Description

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This resource book consists of ten chapters written by sixteen graduate student authors and two academic professional staff members. Each chapter is accompanied by a short video that dramatizes the theme along with probing discussion questions. The chapter topics include seeking funding, the challenges of the first year of graduate school, finding a thesis advisor, working with thesis committee members, balancing family and graduate student life, and life after graduate school. Where these subjects have been treated in an academic style many times, this book conveys its message through personal narratives of the challenging circumstances its graduate student authors encountered and solved. It does not give its readers long lists of statistics about graduation rates or most advantageous actions for best outcomes. What it does instead is provide readers with a vivid sense of the types of life experiences one can expect to encounter when undertaking a graduate degree and the opportunity to discuss these real-life issues with others. The book was started and developed as a project under the Midwest Crossroads Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) and completed as part of the professional development activities under the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) AGEP.

About the Author

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MARK J. T. SMITH received his B.S. degree from MIT, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology, all in electrical engineering. He joined the electrical and computer engineering (ECE) faculty at Georgia Tech in 1984, where he remained for the next eighteen years. While working primarily on the Atlanta campus, he spent several terms in 1991-93 on the Institute's European campus in Metz, France. Five years later, he served a four-year term as executive assistant to the president of Georgia Tech. In January 2003, he joined the faculty at Purdue University as head of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he holds the Michael and Katherine Birck endowed chair. Presently, he serves as dean of the Purdue University Graduate School.