Tales from the Classroom: Prospective Students

Posted on March 5, 2004 @ 10:32 pm

My department asked several graduate students, myself included, to meet this afternoon with a group of prospective students considering entering the MA and Ph.D. programs next semester. I’ve always thought that leaving prospective students alone with current students is a somewhat less than prudent strategy. After all, you’re unlikely to find a more disgruntled group of people than a bunch of overworked and underpaid graduate students. We did our best to put a positive spin on the program, though.

When asked how much work the average class requires a week, we confessed that it’s usually at least a book a week per class, but noted that you eventually pick up some handy speed-reading skills along the way. Plus, no matter how much work we’re assigned, we were careful to point out that it’s not nearly as bad as the average “real world” job. When asked if our assistantships paid enough to get by, we tried to stress the low cost of living in town. Plus, we aren’t in graduate school because of the money we’re making — or the money we hope to make later if we land a job in academia. If we were interested in money, we would have gone to law school. We’re in graduate school because we love the subject matter. As one of my colleagues pointed out, we’d probably all be sleeping on park benches somewhere if we weren’t graduate students.

We did try to warn the prospective students that studying political science in this day and age isn’t quite the same thing as simply studying politics. For instance, the former requires significantly more mathematical training than the latter.

Eventually, however, one one of the prospective students got around to asking the $64,000 question: “So, do you guys feel like you made the right choice coming here?” After spending the past hour doing our best to paint the department in a positive — albeit honest — light, none of us could produce an answer to this simple question. Instead, we just glanced around at one another uncomfortably for a few moments before someone finally began to discuss the fact that the university compares favorably to other similarly-ranked schools around the country. None of the current students, however, was willing to go on record categorically affirming that coming to the university to study was a good idea.

That’s graduate students for you. I’m sure that you’d find the same thing at Harvard.

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