A week ago, I submitted my dissertation to my committee. As I await my final oral defense, I have been reflecting on the years that I’ve spent in graduate school. I have had an incredible experience at UW, and I’m grateful for the friends, colleagues, and mentors that I’ve met over the past four years. In preparation for my upcoming move overseas, I’ve been going through my bookshelves to decide what to keep, store, or give away. Here are several books that really helped me in graduate school. You’ll notice that they’re not about theory or methodology – depending on your discipline, there are countless ones that can help you there. Instead, these focus on writing, productivity, and being an academic.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

I love Anne Lamott’s writing – she’s funny, self-deprecating, and incredibly honest.  When I first started graduate school, I didn’t realize how much of my life would be spent writing.  Or, more accurately, preparing to write, trying to write, and attempting to revise my writing.  As a former English teacher, I really enjoy writing.  But it’s not something that always comes easy.  As Lamott says, writing “is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work” (p. 7).  Over the years, I’ve realized that many graduate students tend to be perfectionists.  (Or maybe it’s that perfectionists tend to be graduate students).  This can lead to paralyzing perfectionism, which often manifests itself around writing.  In graduate school, you need to write (and write well) to clear the major hurdles: master’s thesis, preliminary exams, dissertation proposal, and the dissertation itself.  Lamott’s book provides insight into the writing process.  While she focuses on fiction, many of the chapters readily apply to academic writing, including the ones entitled “Shitty First Drafts” and “Perfectionism.”

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

This is the kind of book that you may see in Barnes and Nobles’ self improvement section which, incidentally, is not far from the teenage paranormal romance section.  (Thank you, Twilight).  The premise of Allen’s book is that small changes in our daily habits and organizational practices can result in less stress and higher productivity.  Take email, for instance.  Many of us send and receive dozens (if not hundreds) of emails each day.  Allen offers the “do it, delegate it, defer it, or drop it rule” that can be useful in maintaining a nearly-empty inbox.  He also argues that we need to write down all of the things that we need to do, even the everyday tasks like “take the cat to the vet” or “bring donuts to next week’s meeting.”  Otherwise, we’ll remember at random moments and it will be a source of stress.  The book also tackles issues related to setting goals, managing projects, and generally, staying on top of life.  Personally, I found a combination of using Gmail (and having all email accounts forwarded there), Google Calendar (with various color-coded calendars), and Todoist (which works with the Doings app on my iPhone) invaluable.  My friend Alecia prefers CalanGoo with Google Tasks.  Sarah uses beautiful stationary and hand-written lists.  If you consider all of this within a theory of distributed cognition, it makes a lot of sense.

Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success by Wendy Laura Belcher

In my discipline, graduate students are encouraged to publish.  Sometimes, we work as part of a research team and conduct research, analyze data, and write articles together.  Other times, we work on a project with our advisor and publish from that.  These experiences can be instrumental in exposing us to the peer review process, not to mention helping us land a tenure-track position down the road.  But most of us, at some point, may be working on our own, targeting a specific journal, attempting to organize our writing schedule, or just struggling to move an article from conception to completion.  Belcher’s workbook can be incredibly useful in that respect.  While I haven’t followed it from start to finish over 12 weeks, I’ve referred to chapters here and there.  I used to think that there was some magic that went into writing and publishing peer-reviewed articles.  Now I know that it’s more about applying your ass to a chair and your fingers to a keyboard.  Recently, a professor at my university was discussing, with admiration, the writing habits of another senior professor:  “Before he does anything else that day, he writes three pages.”  While I didn’t have the heart to ask if it was single or double-spaced pages, it did leave an impression on me.  Regular, goal-oriented writing is what matters in academia.

Advice for New Faculty Members: Nihil Nimus by Robert Boice

When I was pregnant with my son, I read all of the books that I could about pregnancy, labor, and delivery.  A week before my due date, I had a sudden realization: I hadn’t read any books about parenting.  I had knew nothing about no-cry sleep solutions, the happiest babies on the block, or parenting with love and logic.  Somehow I was so focused on the task at hand, I missed preparing for the next phase of my life.  For a lot of graduate students, the same can happen.  We’re so invested in collecting data, writing our dissertations, and job hunting that it’s easy to feel unprepared for the next step: being a new faculty member.  Boice’s book offers insight into teaching, researching, and writing – all in moderation.  Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Boice’s book come highly recommended, as does Ms. Mentor’s Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia by Emily Toth.  I read them both a couple of years ago, and I plan to reread them again in the coming months.

I’m very excited to finish my doctorate and begin my career as a literacy researcher.  As I make that transition, I thought it may be useful to share some of the resources that helped me in graduate school.  Any other books, websites, or tools you would like to add?

Photo Credit: lowjumpingfrog

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