Departments are often told that expectations for graduate students are not communicated clearly enough, and that professional advice is too often implicit or hidden. To help address this concern, here are some explicit guidelines about expectations and responsibilities for your time in the program and your career development as professional academics.

While your initial years in the program will be devoted to coursework and preparing for qualifying exams, you should also use these years to develop general skills that you will need for your dissertation and for your long-range postdoctoral career. Here, we focus on preparation for an academic career, but these skills are eminently relevant to many different career pathways.

Time Management

Everything starts with effective time management. Planning your time will decrease last-minute stress, establish solid communication with your advising team, improve your productivity and the overall quality of your work, and give you desirable short and long-term goals towards which to plan. Get to know your rate of work and how long it takes you to complete different kinds of assignments and exercises. Learn to make realistic assessments of the time that you require for class preparation, meeting deadlines, etc.

• manage your workload
• don’t overcommit
• stagger deadlines
• bet against yourself when reckoning how long a task will take!!
• remember to factor in time to breathe and find balance, too.

This advice about time management also applies to giving others reasonable time when making requests (for meetings, letters of recommendation, etc.).

Summer Planning and Independent Study

Every graduate student is expected to perform a substantial amount of independent study. Be intentional about planning academic work for the months that fall outside the regular semesters. Summers are especially important times for study, research and writing—depending on your track and program stage, a significant portion of each summer should be spent making academic progress in applicable areas. Whether you choose to spend the time in fieldwork, preparing for general exams, learning a language, participating in a structured academic program, or writing a significant portion of a dissertation chapter, learn to allocate time between finite coursework, that is not meant to extend beyond the semester in which you take a course, and the more open-ended preparation for qualifying exams or dissertation writing.

Managing Information

Develop an excellent (digital) filing system and secure backup. Get in the habit of filing notes, handouts, bibliographies, etc. This will be crucial for future teaching and research and for general recall. Pay attention to taxonomy, so that you can retrieve the information when you need it! Take advantage of the regular workshops on Zotero and other bibliographical management systems offered at Harvard Libraries and connect to librarians to learn more about accessing and managing citations and sources.

Presence and Participation

We can’t emphasize enough that regular attendance at departmental lectures, workshops, colloquia, etc. is crucial for keeping up with trends in the field and learning what makes for an original topic and for effective presentation of one’s research. This is also one of the best ways to learn how to ask well-formulated, generative questions, and it is excellent preparation for becoming a versatile teacher. Remember that, in pursuing a PhD in your chosen field, you are responsible for knowledge about the field (history of scholarship, current research) and not just knowledge of your specialist area. Alongside coursework, active engagement in the lectures and workshops culture is an important way of acquiring this broader field knowledge.

Cross and Interdisciplinary Engagement

At the same time, some of the strongest work in Humanities and Social Science disciplines is distinguished by its interdisciplinary scope and the scholar’s ability to situate their work in broader intellectual currents. No one discipline has a monopoly on these currents and the theoretical approaches used in Classics and Ancient Studies are typically drawn from across the disciplines. We recommend that, where your schedule allows, you take pertinent courses in other departments and programs and that you get into the habit of going to talks in other departments and programs. Similarly, depending on your program, you should develop an understanding of debates and trends in the contemporary humanities and/or social sciences. This will also expose you to different modes of argument and styles for presentation and help you to learn how to address your ideas to audiences from different disciplines. Bear in mind that, if you go on the academic job market, there are contexts in which your work will be compared with that of scholars in other fields (e.g. applications for competitive postdoctoral fellowships in the Humanities). Many students find that secondary fields are an excellent way to cultivate transdisciplinarity. Our departmental track requirements are designed in such a way as to allow you to pursue a GSAS secondary field if you so choose; research the full offerings so you can plan ahead.

Responding to Critique

Accepting and responding to critique of your work is a recurrent feature of academic careers and vital for your progress as a scholar. In the short term, this might take the form of feedback on coursework, potential article projects, dissertation chapters, etc. In the longer term, every article / chapter / book proposal / book manuscript submitted for review elicits critical feedback to which you need to respond, not to mention live critique when giving talks.

It is crucial to learn not just how to accept, but also to welcome criticism and to use it to strengthen your ideas and writing. Remember that giving constructive feedback implies a commitment on the part of your reader to your growth as a scholar. It is a sign that your work is taken seriously. Even if you think that the criticism is unfair, it can be a guide to how some readers will construe and respond to your work. One way to manage the inevitable insecurity that we all feel about critique is to proactively invite it, with phrases such as, “Please give me some frank feedback on this draft and some advice about where and how you think I might strengthen my argument.” The critique of others will help you to become one of your own best critics.

Learning How to Edit

Use your time in the program to develop editorial experience and skills. Does the work you submit contain lots of typographical mistakes? Do your readers struggle to follow your arguments? How confident do you feel about the logical progression of arguments? Do you know how to edit for fluency, consistency, and accuracy? Paying attention to editing and how others edit your work will help you to develop as an editor of your own work and that of others. Focus on where edits strengthen and clarify meaning, structure, and arguments.

Do you understand House style guidelines (e.g. MLA, Chicago, APA)? Can you copy-edit and proofread others’ work to a high standard? While it is reasonable to expect some editorial feedback from instructors and advisors, you also need to take responsibility for editing your own work. This is a prerequisite for an academic career and encompasses teaching, publishing, and effective communication. Key documents often fail to achieve their aim if they are poorly edited. Publishers’ budgets for editorial support (copy-editing, etc.) are shrinking and you need to be a scrupulously attentive editor of your own work. Look out for workshops that teach these skills and consider joining or forming a peer-group where you agree to edit each other’s work.

Communication and Learning to Ask for Help

If you do not already have them, try to develop good email habits: responding punctually to emails and using email to communicate with instructors, mentors etc. On a related note, get into the habit of asking for help. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness; on the contrary, it is a smart way of benefiting from and learning from the experience and expertise of those around you. It is important to be able to communicate the significance/big ideas of your research to those in and outside of your field. Practice this and pursue resources, particularly through workshops and seminars at the Bok Center.

Understanding Higher Education

You will have more agency in the program and in GSAS if you learn about the wider ecosystem of the university, from learning about the history of doctoral education in the Humanities to learning how university budgets work. Start with the institutions of which you have personal experience and educate yourself about their histories and where they fit into the landscape of Higher Education. In the US, become familiar with the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education and read the newspapers that cover the higher ed sector (like The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed). The ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) is an important source of information about debates and developments in higher education, the arts, government policy, etc. and their implications for Humanistic disciplines (and vice versa!). Keep up with research analyzing the state of the current research university and its potential futures.

Professional Development

Professional development Is an ongoing project and should occur at every stage of the program. One way of approaching professional development is to reverse engineer an academic career by asking faculty mentors about what their academic careers involve and the skills that they require. Use these conversations to anticipate some of the skills you will need and the tasks and duties that you will be asked to perform. Then compile a list of skills that you will need to learn (e.g., editing, grant-writing, peer-review, conference organizing, etc.), so that you can look out for opportunities for how to develop them.

Dissertation-Specific Expectations and Responsibilities

For Advisees

See Expectations for Faculty for dissertation committee guidelines for faculty.

Dissertation writers (advisees) have the following responsibilities:

• complete the prospectus by the end of the eighth semester at the latest, but preferably by the end of the seventh.
• submit a minimum of one chapter per year to the dissertation committee, but preferably aim to submit one chapter per semester.
• discuss a specific timeline for completion of the dissertation with their advisor and revise it on a regular basis. The timeline should consist of a challenging yet realistic plan for completion of each chapter over the course of the time allotted to dissertation writing in the program (roughly 2.5 years).
• plan ahead for their final year. For May degrees, a complete draft of the dissertation is due to the committee in March. For those going on the academic job market, the fall semester of the final year is often very full. For this reason, it is recommended that you plan to complete the bulk of your dissertation before the fall of your Dissertation Completion Fellowship year.
• meet with their dissertation committee at least once per academic year.
• give adequate notice. The quality and thoroughness of the feedback that you receive will depend on how much time you give advisors, dissertation committee members, letter-writers, etc. Given how many different commitments faculty are juggling at any one time, a courteous norm is a minimum of three weeks. At some times of year faculty may need longer. It is your responsibility to plan in advance and not leave requests for feedback, meetings, letters of recommendation, etc. until the last minute. While faculty try to be flexible, they also have deadlines and commitments.
• be responsible for communicating in a timely manner with their advisor when going on the academic job market. They should provide regular and structured updates on applications for fellowships and positions, communicating ahead of time about job application deadlines. Sharing a planned schedule of application deadlines with the advisor near the start of the fall semester is recommended, and following up with reminders for advisors closer to the individual deadlines is always helpful. Many have found that an updatable spreadsheet of job application deadlines with important details (e.g. supporting documents, method for submitting letters of recommendation etc.), shared with the advisor and other letter-writers, is a very effective tool for staying organized, though it does not replace or alleviate the need for frequent reminders to your letter writers of upcoming deadlines.
• seek frequent feedback on their writing and job materials from as many sources as possible. Dissertation committee members should be consulted first and foremost with ample time allotted to take into account their feedback. The placement committee is also available to provide non-specialist input on job application materials. We have abundant opportunities for peer and faculty input on work-in-progress research by students and these should be sought throughout the dissertation-writing stage.
• seek help from the DGS if they are having trouble communicating with their advisor, or are having any difficulties for which they need assistance beyond their committee.