GPS for Graduate School: Students Share Their Stories

This resource book consists of nine chapters by sixteen graduate student authors and two advisors of graduate students, with corresponding video vignettes which briefly dramatize each chapter’s theme and are accompanied by group discussion questions. The chapter topics include seeking funding, the challenges of the first year of graduate school, finding a thesis advisor, working with thesis committee members, balancing family and graduate student life, and life after graduate school. 

Where these subjects have been treated in an academic style many times, this book conveys its message through personal narratives of the challenging circumstances its graduate student authors encountered and solved. It will not give its reader long lists of statistics about graduation rates or most advantageous actions for best outcomes. What it does instead is provide readers with a vivid sense of the types of life experiences one can expect to encounter when undertaking a graduate degree and the opportunity to discuss these real-life issues with others.

The book is published on behalf of the Midwest Crossroads chapter of the Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP).