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Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student's Guide to Earning an M.A. or a Ph.D. By Robert Peters ( Farrar, Straus and Giroux )
Release Date: 1997-04-11
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List Price: $16.00
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Product Description
Is graduate school right for you?
Should you get a master’s or a Ph.D.?
How can you choose the best possible school?
This classic guide helps students answer these vital questions and much more. It will also help graduate students finish in less time, for less money, and with less trouble.
Based on interviews with career counselors, graduate students, and professors, Getting What You Came For is packed with real-life experiences. It has all the advice a student will need not only to survive but to thrive in graduate school, including: instructions on applying to school and for financial aid; how to excel on qualifying exams; how to manage academic politics—including hostile professors; and how to write and defend a top-notch thesis. Most important, it shows you how to land a job when you graduate.
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 Practical Advice for Impractical People
In the humanities, completing a PhD can take as long as 10 years. Reducing that time as much as possible is crucial for a graduate student. This book addresses many of the practical issues related to completing your graduate degree, from applying to grad schools to choosing a dissertation topic to find a job afterward. While different disciplines vary greatly in their requirements and expectations, this guide will be very useful to anyone considering graduate school or currently enrolled.
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 Focused on traditional students
I have to agree with other reviewers who say this books needs to be updated. I am a working adult who has gone back to college to finish a degree as a part-time student. I am considering graduate school, but there is no way I can quit work and become a full-time student. The book is aimed at "traditional" students who generally finish their undergraduate training before they're 30 years old, and who aren't stuck in a mortgage situation yet. The book is aimed at very young adults, telling them that graduate school is going to be tougher than undergraduate school, where "you could get away with almost anything short of burning down the administration building."
Despite this, I found the book useful as an overview for some of the differences between master's and Ph.D. programs, and some insight into finding good advisors or faculty. But I would like to see a new edition that includes online schools and schools with limited residency. I'd also like some material aimed at adult learners who must hold down a job while they study, and some of the pros and cons of online versus face-to-face graduate programs.
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 Good but needs updating
I bought this book when I was preparing to apply for Ph.D programs in the social sciences. It is a good source, and is actually the most detailed account of graduate school I ever received, including things that my professors said to me. This book details graduate school from beginning to end, starting with the admissions process and ending with the job search. It's rightfully thick and will be quickly devoured by anyone who's really, really interested in getting a Ph.D. It's a good read, too, not boring or stuffy.
I only have a few complaints with the book: one, it's outdated. I believe it was published in 1992 and it really showed how much the world has changed in 15 years. The admissions chapter talks about organizing paper application documents; one of the chapters on research speaks of buying a huge file cabinet and organizing hard copies of journal articles into this cabinet; another chapter on organization explains what a personal information manager is and speaks about older, outdated models or versions of that kind of software. I'd say for that chapter, you'll definitely need to supplement by asking current grad students and new/young professors about the methods they use(d) to keep themselves organized in grad school (a lot of grad students use Zotero, a free Firefox add-on, or EndNote [which is expensive; check to see if your school gives it out] to organize their materials. There are a lot of free, open-source ones on the 'net).
Second, a lot of the information is peculiar to the natural/"hard" sciences. Peters admits that to himself, noting that his book will be most relevant to those in the natural sciences, next the social sciences, and finally least relevant to those in the arts and humanities. For example, Peters advises avoiding teaching responsibilities at all costs to try to facilitate getting through graduate school faster, whereas in the humanities and some social sciences this is equivalent to career suicide, particularly if one wants to go into academia/university teaching. Many of my humanities colleagues have cited that the book is worthless or of little value to them and recommend "Graduate Study for the 21st Century" instead.
I think if read with common sense and the realization that the book is now 16 years old and written from the perspective of a science Ph.D holder, it contains good advice and a realistic description of graduate school life, including highlighting things that students would never think about (such as Peters' retelling of how some professors/advisers defrauded their students by stealing their work and passing it off as their own, or how some students who ingratiated themselves with the department secretary fortuitously earned fellowships when their late or disfavored applications mysteriously rose to the top of the pack).
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Really Helpful
I am in the middle of my reading. But everything looks like what I needed to hear. If you are looking for doing a master or a Ph.D. sure it will result very helpful. If you're close to start with your graduate studies... even better!!
Everything is O.K. with the book, but it would be better if R.L. Peters makes different versions for Masters and Ph.D.'s.
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authors humor made my day while grad school was miserable
I bought this book during a period in my second year of grad school when I was at a low point. I was unhappy with my research, annoyed at my professors, and coming home everyday crying. While this book did not solve my grad school problem, it did make me feel better. In retrospect it would have been nice to read this book before starting grad school, but much of the second half of the book (about research, dissertations, jobs, etc) has been helpful in my later grad school years. The author has a nice sense of humor and I think much of his advice is pretty good. While there isn't anything in the book that is earth shattering, he gives solid advice that is likely useful to grad students in a variety of fields. I agree with a previous post that I would recommend this book to those thinking about grad school, or those beginning a PhD.
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Addiction
