Advice for graduate students
Note
Useful how-to guides for graduate students in the social sciences. Also see Advice for college students.
Getting into graduate school
- Master’s degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education. (Not so bad in Taiwan, where the costs are lower and many foreign MA students have funding, but I often warn students away from MA programs in the US and UK. Often better to just do a PhD directly, or do an MA in Taiwan and then a PhD abroad.)
- For those considering graduate school.
- Something I wrote on picking a graduate program in anthropology.
- Getting in to graduate school.
- What you’ll wish you’d known.
Advice for those in graduate school
- Charles Tilly’s PPT “selecting a dissertation topic“
- The Art of Writing Proposals
- Writing Grant Proposals for Anthropological Research
- Matthew Wolf-Meyer's advice on professionalization (including choosing a committee, preparing for exams, writing a dissertation, etc.)
- awesome-PhD: All the resources I wish I knew when starting my PhD.
Thesis Writing
- Dunleavy, Patrick. 2003. Authoring a PhD Thesis: How to Plan, Draft, Write and Finish a Doctoral Dissertation. 2003 edition. Red Globe Press.
- ———. 2009. 博士论文写作技巧: 博士论文的计划, 起草, 写作和完成. 东北财经大学出版社 = Dongbei University of finance & economy Press.
- Weaving vs. Bookending
- Starn, Orin. 2022. “Anthropology and the Misery of Writing.” American Anthropologist, February. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13677.
Methodology
- Crane, Julia G., and Michael V. Angrosino. 1984. Field Projects in Anthropology: A Student Handbook. Waveland Press.
- Daynes, Sarah, and Terry Williams. 2018. On Ethnography. John Wiley & Sons.
- Family Health International, and Natasha Mack. 2005. Qualitative Research Methods: A Data Collector’s Field Guide. Family Health International.
- Heller, Monica, Sari Pietikäinen, and Joan Pujolar. 2017. Critical Sociolinguistic Research Methods: Studying Language Issues That Matter. Routledge.
- Lareau, Annette. 2021. Listening to People : A Practical Guide to Interviewing, Participant Observation, Data Analysis, and Writing It All up.
- Mullaney, Thomas S., and Christopher Rea. 2022. Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World). University of Chicago Press.
- Pollard, Amy. 2009. “Field of Screams: Difficulty and Ethnographic Fieldwork.” Anthropology Matters 11 (2). https://doi.org/10.22582/am.v11i2.10.
- Russell Bernard, H. 2006. Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. Rowman Altamira.
- Schensul, Jean J., and Margaret Diane LeCompte. 2013. Essential Ethnographic Methods: A Mixed Methods Approach. Rowman Altamira.
- Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2013. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (2nd Edition). Zed Books Ltd.