Editing How to learn from a thing that's not your thing
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Learning from a thing that's not your thing is a necessary part of scholarship: it can be generative and exciting. It can also be boring and overwhelming. The invitations go out constantly, tugging at your sleeve to bid for your time. Sometimes "nope" is the right answer, but it turns out that saying "yep" is often a good idea. | Learning from a thing that's not your thing is a necessary part of scholarship: it can be generative and exciting. It can also be boring and overwhelming. The invitations go out constantly, tugging at your sleeve to bid for your time. Sometimes "nope" is the right answer, but it turns out that saying "yep" is often a good idea. | ||
Graduate school and academic culture is filled with all kinds of events and | Graduate school and academic culture is filled with all kinds of events and activities -- some highly related to your research, some not. Attending these events and learning from them is part of the "hidden curriculum" of graduate school -- but that means the lessons to be learned can be a bit implicit. Although it might make a lot of sense to attend these events to learn these lessons, the vague/hidden nature of the lessons can make a person feel lost. If one goes in expecting explicit connections to one's own work, letting unrelated work just wash over you may feel like a waste of time. This page is a list of concrete lessons to be learned from varying kinds of events that happen, and the kinds of lessons that can be learned from going to them even if they're not related to your area of work. | ||
=== | ===Job Talks=== | ||
* What goes into a job talk? | |||
* Is it terrifying? What does awkward and unprepared look like? | |||
* How does someone summarize a body of work into an interesting story that can appeal to a broad group but still sound scholarly? | |||
* What kinds of questions do people ask? | |||
* Who will attend my job talk? | |||
===Defenses=== | |||
* | * What goes into a defense? | ||
* What does | * Is it terrifying? What does awkward and unprepared look like? | ||
* | * What's the flow of who speaks when and how much? | ||
* How does someone summarize a body of work into an interesting story that can appeal to a broad group but still sound scholarly? | |||
* | * How specific should I get? | ||
* What | * What kinds of questions do people ask? | ||
* Who will attend my defense? Who do I want to invite? | |||
===Workshop=== | ===Workshop=== | ||
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* Use the comments that people make to build a summary or set of notes for yourself in your zotero. You might find it useful later. | * Use the comments that people make to build a summary or set of notes for yourself in your zotero. You might find it useful later. | ||
=== | ===Departmental Lectures, Colloquia, Special Speaker Things=== | ||
* If it's your department and during daylight hours, you probably should go. Because probably someone is noticing who goes. | |||
* | * What does the organizer do? When it's your turn to organize a thing like this, what will you need to know? | ||
* | * Unrelated to your thing? Thank goodness. Someone is about to save you a lot of time, because they'll summarize an area of knowledge and work for you, and that means you don't have to read the books and take the classes to at least be conversant enough in the topic to know it's not related to your thing -- or what the connections might be. | ||
* | * See previous lessons: what's at stake, why this speaker, how do they structure the argument, how would you do it, where do they fall short? | ||
* | |||