels, for the simple reason that such hotels are the only places where large numbers of out-of-towners can sleep. At first it might seem like a scam that everyone in your field gets to travel to a different interesting city every year for a conference. You'll stop thinking that way, though, once you have been to a few dozen conferences and gotten sick of traveling. People's home institutions are spread out, they have to meet somewhere, and so they might as well meet someplace reasonably nice, hopefully with good airline connections. They'll be spending most of their time in homogenized airports and hotels anyway, so it's not like a trip to a resort.
The fundamental purpose of professional conferences is networking. Everyone in your field has a professional network, just like you. They built their networks the same way you are, and they attend conferences to keep their networks in working order. In the old days, before the Internet, conferences were also occasions when committees would meet, for example to edit journals or plan future conferences. That does still happen to a degree, but e-mail and the Web have moved most such logistical matters online, leaving the more ceremonial functions to face-to-face conference interactions. Conferences are also occasions to publicize your work, although that function can hardly be dissociated from networking, and they are places for the job market. Some conferences have evolved rituals for interviewing job candidates in hotel rooms; others simply provide hunting grounds for advanced graduate students to network with senior scholars whose departments are likely to be hiring. For all of these reasons, you should attend conferences, and take them seriously as professional occasions, as soon as you have research that's ready to report.
Although each field has its own practices, as a broad generalization conferences accept papers in two different ways: either you submit your paper (or perhaps an abstract) as an individual, or else you join a coherent "panel" of papers that are submitted to the conference as a group. In either case the program committee somehow decides which papers get accepted. You should find out which practices obtain at the conferences you hope to attend, and plan accordingly. If the conference only accepts panel proposals, it would not be excessively presumptuous of you to start organizing a panel yourself. You might discover that the people you approach are already putting panels together, in which case they might (or might not) include you in their planning. This process can get a little bit clumsy, but don't worry about it.
If the conference takes individual paper submissions, then you should seek detailed advice about the politics of the process. For example, some conferences require you to provide a few keywords on the title page so that the program committee can route your paper to the most suitable referees. Obviously you want to include the keywords that get your paper routed to the referees who are most likely to appreciate your work's virtues, and only your faculty advisors can tell you what those keywords are likely to be. (You should find out whether the conference is formally refereed, meaning that the program committee recruits people to actually write comments on each paper, accepting some and rejecting others. Formally refereed conference papers are more valuable in career terms than papers that were handled more informally.) Papers that are accepted individually will usually then be grouped into panels by the program committee, so that the program will list your paper alongside a few other people's, and responsibility for convening the panel will be assigned to a panel chair, most likely a regular conference attendee whom the program committee has drafted for the job.
Some conferences distinguish between papers and posters. A paper is something that you present in front of an audience, at a set time, with a microphone and audio-visual aids. Posters, on the other hand, are grouped into one big room. You'll be given a bulletin board of a set size, and you'll be asked to prepare a poster that can be tacked up on the board. Conference attendees will be able to browse through the posters, and certain times will be advertised when poster authors are asked to be available alongside their posters to chat with passers-by. A poster is a lower-status form of presentation than a talk, but no stigma attaches to it, and you shouldn't be embarrassed to prepare a poster. Once you get over the feeling that you're a salesperson waiting on customers in a shop, it can be a more relaxed way to talk to people individually than the crush after a panel is over. If you do prepare a poster, take the time to do it right, with appealing and legible graphics.
Conferences cost money. Most conferences have discounted student rates, which you might even be able to afford. Many conferences offer free registration for students who are willing to engage in menial jobs such as staffing the registration desk, and you should go ahead and accept such deals unless it offends your pride. There might be a Web page for students looking for other students to share hotel rooms with, or perhaps you can establish such a page yourself. If you are getting ready to go on the job market then you should guilt-trip your thesis advisor into paying your airfare to the conference, or at least make sure to write travel money into the relevant grant proposal well ahead of time.
Here, finally, is the promised advice for socializing at conferences, partly adapted from notes by Dan Ryan.
Many conferences are preceded by smaller one- or two-day workshops; these events will usually provide a more focused and comfortable occasion for mixing with people than the larger conference. It is much easier to approach someone at random during such an event, something that tends to work poorly in a crowded conference setting.
Stay in the main conference hotel if at all possible; when you check in, locate the fitness center, if any, and the nearest good breakfast place. Study the conference schedule to determine which talks you'll be attending, and find out in advance where the meeting rooms are. You'll be happier if you don't look lost. Go find the room where you will be speaking and check it out. Find a moment when nobody is using the room, stand at the speaker's podium, and get used to the energy.
Once the event gets rolling, act like a host. Introduce people to one another, include them in things, and notice when they are feeling bad or being oppressed. Hunt for the person who is chairing the panel that you are speaking on.
When your talk comes, keep it simple. Practice your talk several times in realistic conditions before traveling to the conference, so you can be confident of doing well when the time comes.
If you aren't accustomed to speaking with a microphone, take a moment to do it right. If the room has an audio technician, ask if you can get a cordless lapel mike, which is much less constraining than a mike that is mounted on a podium. Refuse to use a headset or a hand-held mike, which are only for experienced performers. If you must use a podium mike, you can avoid looking like a fool by stopping briefly to familiarize yourself with its on-off button. If you are the first speaker in a session to use the mike, check the sound level ("can you hear me?") before you launch into your talk. If you are seated at a table with the mike on a stand in front of you, resist the temptation to press your mouth right up against it. You don't want the mike directly in front of your mouth, since the wind from your sibilants (s-sounds) and plosives (p-sounds) will make a roaring sound in the speakers. Sound travels in all directions, not just straight out of your mouth, so put the microphone just below your mouth. That will also help people to see your face. If you have problems with the microphone, don't be shy about stopping to get help. It happens all the time.
The chair of your session should tell you in advance how long to speak for. If not then ask. Try to finish on time. But if your talk runs more than a minute over your allotted time, suppress the overwhelming urge to race through the rest of it at 100mph. Don't be one of those people who says "in conclusion" but keeps on talking. Instead, just give up. Shrug and say, "oops, well, I've gone over time so I'll just stop here; I have the full paper here if anyone wants it", and then briefly remind everyone what your bottom-line conclusion is. Everyone will be impressed at your poise.
After all the panel members' talks are over, a question period typically follows, with audience members specifying which speakers their questions are addressed to. Don't worry if you aren't asked any questions; questioners are often drawn to the most provocative comments, and provocation doesn't imply quality. If you are asked a question, resist the temptation to launch into a long speech that explains all of your intricate thinking from the beginning. If the question has a short, conclusory answer (such as "yes" or "no"), say the short answer first. Having said the short answer, you might find that the long answer becomes shorter as well.
When your panel is over, hang around for a few minutes in case anybody wants to chat. Bring business cards to exchange (but, as the speaker, don't offer anyone a card unless they offer a card to you). Affect a calm, low-key demeanor and ask them, with genuine interest, "are you working in this area as well?". When you're done, go get some fresh air.
Relax. Take care of yourself. Breathe. Drink water. Buy a book. Don't drink coffee. Don't eat junk food. Rarely pass up an opportunity to go out with a group to eat. If you run out of things to do, go figure out who the smartest people at the conference are, especially the more human and less established ones, so you can start promoting their work.
If you have a laptop computer, consider typing in a straightforward narrative account of the ideas presented at the conference; after the conference is done, you can help others by editing this narrative for clarity and sending it to a mailing list of people in your field. This is a low-effort way to help the community and get your name out.
Start imagining yourself into the role of conference organizer by consciously noting aspects of the conference that are especially well- or poorly-organized.
Some technically advanced conferences have created Web-based systems for helping attendees connect with each other and schedule their time before the meeting even begins; advocate that such a system be built for any conference that you might be involved in organizing.
The most basic skill for attending conferences is talking to other researchers about your work. They will ask you, "What do you work on?", and you need to be able to answer this question any time, to anyone, at any length. This is amazingly hard, and you may end up kicking yourself at your stammering non-answers. That's fine; it's part of the process. You should rehearse answers to this question before attending conferences. Your local research group may not be helpful; since they already know what you're working and share all of your assumptions, you rarely need to explain yourself at a basic level to them. Try practicing ten-second explanations, one-minute explanations, five-minute explanations, and so on, up to a full-length talk.
The hardest part is tailoring your explanation to your audience, and this is an area where you should invest sustained, structured effort. Do you remember when you were in the library, identifying researchers whose work was related to yours in various directions? This is similar. Try to avoid explaining your work to a complete stranger. Instead, get them to talk first. And while they are talking, work to articulate specific elements that your respective research interests share in common. (By the way, the phrase "I am interested in ..." actually means "I am conducting research on ...".) Perhaps you both employ qualitative research methods. Perhaps you are both doing comparative work. Perhaps you both have a political agenda, even if maybe not the same one. Perhaps you are both studying the history of a certain region, or a certain century, or a certain industry, even if other elements of your research topics are different. Perhaps you are both aiming your work at industrial applications. With practice, you will begin to spot the commonalities at a greater distance.
Once you have identified the commonalities between your two projects, fashion an explanation of your own project that puts the common elements in the foreground and leaves the other elements in the background. For example, if you are using economic theories to study the Mongolians, and the other person is using cultural theories to study the Mongolians, put the Mongolians in the foreground; explain what sources of evidence you're using, what particular people and places you're looking at, and so on, and then mention along the way that you're using some economic ideas to look at those things. On the other hand, if you are using economic theories to study the Mongolians, and the other person is using economic theories to study the Japanese, put the economic theories in the foreground. Explain what theoretical authors you are drawing on, what methods you are using, what big economic questions you're hoping to help answer, and so on, and then mention along the way that your case study happens to be drawn from the Mongolians.
This strategy of foregrounding shared elements might seem weird at first; it might even seem manipulative or phony, as if there were one single authentic answer to the question "What are you working on?" and all the other answers are artificial. But that's not how it works. The answers that you construct for people from unfamiliar backgrounds will certainly feel unfamiliar. But if they are honest representations of your work then they are good, informative, relationship-building answers. Once you get some practice consciously constructing explanations of your work for many sorts of people, you will begin adjusting your explanations automatically, and the sense of weirdness and fakeness will dissipate.
If you have a hard time traveling to face-to-face meetings
The Internet helps people at far-flung or ill-funded universities to keep their hand in the research world. Here are some guidelines:
* Follow the basic six-step outline I described above, more or less omitting the steps that involve face-to-face contact. This is better than trying to undertake those steps using e-mail, since e-mail really is not very good at some things.
* Correspond. Spend lots of time writing intelligent, thoughtful letters to people about their manuscripts and papers, along the lines I've described.
* Translate. If the major language of your country is not English, but you are corresponding with authors who do write in English, consider translating short papers that provide introductions to their work. This is a good way to build professional relationships, as well as bridges between different intellectual cultures.
* Publish. And then make it a priority to get reprints into the hands of people who might be interested in them. If postage is a problem, make a postscript file (or preferably several different formats, since not everyone can translate postscript) available on a Web site or ftp server.
* Join the conversation. You might be isolated geographically, but you don't have to isolate yourself intellectually. Make sure that your letters and papers are part of a conversation. That is, formulate your professional papers as responses to the existing literature, and to particular contributors to that literature, and make clear the nature of your debts to those authors and the nature of your own contribution. If you're not clear how this is done, use existing papers as a model.
* Relentlessly promote your own work. Mention your ideas and publications in messages to appropriate electronic discussion groups. But always keep it low-key. No fanfare, no hype, no big claims. Cultivate an attitude of quiet, confident intellectual seriousness, and then consciously and carefully project that image.
* Make yourself useful. When you read something you genuinely respect, send a brief review and recommendation to the appropriate discussion groups. Pass along useful items you encounter on the net. Invent some useful network facility, if only an annotated bibliography or guide to resources.
* Be systematic. Once you've gotten accustomed to the whole process of networking, take a few days out to search all available resources, both on the network and on paper, and make list of all of the people you want to approach using the six-step process and all of the e-mail discussion groups you want to publicize your work on. Then slowly and systematically, over several months or a year, approach them all. The process takes lots of time, but it does work.
* Keep trying to raise travel funds. The professional contacts you develop on the net ought to be able to help with this, since the world is full of international travel grants and exchange programs that are relatively easy to set up once you have willing parties on both ends. But wait until you have a fairly strong relationship going before you try this.
* Make your travel count. Don't spend your hard-earned money on travel unless you're going someplace where you can meet with several people you already "know", if only through e-mail correspondence and the networking process explained above. Unless you're an unusually sociable or charismatic person, don't attend a conference in the abstract hope that you'll meet someone useful there.
* Share your experience. Help build the electronic networking community by getting involved in Local Civic Networks and the like. Reach out to people in your area whose interests in computer networks might be different from yours, and do some community-building among them. Reflect on how your relatively marginal position in the world's research system conditions your work and your life. Write down your experiences and advice for the benefit of others.
Publication and credit
Another dimension of the institutional structuring of professional relationships pertains to credit. If you do something new, you ought to get credit for it. Credit resembles money in the sense that you can "buy" certain things with it -- for example further research funding. (Credit for this observation, for instance, belongs to Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar in their book, "Laboratory Life".) Credit can also be understood as an informal type of intellectual property. A research paper resembles a patent application, which is always drawn as widely as possible, consistent with the actual accomplishments of the work and being careful not to trample any prior art. But credit differs from money and property in other ways. The most important of these is that nobody is keeping an objective ledger of who gets credit for what; it's much more an evolving consensus that only becomes formalized years after the fact. Many people get neurotic about credit and invest tremendous effort trying to manipulate others into giving them the credit they think they're due. But the actual keys to getting due credit for your work are simple. The first is to publish promptly. When you do something good, write about it and get it out there. And the second is to do your networking. I have already explained one reason why writing helps with networking -- it gives you something to talk about. A second reason is that if you talk about your work without having circulated it in written form then you will be (perhaps justifiably) paranoid that someone else will (perhaps innocently) publicize your idea before you and therefore get the credit for it. Don't get yourself into this demoralizing rut. And understand where the danger comes from: when two people are doing research in the same area, their relationship is inevitably structured by a tension between a natural alliance (helping one another, organizing things together, jointly publicizing the shared area of research) and natural competition (over credit for new ideas). This tension will be much easier to manage if you continually put sane amounts of effort into both your writing and your networking.
When you do publish your work, where should you publish it? Two errors are common. One error is to choose your publication venues reactively by simply publishing in the places where someone in your network happens to invite you to publish -- for example, in a book that this person might be editing. While accepting such invitations might actually be a good idea, don't let invitations drive your publication strategy. Instead, talk to people who are knowledgeable, hit the library, map out all of the potentially relevant publications, and make conscious decisions. This leads us to the second common error, which is to get obsessed with publishing in the "good places". Lots of people get preoccupied with ranking journals, so that publication turns into a zero-sum status game. This is most unfortunate. It is much better, in my view, to think about publication choices in terms of professional relationships. A journal is not just a badge of rank. Much more importantly, it is a gathering-place for a particular community of people, namely the professionals in that field who read it. When you publish in a particular journal, you are doing two things: (1) you are representing yourself as being relevant to such-and-such a research community, and (2) you are introducing yourself to that community and inviting them to get to know you. So instead of asking, "where is the high-prestige place to publish", ask "who would I like to associate with professionally?". That makes the decision much easier. If you don't know what sorts of people read a given journal, you can always ask. Most likely you will get different answers from different people, according to their own relationships to that journal's readership, but that's alright. Just decide who you believe and carry on.
Intellectual leadership
The steps for making contact with people that I've been describing obviously do not exhaust the social skills that are necessary to get along in the professional world of research. But they do provide a necessary foundation -- the basic strokes of the professional combustion engine. Having gotten your network going in this way, the obvious question is what to do with it. Well, maybe you do nothing with it. Having people to talk to about your research might be plenty. But if you'd like to do good in your field, or do well in it, or both, you'll want to try organizing something: a workshop, a journal issue, an e-mail discussion list, an approach to a funding agency, or whatever. Later sections will discuss these activities in more detail. Right now I want to introduce two important concepts related to them: "emerging themes" and "consultation".
Most everyone regards the notion of an "emerging theme" as hype, and no doubt I will be thought cynical for explaining it, but it's tremendously important anyway. Research, of course, is about new ideas -- and not just individual new results, but whole new fields of research and whole new ways of doing research in a given area. New ways of doing research rarely spring full-blown from any individual's head. Rather, somebody who has been keeping up with many different research projects starts to notice a trend -- a direction in which a substantial number of research projects are all headed. Perhaps it's a previously unnoticed analogy among various new concepts; perhaps it's a metaphor that makes sense out of a range of seemingly unrelated results; perhaps it's a pattern that appears to underlie the work of several different groups; perhaps it's a method from another field that several groups have been importing into their own field and have independently found useful or necessary; or perhaps it is a widely shared dissatisfaction with the old intellectual frameworks that is now starting to take form as a new framework. If you want examples, simply look at the titles and introductions to any edited book, any special issue of a journal, or any workshop. Fame and fortune justly attach to the people who notice such things, put names on them, and gather together the people whose research appears to fall within them. These people are the shamans; their role is not to create something out of nothing, but to help the community become conscious of new understandings that have been taking form below the surface. Such people have four qualities: (1) their own research is an instance of the patterns they are noticing (unfortunately, this is usually a prerequisite to being taken seriously in the role of pattern-seeker), (2) they care enough to actually think about other people's research (this quality is in short supply, thus creating abundant opportunities for those who possess it), (3) they communicate intensively enough with other people to actually keep up-to-date with them (this is where e-mail helps), and (4) they are smart enough to notice the patterns in the first place (this is sometimes the least important factor). You can work wonders if you cultivate these qualities.
As a practical matter, you'll work these wonders through consultation. Research people, especially in academia, generally insist on being consulted beforehand on any matter that affects them. Consultation is the fundamental protocol of all academic life -- both within institutions and within disciplines. So, for example, if you have noticed a hot new theme emerging from the research in your area, you should not immediately announce a workshop or a mailing list on the topic and expect people to flock to it. (In general, never try to organize a group activity just because you think, in an abstract way, that it would be a nice idea. It doesn't work that way.) Instead, you should decide who the affected parties are and communicate with them. One way to get started on this is to write a (short or long) survey paper that describes the pattern you see emerging, puts a name on it, sketches in a sympathetic way how various projects (your own and others') seem to fit within it, explains what can be learned by looking at things this way, extracts a set of axioms or principles or methods or organizing concepts, and outlines some suggested lines of future research. Another approach is simply to write a paper that explains your own research in terms of the emerging pattern and then, as a secondary matter, explains how the other projects fit in. And a third approach is to attempt to organize a workshop or other small-scale professional meeting around the theme you've begun to articulate.
To do this, write a draft announcement for the meeting that explains its unifying concept -- the emerging theme. Clearly label it as a draft. Then -- and this is consultation -- send this draft individually to each of the ten people whose participation in the meeting is crucial. Include a cover letter/message soliciting their perspectives and their guidance. (The phrase "I'd like to ask your advice" causes miracles the world over.) Ask them if they think the time would be ripe for such a meeting, and ask them if you have articulated the emerging theme in the best way. Do not present anything as a fait accompli. When you get responses back from these people, take the responses seriously. Modify your draft to take them all into account. Rewrite it from scratch if necessary. Get lots of advice and really listen to it (even if you don't follow it). You will probably fail at this process once or twice before you succeed, but more importantly you'll learn what it's like to internalize other people's opinions -- the basic mechanism of socialization into a community. And remember that consultation, like most things, works much better if you have gone through the six network-building steps I've described above, at least with a majority of the people involved.
This whole consultation process probably sounds like a lot of work. Many people even regard it as a thankless sort of "dues" that they must pay to their field. This is not so. Engaging in consultation is a powerful act. It changes your whole way of seeing the world. You learn to notice the conditions that make action possible, and you become able to internalize others' thinking without giving them power over you. As a result, a whole landscape of possibilities will become visible before you -- a landscape that most people never see. It is a good idea, therefore, to organize professional activities in your field. It does require a lot of initiative, but it does not necessarily require a vast amount of work. The key is to delegate. If you are willing to lead -- that is, to take the initiative to define, consult, oversee, subdivide, and keep track -- then lots of people will be willing to take responsibility for one piece of the larger whole. If this doesn't happen -- that is, if you can't get people to commit to narrowly defined jobs -- then that's a sign that you have misjudged how much energy really exists around the theme you have identified. Either rework that theme through another round of consultation or simply abandon the whole project and write down the lessons you've learned from it. Don't force something to happen if it just won't. Lots of good ideas will never happen; your job is to find the ones that can happen.
When a new theme does emerge to organize the research of a community, often someone will complain that they had articulated that theme themselves some years before. Usually, however, that person had not done the hard work of talking to everyone, internalizing their perspectives, and building consensus around a particular formulation of the theme. That is what I am encouraging you to do.
Having identified an emerging theme and organized a meeting of the community around it, the next step might be to edit a book. You may not think of yourself as the sort of person who does book deals with publishers, but it's not that hard. Here is a simple method. Identify a senior member of the emerging community who is decent and well-connected, with whom you have good rapport and who would be regarded as an honest broker by everyone involved. Approach that person and say this:
I'm thinking it be might time for an edited book about this emerging theme. Here's a rough draft of a proposal for the book. Likely chapter contributors would be A, B, C, D, and E. I'd like to propose that we edit the book together. If you can help with the diplomacy of recruiting the authors then I will do all of the logistics. Don't use those exact words; hopefully you'll know this person well enough by now to find words that are comfortable for you. In any case, you have just signed up for a lot of work: iterating drafts of the proposal through consultation with the most important authors, dealing with the publisher and copyeditor, keeping track of all the manuscripts, sending reminders, cajoling people to offer comments on one another's draft chapters, drafting an introduction to the volume, writing your own chapter, preparing the index, managing your overcommitted coeditor, and fighting the half-dozen fires that will erupt along the way. It's work, but it's worthwhile. If you go through this cycle even once then you will truly understand how the world around you works. You will also have a book on your vita. Of course, you won't know how to do much of the work you've signed up for. How, for example, do you find a publisher? Asking advice from the people in your network is part of the process. If you take the initiative, and if your emerging theme has enough energy behind it, then people will be happy to help.
That being said, here is some more advice for would-be book editors. You should organize the project in a loose way, for the simple reason that one or more of your chapter contributors may flake out on you. Everyone from the publisher to the people who review your book for academic journals will insist that all of the chapters fit together to make a coherent whole, and this is a good ideal to the extent that it is practical. Don't try to organize an edited book unless you do honestly think that the chapters will work together. But make sure that the book will still work if one or more of the chapters fails to materialize. Realize, too, that some people can't write, or can't make deadlines. One reason to build your network is that you can find out ahead of time which potential authors are good to work with in these ways, and which ones will cause you a lot of headaches for very little payoff. When you discuss the project with a publisher (or, more precisely, an acquisitions editor who works for a publisher), keep in mind that publishers only eat when they sell books. As a result, they always have a mental calculator going in their heads that tells them how many copies of your book they can sell. You can't trick these people, so have an honest conversation with them about how the book works as a business proposition. Who would buy it? Publishers are generally unenthusiastic about edited books these days, in part because they are less likely to be reviewed by large-circulation magazines and journals, much less newspapers. So you have to make a clear case that your project has a lot of social energy behind it, and that the topic you have identified is right on the verge of exploding into a major intellectual movement of the sort that sells books. Most academics find it hard to think in business terms about their publishing projects, so swallow your pride and let the publisher instruct you in the matter. Maybe a project or two will fail before you learn to see the world through the publisher's eyes.
If the book project goes forward, you'll be negotiating a contract with the publisher. Don't make it complicated. An academic publisher won't be making much money on your edited book, and you're probably not famous enough to be negotiating for special terms. The only hard question you'll face is how to distribute the royalties. Should the people who contribute chapters get any of the money? How much? It is common not to mention money when dealing with the chapter authors, so that the book editors pocket it all. This is not an unreasonable procedure given the work that's involved, and the publisher may not want to deal with the complexity of paying a percentage royalty to each chapter author anyway. Another approach that's a little more fair is to pay each chapter author a fixed honorarium that's basically a share of an advance. In most cases, however, you'll find that the authors are surprised to be getting anything. So don't worry too much about it.
When you do build your professional network and identify your first emerging theme, a voice in your head may tell you something like, "well, if you thought of it then it must be obvious; surely you are the last to know". And since the task of initiating activities such as the ones I've described can look like a steep mountain when you're doing it for the first time, you might be tempted to assume that it's not worth the trouble. You'll think, surely someone else will beat me to it. When you hear these voices in your head, pay close attention to them. They don't want you to succeed professionally. Why? Are they trying to protect you from the pain of failure? Or do they just think that you've been destined to fail since they day you were born? The fact is, if you've built your professional network, and if someone in that network already has activities under way around the emerging theme that you have identified, then you are likely to have heard about it already. Of course, as you progress with your organizing you might learn about other activities that are related to yours in one way or another. In rare cases an existing activity will render yours redundant. It happens. But much more often, the existing activities will be off at an angle from yours. In that case, you will want to have a friendly conversation with the people who are organizing them. Perhaps you will decide to join forces, or perhaps you will articulate the way in which your respective activities are complementary. (You will find that "complementary" is a useful word.) You can then decide whether and how to redesign your activity to bring out more clearly its unique contribution.
Those, then, are some of the rudiments of intellectual leadership. (I will return to the subject later on.) Many people don't want to be leaders because they associate leadership with abuses of power. It's true, many leaders do abuse power, and if you lead then you will acquire power that you will be tempted to abuse. But real leadership does not require you to manipulate people, and a community of well-informed and confident people cannot be manipulated. So even if you can't imagine yourself as a leader, I hope that you will organize something, just once, so you'll understand how it works. Focus on articulating shared values and you'll be fine.
Norms of humility
I have been advising you to promote your research and take a position of leadership in your field. Many people flat-out refuse my advice, however, on the grounds that self-promotion is either inadvisable or literally wrong. Those people are not entirely mistaken. They are referring, on one level or another, to the norms of humility that operate in most areas of social life. Suppose that you stood up in public and said, "I am exceedingly intelligent" or "my research is of very high quality". The audience would be incredulous, and would openly treat you as a jerk. Even otherwise pleasant people can become quite nasty when you violate these unwritten rules. Norms of humility thus place extensive constraints on your public persona, and you will have to learn an elaborate phraseology before you can engage at all effectively in professional conversations.
Here, then are the phrases that you need:
* Say "we" rather than "I", as in "we discovered such-and-such". "We" can refer to your research group, or to the people who have joined themselves into a particular workshop or intellectual movement.
* Mitigate your expressions of opinion by saying things like, "I personally think that ...", owning your opinions rather than asserting them as truth.
* Give credit to others. In explaining this article, for example, I typically say that "NotN includes good advice accumulated from dozens of people over many years, and I want to get it into the hands of every PhD student in the world". This statement is true -- NotN does include advice accumulated from dozens of people, etc. I could have emphasized my own originality, but what purpose would that serve?
* Don't crow about your successes. Yes, of course your paper made a big splash at the last conference. But why talk about it? The success will speak for itself, especially with the people whose opinion you most care about.
* Deflect praise. If someone says something positive about you and your work, you should calmly take the first opportunity to acknowledge it. Say this: "I appreciate the kind words". Or this: "Whether my work has such-and-such merits you've mentioned is for other people to decide". Notice that these formulas are mandatory: if someone praises your work in your presence, and you don't deflect the praise, it is as though you uttered the praise yourself. Strange but true. So you should not let any praise go by without deflecting it.
* Emphasize the intellectual reasons for your work, not the personal reasons. If someone asks you, for example, why you chose a certain direction in your research, you probably know enough not to say, "so I can get tenure". Instead, your answer should refer honestly to the way in which research such as yours might hope to make the world a better place. Have such answers already rehearsed so that they will be ready when the time comes. The commonalities that you have articulated in your conversations with others will help a lot.
* Recognize that some social puzzles have no good answers. If you are invited to a conference that you just don't find worthwhile, or are invited to a collaboration with someone who you just don't respect, then you are stuck. You don't want to say yes, you don't have any honest way to say no without making yourself seem superior, and you don't want to lie. "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I can't" is probably the best you can do.
As you evolve a professional persona, you will learn many formulas like these, each of them adapted to a recurring problem of professional life. In each case, you will have to struggle with the feeling that you are being fake. Listen to the formulas that other people use in similar situations, and do the best you can.
Recognizing difference
These concepts, I hope, further illuminate the complex structure of professional relationships within the institutions of research. As with any social system, the point is not that some infinite power imposes this structure on us from the outside, but rather that we recreate the structure ourselves every time we interact with another person. And these numerous local accomplishments are all the more remarkable given that, structures and systems notwithstanding, people really are different from one another. If you are carrying around an overly rigid view of institutions and their workings (say, for example, the view you probably got from your experiences of undergraduate education) then you might not even notice the real and rewarding work of exploring the differences between yourself and your professional acquaintances. The skills of recognizing human difference -- not in the abstract, but concretely, within particular interactions and particular relationships -- are growing more important as research communities in all fields lose their national and cultural boundaries.
A common mistake is (usually unconsciously) to use networking skills to seek out people who seem identical to you, either by ignoring the differences, putting easy labels on the differences, or blowing the differences out of all proportion. This might have worked alright when research worlds were heavily segregated by gender, culture, discipline, research "school", and everything else, but it doesn't work now. Just about everyone is being forced, for example, to reflect on different national traditions' remarkably different ideas about the relationship between theory and evidence. And we are likewise learning to develop professional relationships with people who don't already speak the same disciplinary language that we do -- it no longer suffices to detect potential allies simply because they talk the same way. Nobody yet knows how the practices of professional networking might evolve under the pressure of these increasingly prevalent types of professional difference. My sense, though, is that e-mail is poorly suited for the initial stages of establishing a shared context for discussion between people with different cultural or disciplinary backgrounds. If this is true then my emphasis on careful mixing of electronic and face-to-face communication takes on new importance.
A problem that often arises when talking with someone from a different intellectual tradition involves "results". What counts as a "result" in your field? A theorem? A policy prescription? An experimental outcome? A newly theorized concept? As you start talking to people, you will be surprised to discover just how diverse the various fields' conceptions of a "result" can be. People who have been socialized into a given school of thought will habitually search anything they read for the specific type of "result" that they are accustomed to. Even neighboring subfields of the same intellectual tendency within the supposedly same field can fail to communicate because they are trying to discover incompatible types of "results" in one another's work. This failure of communication can be calamitous. Each side may perceive the other to be doing poor work -- or, literally, no work at all. They may even accuse one another of hiding their conclusions. Emotions may become strong, and serious conflict may result. In many cases the conflict will be ongoing, and (sub)fields may have developed elaborate and nasty stereotypes of one another. These stereotypes can be hard to puncture because they are expressed in the metatheoretical shorthand that each field has developed for its own discussions. The neighboring (sub)field, for example, may be said to have "no ideas", where the word "idea" has acquired a complex history of unarticulated baggage that automatically rules out anything that does not fit that particular group's ways of working and talking. Or, to take another example at random, qualitative fieldwork methods might be disparaged as "anecdotes that don't really prove anything" -- not a good way to think if you're going to start a professional relationship with an anthropologist! Needless to say, you'll want to anticipate this problem and defuse it before it damages anyone's reputation or messes up a potential relationship. This may require you to overcome your own disciplinary socialization, which has almost certainly included a lot of taken-for-granted invidious distinctions that mark certain "others" as intellectual barbarians.
Getting a public voice
Although the institutions of research tend to focus your attention on the other researchers in your field, your research interests probably have a broader importance to society. (I realize that some parts of mathematics can't be explained to a general audience. But that's the exception.) As you develop your professional voice, I hope you will also consider developing a public voice, that is, a voice that normal people outside your research community can understand. This includes speaking to community groups, writing for newspapers and magazines, being interviewed by the media, testifying in legislative hearings, circulating commentaries to a broad audience on the Internet, or simply being able to discuss your field with normal people in social situations.
Some of these situations are relatively tractable. For example, if you announce a discovery and a science reporter asks you to explain it, you will probably be able to find plain language for it. That situation is relatively easy because it's your own personal research topic. You've promised that you'll make it interesting, a professional reporter has decided that you'll succeed, and you give more or less the same speech that you give to people informally at conferences. Even easier is when someone else makes a discovery and you are asked to comment on it. You say, yes that person is a serious researcher, and yes that discovery sure sounds important, though of course much more work will be required before we are sure.
Or perhaps you want to start a sideline of popularizing work in your field. Unless you are a real popularization prodigy you wouldn't want to make popularization into your major line of work, because that is an entirely different and exceedingly competitive profession that requires extreme amounts of networking in entirely different worlds from your own. But writing popular works as a sideline can be lucrative, personally satisfying, and a public service, if not necessarily in that order. Stephen Jay Gould's monthly magazine columns about biology, which have been collected into a long series of successful books, are perhaps the prototype.
If you want to write these sorts of popular works, you face several sorts of challenges. One is that all of your academic colleagues believe that it's their job to help you get tenure, and so they will all discourage you from writing such works until that happens. I know of one department, an extreme case I'll admit, that actually put in writing a policy that non-academic publications will be counted against a candidate for tenure. But if you write easily, I personally see no problem of spending a day a month, as Gould did, writing that sort of thing, and if you publish enough refereed journal articles then only the crazies will hold it against you.
A second challenge is that wide-circulation newspapers and magazines prefer to publish work by people they know. The solution to this problem is actually easy: start an Internet mailing list and Web site to circulate your popular work. Your circulation will be low at first, but your work probably won't be very good at first either, so that's okay. As your work gets better, people will pass it around and your circulation will go up. If your work is good then it will definitely get circulated to the editors who should be publishing it. Part of their job is to look for new talent.
A final challenge for the popularizer is simply coming up with a steady stream of topics to write about. You can probably come up with a few topics just from your own research, but if you want to write regularly then you will need to cultivate the right sort of intellectual life. Popularization is really for people whose reading and thinking are not confined strictly to the latest research reports by their micro-specialized peers, but who naturally spend a reasonable percentage of their reading and thinking time ranging more widely into the deeper meanings of the field. If this kind of breadth comes naturally to you, or if you take the trouble to cultivate it, then it's particularly important that a wider audience get the benefit of your effort. The writing will come hard at first. But as you start writing regularly, something good will happen: you will find yourself spontaneously rehearsing phrases that relate the ideas to the world of a normal reader, and before long you will establish a kind of pipeline back and forth between the professional world where you present your research papers and the public world where normal curious people are concerned about the things that normal curious people are concerned about. Columns will take form almost spontaneously in your head, and you will write them down. So don't be disheartened by the difficulty of getting the process started. It will get easier.
What's really hard is when you are called upon to address yourself to different issues than the ones that organize discussion in your field. Any sphere of debate, whether scholarly or political or anything else, has an "issue agenda" (also called its "problem set"): the questions that are consensually considered to be on the table right now, and that everyone is expected to address themselves to. The people in your field probably have a consensus about which issues are important right now, and you have probably learned how to talk in a way that addresses those issues. Problems arise when the broader public, or more accurately the pundits and politicians in the media, have a different issue agenda. A reporter will call you on the phone, perhaps having gotten your name from your university's PR office as an expert in a certain field, and will expect you to address the issue that happens to define public discourse. You will find to your surprise that you aren't able to speak to that issue, for the simple reason that your day-to-day professional life has rarely required you to do so. You might select from your repertoire whatever standard spiel falls in the general vicinity of the reporter's question, only to be told, politely or not, that you're heading off at some weird academic angle to (what the reporter regards as) the real issue.
The solution to this problem is, first, to understand it, and second, practice. You simply have to figure out what the issue agenda is and come up with something to say. As a voice in the public sphere, you will be expected to have a "message": a single line that responds in some way to the issue agenda and that epitomizes the larger collection of things that you have to say. (My own "message", in case you happen to care, is that radically improved information technology is causing the ground rules of every institution in society to be renegotiated.) You should also be prepared to answer some standard questions, most particularly what implications your argument has for public policy. This would seem like an obvious question, since that's what the sphere of public debate is all about. But unless your research area is directly related to public policy, your professional training has taught you how to address research agendas, not public policy agendas. So give the question some thought and rehearse some answers before you get caught flat-footed.
It helps if you understand how the public sphere works in practice. Political philosophers often have an idealized picture of the public sphere in which citizens get together and engage in deliberation, or in which public intellectuals spin an elite sort of public philosophy. This idealized picture is almost entirely false. In reality, the public sphere is itself a sprawling professional network with its own meetings, gossip, rivalries, and the rest of it. At the center are journalists, by which I mean not just day-to-day working reporters but a broader class of professional writers who make their careers largely by building extensive networks within the field they report on. Many of these figures go on to become semi-intellectuals in their own right, for example by publishing serious books or starting institutes. Also at the center are foundations, many of which specifically intend to shape public debate by building networks and publishing reports that are designed for maximum coverage in the media. Some foundations regard themselves as nonpartisan, and spend their money flying people to resorts to debate the issues of the day. Others are aggressively lean and mean think tanks that exist to argue the positions of their funders. If any money is at stake then the players will also include lobbyists and other professional advocates.
Scholarly researchers such as yourself are definitely part of this picture, and do get invited to the talking shops where the real work gets done. As you establish a public voice in your area, you may get swept into this world. You will develop a network outside your research field, and you will have to decide how much time and effort you want to invest cultivating it and pushing your own public agenda through it. Understand that this is not the research community whose rules I have been explaining. Even though most of the people are decent and serious, it is a different world that runs on its own rails. They don't use formal peer review, methodology is often weak, sophistry is widespread, sound bites are important, and the essence of the game is shaping the evolving issue agenda. Because everyone is assumed to have a public persona, you won't be sending people your publications unless someone asks for them. On another level, though, the similarities to the research world are strong: you succeed by building networks, the glue that holds relationships together is the values that you share with people, and the way you get things done is by articulating emerging issues within the collective thinking of that particular network.
Last comment. Although normal rules of etiquette will largely suffice for your dealings with the world of public debate, it will help to keep in mind that people in the non-profit sector (meaning, outside of universities and corporations) who are funded by foundations have a very fragile existence. If networking is important for your career, it is ten times more important for these people. The way they feed their families is by defining an issue, building consensus with the relevant foundation people, and finally being invited to write a short grant proposal that gets them the money. This is a long-drawn-out process, and it requires continual upkeep. When you are dealing with such people, therefore, you should take special care not to be seen as encroaching on their issue-territory. Being an academic, you may not feel like you are competing with them. But they don't know that. So even a stray comment about how you're interested in a certain topic, or wrote a comment on a certain subject, can be misinterpreted as announcing an attack on their foundation funding. Your life is easier than theirs.
A final point
Before you get too comfortable with the relatively advanced skills I have described in this section, I hope you will take a moment and remember what it was like not having a clue about professional networking. Fix this memory firmly into your mind, and bring it back any time you're working around junior people. Cut them some slack, explain to them what's going on, and hand them a copy of "Networking on the Network".

.::::.

Application Deadlines for LL.M. Programs in the United States

Short list of upcoming deadlines for programs beginning in Fall 2007

For prospective LL.M. students looking to study in the United States, here is a short list of application deadlines for programs beginning in the Fall of 2007.

The 20 law schools listed below were chosen based on the most-viewed university profiles.

NYU - Foreign-trained lawyers: December 1, 2006; US-trained lawyers: April 1, 2007.

Harvard - December 1, 2006 (strongly encouraged by November 15)

UCLA - February 1, 2007

Columbia - December 15, 2006; "Early Review Program" November 1, 2006.

Fordham - Fall 2007 deadline not yet announced (Applications for 2006 were due May 15)

USC - March 1, 2007

Berkeley - December 15, 2006

Georgetown - "Early Action" foreign lawyers: November 15, 2006; US Lawyers, January 5, 2007

Stanford - December 15, 2006

Cardozo (Yeshiva University) - June 15, 2007

San Diego - July 1, 2007 (Fall admissions)

Illinois - February 15, 2007; encouraged as early as possible after January 1, 2007

Vanderbilt - March 31, 2007

Penn Law - December 1, 2006 “Early Notification” deadline; January 1, 2007 for other LL.M. and LL.C.M. applications

Yale - LLM: December 1, 2006; recommended as soon as possible after September 1, 2006.

George Washington - Non-U.S. law school graduates: March 15, 2007; U.S. law school graduates: June 1, 2007 (Fall semester)

Texas (Austin) - February 1, 2007

Hofstra - June 1, 2007 (Pirority Deadline)

Hawaii - March 1, 2007

Michigan - January 3, 2007

Please note that deadlines sometimes change and often vary due to the variety of postgraduate programs being offered.

All prospective students are advised to double-check the deadlines as soon as possible before applying.

.::Interview Tips Part 2::.

FOLLOW UP AND STAND OUT. Follow up the interview with a "thank you" letter. Not only will such a letter remind the interviewer of your existence, but will also help you stand out from within a large pool of candidates. You may also look at this as a follow up interview in which you get to do all the talking!
BODY LANGUAGE IS IMPORTANT. Make sure to have positive body language throughout the interview. Good eye contact, good posture, moderate body/arm movement and an air or enthusiasm are extremely important.
DON'T' REVEAL EVERYTHING. Although you should be talking about yourself to a great extent, make sure you don't overdo it! Take care not to launch into tirades about irrelevant or negative aspects of your life and personality. Be careful not to bare your soul and express negative feelings or ideas about others (unless specifically asked). Try to be as congenial and diplomatic as possible.
OK, SO YOU'RE NOT PERFECT. If an interview points out a mistake or a negative quality about you, try to show him/her a positive perspective of the same thing. In such a situation you should be challenging, but not rude or stubborn. If, despite all discussions, it seems that the interviewer has got you cornered, don't hesitate to accept or own up to your mistakes. However, don't miss the opportunity to express how you've learned from the mistake and are now a better, more capable student.
RELAX BUT CONCENTRATE. Your demeanor during the interview should be one of relaxed concentration. You should tune out any "noise" inside your head and concentrate on the moment at hand. This concentration on the present will also help you avoid distractions, nervousness, or self-doubt.
PREPARE, YET BE SPONTANEOUS. Act spontaneous, but in actuality be extremely well prepared for the interview. The interviewer should not get the impression that you are reading a previously-rehearsed script. This is done by memorizing the points you intend to mention, but not memorizing the actual words. For example, you may decide beforehand that when they ask you about the reason why you want to join their college, you will start out by mentioning the fact that the particular college has one of the most qualified faculties (or anything else you may want to point out). However, the words you choose to say that should be coming naturally and spontaneously. In short: rehearse the content, but not the words.
SELL YOURSELF. If the interviewer does not get around to asking you questions which you think are extremely relevant, go onto them yourself (diplomatically). For example, if you want to mention your exceptional GPA but are asked about extracurriculars, you may respond, "I feel that ECs are extremely important for a student and I have participated in my fair share of ECs (mention them here), but I still feel that academic performance is a critical factor behind success and that is where the bulk of my effort has always been concentrated, which is reflected in my GPA, which was in the top 1% of my school..."
KNOW WHERE YOU ARE GOING. Leave home with the address of the admission office or off-campus site, a contact phone number, and a good set of directions and map
BE FLEXIBLE. Give your interviewer a firm handshake, maintain eye contact, and follow his or her lead. Sometimes you will be asked first if you have any questions, other times the admission interviewer will take the initiative with questions. Remember: Try to be flexible!
SUMMARIZE HOW THINGS WENT. Make a mental (or written) list of what you learned about the college. Do this as soon as you finish the interview, so that the facts are fresh in your mind. This information will be helpful weeks or months later, when you wish to compare prospective schools.
AVOID POPULAR CONCEPTIONS. If there is a popular conception of the school (Princeton is isolated, Dartmouth has too many fraternities, Harvard has too little student-teacher contact), don't ask about it. Your interviewer will have heard the same question ten billion times. Save this question for your tour guide or for other students you meet while on campus. You don't want to seem off the wall by asking bizarre questions; but even more you don't want to sound exactly like every other boring kid who was in there before you. Challenge yourself to come up with creative and interesting questions and ones that you are curious about the answer.
PRACTICE FOR YOUR INTERVIEW. Before the actual interview, practice. Many of you have probably never been formally interviewed. OK, maybe there was that interview to work at the Gap over the holidays, but did they really ask you questions that made you think about yourself and your future? Sit down with one of your parents, a teacher, or a friend (who can do this without cracking up), and have him or her ask you real, thought-provoking questions. Then answer them honestly and seriously. Allow your "interviewer" to critique you and listen to what he or she has to say. Maybe he or she will point out that every other word you used in your response was "like": "Yes, like, I really thought that this campus, like, was beautiful. It reminded me, like, of the Italian countryside, like, I went there on vacation this summer."

.::Interview Tips Part 1::.

We have compiled many tips on how best to prepare and perform during your college admission interview. Good luck.

STAY CALM. Prepare by practicing with friends and formulate a few questions to ask. Dress for the occasion. Follow up with a thank-you note.
MAKE AN APPOINTMENT. Although most admission offices will be accommodating to students who would like an interview without an appointment, in order to ensure that someone will be available to sit and talk with you when you visit campus, it is always best to call ahead and make an appointment.
DRESS APPROPRIATELY. When you are picking out an outfit for an interview, keep in mind that you're not going to the prom and you are also not going to your friend's house to play football. You'll want to wear something like what you might wear to dinner at a nice restaurant.
BE YOURSELF. Don't worry if you're not the star scorer on your soccer team, haven't gotten all A's during high school, and were never the class president. Colleges are looking for a well-rounded, personable student who can share candid stories about his or her experiences. The questions are meant to help you tell colleges who you really are as a person and a student. Just be honest and answer the questions as best you can. If the interview is going well, you won't even feel like you are answering questions; you'll feel like you're just having a conversation.
MAKE EYE CONTACT. It may be awkward and you might be nervous, but it's always best to look at someone in the eye when you are talking with them. Making eye contact shows that you are listening to the admission counselor and that you are serious about your answers to their questions. Besides, you won't find the answers on the ceiling or out the window, so why look there?
TAKE YOUR TIME. If an admission counselor asks you a difficult or challenging question, he or she is only trying to dig a little deeper to learn more about your personality. Sometimes questions are intended to be slightly more challenging, so take your time answering them. It is perfectly okay for you to say something like "Oh, I need to think about that one for a minute," rather than blurting out something like "I don't know. No one ever asked me that before." Admission counselors don't expect you to have immediate answers to all of their questions, so take your time to ensure that you are answering their questions with thoughtful answers.
TURN THE TABLES. It's always a good idea to have some questions in mind that you want to ask the counselor at the end of the interview. Not only does asking your own questions show that you are truly interested in the school, but it also allows for you to interview the counselor and find out what his or her experiences have been like at the school, either as a student or as a staff member.
DO YOUR HOMEWORK. Read the information the college has sent you. If you have not received admission literature, consult the college guides in your school or library or on the Internet.
HERE ARE SOME TYPICAL INTERVIEW QUESTIONS. Why are you considering this college? How did you come to include us among your choices? What makes you think this college and you are right for each other? Where else are you applying and why? Which is your first choice? What do you hope to major in? Why? If you were the principal of your school, what would you change? What are your plans for the future? What do you expect to be doing ten years from now? What have you liked or disliked about your high school? What would you like to tell us about yourself? What newspapers and magazines do you read? What books not required by your courses have you read recently? What television shows do you watch? Tell us about your family? How do you spend a typical afternoon after school? Evening? Weekend? What extracurricular activities have you found most satisfying? What are your strengths? Weaknesses? Do you have any heroes, contemporary or historical? How would your best friend describe you? If you could talk with any one person, whom would it be and why? How do you feel about Terrorist acts? Legalizing drugs? Globalization? What events have been crucial in your life? What is the most significant contribution you have made to your school or community? What is the most important thing you have learned in high school? What do you want to get out of your college experience?
THE MAGIC QUESTION. There is always one SINGLE question behind every question you are asked: "Why should we accept you?" Be sure that every response you make, regardless of the question, ends in answering this question.

.::Get a welcoming handshake in minutes with 'instant' admissions::.

Getting accepted into Newbury College this fall could take about as long as watching your favorite sitcom. Instead of filling out a lengthy application and waiting weeks for a reply, students can take advantage of the school's "instant admissions" option. Applicants meet with an admissions official–either at the college's Brookline, Mass., campus or their high school–who reviews their transcript and test scores and asks them a few questions about their academic interests or extracurricular activities. Applicants then get a thumbs up or thumbs down, usually within a half an hour.

Virtually unheard of 20 years ago, "instant" or "on-site" admission has been adopted by a host of state schools over the past decade, including William Paterson University of New Jersey in Wayne and Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. Now, private colleges like Newbury and DePaul University in Chicago are jumping on the bandwagon, too. For schools, the advantage of this quickie service is that it ups the percentage of accepted students who choose to attend. Students given a welcoming handshake during an interview are more likely to attend the university than other admitted students, says John Fraire, dean of admissions at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. For their part, high school seniors get a big reduction in stress. While they may be offered admission as early as the fall, they usually can wait until May to give the school an answer. Julia Pravlochak, 18, didn't wait that long, however. When offered a spot in Western Michigan's freshman class last fall, she immediately accepted. "I had the best smile on my face," she says.

Going with an instant-admission interview does not appear to increase or lower your chances of getting in. At Newbury, for instance, the regular and instant-admission applicant pools both have acceptance rates of about 80 percent.

"Don't see this as drive-through admissions," warns Sal Liberto, assistant dean of admissions at Newbury. Call the college ahead of time and ask what you need to bring, he says. Newbury requires a personal essay, for example; Western Michigan does not. Also be sure to practice your interview with a guidance counselor or parent. If you got an F in sophomore English, you should be able to explain why you received the grade and how you've improved. If you can't, you might flunk instant admissions, too. -U.B.

.::How should I answer questions about where else I am applying?::.

Don't, say many high school counselors. "Full disclosure is not in the student's best interest," says Judith Williams, a college counselor at the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pa. The reason is that the information may be used against you. While some schools just want to figure out what college criteria matter to you (all the schools on your list have strong journalism programs, for instance) so as to better market their campus to you, others want to assess how likely you are to attend if admitted. That's potentially a problem at colleges attempting to boost their yield, the fraction of admitted students who ultimately enroll. Such colleges may preemptively reject (or wait-list) top candidates with more popular schools on their lists.

So what to do? Some counselors suggest answering with a few similarly competitive schools from your list or stating that you are still undecided. Willard Dix, college counselor at the University of Chicago Laboratory High School, usually recommends leaving the question blank (on the application) or declaring yourself uncomfortable with the question (in an interview). "I don't want to put kids in the negative position of lying or prevaricating," he says.

Don't be surprised if an interviewer pushes for an answer. Mark Geyer says a Tufts University alumni interviewer asked four or five times what other schools he was applying to. He tried to evade the question, he says, but the interviewer persisted. The experience left Geyer with "a sour aftertaste." Although he was admitted to Tufts, this fall he enrolled at Harvard in Cambridge, Mass. But for the most part, colleges will let unanswered questions slide. "I respect a student who says they prefer not to answer," says Michael Frantz, vice president for enrollment services at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

.::Should I include other extras with my application?::.

If you have a special talent that can be captured in a portfolio, you should consider sending that material to the admissions office–particularly if you've received recognition for it from someone other than your mom. Smaller colleges especially welcome extras. "We really want to know as much about each candidate as possible," says Paula Mitchell, director of admission at Ithaca College in New York. Ithaca freshman Genevieve Conklin sent slides of her paintings to emphasize that, although she didn't plan on majoring in art, she devoted considerable time to creating it. Many big state schools don't have the time to examine your works of genius, however, so find out the school's policy before dropping your creative output into the mail.

If your talent–in student politics, for example–won't fit in a portfolio, include a résumé in your application, says Pam Proctor, president of College Application Consultants in Vero Beach, Fla. On the résumé, you can detail what you accomplished in each of the activities listed on your application.

.::I know an alumna (or a CEO or a senator). Should I ask her for a recommendation?::.

Additional recommendations that shed light on your abilities or personality can bolster your chances but only if written by someone who knows you well. VIP recommendations that say merely that Joey or Jill mowed the lawn and seemed like a nice kid don't help.

Jeff Lee, a freshman at Duke University in Durham, N.C., used a recommendation from his boss at a medical technology company in Rockville, Md., to spotlight the skills in market research and event planning that he had developed on the job. "Getting a recommendation from a boss shows what potential you might have in the workplace as opposed to what your capabilities are as a student," says Lee, who plans to major in economics.

An endorsement from an alumnus who is a friend or mentor can also be influential. "We want recommendations that say why a student would be successful at Juniata," says Michelle Bartol, dean of enrollment at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pa. "Alumni can write those types of recommendations because they know the school."

Quantity, however, should not be confused with quality. Emory has instituted a three-recommendation limit. Most other schools say they rarely want more than four recommendations total–and definitely not the 14 that filled one applicant's folder at Wake Forest last spring.

.::I got into some trouble at school. Do I need to 'fess up on my application?::.

In a word, yes. If a college asks whether you've ever been suspended, expelled, or arrested, you should come clean about your misdeeds. Admissions officers want to ferret out the nasty characters who could harm other students or cause legal headaches down the road, so youthful high jinks don't worry them much. Charges of assault, drug dealing, and academic dishonesty, on the other hand, will be closely scrutinized.

The key here is to demonstrate that your brush with authority led to personal growth. Writing a thoughtful explanation of what happened will help, but if the infraction is serious, a special trip to colleges to explain yourself in person may be in order. Soon after one Florida high schooler was expelled when marijuana was found in her car, she arranged a meeting with officials from the New College of Florida in Sarasota to describe what happened. The student had already signed up for drug counseling and taken steps toward earning her GED. Joel Bauman, dean of admissions and financial aid, was impressed: "She confronted the problem head on and had done things to make up for it. That takes courage, integrity, and character." The student was admitted.

Whatever you do, don't lie. "If a student has falsified their answer [to the discipline question], I have no problem pulling the rug out from under them," says Christopher Gruber, director of admission at the University of Richmond in Virginia. The likely leaks? High school counselors required by school rules to report infractions to colleges and teachers who inadvertently mention in a recommendation letter how much Johnny has matured since he burned the gym down junior year.

.::Learn to dance with admissions: I heard that "showing interest" will help me get in. How do I do that?::.

By Rachel Hartigan Shea and Ulrich Boser

Challenging course load? Check. Decent test scores? Check. Eloquent essay? Check. Strategy for dealing with the admissions office? Uh-oh. You thought you'd done everything within your power to get into your dream school. But in fact, there's still one more subject you need to master–the etiquette of dealing with the folks in the admissions office. We asked admissions officers and guidance counselors for advice on handling such unusual–and awkward–social situations as reporting your own bad behavior or answering questions about where else you plan to apply. Among the things we found out: Confessing to a silly sophomore suspension won't derail your application, but listing all of your other college choices might. Read on for more surprising tips:

I heard that "showing interest" will help me get in. How do I do that?

Rory Gavin used her car. After she was wait-listed at Wake Forest University, the 17-year-old drove 12 hours from her home in Massapequa, N.Y., to Winston-Salem, N.C., to pay the school a second visit–and to demonstrate to the admissions office that she was still eager to attend. She was one of the first to be admitted off the wait list last May.

Colleges want to know how much high schoolers want them. It gives them a better handle on which applicants will enroll if accepted, preventing the expensive error of too many, or too few, students come fall. As a result, many schools will record your every contact with the campus. If you order a video tour of Atlanta's Emory University, an admissions officer will note the request in your application folder. E-mails to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, will be logged into a database. Most institutions naturally construe a campus visit as a sign of serious interest, so you should be sure to travel to the schools that top your list–and let the admissions office know you've stopped by.

But don't, as Stevie Wonder sings, just call to say I love you. With every contact you should be either updating admissions officers on recent achievements or seeking information about the school that you cannot find in the brochures. Ask how many students stick around campus over the weekend, for instance. Or ask about the closest mosque or Methodist church. Don't go overboard, however. "So many kids make the mistake of being overly aggressive," says Tom Parker, dean of admissions at Amherst College in Massachusetts. "It does more harm than good."

Will admissions officers think I'm a pest if I check on my application?

Depends on what you mean by "check." Trying to find out whether you've been accepted before decisions are released will most definitely irritate admissions officers. But checking that your application is complete could stave off disaster. Katherine Nuckols, a sophomore at Elon University in North Carolina, didn't realize until March of her senior year that the College Board hadn't sent her SAT scores to the colleges. She had to postpone higher education for a year and go through the whole process again. The second time around, she says, "I was that annoying person who called every single day." She ended up getting into all of the 12 schools to which she applied.

.::Application Process: GPA, GRE, Resume, Statement of Purpose, Recommendation Letters, Writing Sample::.

a. Time management is crucial here. Do a backward timeline scheduling so you know what you need to do in order to have all materials ready for mailing before the deadline. Find out when GRE dates are and how long your professors need to write you recommendation letters.

b. Your GPA is an important criterion in admission. Try to have at least a B - GPA. Schools may toss out application below a certain GPA unless you’ve made other efforts for them to consider even reading your application (good words from professors advocating for review of your application b/c other parts of your application are stronger). Some schools will cons ider GPA of one’s major versus one’s overall GPA.

c. Many programs require at least a general GRE test score. Other programs require the general and a discipline specific GRE score.

Make sure you take the right tests that the programs required.
i. There are study groups for GRE. If none exists, form one!
ii. There are expensive classes to help you prepare for the GRE as well.
iii. The test is now computer-based. Go to http://www.gre.org for more information and to sign up and obtain a CD to practice for the exam.

d. Sometimes, department or program requires a resume. A one or two-page resume can be a quick documentation of your achievements. This can also help you in writing your statement of purpose, too.

e. The Statement of Purpose is ve ry important!
i. You want to demonstrate to them that you know what you’re doing. Your experience has prepared you for their program.
ii. Their program meets your needs. You meet their needs in becoming a stellar student whom they can brag for years.
iii. Provide information about your uniqueness, achievements, abilities, goals, and determination to finish graduate school.
iv. Write many, many drafts. Have many proofreaders.

f. You want professors/employers who can write you a STRONG letter of recommendation. Some professors don’t like to say no and may end up writing you a lukewarm letter, which is not to your best interest.
i. If you have choices to choose from, pick people who are prominent and respected in your field.
ii. Consider if your recommender has a positive relationship with the institution you are applying. It could work against you.
iii. Ask your potential recommender if they are willing to write you a strong letter and let them know when it’s due. Then, give a draft of all pertinent application information to your recomme nder at least a month in advance of the deadline .

g. Writing samples allow the admission committee to have a better idea about your writing and analytical abilities. Many programs now require that you submit a writing sample if not two. Writing samples are basically papers you have written in your undergraduate classes.
i. Consider the program you’re applying to and send the most appropriate/relevant writing sample.
ii. Before you send the paper, have several people proofread it. Make sure it’s a paper you’re proud of and had earned a good
grade. Use this paper to illustrate your skills in your statement of purpose.
iii. It would be even more appealing to show that you have some research interests for grad school already by providing a writing sample that is about your research interest.

.::SECTION 8. How to Get Tenure::.

A professor once told me that getting tenure is like not getting hit by a train. What she meant is that what matters psychologically is the prospect of being denied tenure. Coming up for tenure is extraordinarily stressful for many people, and this stress causes many people to distort their lives and their research in an attempt to second-guess a tenure process that they do not experience as rational. My goal here is to explain the process of getting tenure in a way that relieves the stress and makes such distortions unnecessary.

The first concept you need is deep tenure -- the kind of tenure that derives from an extensive network of relationships within your field. People who are starting out in their first job as a professor often misunderstand their relationships with the other faculty in their department. They are looking for some kind of community among equals, and they are often surprised to find their colleagues investing most of their attention in the outside world. The junior faculty feel that they need to work closely with the senior faculty who will decide their tenure cases, or at least they will invest effort in politicking those senior faculty in an attempt to influence the eventual decision. Much of this effort is misdirected. Of course, senior faculty do exist who ignore junior faculty or treat them callously. But you should understand that a department of a research university is not the sort of village that Tocqueville idealized. Instead, it is more like an alliance of entrepreneurs, each of them moving and shaking in the larger world as well as within their departments.

Once you understand your department in those terms, the question of tenure changes. Getting tenure in your department is good, but more important is getting deep tenure: a thoroughgoing integration of yourself and your career into your field as a whole. I have already explained most of the process, which is nothing but publishing, articulating commonalities, networking, identifying emerging themes, organizing activities, and so on. Once you obtain deep tenure, your university would be foolish to lose you. And if your university does in fact fumble your tenure case, deep tenure means that you are nearly certain to have another good job waiting for you somewhere else. If you put enough effort into networking, and if you shift your psychology away from your department and toward your field as a whole, then the process of getting tenure will be much less distressing. You will be less likely to engage in excess politicking of your immediate colleagues. And you will be able to relate to your colleagues as fellow movers and shakers rather than as neighbors in an idealized village. In particular, your independent standing in the field, because of your widespread network, will increase your autonomy and make you less open to manipulation by others.

The best news of all is that getting tenure and getting deep tenure are more or less the same process. Here is how it works. When you come up for tenure, or for any other career review, your tenure case will be decided by people who lack deep knowledge of your research area. Therefore -- and this is a basic mechanism of the university on all levels -- they will necessarily seek out evidence of your research accomplishments other than your own estimate or theirs. One common measure is where and how much you have published in peer reviewed venues such as refereed journals and scholarly publishers. So of course you should publish a lot, with your main emphasis on those kinds of outlets as opposed to nonacademic publications and unrefereed chapters in edited books.

More important than publication, though, will be the letters that your department will get from senior people in your research area. For that reason, your tenure campaign should be very much organized around those people. This means networking, very much as I have described it above, but with a more systematic approach. It couldn't be simpler. Make a list of the twenty people whom your department is most likely to get letters from. These will be senior people whose work is widely known, and who are known themselves as the leading figures in particular areas. Make sure that every important aspect of your work is covered by this list. Then set out to build strong professional relationships with every one of those people in the ways that I have been describing in previous sections. This is easier than it sounds. By the time you come up for tenure, you may have had three or four conversations with each person on your list. That may not sound like much. But if you have been working the process in the right way then that will be plenty. When your tenure case approaches, your university will probably ask you for a list of suggested referees, and you should discuss with your colleagues which names would work best on your list. You can also ask the individuals involved whether they would be willing to write a letter if they are asked. (You don't have to ask them, th