Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities

FROM THE FOREWORD BY MICHAEL BERUBE:
"Gregory Colón Semenza has written the ideal book on [how to be a graduate student]. By 'ideal' I mean simply this: it is sane, circumspect, and sagacious.... Semenza knows that no two humanities departments are alike, and that there is almost as much variation among graduate programs as there is among graduate students. He remembers well how terrifying it is to face your first class as a teacher, and he knows how difficult it is to try to explain to your parents– or your loved one’s parents– what you’re doing (and hoping to do) with your life. He knows what it’s like to balance the demands of profession and family, and he knows what it’s like to mediate among differently-minded members of a comprehensive-exam committee. Best of all, he knows how the academic professions really work, right down to the invisible but critical minutiae of departmental committee service and the tricky question of when it’s all right to ask a journal editor what happened to the essay you submitted last spring. The result is that Graduate Study for the 21st Century might just be the least idiosyncratic–-that is, the most reliable–-book I have ever read about academe and its inhabitants."