18: ABCs of Grad School – Part 2

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Hi, happy Sunday. Today I am going to be continuing my discussion of the ABCs of grad school. This is part two. Actually, before I get started, I have a little announcement to make. I am going to be doing a few things each week just to add to the podcast. The first thing is I like to invite co hosts. So I am right now in search of anybody who would like to come on my podcast and have a conversation with me about grad school, either your experiences in grad school or your questions about grad school. You can be anyone. You can be undergrad, grad student, professor. If you want to have a conversation about preparing for graduate school, if you want to provide advice, or if you want to get advice, please reach out to me over email. I'm happy to add you to my schedule so that we can start incorporating these additional episodes. This means that yes, I'm going to start to have co hosts. It's not going to be on a regular basis. These will be bonus episodes. Just anytime that folks are interested and available, I'll do my best to provide these extra episodes for you.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Okay, so that's announcement number one. I also want it to say that I'm really grateful to the new listeners that I've gained. I recently started an Instagram account. It's @gradschoolfemtoring. I started it two weeks ago, and I have a little over 100 followers, which is not bad considering this is a very small, home based project for me. And it's my way of giving back to the community. For the listener reviews- if you're new, please, I want to remind you, and I know I say this in every episode, but please leave a review, leave a comment and add your three, four or five stars on iTunes. What I'm going to be doing is each week, I'm going to select one review, one comment to read out loud, and that special person will get a prize. You are going to receive a copy of my CV template and you can just email me. I will gladly send it to you. That template is supposed to help you format your CV and it includes every section that you need in a CV so that way, it's one less thing to worry about as you prepare for grad school applications. It's also useful for those of you that are in grad school and need to perfect your CV. So listener reviews are definitely welcome. Then the last thing I'm going to be incorporating every week is at the end of my episode, I'm going to be doing a shout out. I'm gonna shout out a resource. It could be a website, it could be a book, it could be another podcast. Anything that I think would be a resource to my low income, first gen, URM listeners, I will be sharing that with you. Okay, so now let's get started.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Last time, I ended in letter "I" and so I'm going to continue with letter "J." For "J," we have JD, which is Juris Doctor or Doctor of Law. I mentioned this last week, but just a reminder. For "L" the term that I have to talk about is literature review. What is a literature review? If you're new to research, maybe you haven't written one yet, but you've might have heard about it in a class. This is a critical summary of the academic literature related to your research topic. It describes, summarizes and evaluates this literature as it relates to your research questions.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

One thing that I've heard some of my students say is, well, I'm in STEM, or I'm in humanities, and we don't have a literature review section in our field. That means that they have when they're writing their research paper, they're not expected to have a section that's literally titled "Literature Review." That doesn't mean that they don't do a literature review. It just means it's incorporated in a different part of the paper. For those of you that are in the humanities like me, or in STEM, most likely your literature review is going to be present in the introduction of your paper. Take a look at papers in your field. Start to look at academic journals to find out where you will most often find the literature. Why do you need to do this? Because if you haven't read the literature in your field, how do you know what's available and what gaps you're gonna fill? It's important to develop that foundation first, before you even think of working on your research.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Okay, next "L" is loan. A lot of us know what loans are. Hopefully you don't have any or too many. Loan is a form of financial aid that is available to students and to the parents of students. An education loan must be repaid. In many cases, however, payments don't begin until the student finishes school. There are personal loans. There are federal loans- education based loans. Usually the federal, student based loans, they have lower interest rates. You can - what's the word it- you can defer them while you are a student, both in undergrad and in graduate school. But it's still not something that you want to have to rely on too much.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Oh, the other thing I want to mention is, I know I have a few international listeners, there's a couple of you. I've seen it in my stats. I understand that, at least to my knowledge, getting a PhD in the US will take you much farther than getting a PhD in another country. I know that I had, for instance, international students in my PhD program who came, got their PhD here, and then went back to their home countries and they obtain Professor positions, and they were much more competitive in that way. There's a good amount of rigor that's involved in the PhDs that you obtain here, that may not necessarily be true at all universities abroad. The other thing why some folks- international students- come to the US for graduate school is that not all countries have financial aid. We take that for granted as those of us that are US born. We take for granted that community college will provide you financial aid, for your university that will provide you some sort of financial aid for those that are need based students, for those of you that are low income students. That's not the case everywhere. In fact, I have a student right now who, when he moved here from Japan, he didn't know that in community college that he qualified, or there was even financial aid. He didn't know it existed. He just assumed- in Japan, there's no financial aid, that it was the same here. So he worked really hard and he paid, just barely making ends meet, didn't have enough money for food, just really struggling financially, and paid out of pocket his first semester. Maybe even the first year, I am not exactly sure. It wasn't until later on- eventually, he found out that he qualified for financial aid and it helped him out tremendously. So keep that in mind. Loan is a form of financial aid. It's not the best option, but it's something.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

All right, next letter "L" word is LSAT. That is the law school admissions test. This is another standardized test required for admission to most law schools. Unfortunately, it's another one of those tests that becomes a big hurdle for low income students. Because if you don't have the funding to take a prep course and to study, it can really affect you. Especially with the LSATs, you want to have a really high score because the higher your score, the more financial aid you'll receive in law school. So you got to take that very seriously.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Okay, next is master's degree. So now we're into the "M"s. A master's degree is a grad degree earned after an undergrad degree or a bachelor's degree. Like I said last week, you don't have to have a master's to get a PhD. That's not always true or a requirement for every PhD program.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Next- MCAT. Medical College Admissions Test. Another standardized tests required for admission to most medical schools. I am not a law school or med school expert. I wish I were because then I could help my baby brother out, who wants to go to med school. What I do know is that if you're interested in pursuing a joint degree program that's both MD/PhD or JD/PhD, you're going to have to study for both exams. That means you're gonna have to study and take the LSAT, study and take the MCAT and also study and take the GRE. So it's double the work to do these joint programs and hopefully double the reward. But again, that's not my experience. So it's hard for me to to say exactly what the benefits are of getting a joint degree aside from having more job opportunities.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

All right, MD is next- Doctor of Medicine. Next "M" word is mentoring. In this case, I refer to it as femtoring because I self identify as a Chicana feminist and I want to help out other mujeres like me. But obviously, also this podcast is open to anybody that listens, however you self identify. Mentoring and femtoring is the process of advising and preparing students to meet their academic and/or other professional and personal goals. This is really near and dear to me, because I haven't- well, I had a lot of good and bad experiences when it comes to mentoring. I had a really incredible undergraduate mentor. She was just a really good model for reaching out and advocating for me. I didn't always feel comfortable talking to her about personal matters and personal issues, and I didn't always feel comfortable reaching out to other people to have them mentor, femtor me. I think that part of it had to do with impostor syndrome, feeling like I wasn't good enough, like why would someone even invest their time in me? Like, what can I give them back? Even to this day, I still struggle with finding mentors and femtors where I am, at my stage in my career, because I'm not quite- I'm not a professor. A lot of junior faculty who are my age and graduated when I graduated, now have their first tenure track jobs or postdocs. They get assigned a mentor. And I'm more in the Academic Affairs. I'm not quite Student Affairs, so I have an academic appointment. But I don't quite have research expectations or requirements, which means I don't necessarily have someone assigned to me. If I want a mentor, a femtor, I have to go out of my way to reach out and as an introvert, that's hard for me. But anyway, I'm going on a rant now. The point is that I provide holistic mentoring to the people that I work with, because it's what I wish that I would have had when I was in undergrad. I wish that someone would have asked me, how are you mentally, physically? How are you spiritually? And I didn't quite get that. So yes, mentoring, femtoring is really important.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Next M word is merit based financial aid. This is financially that's given to students who meet requirements not related to financial needs. Most merit based aid is awarded on the basis of academic performance or potential and is given in the form of scholarships or grants. My familiarity with merit based financial aid comes from having worked at the UCLA scholarship center, and helping students apply and get merit based national and international fellowships, and scholarships. These you know, you've got to have a 3.8, 3.9, near perfect GPA to qualify in many cases. It's not always easy. And just like I mentioned about the GRE, I'll say this about merit based scholarships. The whole idea of there being a meritocracy is a myth. There are so many race and class based hurdles that students like us face- low income, first gen, URM- face that make it incredibly hard to get that 3.8, 3.9 and qualify for the scholarships. But if somehow you're making it work, go ahead and you qualify- if you're eligible, go ahead and apply.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Next, M word is methods. This is the "how" of your research. When you're conducting research, you've got to learn your methods. This can be a little bit confusing for humanities students, because you don't always get to take a methods course in your discipline. I know there wasn't one when I was an undergrad as an English major, and so it was just reading and writing. And my mentor was trying to teach me how to close read and interpret, but I never quite felt like I was doing it right. And yet in the social sciences, there are actual courses you may be learning qualitative or quantitative methods. I'll expand more on those two words later. In STEM, you know, you may be learning certain procedures to run certain experiments, but there's always a "how" that you go about answering your question. It could be ethnographic it could be historical, it could be statistical etc. Everybody has a method if they're conducting research. Iff you don't think you have a method, you have one, you just haven't articulated it quite yet.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Okay, now we're going into the N's, need based financial aid. This is the kind of financial aid that's given to students who are determined to be in financial need, of assistance based on their income and assets and their family's income and assets, as well as other factors. If you don't even know what assets means, you most likely don't have assets. I didn't even realize that. I was like- oh, my goodness, it wasn't until I got to college that I realized people actually come and have trust funds. They have savings accounts. They have educational savings that their parents built for them since they were born, that folks getting money from life insurance. I was just blown away. Like folks who have parents who have homes, who have parents who are gonna buy their homes. Wow, again, I didn't realize just how low income I was until I got to college, and I definitely was eligible for need based financial aid.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Next N word is non resident tuition. This is a larger amount of tuition and fees required by non residents in a state university system. This doesn't necessarily apply to private schools. Non resident tuition is something to think about when it comes to applying to graduate school. What a lot of folks do when they apply to out of state schools is they after living there their first year, they'll apply to become a resident in that state. So that way, they qualify for cheaper tuition the next year. Most of the time, it's not a huge deal for PhD programs, because the odds are, you're probably going to get into a fully funded PhD program. If you've done the research, if you've done the preparation- if you're one of my students, that's my goal for you is to get you into a fully funded PhD program, where they're covering your tuition and fees, but still it's something to keep in mind.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Next N word is normative time. This is an established period of time in which a grad student must reach certain milestones in a given department or program. Maybe normative time will be that a student has to reach ABD status- all but dissertation status- by the end of their fourth year. Normative time is useful to think about because if you're talking to grad students or faculty, you're getting invited to a campus visit, there is an expected amount of time for you to complete things and you want to ask, well, what's the normative time to graduate? Then you also ask, what is the actual average amount of time it takes for grad student here to graduate? So maybe they'll say normative time is five years, but the actual amount of time is more along the lines of eight or nine years. The longer it takes to get a PhD- how do I put it in a nice way- you want to be searching for programs who have students that are finishing up in the normative time. That means that they're being supported enough that they can finish their PhDs on time. If they're not necessarily always being supported, both financially or just in terms of the culture there, that means that sometimes graduate students end up having to TA more, or work on the side to make ends meet, which reduces the amount of time they have to do their research, which lengthens the amount of time it takes for them to graduate. So normative time is useful to know and also how long someone actually takes to get a PhD in that program is also useful to know.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Alright, from N, we are skipping O, and going straight to P. PhD, Doctor of Philosophy. Okay, I just had to put that in there. I know you all know what that is now. P-post secondary. This means anything that happens after high school and refers to all programs for high school graduates, including programs at two and four year colleges, vocational and technical schools. So essentially, everybody that I work with are post secondary students. I don't necessarily work with high school students. Why not? Because I've been in the college setting so long. That's probably why.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Okay, next P word- pre requisite. If you're an undergrad, you know this. It's specific courses you must successfully complete and pass so that you can enroll in another course. Students must satisfy prerequisites and any other stated conditions before enrolling in a course. So just like you have prereqs, in undergrad, you may also have prereqs in grad school.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Next professional degree- highly specialized degrees, such as law and medical degrees. Again, when I refer to grad school, I'm not referring to professional schools. That's the distinction I want to make clear.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Okay, P professor, this is a term that across the board refers to all types of faculty. If your professor has a doctorate degree, you may also refer to them as a doctor. So you can call anybody who's teaching a class, a professor, even if they're still a graduate student and don't have a PhD. If they have a PhD, you can call them doctor. So for instance, I teach McNair seminars. But aside from that, I don't necessarily teach college courses. And so my students call me Dr. Yvette. That's my preference. You can call me Yvette. You can call me Dr. Yvette. You can could call me Dr. Martinez-Vu. You can talk call me Dr. MV. But most of the time, my students call me Yvette or Dr. Yvette.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Okay. P- proposal. This refers to a document outlining a proposed research project. This includes a statement of the problem that you're trying to address, your literature review, discussion of methods that you're going to use, the potential limitations of the project. You may need to write a proposal for a thesis- a master's thesis, undergrad thesis- for a dissertation, or for a funding opportunity. I wrote a proposal when I applied to grants and fellowships in grad school. There was a proposal required for the Ford fellowship.I had to write a prospectus, which is a proposal, for my dissertation. So proposals, you're going to be writing them from here on out if you're starting to do research and interested in grad school.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Alright, prospective student. Separate from the incoming student that I mentioned last time- incoming students or students who have been admitted and are going to start going to that school or program. prospective students is someone who is considering applying or waiting on potential admission to a university or college. Most of my listeners, you're all trying to learn about grad school on how to apply. You're all prospective students at whatever universities you have listed in your grad school list.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

PsyD, that's doctorate in psychology. I mentioned it earlier. I want to make sure I get all my doctorates in.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

All right now, Q -qualitative. I mentioned methods earlier, and that you could have qualitative or quantitative methods. I used to actually get these confused in undergrad and I used to be so ashamed of it, because I didn't use these. These weren't part of my daily jargon. It wasn't part of my language. Well, qualitative refers to conducting research and analyzing language, behavior. You're analyzing data from interviews, surveys, or participant observation. Quantitative data are ways of conducting research that analyze numerical data using statistical methods.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

R- research assistant. This is a paid position for graduate students that requires aiding a faculty member on their research project. Research assistants often also get a stipend and get their tuition and fees paid. So if you get a financial package for a PhD program, odds are you're probably going to get TA ships and RA ships-research assistantships, and also maybe a couple of years of where you're on fellowship and you don't have to TA or RA, you can just work on your research.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Okay, now let's talk about research universities. Sometimes I tell my students, oh, you know, what PhD granting programs want you to say when you apply to grad school is that your long term goal is to become a tenure track professor at an R1 Institute, where you can continue to produce research and teach and mentor et cetera. The whole are one thing- I didn't quite understand that an undergrad either. What does R1 refer to? This is a research one university. This is a doctorate granting institution with a very high research activity. UCLA is an R1. UCSB is an R1, and many other universities are R1s. Now, what about the others? There's also research universities that are referred to as R2 universities, research two. These are doctorate granting institutions with high research activity, but not very high compared to the R1s. That's why I tell students, you want to be at the top of the top program in your field, getting a job there. I mean, at least what your PhD programs are training you for. Maybe in reality, you don't want to be at an R1, you want to be at a community college. That's completely okay too. In fact, I think that eventually, at some point, I'm going to end up working at a community college. I just feel it. I see myself. I feel like I could do really good work with those students. In fact, my favorite students happen to be transfer students. So who knows? You don't have to be at an R1 if you don't want to, but they want to hear you say that sadly. Even though you can use your PhD in a number of different ways,you know, and produce really good work nonetheless.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Okay, now we're gonna go to S- statement of purpose. This is a main component of your graduate applications. So important, you don't realize how important it is. It should describe your research experience, research interests, what you want to study in graduate school. You want to address your fit within the department, your strengths, and you can add a little bit of your personal experiences relevant to your academic goals. You don't want to add too much of the personal stuff, because a lot of them- a lot of the applications will also ask you to write a personal statement. If they don't, if they just asked for a statement of purpose, then yes, add a little more of the personal stuff in your Statement of Purpose, because you don't have a personal statement to worry about.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

All right. Let's go on to T- teaching assistant. So I mentioned RA ship, earlier now its TA ship. This is a paid position for grad students that requires aiding an instructor in teaching an undergraduate class. Ta ships provide a stipend and often the payment of tuition and fees. TAs lead discussion sections, grade student work, and provide administrative support to instructors.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Next T word- this is a really important one- tenure. This is what's awarded after a junior member of the faculty of a college university has demonstrated a strong record of research, teaching, and service. It results in a promotion to associate and also full professor. Most of the time associate, because you've got to be as an associate first before you become full professor.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Alright, another T word, just FYI, is terminal Master's. And you're going to think, wait, what? How's that different from a regular Master's? This is a master's degree offered in a department that does not lead to a doctoral degree. So my department didn't provide master's degrees. But it did provide a terminal Master's. If you didn't pass your qualifying exams, or at any point decided that you didn't want to continue in the program, you were given a certain assignment to complete so that you could walk away with a terminal Master's. But you could only get a terminal Master's. I mean, you couldn't just get a master's and keep getting your PhD. Only those that left got a master's.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

All right thesis is a piece of original research usually required for an undergraduate degree with honors or a master's degree. If you can work on a senior thesis while you're an undergraduate, I highly recommend it. Usually it's under a departmental honors program. You should definitely reach out to undergrad advisor to ask about that, because typically the application is out during your junior year of college and you don't want to miss out on that opportunity. You'll get a lot of mentorship and support from the department. You'll be required to take certain seminars where they'll prepare you for it.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Alright, next T word is time to degree. This is an established period of time in which a graduate student must complete their master's or doctoral program.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Next key word is TOEFL. I don't even know if I'm pronouncing it right. It's a Test of English as a foreign language. This is a test required by many universities to measure non native English speakers command of the English language. One of my students right now is preparing.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

All right, we're getting closer to wrapping up. I actually don't even know what happened. Somehow, after I finished the T words, I lost my recording. It just stopped recording. So I'm just going to keep on going from there. The next word is university. This is an educational institution of higher learning offering degrees and research facilities.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

And the last word is work study programs. These are programs offered by many colleges. They allow students to work part time during the school year as part of their financial aid package. The jobs are usually on campus, and the money earned is used to pay for tuition and other college charges. One thing to note about work study -that actually I didn't even know when I was a grad student- is that work study is available to graduate students too. It's not just an undergrad thing. If you're a grad student, and you apply for FAFSA, and you qualify, you show that you have financial need, you may qualify for work study opportunities. Actually, at the scholarship center where I used to work, we would provide work study opportunities for grad students too. So it's just another useful thing to learn. All right, that is my last word.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Before I go, I am going to actually, you know what, I'm gonna do my first listener review. I'm going to do that, and I'm also gonna give a shout out. So for my listener review, let's see if I can pull it up under podcasts. Again, if you are a listener reviewer, and I read your review, you're gonna get a free CV template. Just go ahead and email me say- Hi, Dr. Yvette, you read my listener review comment and I'd like to have a copy of the CV template. I will gladly email it to you. Hopefully, that'll motivate some of you to leave me a review.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Okay, here it is. So the first reviewer that I'm going to be pointing out, is Chelsea dot Onay. I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing it. The title is- thank you so much. I am writing my personal statement now and I was struggling. The podcasts on the personal statement has given me so much clarity. Thanks so much for your review, Chelsea. I appreciate knowing if any of my episodes are helpful, and definitely reach out to me so that I can send you my CV template.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

All right now for the shout out. I'm going to shout out a podcast today, and it's a brand new podcast. It's called Bookworm Por Vida, and it's by my friend Cecilia Caballero. So Bookworm Por Vida is a woman of color feminist podcast and project that celebrates books and writing by BIPOC- so Black, indigenous, people of color- for liberation. This is my homegirl Cecilia, who was also part of the Chicana mother work collective. She is an incredible writer, creative writer. I am probably her biggest fan. If I'm not, I'm one of her biggest fans. I absolutely love her writing. If you want to check out what she writes or how she writes, there is a blog that she posted on the Chicana mother work website- ChicanaMotherWork.com- called, "Mothering While Brown In White Spaces, or When I Took My Son To Octavia Butler's Exhibit." That blog, that piece went viral. And that's only one of multiple pieces that she has published and will be working on publishing soon. So definitely check her out, because I definitely look up to her when it comes to any kind of recommendations for parenting books, novels by people of color. Anything related to reading and writing, she is a great resource. Definitely check out Bookworm Por Vida. She doesn't have an episode out yet, at least not that I know of. But you can follow this podcast by going to Instagram. The handle is Bookworm_PorVida. She'll let you know when the first episode is up on there. All right. So I think that's all I have for today. I did my listener review, my shout out. I want to remind you if you want to be a co host, you can be anybody and still co host with me. Send me an email. I'm happy to coordinate and find a time for us to record an episode. Thanks so much for tuning in. And I will talk to you all next time.