3.1 when your chair isn't enough - building a team of mentors
welcome back to season three of the podcast!! this season, i'm demystifying all the stuff that makes grad school hard that you might not know about, and this week, we're talking about mentorship!
i don't know about you, but i got a lot of advice and gave a lot of thought when it came to building my dissertation committee, but no one really ever talked about building a mentorship network beyond that. so, if that's you too - this week's episode will tell you all about why you need a team, how to evaluate what you already have in terms of mentorship, and how to build strength in the areas you need.
use this free worksheet (download the PDF here) and the reflection questions i share to get started!
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What if there was a way to take some of the pressure off your dissertation chair and get more comprehensive, supportive mentorship all at the same time. Let's talk about it in this week's episode of
📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
And in season three, I'm demystifying some of the most important, but often invisible parts of grad school that learning about might just make your life a little bit easier. And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
No one really explained to me how to find mentors in grad school. People gave me a lot of advice, however, on how to pick a chair for my dissertation committee. And I imagine there's a lot of advice around, selecting a PI or a lab to join. In a perfect world. The head of your PhD project would be also be the Keystone of your mentoring as a graduate student. But even if you have the most educated open-minded available, supportive person in the world, I would still give you the same piece of advice.
Get yourself, a team of mentors. No matter what you're after degree career plans are no matter what your personal life looks like. And no matter what your subject is, a team of mentors is a wise move professionally and personally. Reason number one is that team mentoring can take some of the pressure off of you.
We are all complex beings. With lives that stretch way beyond the PhD. Having a team of people that you look to for advice, mentorship and support can make it seem a lot less overwhelming when you need to confide difficult information or seek support about a sensitive topic. Before I consciously started to create a team of mentors. I often hesitated or even straight up refrained from confiding in anyone about sensitive issues like my health or my future plans, because they didn't want it to impact my standing in the program. My access to funds or even my reputation as a grad student. But after I started to build a team of people,
I had so many choices from all sorts of areas in my life on campus and off who could offer advice without being directly responsible for my degree process at the same time.
Reason number two is that team mentoring can take some of the pressure off your mentors, too. At some point, I realized that it was completely bananas, that I was expecting tenured faculty members at an R one university to give me solid advice and mentoring about how to best translate the skills that I was getting during the PhD into a job outside of academia.
I'm not saying that to excuse faculty ignorance or to excuse refusal, to engage with the realities of the job market, but to acknowledge that there were many, many people right on my campus, even that could give me much more sound advice on different kinds of careers, because they had them. I had similar issues when I had questions coming up around how to have a family in academia or how to manage a job search in a geographically confined area.
My mentoring needs had extended beyond the work that one mentor could do. And I needed to adjust my strategy.
By not expecting any one person. To give me sound researched, supportive advice in every area of my life, personal and professional. I freed all of the parties from having that burden. I shifted from asking all of my questions to one person, to asking specific tailored questions, to specific people. And that gave me richer conversations and widen my network at the same time.
All right. You might be thinking I'm on board. How do I find this team, Katie? And the first thing I would say is that you need to evaluate your mentoring needs. This is the critical step that I see. So many people skip. Many people can see the benefits of expanding their mentoring network beyond their chair, but not that many people know how to secure a diverse range of voices to support them.
And I would argue that stepping back and assessing what one's mentoring needs are first can lead to a more . Targeted and efficient networking, building phase all around. I created a chart and you can get it free in the show notes to help you brainstorm what areas you're already receiving mentoring in and where you can improve.
Of course, these categories might shift depending on your PhD and its parameters, but for most people, this is a good starting point. That worksheet outlines five different mentoring zones. And in the next section of this episode, I'm going to give you some questions to help you evaluate what kind of mentoring or support you already have in this area and what kind you might want to look for moving forward.
Get your pencils out because here those questions come.
Area one. Discipline or your field or your subject?
For many, this is the area that's the most easily addressed in a role that's probably filled by your dissertation advisor, at least partially, but some questions to ask yourself. Do I have support to keep abreast of all of the latest developments in my field. Are there places I can go to make sure that my work is part of conversations that are important in my discipline.
Am, I well connected to mechanisms for distributing my work in my field. Whether that's applying for journals, conferences, Twitter conversations. What have you.
And last but not least if my dissertation advisors research does not completely overlap with mine. Am I looking for other spaces and conversations where I might be more of a direct fit?
Zone two is teaching. Although teaching is not part of all PhD programs, many jobs in academia, involved teaching in some capacity. But as many of us know many jobs in academic or even non-academic spaces require teaching as part of the role. University's normally are well-equipped to support your teaching growth. If you know where to look.
So here's some questions. Am I getting feedback on my teaching regularly. Either from faculty members, staff, from teaching centers, student teaching mentors, or even fellow graduate students. All of those different kinds of people can give you feedback or help you to interpret the feedback that your students are giving you.
Am I learning and growing as a teacher. Am I staying involved in current pedagogy developments or experimenting with new technologies. And am I seeking out opportunities to teach, even if my funding doesn't include a regular teaching assignment. Many students report that giving guest lectures or volunteering for limited teaching engagements like workshops or greater positions can give them really valuable experience for their CV.
Zone three is skills. Grad school gives you a concentrated opportunity to develop many skills, but your advisor might not have the time or capability to support your growth in a complete way. So. Are you improving your skills as a writer? Are you taking advantage of on-campus writing support, like writing centers or writing groups?
Are you involved in any writing groups? Are you seeking feedback on your writing from a wide range of audiences? Are you improving as a reader? Are you reading widely in your field? Are you organizing the information that you're ingesting as part of your reading? Are you improving your networking skills?
Are you practicing informational interview skills? Are you cultivating an online presence? And are you improving any of your discipline specific skills? Like lab skills, teaching skills, media skills. It's going to be specific for you.
Zone four is career planning.
For many reasons your academic advisor might not be the best person. To help you plan out a diverse range of career options and the skills and steps that you'll need to follow in order to make those possibilities happen. But there are a growing number of places in spaces that might help you do that.
So are you being open-minded about the types of positions that you'll be seeking? Are you taking time to meet people from your discipline or your field who hold a wide range of positions? Are you consciously building a CV to support whatever your career aspirations are. Are you building a resume or at least thinking about a resume that might translate to employers that are outside of academia.
Have you sat down and evaluated. What kinds of activities you actually enjoy doing during the PhD? And what that might mean for your job search. Have you done the same introspective work about your values, your ethics, and what kind of life you envision the role of your job playing for the rest of it?
And the last zone is your personal life. So being vulnerable, isn't easy. Especially in a high pressure academic environment. Building a team of mentors where you have places to go to be your authentic self is so valuable. So, do you have people that you can confide in when you're not feeling your best mentally, physically, or otherwise?
Do you have people that will help connect you to resources that will help you be well and healthy. Without having to worry about what asking for help may mean.
Are you building a network of people whose values align with yours and can those people respect your values and how you're choosing to live them out?
Do you have people who will be able to listen, respect and talk through personal issues in a confidential and sensitive way.
So when it comes to building the team, Take this wheel and place people where you think they might best support you, or maybe you're already supporting you. Do you have any empty spaces on that sheet? Hopefully the answers to the questions in each of these sections will help guide you as you determine where your network is already strong and where you can build it up.
And when you've identified an area that you can build your network, these questions can help you narrow down the specific kind of support and mentoring that you're looking for.
And then you have the beginnings of a script that you can use to approach them, asking for their help.
Keep in mind that specific limited requests are always going to be more successful when you're building a new relationship. For example. Emailing a professor who's teaching you admire to see if they'll review a syllabus that you're pitching for next fall. Bonus points. If you can guide that feedback even more specifically by asking questions or limiting their feedback to structure or content.
That request is going to be much more likely to get garner a positive response than an email that's asking for more vague mentoring on teaching. Mentoring is built on building relationships, but beginning that specific relationship with a request can feel more genuine and less forced. The important thing here to remember is that not every mentor, it needs to be perfectly aligned with you in every area of the mentoring wheel.
Some people might give you outstanding mentorship and the aspects of your discipline that are confusing. And clique-ish. While also giving you terrible advice about the job market or teaching or balancing all of this with your personal life. Having clear expectations, both for each person in your mentoring team and for yourself as the designer, builder and maintainer of that team.
Can make some of these abstract relationships feel so much more concrete and useful.
And you deserve to have relationships that feel supportive for all of you. And that just might be more possible if you have a team rather than just one singular mentor. Thank you so much for joining me and I will see you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
2.16 wait, do i know everything, or nothing? - bouncing between student and expert
it should be a smooth progression right? you start as a grad student, and you emerge as an expert! a doctor! a colleague!!
but why does it feel so bumpy? let's talk about all the reasons why you might feel like a superstar one day, and a trash racoon the next - and things you can do to soften the bumps, too!
and sign up for the FREE webinar on turning confusing feedback into effective edits - i'm hosting dr. bailey lang and i'm so excited!
I am giving away one FREE 45 minute session with me a month to anyone who reviews this podcast on Apple Podcasts! Leave a review and I'll announce the winners in the last episode of the month, and in my newsletter! Thank you so much for helping to spread the word about the podcast! And if you are user pcynde, you won this month's free session! Email to claim!
Summer Camp has officially kicked off!! Learn more about it here - and don't forget to use the code PODCAST for 10% off any sliding scale level or payment plan!
Get your free summer planning workbook here - get a more spacious, fun, and supported summer!!
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One minute you're flying high. Feeling yourself, knowing that you are a scholar and then the next minute you feel right back at square one. And like, you don't know a single thing. Let's talk about the balance between student and scholar on this week's episode of Yeah.
📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for a brand new summer planning template, all available for you for free. Now. Let's get into it.
One of the trickiest parts about grad school. And a lot of other experiences where we're expected to grow and learn while also doing something. Is that we are usually both the student and an expert. We're at least growing into an expert. And this feeling of being both, it causes major intellectual, emotional, and sometimes even physical whiplash.
One second. You're writing up your research and you need to state your authority and your originality and how brilliant you are. And then the next minute your supervisor is taking pains to remind you that you haven't read every book that they have and their 92 year career. And you, in fact know nothing.
One tradition, at least in a lot of the U S departments that I'm familiar with is to invite a successful candidate back into the room after they have their thesis or dissertation defense by using their title. Can you come back in? Dr. Pepin my advisor said a signal that I had left the room for their deliberation as a student but I was entering back into it as a colleague. And in theory, that transition happened smoothly over the course of my five years in the programs. I started as a student, I went through coursework. I took my exams, I passed it into candidacy. I did my reviews. I went to conferences and slowly and slowly and slowly, I built up that expertise until poof. I defended I was an expert.
I was a colleague. I was a doctor. But emotionally and physically, and even sometimes administratively, I went backwards and forwards all of the time. Sometimes I felt like I was more than capable to teach my undergraduates and being an expert to all of my students write up my research. I felt like I was making original contributions. And then at other times I felt like I couldn't even be trusted to know what email was or how other humans used it.
Yeah. And I want to be clear that I'm not talking about here, the separate, but related issues of imposter syndrome. And the very real feeling that many of us get that the university decides our status by convenience. I will briefly say that it was in my department's best interest to call me a student when they did not want to pay me as an expert. And it was in their best interest to consider me an expert administratively when they wanted labor. Like a class covered or somebody to volunteer at a conference or to give a talk or a guest lecture, then it was fine for me to be an expert because they weren't going to be paying me anything extra. That's the nature of being a student in a program. And it also is one of the reasons that I'm such a big fan of unions for graduate students, but that's a whole other issue.
I want to be clear here, because I am not saying that all of us are manufacturing this whiplash in our heads. There are administrative and systemic reasons why our advisors, our departments, or universities, even the field itself consider us students when it's convenient and they consider us experts when it's convenient.
That changing back and forth can be really disorienting if not dispiriting or even worse. So I just want to name this feeling. It is so hard to flop back and forth between student and expert all of the time. And know that for important structural and systemic reasons, you are never going to be able to think or self care or self confidence or hype yourself out of that switch. Some of it is completely outside of your control.
But the truth is that you can also be both at the same time. In fact, we are often expert and student. teacher and learner and a lot of aspects in our life. We are always learning to do things more efficiently, more effectively, differently, and often we're using those skills in our daily lives, too.
We're learning to write better while we're also producing a lot of writing. We're working on our, improving our focus and our time management. While we also learn more about what makes our brains work and what tools do and don't support them. The important thing here that I really want to drive home in this podcast episode is that your skills have value even if, especially if you are working to improve them. You are not only worthy as a person once you're an expert. You can share what, you know, even if there are other people who do things differently than you do. So much of what makes PhD candidates stand out and why we're recruited into these programs for the first place. is our life experiences, our identities, our previous work experiences, the communities we grew up in the perspectives that we have. All of those things make us experts in our own lives, our own communities, our own spheres of knowledge. But it's so easy to get into the hollowed white halls of academia and forget that any of that matters.
So, if you are waiting to feel proud of yourself until you're an expert with nothing left to learn. You will probably never get the chance to call yourself an expert. And even if you do, if it's going to be at the very end of your career, What would it feel like instead if you gave yourself the chance to be proud of where you are right now?
while also giving yourself space to grow and change. What would it change for you if you gave yourself permission to celebrate how far you already come on this path? While still acknowledging that there's more to go. Yeah, it is so destabilizing to be in an environment that depends on distinctions between experts and novices, for promotion advancement and in a lot of cases for even praise and feedback. But don't let the ego games of academia convince you that you're still a scrawny student at the whims of your teacher in every facet of your life. And to that end, here are three different things that you can try over the next week, or maybe even further along, that might help you feel into the ways in which you are already capable. You're already an expert.
You are already a person who can learn and celebrate what you've learned at the same time. So the first thing to try is owning your expertise. You might find that you are an expert in all kinds of things. You maybe are an expert in how to cook a fantastic set of pancakes for breakfast, or you're an expert in using the autoclave machine in your lab.
Maybe you are an expert in a particular method or a piece of software, maybe you are the grad student that everyone goes to to figure out how to get their canvas sites to work. In what ways is your expertise already being drawn on as a resource in your department, in your human life, in your communities?
And what would it feel like to make a list of all of those things that you're already really good at? Our brains naturally focus on the stuff that we wish we were better at already. Like the fact that I am not as good at Excel as I want to be, or I can't code an R yet, or I'm still taking this course to improve my language skills. Everybody's got those things and yeah, it's healthy to keep growing and striving and always improving our skills.
To a point. But if we never stop and name, the fact that we have already improved ourselves, we have already grown and changed and learned things. Then it can feel like you're caught on that. Never ending hamster wheel of just never being good enough. So take a moment list those things that you're already an expert at and see if there's any way that you can claim a little bit of that expertise for yourself. And the next week or so.
Option number two that you could try is owning your expertise in non-academic spaces.
Maybe you teach a class at your local yarn shop about how to knit. Because it gives you such a pure amount of pleasure to be an expert in share something that you love. Maybe you go and volunteer at the local museum and you give tours and you feel like, wow, I'm a docent. And I'm teaching these kids things and it feels great. Or maybe you pick the most complicated recipe that you know, how to make you invite all of your friends and you wow them with the fact that you can make souffle's right there on the spot.
You do not only need to be an expert in the thing that you were working on professionally. And sometimes that little bit of mastery feeling in another space can really go a long way.
Last, but not least I would love it. If you experimented with remembering that it is okay to still be learning. And if it feels unsafe or unwelcome or a little bit tender and vulnerable to do that at work.
Why not still learn in another space. That's completely separate. I love learning new hobbies for this. I think that. Taking on hobbies during my PhD was one of the reasons why I finished it was so great for me to go to a yoga class and work on a new pose. And fall down a bunch and you don't mess it up a bunch and mix up my left and right.
A thing that I'm notorious for doing. And remember that it was okay to play. It was okay to fall down. It was okay to not be good at something yet. That was such a liberating feeling when I felt like every other aspect of my life was such high stakes. I encouraged you to find someplace where it feels a little bit more comfortable to not be good at something.
Maybe you take a pottery class or you watch a bunch of YouTube videos and teach yourself how to watercolor. The sky's the limit, but giving yourself that chance to practice learning in another space. Might help you feel a little bit more comfortable doing it in your professional life too.
But anyway, you shake it. Grad school is one long apprenticeship in which your expert in student status in theory progresses in a linear line, but most of the time bounces up and down sometimes a million times a day. And anyone's nervous system is going to get kicked up by that. Just remember that part of that is how the system is designed.
And there's also a lot of space to give yourself support. As you move through the ups and the downs on the path to becoming a doctor.
And if you are struggling with the ups and downs of revision, make sure that you check out the show notes. I am hosting a free webinar on June 20th, all about taking confusing feedback and turning it into an actual plan to edit and revise your writing. I'm hosting the amazing Dr. Bailey Lang to give this workshop. And I'm so excited to have her and all of you join us.
More links are at the bottom sign up it's completely free and it will also be recorded and transcribed afterwards. In case you can't make it live. Otherwise, I will see you around the neighborhood. Bye. Great.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
8 - Why is working with feedback so hard?
episode 8 - Why is working with feedback so hard?
So, you got up your nerve and asked for feedback on your work...now what?? It can be so hard to process someone else's thoughts on how, where, when, and why your work should change, and balance their suggestions with your own vision. This episode has strategies to help you move through that a little more efficiently, a little more gently, and hopefully with just a dash more empowerment.
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
The biggest and only sale of the year is happening at thrive-phd.com. Check the link in the show notes for more information.
If asking for feedback is one of the more vulnerable things that you can do as a grad student, receiving and processing and moving your work forward based on that feedback? Well, that's even harder. So this week, let's talk about some strategies, some experiments to try some places to reflect around what your process is for taking other people's ideas on how you should do your work and incorporating them into your own scholarship.
One of the things that's so hard about processing feedback is that most of us push toward some sort of submission. We use that to monitor our energy. We say, okay, I'm going to get this chapter ready to send to my advisor by the end of the month. You push you get that chapter ready.
And then you're it feels done. You feel like you can take a break and switch to other projects, but then the feedback comes back and then you are very much undone. You have things to address and it can really sort of make you feel like you're going backwards. Processing feedback can be really uncomfortable because what you thought was up to a certain point is not at that point anymore through no fault of your own.
And a lot of the changes in that feedback can be more substantial than you're used to. I know that when I started grad school, I was really only used to copy editing my paper, checking things over for spelling mistakes, maybe a grammar mistake here or there. I'd never actually changed much of anything that was more substantial than that. I definitely hadn't done any major restructurings.
I hadn't paid attention to citations. I hadn't thought about my voice really in any substantial way. So the kind of feedback that I was used to was much more quickly addressed than the kind of feedback that I was now working with. And that made me feel like I just wasn't a good writer which may into processing that feedback even harder.
One of the things that's really hard for scholars in grad school and even further along in the field is that the feedback are based on what other people think that you should do with your work. And it can be really difficult to balance what you envisioned for the project, the directions you want to take it in, the way you want to write it, the way you want to research it, with all of the people who have more or less power depending on the situation to make you do it their way. Some suggestions are really great and you're excited because they move the project forward into a way that you couldn't have imagined and it feels even better than what you could have pictured. And then some things really don't feel like they're in line with the kind of work, the kind of scholarship you want to do.
So processing feedback can be this very tricky dance where you're trying to balance your own voice and vision for the project with the feedback from people who have the power to get your dissertation passed or get that article published or give you a book contract. It's certainly not as straightforward as checking for any typos.
This is a sensitive topic. So put your feet on the floor, take a deep breath and think about these questions. You might want to get a journal. You might want to go for a walk and think about them, but let's dive into what feels salient about the way that you already interact with feedback.
Question one. If you were to write out the steps of how you process feedback - so you get a draft back it's covered in feedback - what would you do? What are the steps?
What is the order? Sometimes we don't have a good understanding of our own system, or we've never really done that before. So it can be hard to imagine a different way.
Question two. What role does feedback play in your professional ecosystem? Is it given regularly and constructively? Infrequently or less than generously? What are the constraints that you're working with? Does your advisor take forever to get feedback back to you? And then you're really in a rush to integrate it? Do they want to see a draft every single week? And then every single week you have things to change and you feel like you're revising the same 10 pages over and over again? What are the constraints that you maybe feel like you can't change? You might not be able to reach into your advisor's brain and make them better at feedback. And what are the things that you could imagine working differently?
And then lastly, how does feedback work with your brain and emotional landscape? Are you working with rejection sensitivity? Or do you seek out a lot of extra feedback for validation that you're on the right track? So often our human stuff comes out to play during activities that feel tied to our worth and performance and feedback on your writing is nothing but one of the most intense versions of that kind of experience. So it's worth looking at what your overall relationship is to things like feedback or criticism or suggestions that you could or need to change.
But let's get into some of the experiments that you can try now that you've received some feedback.
The first one I'm calling, working big to small. I know that the first couple of times I got substantial feedback on a piece of writing. I opened it up and I started to address the comments from the top of the draft to the bottom. Unfortunately, this often meant that I changed the introduction of a chapter or an article so substantially that I almost lost track of what the chapter was supposed to do, what things I was changing. And it got really frustrating and confusing in the middle, trying to change things at all of these different levels at once.
So I really recommend that you work through all the feedback and decide what are the really big changes that you need to make on down to the smaller ones. So if there is a suggestion that you might want to restructure things, it's better to do that big restructuring and then work with all of your transition sentences. Otherwise you're going to be polishing transition sentences for transitions that no longer exist.
You get the drift, but this can be counter, intuitive. Especially, if you are used to a more copy editing style of feedback, where you kind of go through and you address the typos, you address the changes one by one. If your doing something that's much closer to revision, which almost all of us are that strategy can really backfire. So work from big to small and see what happens with your overall sense of flow and understanding of that piece as it changes.
Experiment two is categorizing and sorting feedback into three different categories. I love a three column list. If you hang out on this podcast long enough, I'm sure I will suggest. Uh, other three column lists that you can do. But this one is one of my favorites. Especially if you're processing feedback from someone who gives you a lot of feedback, they write down every thought, or this can be really helpful if you're revising a substantial amount of writing, more than three or four pages.
You make a list of all the things that you're going to change or that are suggested that you can change. And you sort those items one by one into three different categories. The first category are the things that you're definitely going to fix. They're good suggestions. You think they need it? They make the piece stronger. Automatic Yes From you. Those all go in column one.
Column two are the things that you might do, but you're not really sure. They could be a good idea, but it may be depends on a restructuring or if you've changed some of the literature. There are things that you want to come back to later. You haven't ruled them in or ruled them out yet. And you've maybe guessed it, but column three are the things that you absolutely will not do.
I really like to empower grad students to make this third column, because many of us feel like we can't. Then, if our advisor says that we have to change something, then you have to change it no matter what. And to be clear, some advisers do expect you to implement every single one of their changes and that's a different situation.
But if you're getting feedback from somebody, maybe from a writing group member or a committee member that doesn't know the whole project or somebody that's dropping in and giving feedback without all of the context, then there can be a list that you make that's called, "these are great ideas, but not for me."
And then once you have your three columns, that's the order in which you do the revisions. You start with this stuff that you're definitely going to do. And then you move things in that middle column into, yes. This is a good suggestion in this new world. I'm going to work with that or, no, I don't think this one applies anymore.
I also love this strategy because it can help you get out of the mindset that every suggestion is one that you need to take. This way you have a list of the suggestions that you considered and the reasons why, whether you wrote them down or not, you decided not to use them which can help you feel really empowered as a writer that you don't need to do every single thing that every person on earth suggests because it's your project.
Experiment three is for all of my people out there who feel a lot of sensitivity and vulnerability around feedback. I count myself among you, by the way. One strategy that can be really effective that I suggest that you experiment with is having a friend, a colleague, this can even be a non-academic person read through the feedback and summarize it for you. So if you have a draft that's covered in red ink and you just can't bear to look at it and you have a friend in your corner.
Sometimes it can be really helpful to send it to them and say, Hey, can you summarize like the top five most important things that this person thinks I should change? And then you work off of a clean copy of your writing to make those revisions.
If you get the kind of archetypal. Reviewer two who just sort of slashes through your work in a way that's not helpful or constructive at all. This can be a really excellent way to kind of soften some of the blow of that. Have it be translated into more actionable language by a person that cares about you and cares about the work.
And then you work from the translation and not the unfiltered, deeply ungenerous reality. Or the unfiltered completely overwhelming reality. There is no rule that says that once somebody gives you feedback, that becomes the most important copy of your work.
Sit down with that list of things that you could do, the list of things that your friend has sort of summarized for you. And work from that version as opposed to the one that's covered in some useful, but a lot of not useful feedback. Whether that's overwhelming ungenerous or both.
I really want to encourage softness with this particular week of experiments and overall with the process of processing feedback. It can be really difficult on our nervous systems on our heart and even on our kind of scholarly identity to feel like somebody thinks that this piece needs to actively change, but....
I'm here to tell you from the other side of that particular moat, that all academic writers revise their writing heavily. Many of us are moving through multiple rounds of feedback, multiple rounds of revision, different editors, different reviewers revises, and resubmits committee feedback. Start from the drawing board. That's all part of the kind of very complex writing that academic work generally tends to be.
So if you're finding it difficult, you are 100% not alone. And I hope that some of these strategies help make it feel a little bit more doable and less overwhelming. See you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
7 - Why is it so hard to ask for feedback on your work?
episode 7 - Why is it so hard to ask for feedback on your work?
Why is it so hard to ask for feedback on your work? And why is it sometimes even harder to get the kind of feedback we WANT on your work, when and how you want it? This episode is all about one of the biggest (and hardest) skill jumps a grad student has to make - going from seeing feedback as a grade, to seeing it as a tool to develop work.
A few resources on reading and evaluating writing, in case they're useful!
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
There's still time to join us in AcWriMo. And there'll be more details about that at the end of this podcast.
When I started to plan for this podcast, I knew I had to have an episode about asking for feedback, because this is one of the hardest things that grad students do. And it's also one of the most mysterious things. We have a sort of narrative that people get feedback on their writing, but who really knows how much, what kind, at what frequency, from what people...
All of those questions are really idiosyncratic. They vary wildly from discipline to discipline from sometimes even supervisor to supervisor. So let's zoom out a little bit and think about why the process for asking for feedback can be so difficult. And what things you might want to do about it.
The first reason that asking for feedback is really hard is because we're not often used to feedback as development. We're used to feedback as evaluation. If I were to ask many young grad students in the beginning of their programs what feedback means to them - most of them, I have to bet would say, "oh, it's the comments at the end of the paper. It's the work that I get on my exams when I turn it in so that I can do better for next time."
Which is a model of feedback where your work is judged against a standard. And the feedback is meant to show you where you fallen short in some ways or what things you've done well so that you can take that knowledge into a new class, into a new project.
But often as a grad student, you're working on a complex project with many parts over the course of years often, and the feedback is meant to help you develop the project instead of evaluate it. The feedback helps you pick a better research question or narrow down the variables for your experiment. But if you're used to that feedback coming as a, "did I do a good enough job on this? Yes or no?" kind of frame, it can be really difficult to get that feedback. And ask for it because it feels like asking to be graded on purpose.
Another thing that can be really difficult about asking for feedback is that you might not know what's possible until you hear the range of feedback that's being offered to other grad students in your department, in your university, around the world. I sometimes hear from clients that they have one single source of feedback: that they can only share drafts in progress with a PI, or with a chair of a committee. And then I know other people who live in a department culture where the entire committee gathers to discuss a chapter in progress and you get a rich, robust, beautiful conversation with five or six or even seven people. Sometimes some departments have a culture of helping develop work in pro seminars or in colloquiums or in workshops for feedback. But other people really only work with one person. And if that one person isn't giving you the feedback that you want or need, it can be hard to imagine a world beyond what you've been given. Or to feel like you can ask for something different if it's not being offered to you.
And lastly let's be real, not all mentors or supervisors or the people giving you feedback are skilled at giving feedback. So one or more bad experiences - feedback that's not helpful, feedback that's really harsh - can really turn you off to the idea of like, yes, I volunteer as tribute for more of this criticism, please. And because we don't often train supervisors. Into the very difficult role of how do you see somebody else's work? How do you not push them exactly into the way that you would do it? And develop what's strong about what's already there - that's a high level skill that a lot of people aren't getting training in. So it both makes sense that people aren't great at it off the jump. And it also makes sense that lots of people are a little bit hesitant to ask for more.
So get your notebooks out, take a deep breath, and let's think about some questions that might help you figure out where your own stickiness is when it comes to asking for feedback.
What are the hardest parts of your writing process? Where do you tend to get stuck the most? Is it in the idea generation phase? Is it in the site citing other pieces of literature phase? Is it in the revision or the argumentation stages? But where do you tend to get stuck the most? Or what are the parts that you find to be the hardest?
What feedback experiences - for good or for bad - have stuck with you? How was that feedback given? How much time or space or support were you given in processing it? What is the model of feedback that you're applying to every one of these interactions moving forward as either the gold standard? Or the very much not gold standard?
And lastly, if you're a teacher. What kind of feedback do you offer your students? What do you notice about the process of giving feedback of grading, of evaluating of helping to develop works in progress that you can maybe use to think about what feedback is being offered to you? Because let's be real. You are also still a student.
Now some experiments to try, because I'm not just going to say, "wow, all of this is hard. Good luck out there, kiddos." The first one is getting specific about the kind of feedback that you're actually requesting. It's not nine times out of 10, but maybe five or six times out of 10. I see that people are able to get more of the feedback that they want by being able to more accurately name what they're looking for. So maybe imagine a rubric for graduate student writing. And if that's something that's hard for you to imagine, I've put some resources in the show notes for you. But think about what kinds of feedback we evaluate writing on? Is it structure, is it flow? Is it argument? Is it cohesiveness? Is it comprehensiveness?
And then I think about what level of feedback are you looking for? And how much time do you have to implement it? The kind of feedback that I'm looking for on a Friday when the chapter is due on Monday is very different than the kind of feedback that I want when I have maybe a few weeks or a couple of months to develop this paper or this chapter. And I'm actually looking for feedback about which ideas seems most promising. As opposed to what are two or three things that I can do today before the end of the day before I send this chapter off. So think about what kind of levels you're looking at, maybe what kind of levels of feedback you're lacking so that you can be more specific with the request that you ask for, whether that's with your supervisor.
Or. With the people that you identify in experiment two. Which is something that I'm calling, creating a feedback Rolodex. If you've never seen one before. Rolodex is an old fashioned way to keep track of people's phone numbers. It was a sat on desks. You maybe you've seen them in a variety of period television shows, but basically you would flip through it and it would help jog your memory of all of the people in your network. So this idea is for you to create a team, so to speak a feedback team.
And just like in any team, you're going to say, who is good at what? Maybe you have a friend who's an amazing copy editor. They're going to be a great person to help you proof a manuscript right before it needs to go to a journal.
Maybe you have a friend from a couple seminars ago that really loved the same things that you did, that are now the foundational texts of your work. And so you think about what they might help you with in terms of idea development or understanding of the literature or citing some of these authors.
You make this list and you say, okay, who are these people?
What are their superpowers? Who are these people on your feedback team? Who can you barter with? Maybe you set up a draft exchange with that really good friend who's great at using the same literature is you and you both agree to read drafts whenever the other person needs to, because that kind of foundational idea generation isn't really happening with your supervisors.
I really recommend that grad students create this team, not just of faculty members of mentors, but also their colleagues. Some of the best feedback that I got was from people who were underneath me in the program, because they were working in coursework with all of the foundational texts that I was drawing on. So it felt really fresh to them. So be creative and create that Rolodex so that you feel like your ability to get feedback doesn't hinge on just one person or just one specific group of people. And you have more places to go.
And our last experiment is to practice giving feedback yourself. I mentioned before that I think that a thriving economy of grad students supporting grad students is something really helpful. I think it's helpful to help people see that they're not alone. Writing groups for example, are really good for this.
Like writing, feedback is a skill. And the more you practice it, the better you get at delivering it. So you become a more valuable member of other people's feedback teams. Always something that's helpful to offer your scholarly community, but you also can be more adept at figuring out what kinds of feedback you're actually looking for.
The more you think about the process of giving feedback, the easier it becomes to specifically request the kinds and types and frequency of feedback that you're actually looking for. And if you don't have a scholarly community and let's be real pandemics have made a lot of that, a lot more challenging.
You can also think about your feedback process as you're grading, if you're in a process or a position where you teach people. I learned so much about what I was looking for in terms of feedback, by giving feedback to my students. It really helped me see, "oh, wow. It is really overwhelming if somebody gives you every thought in their head while they read a draft."
It is really frustrating if I tell my students two days before the deadline that, "oh yeah, this outline's not really going to work" . So giving more. Feedback, both as a reader and receiving it as a writer helps the whole ecosystem go round.
I am in no way here to undercut how sensitive it can be to put your work on the line and ask for people to look at it and tell you what's good about it and what things could be improved. But I think that it's one of the biggest skill jumps that grad students make - is this idea that when we ask other people for feedback, it's not because we want them to grade us.
It's because we want them to help us develop the work and that if you need help, developping a complex idea, then that's not a failure, that is making scholarship happen in a community. We all make scholarship happen in a community, whether that's asynchronously through sharing work, reading other people's writing, or in person or slightly more real time exchanging drafts.
Nobody does this alone. And the more that you can build a system of supportive feedback for yourself, the easier it is to see how and where other people are developing this work too. Until next time!
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com, where you can also sign up for AcWriMo 2022, a free month of writing support and resources. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!