One Week in Graduate School: Crazy Making

After graduating from Shepherd with a BS in Communication in May, I began my transition into a new life as a MA student and Graduate Teaching Assistant at West Virginia University. Last Thursday was my first day of orientation, so today marks one week in grad school.

If you're going to go to graduate school, know that nothing can prepare you for the experience. You will be incredibly stressed the entire time, and there is no longer such a thing as sleep. For this week, I had to read 19 scholarly research papers, with an average length of 15-20 pages, and write a research proposal. By next Tuesday, I'll need to read three more 20 page articles. The only other people I ever see are the other 12 people in the MA program, and we are practically required to be friends, as we all share an office. For comparison's sake, this would be like 6 people sharing Jason's office at Shepherd. We have 5 classes a semester, with each one requiring a ten page APA formatted paper, with one class also having three exams on top of such a paper. While doing this, my GTA duties include being the immediate supervisor of seven undergraduate teaching assistants (who are basically paper-graders that do what I say for 3 credits), running the gradebook for two sections of Introduction To Mass Media, totaling 350 students, and being present in my office six hours a week. I also have the great opportunity to give a guest lecture for one section of Introduction To Mass Media, which I will likely take up.

I'm not writing this to complain about how busy I am. On the contrary, I have never felt more fulfilled in my life. This is an incredibly challenging program, but it is a challenge that I can not wait to complete. I write this because some of you readers may be thinking about graduate school.

If you hate classes like Kevin's Media Studies, or Jason's Gender In Film classes, because of all the complex ideas and long writing assignments, grad school is probably not for you. If you love these courses, love writing APA papers, and want to learn how to do empirical, quantitative research (the work done in most classes at Shepherd, Kushin excluded, would be described as critical/rhetorical research), then WVU is a great program. In fact, there has been actual research done that suggests that WVU is the best Communication Studies university in the nation when analyzed by how much published research comes out of the school. Also, if you like producing media, graduate school doesn't really involve that, and you will not have time to do it on your own.

Kevin Williams once told me that when he got to his masters degree program, he realized he really knew nothing about what he had thought he knew everything about in Undergraduate. This is a statement that I would totally agree with. In fact, I probably know less today than I did on Monday, and if this blog is incoherent, being in one classroom from 9 am to 5 pm everyday for "hell week" is probably the reason. Next week will slow down considerably, but I will still be very busy.

So, to recap:

Go to grad school, you'll love the challenge and all the things you'll be learning!
Don't go to grad school, because Dr. Rold told me today that I'll stop being tired around Christmas.
Doing this much work is making me lose my mind.
I've learned more in this past week than I did in entire semesters of undergrad.

And, if you're far enough away from grad school time (you should start applying in November of your senior year of undergrad), take some of Kushin's classes, because that stuff that I completely missed out on at Shepherd would have been really helpful as background material.

Finally, go find a Comm Journal Article by Alan Goodboy, Scott Myers, or Melanie Booth-Butterfield and read it, regardless of whether you have interest in graduate school.

Seriously, right now. Get on Ebscohost and read "Funny Students Cope Better" by Melanie and Steven Booth-Butterfield and Melissa Wanzer. Go read "Instructional Dissent In the College Classroom" by Alan Goodboy. Go read "Perceived Aggressive Instructor Communication and Student State Motivation, Learning, and Satisfaction" by Scott Myers. This department has some amazing researchers on staff.