Yeah, we're busy. But, we need to run grad school better.

(Or, a few things I learned from being a grad school misfit.)

Left to right: start of grad school, middle phase, end of grad school (where almost nothing I worked on was part of "the plan.")

I wasn't supposed to be a graduate student. I was a first-gen kid with no expectations of advanced degrees¹,². I didn't know anything about what grad school was supposed to be³. That left me learning a few things "in the trenches" that no student should have to learn. These are avoidable takeaways. They are, in our most principled visions of the grad programs we run, the wrong takeaways.

And yet, these takeaways almost certainly apply to numerous (and increasing) proportions of the graduate students that I (and you, dear reader) teach, support, advise, and hire.

Put another way, my grad school experience profoundly informs my approach to teaching and mentoring grad students now, because…