Advice to first-year PhD students

Lane Kenworthy
January 2025

HOW TO BECOME A BETTER SCIENTIST

The main thing scientists do is create publishable research. Start doing that as soon as possible. Think of every seminar paper as a potential publishable article. Work on it until it’s publishable or you’re sure you want to abandon it

Pick mostly research questions that interest you, rather than ones you think will be important contributions or of greatest interest to others.

Enlarge your skill set. Take as many methodology courses as you can stomach.

Write well. Good writing usually comes from two things. The first is clear thinking. But writing isn’t just a way to express what you’re thinking; it’s a way to clarify your thinking. Don’t wait until you have it all figured out before beginning to write. Just start writing; doing so will help you develop your thoughts. The second key is extensive editing. Write a draft. Then edit it. Then edit it again. And again.1

Graph. Learn how to create graphs.2 Excel is good enough. Stata is better. And there are many other options.

PUBLISHING

To get an academic job and then to get tenure, you need to publish your research. The publication process typically consists of rejection after rejection. Be emotionally prepared for this. When it happens, try to improve your paper or book and send to your next choice. And then do that again. And again. Many of my published papers were rejected multiple times. My first book was rejected by (at least) 8 publishers.

Where to try to publish your papers? Begin at the top: ASR and AJS. Then Social Forces. Maybe Sociological Science, Socius, Social Problems. Then top substantive journals (Sociology of Education, Socio-Economic Review, etc).

I’m a fan of books. But many people don’t enjoy book writing. And it takes a good bit longer. I wouldn’t recommend trying to write a book simply because you like the idea of being a book author, especially before you have tenure.

WHEN TO ABANDON A RESEARCH PROJECT

Some projects don’t work out. For what reasons, and at what point, should you give up on a project? Here are the main reasons I’ve decided to abandon projects:

  • I decided I was no longer interested in trying to answer the research question. This happened with the first real paper I wrote in grad school, on which I spent a good bit of my first two years.
  • I thought of something more interesting that I wanted to spend my time working on for the coming year or three. This happened with my dissertation and several subsequent projects.
  • I decided I wasn’t going to be able to answer the question.
  • The statistical analysis didn’t turn out “right.” The most common source of this is a null finding. It’s no longer impossible to publish papers that have null findings, but it’s still isn’t as easy as it should be.
  • I wasn’t sufficiently confident that I had the correct answer to my research question.

What didn’t cause me to abandon a project? Journal rejection. There have been many. And some of them have been very disheartening. But there’s always another outlet. That’s true also for books. A few of my book chapters were originally submitted as journal articles and never got accepted for publication.

Should you be quick or slow to abandon a project? I think it depends on two considerations: (1) Do you have good alternatives? (2) What impact will it have on your career? For instance, if you’re close to coming up for tenure and on the border in terms of meeting your department’s publication expectations, you should perhaps lean toward not abandoning the project.

PRESENTATIONS

Give presentations early in your graduate school career and as often as possible.

Presentations are a major part of academic life. A key — often the key — component of academic job interviews is the “job talk.” Much teaching consists of presenting. And academics regularly present their research at invited talks and conferences.

Presenting also can help you to clarify and rethink exactly what you’re doing. Showing and telling people verbally about your question, data, methods, and findings is different from writing about it.

Part of successful presenting is figuring out a style you’re comfortable with. When you watch others present — in colloquia, in job talks, in practice job talks, in lecture, at conferences — pay attention to their style. Imitate what you like, and avoid what you don’t like.

Presenting is a skill best developed through practice. The only way to get better at it is to do it. So even if it’s frightening, force yourself to present as often as you can. Eventually you’ll get over the nervousness, and you may become quite good at it.

In class: If a formal presentation isn’t part of the course requirements, consider asking if it’s possible to do one. If one of the requirements is to “lead the discussion” one week, ask if you can introduce the topic with the formal presentation. As a TA: Ask if you can give a lecture — or more than one if you’re really ambitious.

THE DISSERTATION

Pick a project, write a detailed prospectus, and start in. Don’t read and read and read and read.

Keep the literature review brief. Cite everything you’ve read if you feel the need to, but only discuss things directly pertinent to your research question. Organize it and write it in a way that makes it easy for the reader to see what’s relevant to your research question. Don’t (except in rare cases) organize it by thinker or by decade or in some other way that aims mainly to show you’ve read a lot.

THE JOB MARKET

For most of us, the job market doesn’t work out as well and as smoothly as we hope. Here’s a list of my academic positions:

  • Rochester Institute of Technology, Assistant Professor of Sociology, 1994-95
  • East Carolina University, Assistant Professor of Sociology, 1995-2000
  • Emory University, Assistant to Associate Professor of Sociology, 2000-2004
  • University of Arizona, Associate Professor of Sociology, 2004-2007
  • University of Arizona, Professor of Sociology and Political Science, 2007-2014
  • University of California-San Diego, Professor of Sociology and Yankelovich Chair in Social Thought, 2014-2024
  • University of California-San Diego, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Yankelovich Chair in Social Thought, 2024-present

Here’s how things played out in my first few years:

  • Fall 1992 job market. Number of applications for tenure-track assistant professor positions: about 25. Number of interviews: 2. Number of job offers: zero.
  • January 1993. Successful dissertation defense.
  • Spring and summer 1993. Adjunct instructor, Pima Community College (Tucson, AZ).
  • Fall 1993. Worked as a temp employee in Chicago.
  • Fall 1993 job market. Applications: 120 or so. Interviews: 3. Job offers: 3.
  • Spring and summer 1994. Worked as a researcher for the Midwest Consortium for Economic Development Alternatives (MCEDA), Chicago.
  • 1994-95 academic year. Assistant professor at Rochester Institute of Technology. My teaching load was 3/2. But at the beginning of the year, the Dean’s office announced it was planning to change that to 4/4. That was more teaching than I wanted to do, so I went back on the job market.
  • Fall 1994 job market. Applications: 30 or so. Interviews: 1. Job offers: 1.

Since then I’ve occasionally gone back on the market in a much more limited way, usually with mixed success.

My advice: (1) Like with the publication process, prepare for rejection. (2) Keep trying. (3) If you want to move and your family situation allows it, try. (4) Be aware that there are a lot of academic positions that aren’t “high status” — they aren’t in highly ranked departments or universities — but are, at least in my view, very good jobs. I was quite happy at East Carolina University, for example, and I’m confident I would have continued to be happy had I stayed there.

PUBLIC SOCIOLOGY

If you’re going to blog or tweet, try to avoid the temptation to put out more content for the sake of holding onto your readers.

I’ve put my core book project, The Good Society, online. I love this: It’s free to readers. It’s accessible by computer, tablet, or phone. I can make it available piece by piece, rather than having to wait until it’s complete before publishing it. And I can update it regularly, with the updates available to readers immediately.

At some point, this kind of online non-peer-reviewed work might count for getting hired, for tenure, and for promotions and pay raises. But not yet. So at least until you get tenure, I recommend focusing on fulfilling your department’s tenure expectations.

  1. Harry Guinness, “How to Edit Your Own Writing,” New York Times, 2020. ↩︎
  2. Kieran Healy, Data Visualization, Princeton University Press, 2018. ↩︎