Grad School Tips

So... You Want an Academic Job

Please take a look at my other page sharing job market resources, which goes into depth about job market processes.

But here I want to quickly discuss preparing for an academic job, because I have seen students get poor advising on this topic and then totally miss the boat. Key takeaway: Preparation for the academic job market begins on day one of your doctoral journey and centers around publications.

Generally speaking, the most important thing when you are interested in the academic route is that you get as many good-quality publications as you can. Your dissertation matters, but more than anything potential academic employers will be looking at your record of publication, as this is a key indicator of whether you may be likely to make tenure. With this in mind, you should get research experiences and publish as early as possible in your graduate school journey, ideally from year one. You may wonder, what about teaching? Well, if you are interested in working at a more regional teaching university or a community college, teaching experiences will also be quite important. If you are interested in an adjunct role, typically the degree is enough, though teaching experiences are a bonus. Please chat with your advisor about exactly what sorts of academic jobs you are interested in, and make a plan for getting your CV well-developed before you hit the market. 

Zotero

You must use Zotero! Get it here: https://www.zotero.org/download/ It is an amazing tool for organizing your literature and supporting your writing. There are several key functionalities:

• First, if you get the Zotero connector for your browser, with the click of a button you can save articles to your Zotero library when viewing them online. So, say you identify an article on Google Scholar, go to the article page on the journal website, click the browser extension, and the system will save that article's info to your Zotero. I tend to have it save articles to my "To Read" folder in Zotero. Super helpful for organizing. 

• Second, in the Zotero program if you upload the PDF for your article, you can double click the PDF and actually highlight and write sticky notes within the PDF. Just like you would normally. But, the cool, and crucial thing, is that once you are done, you can then have Zotero automatically create text-based notes from the highlights and sticky notes. This saves so much time, and gets you notes that stem from the exact wording in the article. You can also search through your Zotero files and this allows you to search your annotations as well. 

• Third, when you install the Zotero program to your computer, it will automatically install a plug-in into Word. This plug-in allows you to insert citations that are automatically formatted to APA (or whatever you need) and to automatically build a bibliography from the citations you have input. This saves hours of your time when writing research papers, particularly a dissertation. If you remove a citation, Zotero automatically drops it from the bibliography--no need to track the entry down yourself. And for some reference systems that require numbering, which are an absolute pain to deal with (trust me!!!); Zotero makes these systems a breeze. 

Reviewing and Organizing Literature

Here’s my process:

1. Locate the literature. Do this by searching through the library, Google scholar, looking through reference lists of relevant articles, seeing articles in journal notifications, etc. 

2. Save the citations in a to-read folder. I use Zotero and have a folder called “To Review.” 

3. Review the articles! I read the article using the PDF function in Zotero, annotate, and export the annotations, per my Zotero post here.

4. Organize all your annotations in a document. I have a separate bibliography document that I add my annotations into, about a common topic. The primary two topics I review are related to social justice leadership and neoliberal education reforms. So, I have one bibliography of annotations for each topic area. 

5. Make thematic bibliographies. Every so often I spend a bit of time taking the articles I’ve reviewed and moving annotations to themes. This is extremely helpful for writing. So for example, if I read an article on social justice leadership, the article may discuss barriers/risks, actions, and motivations of the leaders. These are also topics I might want to write about. I’ll take all of the annotations I’ve taken and then organize them into themes. I basically just copy and paste into a new document (including parenthetical citations) and add themes as themes come up.  Then, when I want to write, I just look at the thematic bibliography and create sections from that. 

In my social justice leadership bibliography I have the following themes: 

• What is social justice?

• Terms for social justice leadership or similar leadership

• Contexts

• Methods

• Frameworks

• Motivations

• Skills, Dispositions, and Attributes

• Risks/Barriers

• Actions in Schools

• Actions in Community

• Impacts

• Preparation

• Literature Gaps

As you can imagine, organizing all the text I’ve reviewed really helps make writing much easier. Here’s a snippet of part of the In-School Actions section. You can see that there are multiple authors and that I’ve just taken notes and pasted them. Then, when I go to write, I just take different pieces that I feel are most relevant and useful. Sometimes I’ll notice a number of authors have said the same thing, and this also helps me be able to cite multiple authors easily. 

2. Open Word.

3. Click the File tab and then Open, then Browse.

4. Navigate to C:users/YOURID/appdata/roaming/microsoft/templates/Normal.dotm and click “Open”

5. What will open is your template file. Create new headings in the Style section. Leave the document blank.  I think the easiest way to do this is to type in text and then format it how you would for a given heading. For example, for Heading 1 in APA, I would want it bolded and centered (and Times New Roman, 12pt, double spaced). Then select it, and then right click on Heading 1 at the top and click “Update Heading 1 to Match Selection.” Do this with the normal APA text (double spaced, TNR 12pt, indent at beginning of paragraph). For my styles, I have Normal, References, and Headings 1-5. Word includes other style types but I deleted the rest.

6. When done, press Save at the top and close the document.

7. Open a new Word document and check to see if the template saved correctly.

8. For now on, every time you open a new Word document the APA format should be saved in there by default!

Below is what the Navigation function looks like when you have headings. It’s easier to use than scrolling, especially in a long document, as it allows you to instantly navigate to a particular heading. You can open this view by going to the View tab and then Show Navigation Pane.

Writing Literature Reviews 

I don’t have the key to writing a good paper (does anyone?) but I have some good practices for keeping organized and expeditiously getting content on paper. As I mentioned previously, I create thematic bibliographies where I take all of my annotations from the articles I’ve reviewed and arrange them into general topic areas or themes. For social justice leadership, these might be barriers (and then sub-themes), practices (and sub-themes), and preparation (and sub-themes). This is incredibly useful for writing literature reviews. Say my research paper focuses on barriers social justice leaders faced in the Chicago setting. I’d probably want to cover what is already known about barriers in my literature review. So here’s what I’d do:

1. Save my thematic bibliography as a copy with a new title. I do this because in my process I delete text as I add it to the paper I’m writing. I wouldn’t want to delete from the actual primary thematic bibliography document. 

2. Put the thematic document on the left side of my screen and the document I’m writing on the right side. This is helpful so that I’m not going back and forth constantly. I know some people who do the same but with a second monitor. My computer screen is small but just using one screen works for me. Whatever works is fine. 

3. Read through notes on the left side and begin to draft writing. Look at your notes and start writing topic sentences that sort of summarize the main point across the literature. Then add in more specific points from your thematic bibliography underneath. If many authors say the same thing, you don’t need to give that information multiple times, but can cite a few when making your point. This part of the process is really up to how you write best. 

4. Pull notes from the left side into the right side and delete text from the left side as you pull. This helps me know what I’ve already referenced/used. That way I won’t end up repeating myself. 

5. Finish once you’ve exhausted/deleted all of your notes. You may also find that some of your notes are not relevant or that you need more notes for certain sections.

That’s it! This has been a great way for me to get an initial draft on paper very quickly. After that, lots of editing needs to happen, but this really helps with getting the content down on paper. 

The key to this approach is doing the initial legwork to build your thematic bibliography. As I said in my previous post, I do work to build mine constantly, basically adding in notes from articles I’ve reviewed as I go. For one of my big bibliographies (around 120 single-spaced pages of notes so far) on neoliberalism and education, I recently had to make a thematic bibliography from scratch. It did take a day or two of work. But it was 100% worth it. Now, as I review new articles, I’ll add them to the thematic bibliography every few weeks, which is much more manageable.