Munene, the journey...

If you read my previous post on surviving graduate school, you would have been thinking that there's probably more to surviving than what I posited. Well, I think there is, here are some more thoughts. Connecting the dots Early on in graduate school, I have learnt that I need to connect dots. There's a lot going on here, and no one will decode it on your behalf. Graduation starts when you are admitted; and so the job search begins as early. Keeping up with the email This is the most common means of communicating news and information from the school. Professors use it, administrators use it, the President uses it, sports and activities use it, the health center uses it, the police department uses it. About every department, and there seems to be a lot of them in the University, sends information via email. Going through it, making sense of it, ignoring some, archiving others, responding to others is an important task I have learnt to do at least once a day. Working in...

Graduate school is different from other levels of education, more so the intense American system that requires constant vigilance on the part of the student. As an international student pursuing a public policy program that requires a lot of study, I have learnt some skills to survive. Prioritization The best intentions are for the student to get all the readings done on time, and then read some more extra on the side. This, however, is not possible with the amount of writing, research, practical work one needs to do. Learning to prioritize on what needs to be done as the most urgent is the only way to keep up with all the activities of graduate school. Writing well Writing is a core aspect of graduate studies. Writing well, however, is required to survive and avoid rewrites and poor grades. Obviously, the more the practice, the better I get at it. Reading, fast and wide With tomes and tomes of required reading, I have learnt to read faster than I thought possible. I have vora...