No abstract

American doctoral programs remain the premier training ground for the w o r l d ' s future scientists and scholars (Clark, 1995). Every year, thousands of students enter graduate school with hopes of bright careers; many aspire t o w a rd careers as professors and scientists (Boyle, 1996). All of these p rospective scholars must begin as first-year graduate students. These students go through a cultural learn i n g or enculturation process in which they l e a rn to act as productive members of their graduate department (Corc o r a n and Clark, 1984). Organizational influences, embodied by pro c e d u res and practices, may either facilitate or hinder the enculturation process (Van Maanen and Schein, 1979).Based on our empirical examinations of graduate education and our knowledge of the graduate education literature, we highlight the best practices for facilitating enculturation. When we examined exemplary departments, particularly their organizational cultures and program stru c t u res, we found that e x e m p l a ry departments distinguished themselves in three ways: They foster collegiality among the first-year students; they support both mentoring and collegial, professional relationships between the first-year students and faculty; and they provide the first-year students with a clear sense of the program stru cture and faculty expectations.We begin with a brief description of the study from which our data are taken. We then examine how the re s e a rch on graduate education corre s p o n d s to the best practices we identified. Methods D e p a rtment Effectiveness Ratings.To identify exemplary depart m e n t s , we relied on the National Research Council (1995; NRC) effectiveness ratings. The NRC periodically rates doctoral programs' effectiveness in training re s e a rc h scholars and scientists on a scale from 0 (not effective) to 5 (extremely eff e ctive). The effectiveness ratings of the departments included in this study had a mean of 3.17 and a standard deviation of .44. P a rt i c i p a n t s . We interviewed sixty-six students and faculty from a larg e , public re s e a rch university. We interviewed thirty-six domestic first-year students from ten graduate departments. From each of these ten departments, we i n t e rviewed one graduate director and two advanced graduate students for a total of thirty interviews with senior department members. The ten departments re p resented departments across the physical/life sciences, social sciences, and humanities. I n t e rview Pro c e d u re s . The first-year graduate students were interv i e w e d t h ree times during their first year: within the first few weeks of entry, near the end of their first semester, and during their second semester of graduate school. The interviews covered a range of topics. We re p o rt the data that re l a t e to their perceptions of the departmental cultures into which they had entere d , the social and professional relationships they were forming, and the first-year requirements. Each interview took approximately one hour....

No abstract

No abstract

The author reviews traditional beliefs about creative illness and suggests that their endorsement of euphoric bingeing misleads writers. Productive creativity seems to occur more reliably with moderation of work duration and of emotions, not with the fatigue and ensuing depression of binge writing. The author compares binge writers to a matched sample of novice professors who wrote in brief, daily sessions and with generally mild emotions. Binge writers (a) accomplished far less writing overall, (b) got fewer editorial acceptances, (c) scored higher on the Beck Depression Inventory, and (d) listed fewer creative ideas for writing. These data suggest that creative illness, defined by its common emotional state for binge writers (i.e., hypomania and its rushed euphoria brought on by long, intense sessions of working—followed by depression), offers more problems (e.g., working in an emotional, rushed, fatiguing fashion) than magic. The example of Joseph Conrad supports these findings.