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Moving Past Barriers to Writing

Many of you are thinking about research questions, arguments, and citations for your final seminar papers. Some of you are close to beginning work on your thesis or dissertation. This may also be the first time you are engaging with graduate-level writing, if you are an incoming or first-generation graduate student. Fortunately, there are a number of campus-based and online resources that offer tips and tools to help you progress and complete these writing projects.

For example, the following insights were gathered from a National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (NCFDD) workshop held at the Seattle campus recently. Facilitator Chadwick Allen emphasized that you must first recognize the kinds of barrier(s) you are experiencing before knowing how to address them:

Technical.  Technical barriers–like constant e-mail and social media checking, watching Netflix during your designated writing time, or doing work at a noisy café–are activities you can manage or learn to avoid all together in order to get research and writing done. Close your e-mail program or internet browser. Set up an electronic block to the internet on a timer. Find a quiet place to work. Most importantly, set aside small chunks of time (30 minute writing blocks) to help you move a project forward at a quicker pace. The satisfaction of making progress will propel and motivate you. When you block time in your schedule to do your writing, it is important to honor that commitment to yourself, just like you’d honor an appointment with your faculty advisor or dissertation chair.

External.  These are life events that are completely beyond your control such as experiencing illness, difficulty in finding childcare if you are a parent, or coping with the loss of a loved one. In these circumstances, reach out to your professor or advisor and let them know what’s going on (only share what feels comfortable to you). You can often negotiate for a revised timeline or deadline if needed. If you can be up front about your challenges, faculty are willing to work with you as you cope with these stressors and changes. Sport ID has been designed to serve all sports and all centres. It’s quick to set up, and easy to implement buy fake id The easy way to track, chronicle, and relive every game you attend.

Psychological.  Sometimes feelings related to imposter syndrome or perfectionism prevent us from doing our best work. Know that you are not alone in this, and there are tips for moving through feelings of inadequacy that can be found here or here. Try this out: During your 30-minute blocks, allow yourself to write in a truly unorganized manner. Don’t worry about grammar or sentence structure, just let your thoughts flow. The goal is to get words out on the screen or on paper. More often than not, you’ll have several ideas with which you can work with and build from. You may also find yourself stuck in doing online literature searches because you feel you don’t know enough about your topic. Bets are you do know plenty and have enough literature to at least begin organizing ideas for your paper. Once you’ve drafted an outline, you’ll start seeing gaps that need to be filled. Revisit doing the literature search after you’ve identified those gaps.

Additional Writing Tips and Resources

IMA

The IMA is free to use if you pay the Services and Activities Fee (Bothell and Tacoma students can pay to join), so you might as well take advantage. Besides the fitness center, the IMA offers a pool, climbing center, personal trainers, classes, roller skating, etc. Additional fees may apply. 

Building Your Roadmap Through Graduate School

The Graduate Student Equity & Excellence (GSEE) program invited Core Programs to facilitate a Power Hour event called Building Your Roadmap Through Graduate School. We knew the students were the ones who really had the insight here, and we worked with several outstanding GSEE graduate students including Priya Patel, Osa Igbinosun, Greg Diggs and Juan Gallegos, to plan and facilitate the discussion. So many great insights were shared during the panel and small group discussions that we wanted to share out some of the insights with our broader UW grad student community.

Here are just a few:

Define success on your terms. It may not feel like it at times, but you can influence your pathway through graduate school. Periodically check in with yourself by asking the following questions: First, how are your research interests, courses, labs, or professional work meaningful to you? We know you won’t like every course, theory, lab work, or practicum—but overall, how is being in your grad program meeting your needs?  Second—and this is related to the first point—are you setting personal, academic and career goals that are realistic and achievable? An individual development plan can help you keep track of your goals. Finally, how can you utilize feedback from faculty, peers and professional colleagues to enhance or strengthen your knowledge and skills? When people in your field give you feedback with constructive value, take it as a compliment that they have faith in you to grow in your work and career.

Be proactive and reach out for support. Taking the initiative to build relationships in graduate school is crucial to your success. Yes people are busy in and outside of academia, but more often than not they will make time to connect with you if you are consistent, proactive and prepared to meet with them. Which people do you need to connect with to get the support you need to thrive in grad school? Who do you need to network with outside campus to achieve your career goals, and how will you find them? What meeting agenda items and questions do you need to have ready to schedule that meeting via e-mail or phone? For example, the UW College of Education offers an excellent resource (revise and adapt as needed) that will help you prepare for your faculty advisor meetings.

Remain open to possibilities. Many of you already have a specific research and career focus upon starting graduate school at the UW. This is excellent, because you have a vision of what you want to achieve for yourself. At the same time, any of the following scenarios can happen: you read a text that a sparks a different trajectory for your thesis or dissertation, a conversation with someone inside or outside of the university inspires you to think about diverse career paths, or maybe after a few meetings with your advisor you realize you’re not a match. Any or all of these can be anxiety provoking (totally normal, btw) and be viewed as opportunities for you to think expansively about your educational, professional and interpersonal goals. What lessons can you learn from those situations about your interests, strengths and passions?  Are you allowing yourself to be curious to explore different goals?  What steps would you need to take to accomplish those goals? Remaining open to possibilities can help you see goal setting as a process rather than an end result.

Many thanks to Priya, Osa, Greg and Juan for their permission to adapt these insights for the Core Programs newsletter and for collaborating with us for the Power Hour event, held on October 20, 2015.  Thanks also goes out to GSEE staff Vanessa Alvarez and Cynthia Morales for the initial ask to collaborate!

Commuter Choices

I commute by bike and spend most of my day in a shared lab space. What are my options for showering and storing my stuff?

—Anonymous

First of all, good on ya for biking! Don’t forget, Bike in the Rain is coming up! So your best option is the IMA, which is free (because it’s included in the Service and Activities Fee) to all Seattle campus students. Bothell and Tacoma students can join for a fee. If the IMA is too out of the way for you, ask your building coordinator if there’s a shower in the building for use. For storage, again, check with your building coordinator if there are lockers you can use. Otherwise, a great resource is the brand-new Commuter Commons in the HUB, which has storage units and a changing room. (It’s sponsored by First Year Programs, but completely open to graduate students.) The HUB also rents out lockers in the basement. Happy riding!

Ask the Grad School Guru is an advice column for all y’all graduate and professional students. Real questions from real students, answered by real people. If the guru doesn’t know the answer, the guru will seek out experts all across campus to address the issue. (Please note: The guru is not a medical doctor, therapist, lawyer or academic advisor, and all advice offered here is for informational purposes only.) Submit a question for the column →

Addressing Difference and Growing Your Support

Are any of these thoughts affecting you?

“I should understand that theory or concept already!”
“If I speak up to say I don’t understand something, I’ll look stupid in class.”
“I’m not participating the way everyone else is, so there must be something wrong with me.”
“Where is my community?”

Every graduate and professional student experiences doubt, anxiety or critical self-talk due to the demands of their educational programs. At the same time, there is no universal graduate student experience, and the long-held idea that you’ll automatically be successful if you just work hard enough is a myth. The reality is not everyone enters graduate school with the same access to social, cultural, professional and financial resources and not everyone is treated with equity. This is especially true if you are a first-generation graduate student, person of color, woman, person with visible or invisible disabilities, international student, or a member of the LGBT, Queer or Trans community (one can also embody multiple, intersecting identities and backgrounds).

Sometimes asking for help can feel like taking a risk—that it calls attention to your difference and to your vulnerability. It’s no wonder then that asking for support on campus can either feel truly unfamiliar or feel like a daunting task for many.

Core Programs’ mission is to promote an environment where all graduate and professional students can thrive and to suggest strategies that encourage students to seek out the support they need to reach their intellectual, professional and interpersonal goals. We also see our work as aligned with larger, institutional efforts to address the complexities of difference at the University of Washington.

Here are some tips to help you remind yourself that you belong here and that your work is important:

When you feel you don’t belong. Also known as imposter syndrome, it’s the persistent, internalized belief that “you’re not smart enough, competent enough, or productive enough” to be in graduate school, and that peers, faculty members, and your department chair are somehow going to find out. Notice when these thoughts come up and stop yourself.  As communication studies scholar Dr. Felicia Harris states, “The nagging voice that says I don’t belong discredits everything I’ve done to get to a certain point. Pursuing an advanced degree is an admirable and challenging feat, and I remind myself of this by celebrating every milestone.” Milestones can be getting your reading done, mustering the nerve to ask a professor for their mentorship, or gaining teaching, research, or career experience. Read more from Dr. Harris.

Mentoring needs. There are numerous reasons why you seek out mentors in graduate and professional school.  The obvious ones are to develop intellectual and professional relationships with faculty advisors whose research or career backgrounds resonate with you. Sometimes a single mentor can support you in multiple ways. Yet it also turns out that we often need a mentor network for different dimensions of our lives. Start with an inventory and see where your needs are being met and where you may have gaps. Some dimensions include:

Academic — Specific skills or techniques, new knowledge domains
Career — Sponsorship, exposure, coaching, protection, challenging
Psychosocial — Role modeling, acceptance and confirmation, counseling, friendship
Values — Worldviews, belief systems, politics

Grow your support. In our first fall quarter newsletter, we encouraged you to get to know the campus community by attending departmental and welcome events to make meaningful connections with peers, staff and faculty. Other ways to grow your support system are identifying those safe people you can confide in when things feel tough. These can be close friends, loved ones, members of your faith-based or spiritual community, and even a qualified mental health professional (there’s no shame in seeking counseling).

Jaye Sablan & Kelly Edwards
Core Programs, The Graduate School

Additional Resources

What Influences Your Mentoring Needs, UW Graduate School

Thriving in the Fall

As you delve into your first week of studies, we encourage you to incorporate wellness strategies that help you feel centered and connected to yourself and others. This is especially important during moments when you feel caught up in the frenzied demands of the quarter. We know that your success as graduate students is not only about developing intellectual and professional knowledge and skills, but also about cultivating your emotional resilience.

Try out these tips below and let us know how well they worked for you or share your favorite strategies with us at Core Programs:

Self-compassion. Let’s be real, attending graduate school is going to be hectic at times. You’re juggling everything from living in a new city (and in some cases a completely new culture) to getting acclimated to the rigor of your graduate program to taking care of loved ones. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, this is perfectly normal. Take a few moments to acknowledge your feelings, and recognize that many of your peers experience similar feelings too. So be kind and gentle with yourself. There’s a whole lot to learn, but the beautiful thing is, you can give yourself permission to not figure it all out right away.

Managing feedback. One of the most difficult things to hear in graduate school is critical feedback (whether constructive or unproductive) on your seminar paper, lab work, thesis or dissertation. It can sometimes feel like your intelligence is being scrutinized on a deeply personal level, even when the comments you receive are helpful to your intellectual and professional growth. In these moments, be intentional about listening to the feedback without self-judgement, take a few notes, and revisit the suggestions at a later time. Then make a conscious effort to take a break from your work. Catch up with a friend over the phone. Go for a 10-min walk. Listen to your favorite music. Grab dinner with some friends. Do all four! The goal is to avoid ruminating on criticism by engaging in activities that nurture you and connect you with your support system. You’ll find when you revisit the feedback, you’ll have a fresh perspective.

Sense of purpose. Sometimes when you’re in the thick of it all, it can be easy to focus solely on the factors that make graduate student life stressful. We encourage you to get an early start on curbing this by writing out a short list or an outline of all the positive reasons you’re in grad school (keep your grad school application Statement of Purpose nearby even)—in order to ground yourself. Are you passionate about a particular research topic and want to make scholarly contributions to your field(s)? Do you want to excel in a profession that will be rewarding to you and your family? Interested in making unique and innovative contributions to your community or society? Your reasons for being in grad school may change over time, but the most important things to center are your values, priorities and goals for earning that graduate degree rather than getting lost in the demands of it all.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Getting Started With Your Graduate Education

On behalf of Core Programs in the Graduate School, welcome to all our new and returning graduate and professional students! We are thrilled you are at the University of Washington, where you will have a new year of opportunities to strengthen and grow your intellectual and professional skills. This fall, we encourage you to tap into resources that can help you thrive as you navigate graduate student life.

Here are just a few ways to get you started:

Find your ground. Graduate school is about navigating a complex set of academic, professional and social experiences. Whether you are new or returning to campus, this can sometimes feel overwhelming and unwelcoming—especially if you belong to an underrepresented community based on race, gender, sexuality, class, ability or citizenship. One way to counteract this imposter feeling is to say to yourself, “I do belong here.” You are in graduate school to enhance or find your career path, give back to your families and communities, or make important contributions to research and innovation. For even more tips and strategies on how to counteract feelings that you don’t belong, check out these resources: here and here.

Get to know department staff. From organizing orientations, providing a supportive ear to students, or ensuring that you fulfill your degree requirements, Graduate Program Advisors (GPAs) are often your first point of contact into graduate school. They also provide important administrative support for graduate programs. Feel free to reach out to your GPA, as they have a wealth of experience and knowledge of your campus. If they don’t know the answer, they can often connect you with campus resources that serve the needs of graduate students.

Attend department events. Whether they are faculty or peer presentations, departmental meetings, working committees, or peer pub nights, there are numerous opportunities to connect with peers, staff, and faculty throughout the year. These co-curricular spaces provide an opportunity for you to glean information such as how to develop strong presentations, pick up disciplinary lingo (don’t worry if you don’t know all the terms yet), learn the spoken and unspoken culture of your graduate program, and foster collegial relationships with faculty and peers. Remember to pace yourself—you need not attend everything as you are already busy. We know from experienced graduate students that it’s best to attend events that make sense to you and your schedule.

Prepare for graduate seminars. It’s totally natural to feel excited and anxious about attending your first graduate seminar—especially if you don’t know what to expect or are the first person in your family to attend graduate school. Fortunately, Dr. Ralina Joseph, associate professor of communication at UW Seattle, provides useful tips on how to succeed in a graduate seminar.

Find your community. The University of Washington is a big place, with three campuses and multiple off-site research locations. We know that a feeling of belonging on campus is critical to your success as graduate students. It makes a difference to find and connect with people that can support your whole self—and not just your role as a graduate or professional student.

Best Wishes On a New Academic Year,

Kelly Edwards, Jaye Sablan, Ziyan Bai
Core Programs Staff, The Graduate School