Student: Emanuel Lupașcu-Doboș

Associate Teacher: Alex Ciorogar

Academic/Essay Writing - Practical Course
13 Nov 2019

GRADUATE STUDY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

Book Review

I would like to begin my book review by highlighting the main thesis of the Graduate
Study for the 21st Century: ‘Rather than teaching you simply how to be a graduate student, then,
this books teaches you how to use graduate school as a preparation for what you really seek: a
successful academic career’1. Finishing your BA and entering your courses in MA are one of
the most important events in one student’s life. Moreover, once one has got his/her BA, she/he
should reconsider his/her opportunities, in what concerns his/her future. I strongly believe that
this book, written by Gregory Colon Semenza, is an important manual for those who are
interested in an academic career. Not only does this book teach its readers ‘how to teach,
research, and fit into the hierarchy of one University’, but also shows them the right path to
follow, so as to embed themselves into the academic structure. In this essay, I will follow to
focus my attention on what an academe/ academic life entails.
First and foremost, the main purpose of a graduate student should be the urge of
extending its advanced area of knowledge, rather than earning money from teaching and
indagation. What students must understand it is that they would be involved in an educational
mechanism and that this structure is based on getting to be an expert on one field of
specialization.
In the beginning of the book, the author depicts how the University’s engine looks like
and how every pieces of the puzzle works in the whole structure. For example, the first chapter
focuses on the departmental hierarchy, explaining the importance of administrators, faculty,
assistant professor, associate professor, and the ‘professor’ and how a graduate student should
respectfully - and by ‘respectfully’ I mean ‘sit back and try to figure out how the whole thing
is working’ - interact with them. Even if more and more people are inclined to believe that an
University employee spend insignificant time on teaching and researching, Gregory Semenza
tries to persuade the audience in understanding that being a professor or an assistant professor

1
Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century, M. Colon Semenza, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 2;
takes you around 65-70 hours per week, including desk work, grading student papers, planning
lessons, researching, publishing, or even working on a future book: ‘Most recent studies,
including one by the U.S. Department of Education, suggest that university professor work on
average about 55 hours per week; I would place the number much higher (perhaps 65 hours
per week or higher) for younger scholars, especially those still seeking tenure’ 2. Being an
instruction book, it goes without saying that it is oftenly full of pieces of advice and stratagems.
As an illustration, I will rephrase some of them: (1) a graduate student should definitely read
The Chronicle of Higher Education for improving academic vocabulary and understanding the
issues that University is facing today, (2) a graduate student must involve himself into different
activities organised by the department he is part of, in order to make strong connection with
the other members, and (3) a graduate student should get a lot of information about the history
of a department so to understand the successful career of his peers.
In what follows, the author tries to depicts an ideal plan of getting by during MA or
PhD and how to organize time to make it through the graduate student’s life. A perfect plan is
the best idea in order to skip depression or anxiety, and this book, by giving advices how to
manage your time in order to succeed, is teaching graduate student not only how to manage
with the MA Examination/Thesis, Foreign Language Requirements, and selecting advisory
committee members, but it also gives them pieces of advice in what concerns their personal
life. For instance, these chapters highlights the importance of balancing personal life and
academic life, although the main reason in this period of time should be the academe. Planning
your dissertation should go hand in hand with doing exercise, visiting your parents, and doing
personal stuff. It is highly recommended to hang out with friends or go out for a walk. However,
there must be a plan, a plan in which students should prioritize his/her activities, in order to
work approx. 10 hours per day for his/her dissertation or seminar paper.
Additionally, Seminar Paper is one of the most important things when it comes to a
graduate student, due to the fact that is the repercussion of choosing the best seminars, and the
sum of a good researching and writing. The book draw attention to the importance of choosing
seminars in order to help the student to write his/her Seminar Paper, or even his/her dissertation.
So, he/she must choose those seminars that are related to his/her thesis (for instance, a seminar
regarding cultural/historical context, or a seminar concerning theory of literature that will help
the student to build up his thesis). Seminar Paper will certainly demonstrate that the graduate
student must have worked hard to his/her dissertation and taken seriously his/her seminars.

2
idem, pp. 31-32
 What every graduate student asks himself is ‘how can he/she teach another student
when he/she is still a student, learning and taking exams (‘How can you possibly be confident
about your ability to teach others when you are reminded everyday how much you still have to
learn?’3). This must be a paradoxical question, since every graduate student will be a professor
at his own time. Graduate Study for the 21st Century will help you to understand how to build
your syllabus, how to plan your lesson, how to choose your bibliography for your future
students, how to schedule your week so as to office hours will fit in. Being a graduate student
was never an easy ‘job’, but the aim of this book is to facilitate your learning and researching.
For example, when it comes to choosing bibliography, the author recommend to select those
primary and secondary books that will help both you and your students. What must be very
important for a graduate student who is teaching a seminar is that she/he should focus his/her
attention to take successfully her/his exams. This is why Semenza has a distinct chapter in his
book that tries to help students to understand better the importance and the impact that a exam
has on his/her career. He gives pieces of advice regarding choosing your exams in order to help
you to improve your skills in writing your dissertation/thesis (in your MA or PhD), how to put
together your reading list for comps and how to prepare for the oral defense. Everything
converges to an one fundamental recommendation: everything that you do, being a graduate
student, must help you to polish up your area of knowledge and not to disturb yourself from
your main purpose.
To sum up, Graduate Study for the 21st Century is a very interesting and functional
book, because (1) it is a manual of achieving success in an academic life, (2) it is written in a
cordial and sincere tone (it includes even author’s true stories to emphasize some things) and
(3) because it is very practical (it contains examples of CVs, syllabi, reading plans, note-taking
advices, techniques of writing an argument/ thesis/ essay’s structure and lesson plans). I will
highly recommend every undergraduate student or graduate student to read this book, due to
the fact that, as I underlined the aforesaid facts, it will help anyone to understand how academic
life works and to succeed in his/her career in University.

3
idem, p. 116