RESOURCES, ADVICE, AND TIPS

For Current and Future Students

General Resources for Surviving Grad School:

• For advice on navigating and planning your time in grad school and for more general advice for early career political scientists, see Frank Baumgartner's "Tips and Advice" page. 

• Colleen Wood attended and distilled a myriad of panels at the 2019 MPSA on "How to Survive in Grad School" into a helpful blog post of key themes. 

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Tackling Research & Writing:

• If you're embarking on a new project (and working with me), consider breaking the pre-data and -analysis process into a series of smaller steps: begin with a short project proposal, then move on to a identifying sources and building an annotated bibliography, and then tackle the more larger research design. For more information, click here. 

• Some of the best advice on writing and presentations I received in grad school came from Tom Carsey, who happily wrote and widely shared a (short) writing guide and presentation guide.

  • For Tom Carsey's writing guide, click here.​

  • For Tom Carsey's presentation guide, click here. 

• For a refresher in data set basics, including documentation, click here. 

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Preparing for, Understanding, and Surviving the Job Market:

• Based on my experiences on the Political Science job market and advice I received, I wrote up some advice aimed at demystifying the process. Take its contents with a grain of salt; I'm by no means an expert.

  • Related posts: (1) about the process; (2) about materials; and (3) about interviews

  • Research Statement Template: PDF TeX​

  • Teaching Statement Template: PDF TeX

• Tim Ryan, an associate professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, provides 9 tips for the academic job market based on his experiences.

• For those interested in Post-Docs, Hannah Alarian, an assistant professor at the University of Florida, wrote a guest post for APSA Now on the Post-Doc market. 

• K. Anne Watson, a graduate student at UGA, compiled an extensive resource addressing each aspect of the job market and each standard part of an application in preparation for her first time on market. The result is a very useful guide, with numerous links to additional resources.

• For those interested in non-academic jobs, PS published a special symposium in 2016​ on transitioning from grad school or an academic job to the non-academic world.