This Scholar Wants to Make Grad School’s ‘Hidden Curriculum’ Visible

As a grad student at the University of Pennsylvania, Jessica McCrory Calarco knew that after she got her degree, she wanted an academic job. But she didn’t know how to get there. She and her fellow grad students were expected to know, or figure out, puzzles like how to choose an adviser, how to acquire funding, and what getting an “R&R” on a paper meant. The ins and outs of grad school and a career in academe just weren’t covered in class.

Calarco made it: She’s now an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University at Bloomington, where one of her specialties is inequality in education. Her new book, A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum (Princeton University Press), serves as a road map, taking the reader from the beginning — choosing a program — through navigating the job market to eventually balancing teaching, research, service, and life obligations. She spoke with The Chronicle about impostor syndrome, mentorship, and why the hidden curriculum stays hidden. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What led you to write this book?

Twitter has long been a place for grad students to commiserate about graduate school, to share tips and ask questions. [When I was in grad school] Twitter was just starting to exist. I was thinking about how helpful it would have been to have that community, because I remember so many times there was something I didn’t know, or I found myself embarrassed because I said the wrong thing or did the wrong thing. Certainly I was very lucky to have good mentors who helped me figure out so much of it. But even then, so much of the ins and outs of how academia works were hidden.

Educational institutions at all levels have knowledge and skills that are necessary for success in that institution, and also beyond it, which everyone sort of expects you to know but aren’t explicitly taught. That’s very much the case in grad school. And that has a lot to do with the fact that there is little incentive for faculty members to be high-quality mentors or to be teachers who invest a lot of time in helping their students unpack the hidden curriculum.

Oftentimes that work falls to mentors, especially to mentors from underrepresented groups, who we know do a disproportionate share of the high-quality mentoring in academia, especially when those students have been hurt or mistreated by other faculty members. My hope with the book is that it’ll be a resource not only for students but also for mentors and for departments and universities that are trying to make their hidden curriculum part of the formal curriculum as well.

That definitely struck me as I read it. There were very clear guidelines for mentors. There was a delineation of what their role should be, because, as you write, academe can be a bit cruel or toxic.

That culture of cruelty does so much harm to students and to scholars who are in vulnerable positions. My hope is that mentors will prepare students for that culture of cruelty, and when students are facing it, be willing to say, “Yes, this sucks. This is real. What you’re experiencing is not in your imagination,” but not to try to perpetuate that themselves.

It doesn’t mean, Reviewer two is going to give you harsh feedback, so I’m going to give you harsh feedback to prepare you for Reviewer two. Instead, there’s much more value for mentors in saying, “Here’s the harsh feedback that I got from Reviewer Two. Let’s talk through how I dealt with that.”

You also write that undermentoring and mismentoring of grad students isn’t just an individual problem. It’s baked into the structure of grad school and academe as a whole. Can you expand on that idea?

Most of the universities that have graduate programs are larger research universities. Faculty members are primarily hired, tenured, and promoted on the basis of their research. Getting grants. Writing publications. Being a renowned scholar in the field. Those are the things that really count for faculty success. There’s little incentive to be good teachers or good mentors. That’s especially true at the graduate level, because with undergraduate classes they’re paying customers. There’s often pressure from administrators for faculty members to put time and effort into those undergraduate classes and make them desirable for students, especially if the funding for the department is contingent on how many students can be attracted to those classes.

At the Ph.D. level or in other types of advanced graduate programs, oftentimes the school is funding the students. So the students don’t have the power to demand high-quality teaching or mentoring. They’re dependent on their faculty members for funding, for sponsorships, for recommendation letters. Essentially, that creates a lot of vulnerability for the students. Certainly there’s an incentive for faculty members to invest in training their grad students to help on their own research projects. But there isn’t necessarily incentive to help students navigate their own careers and develop the kind of independent thinking and writing skills that they would be able to use for themselves.

You spend a lot of time in the book talking about the social aspects of being in a department, and you mention that you’re someone who doesn’t drink alcohol or coffee. Lots of networking happens at cafes and bars, and I’m wondering how you suggest that grad students who might be uncomfortable in those situations, or just might not understand the expectations, navigate the social scene.

It’s complicated, and it’s especially challenging for students who are already in marginalized, vulnerable positions to push back against those norms within department culture. Especially if the faculty members in your department whose validation and sponsorship and mentoring you need are people who are heavily invested in that culture. For students, asking a lot of questions up front is really critical. Find out — before you join a program and, ideally, before you even apply — if that’s the kind of culture that you’d be uncomfortable with.

At the same time, no matter where you go to grad school, those are the cultures that are perpetuated in and around conferences. So much of it is “Come meet for coffee.” You can get a soda or water or tea. Alcohol, that’s a little more complicated. Just the expectation to socialize can be complicated for a lot of students. So finding mentors who acknowledge that and are willing to support students who may not feel comfortable in those kinds of environments, it’s really critical.

In the book, I talk about building a team of mentors, as opposed to just finding one person who can be your adviser. Because oftentimes it’s difficult to find one person who can do all the things and be supportive of students in the ways that they need.

When I read the section on finding different mentors for different things, it reminded me of the best relationship advice I’d ever gotten, which is to not expect one person to be all things. You can’t expect one partner to fulfill every need for you.

There’s plenty of people around who can help and be mentors, even if they’re not the one who’s officially listed on your mentoring form. It’s important for grad students to acknowledge that faculty members have really different strengths. Some of us give good advice. Some of us are good at writing. Some are really good at navigating research or at networking. Finding people who fulfill different roles is important, because we’re all going to have drawbacks, too.

It’s also especially helpful for students to have that really big team when they get to the writing stage. They need feedback at the idea-generation stage, at the early-draft stage, when it’s a semipolished draft stage, and right before they submit something. Having different people to turn to can reduce that burden on mentors, and also make sure that students are getting the support they need.

When I started at The Chronicle covering faculty, I’d have conversations with people and not understand what they were saying. What advice do you give to graduate students who encounter words they might not be familiar with?

In grad school, professors forget that not everyone has the same experience that they have. If they are throwing around these words in classes, or other students are throwing around these words in class, for students who aren’t as familiar or simply didn’t have the exposure to them it can feel incredibly isolating. It fuels impostor syndrome in a powerful way.

One of the problems is that the students who feel most comfortable asking for help are going to be from privileged groups. I find in my own research that they often trust their teachers not to judge them, not to punish them for not knowing things. So they’re often the ones who are both most likely to know those terms in the beginning, because they tend to have more exposure, and also the ones who feel more comfortable and confident asking. That’s why having mentors whom you really trust, even if they are other grad students, is important, so that you can jot down something and go to them after class and say, “Hey, I don’t get this.”

I remember when I was a first-year grad student, I didn’t know what the term “pedagogy” meant. It was getting thrown around in the class discussion. I had a friend I trusted enough to be like, “What is this?”

You wrote the book pre-coronavirus. Are you worried about particular effects the pandemic could have on the grad-school experience or on the academic job market?

I’ve been thinking a lot about who will be forced to teach on campus. Tenured faculty members are in a good position to push back and say, “I don’t feel safe teaching. Find somebody else to do it.” I’m concerned that those might end up disproportionately being grad students. To keep their funding, they may be forced to teach on campus and put their own health at risk.

Beyond that, I think there’s also reason to be worried about grad-student funding and opportunities in grad schools more generally. There’s been a number of sociology programs — I know of Princeton and at least one other — that said they’re not admitting new grad students this year. It’s concerning to me that even a private university would be so worried about their department funding and their ability to support current grad students that they would think about canceling admissions this coming year.

We know that during times of crisis, it often takes students longer to finish their research, to get a job. I also worry a lot more that students, and especially students from historically marginalized groups, will be pushed out of programs if they aren’t getting the funding that they need to support themselves. We know that during times of crisis, it often takes students longer to finish their research. I worry a lot about who will end up taking on large amounts of debt to get their degrees.