On the Road To Becoming a Professor:
The Graduate Student Experience

By Jody D. Nyquist, Laura Manning, Donald H. Wulff, Ann E. Austin, 
Jo Sprague, Patricia K. Fraser, Claire Calcagno, & Bettina Woodford

Published in Change, May/June 1999, pp. 18-27.

This interim report summarizes results of an ongoing qualitative, multi-site research project examining how graduate students develop into faculty members. Three refrains emerge most consistently as students discuss their experiences: the tensions they experience in adapting to the values embodied in higher education, the mixed or ambiguous messages they receive about priorities in the academy, and the implicit and explicit pleas for support evident in many of the stories they tell. Few of the students exhibit a real sense of what life in the academy as a teaching scholar and faculty member is like. Participants' reports show how little has changed in terms of their preparation for the various roles that faculty members must fill. Structural issues such as universities' desperate need to generate research dollars regardless of the cost to graduate education and the growing demand for TAs to teach service courses despite departments' limited supervision and mentoring capabilities, make it difficult to effect meaningful reform.

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 Reprinted with permission of the
 Helen Dwight Reid Educational
 Foundation. Published by
 Heldref Publications,
 Washington, DC 20036-1802.
 Copyright © 1999.
 http://www.heldref.org/html/chg.html