Customer Reviews

The Women's Guide to Surviving Graduate School

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This book seems to have a specific target audience: people at the very beginning of their graduate careers -- those deciding whether to go, those applying, and those in their first year or first semester. The authors provide practical if basic advice on the application process, financial considerations, and taking classes. The book will be most useful for (a) people returning to university after a long time away, who need to be reintroduced to life as a student; (b) those who, whether undergraduates or returning students, know very little about what is involved in applying to graduate school -- and the authors do have good advice on many little details and dos and don'ts of the application process; and (c) those attending masters programs or professional schools. The book is ostensibly aimed at women, but although there are some discussions of family, finances, gender discrimination, sexual harassment, study space, and time management that might be particularly relevant for women, most of the advice would apply to anyone who is considering or just starting graduate school.

The book will not, however, be very useful for students who are already midway through graduate school, especially those in Ph.D programs. More than half of the book is taken up with the time before graduate school (applying to and preparing for), and the discussions of being in graduate school only deal with coursework -- which, again, suggests that the intended audience is masters and professional students rather than Ph.D. students. The book's main weakness is that it contains no discussion of writing dissertations or theses, conducting research (which even masters programs tend to require), or preparing and professionalizing for academia.

Those who are just starting to think about graduate school might benefit from reading through this book, but there are better guides that cover more of the graduate experience (in addition to what this book discusses) and that are also more useful for those pursuing a Ph.D. or aiming for an academic career, particularly Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student's Guide to Earning an M.A. or a Ph.D., by Robert Peters.

This book is the bomb. I really got so much out of it. A lot of it is basic information, but I really liked the way this book puts everything you need together. It is also tailored towards women's issues. You can really get some good planning information from here, including worksheets to organize thoughts. For a crazy organizer/planner like me, this book was a dream come true.