The picture above is from the children's book Ten Seeds. A little farmer plants ten sunflower seeds. Something happens to all but one, such as this mole digging up one of the saplings. The one remaining seed blooms into a beautiful, vibrant sunflower and yields ten seeds for the next season.
Speaking of moles and sunflowers…if you want to avoid success in graduate school, a great way to do so is to not show up to anything other than the bare minimum of what’s required to graduate. This is a lesson that I was dragged to kicking and screaming. Looking back on it all, I really don't understand how I was able to get through graduate school successfully while constantly veering towards the wrong choice. I think it's 90% due to the hands-on mentorship model at Indiana University, especially Brian Powell, Art Alderson, Patricia McManus, Scott Long, and Rob Robinson.
But let’s say that you’re trying to figure out how to succeed in graduate school. One of the big, easy opportunities sitting in front of you is to get involved. To simply show up to things, and to show up often. Which activities am I thinking of? Here are the ones that come immediately to mind.
1. Talks and seminars. These are places where you can see what top or influential scholars are thinking about. They provide you blueprints for effective---and sometimes more importantly, ineffective---methods for presenting your own ideas. Job talks provide you templates for your own work and show you the kind of research conducted by folks who somehow got to the top of the stack. Talks increase the chance of gaining a spark in your own thinking. Talks often have space before and after where people chat. You have the opportunity to ask questions that you think are important, either in the Q&A or privately afterwards. Universities often have many talks in many different places on campus. These talks are also useful.
2. Office hours / requesting to meet with a professor. The old joke is that office hours are the time when professors can get their personal work done. Which means…students often don’t attend. But I think they should! These are times when you can get to know your professors, get advice about what important trends are occurring in the field, where you can get your questions answered, where you can run your research ideas by a professor and get quick and (sometimes) helpful advice. Professors sometimes know who to connect you to in the department based on your expressed ideas and interests. You can sometimes form personal connections and sometimes learn about opportunities.
3. Conferences. Especially if you email people you don't know but whose work you admire to meet and chat. Or show up to optional events. Or go out of your way to meet other graduate students. Or talk to people after their talks.
4. Optional events. Things like brownbags, workshops, events honoring faculty, staff, or students, meeting with visiting scholars for lunches, or all those odd random events, especially those that have snacks or are pitched as fun/extracurricular/social.
Here's the awful point I found to be true about these things that you keep simply showing up to: 95% of the time, you might feel like they were worthless, pointless, without any identifiable benefits from them. Why was I dragged kicking and screaming in my own experience? Well, I went to a few things and didn’t see the point. I wasn’t making connections or finding opportunities or making friends. But like the sunflower seeds, you only need a few small number to hit to have big payoffs. The more you plant, the more you show up, the more you increase your likelihood that you meet interesting people, you develop important insights, you make important connections, or you learn about important opportunities. That is pretty obvious to me now on this side of things. Not every time. Not most of the time. But once or twice. And oftentimes, that’s all you need.
If I could go back and do it all again, I would show up to everything I could. I regret not going to more office hours. I regret not going to more talks. I regret not asking questions because I felt shy. I regret not signing up for all the optional lunches. I've observed the weird cumulative effect of simply throwing a whole lot of sunflower seeds in the ground. Even with the state of today’s job market, I think that more involvement with stuff will yield good opportunities for academic and nonacademic employment outcomes. A few bloom, and you don't need to stress about (spoiler alert for Ten Seeds) those saplings that were eaten by the greenflies. It’s not predictable. And it’s pointless, until it’s not.