Customer Reviews

The Real Guide to Grad School: What You Better Know Before You Choose Humanities & Social Sciences

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This is the one and only source book you will need for grad school research in humanities/social sciences. I am an impoverished film school guy and I had to research everything you can think of to try and get a scholarship. I had begun reading other "how to" books with a jaundiced eye. I started peeping at this book every time I was in a bookstore to the point where I broke down and bought it. Graduate school counseling services perused my copy and bought one for every single one of its staff members. The information is well presented and informative without being redundant or overly scholarly. The book is even funny at times! Accept no substitutes.

Researching graduate schools is like doing graduate research - the obstacles filter out all but the persevering. I can't imagine a better starting point for your research than "A Real Guide to Grad School".

How does one specialize in the humanities and social sciences? Are there job opportunities after completing a doctorate in anthropological studies, in medieval Italian history, in German literary studies? Is there any common currency (like mathematics in the sciences) that can provide some degree of career flexibility? Or once a specialist, always a specialist?

The high school student is overwhelmed by shelf after shelf of college guidebooks and school rankings. But comparatively little can be found on graduate schools. Graduate school evaluation is more complex, rankings change with the gain or loss of professors, and as publishers recognize, the market is smaller. We are quite lucky that such a guidebook even exists.

"Real Guide" is prefaced (some 50 pages) with a pragmatic look at what life as a grad student entails, a historical perspective of the "rise of the research scholar", and overviews of the admission process and financial issues.

The bulk of this book is comprised of 23 chapters (12 to 20 pages each) with a similar format - an examination of how a discipline evolved, informed speculation what will happen next, and an analysis of job trends.

Each chapter begins by introducing a somewhat representative graduate student or two - I found them a bit intimidating in their maturity, experience, and expectations. Following these profiles is a historical summary of the "intellectual and methodological" development of the discipline. This may sound dry, but it was helpful in understanding differences in emphasis and approach by various universities. For example, we learn that the quantitative approach to historical studies shifted prestige away from Ivy League departments to the large state schools. And Portuguese may be resurgent because some of the best theoretical language research is coming out of Brazil. Also, boning up on differential equations is the best preparation for graduate economic studies.

Each section ends with a look at the current academic and nonacademic job prospects of recent Ph.D's. An appendix even lists by name all graduating Ph.D's, their school, their discipline, and where they were hired. This book is really two books in one - a guide to grad schools and a guide to an eventual job position. I highly recommend this book and give it five stars. It is without peers.

Wanting to be a graduate student and actually becoming one are so far apart they barely share an atmosphere. This book does a superb job of building a bridge between one state and the other.

The chapters on individual departments and specialties are detailed, thoughtful, and extensive. They not only include information on where the specialty has been, but they also examine where it is heading, what the hottest (and best-funded) topics currently are, and what are the best universities for particular sub-branches of the subject--in many cases, citing the names of prominent professors who are there at the moment. While some of them may no longer be teaching at those institutions, having a name to start a search can lead you to their current placements, their old publications, and programs that supported them in their research.

One of the cruel ironies of fate is that this book is now out of print, and therefore no longer updated. More than ten years after this book came out, some of the information is undoubtedly past it's expiration date. It doesn't matter. For all the specific and time-sensitive information it possesses, this book is surprisingly general when it comes to examining the basic questions of what it means to enter graduate school in the various disciplines. It looks at, not only the new hot areas of study, but also the old traditional standbys and a few areas they identify as up-and-coming, so you aren't left completely at the whim of the trends of the mid-nineties. Given that the NRC data they are quoting is still the most recent--the next list doesn't come out until fall 2008--you're still doing as well as can be expected, ranking-wise. Your own research into the particular program that interests you will help you fill out any gaps or lapses.

At this rate, I anticipate that this book will become dated sometime around 2020--and even then, some of the general observations, warnings, and advise about graduate study will still no doubt be true. It is, hands down, the best graduate school guide I've ever read or seen. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in a career in graduate study in the humanities. (And, for what it's worth, try to read more of the chapters than just the one you think you're interested in. You never know where your interests will take you.)

I bought a handful of guides to graduate school in preparation for PhD studies, and this is the least useful of those. I cannot imagine how anyone qualified for graduate studies in any field would find any new information in 'Real Guide'. Really, the reason why anyone would be applying to a graduate program if they were not already in possession of the truly superficial knowledge contained in this book is beyond me. Of its 511 pages, 440 are divided into puny sections on the various fields of study that make up the standard university. These sections are incredibly cursory, and offer nothing to any half-serious student. The remaining pages of 'Real Guide' are shared between a shallow history of graduate education, 12 pages on admissions, a miserly section on funding, and an inexplicable appendix listing a few recent professorial hires. I hesitate to return or sell this book for fear it land in the lap of someone naive enough to treat it as sufficient information.

Skip it. Wikipedia would be more useful, and it's free.

The clear cut discipline categories embraced by this book leave little for those searching in any specific manner. Highly limiting categories which are all becoming mute in the increasingly interdisciplinized academy and serve to equilize highly different programs. I was quite dissappointed.