Grad School Essentials

Online Description

What’s the hardest part of grad school? It’s not simply that the workload is heavy and the demands are high. It’s that too many students lack efficient methods to let them do their best. Professor Zachary Shore aims to change this. With humorous, lively prose, Professor Shore teaches you to master the five most crucial skills you need to succeed: how to read, write, speak, act, and research at a higher level. Each chapter in this no-nonsense guide outlines a unique approach to acquiring a skill and then demonstrates how to enhance it. Through these concrete, practical methods, Grad School Essentials will save you time, elevate the quality of your work, and help you to earn the degree you seek.

🔫 Author Background

• Zachary Shore is a historian of international conflict. He focuses on understanding the enemy. Zach is Professor of History at the Naval Postgraduate School, Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Institute of European Studies, and a National Security Visiting Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He earned his doctorate in modern history at Oxford, performed postdoctoral research at Harvard, and held a fellowship at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. In 2024, he received the Alfried Krupp Foundation fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin.
• He is the author of six books, including four on enemy assessments shown below. He has also written on decision making, Blunder, and he published a practical guide to success in graduate school, Grad School Essentials.
• Through his company UpWords, Zach provides services as a writing coach to authors, professionals, and students.

🔍 Author’s Main Issue / Thesis

• Author argues that anyone working on a degree (any level), needs to learn 5 skills, how to read, write, speak, act, and research. With the book primarily aimed at students of humanities and social sciences that love to learn.

📒 Sections

• Introduction

  • See main thesis above. 5 skills broken into 6 sections (two for reading)

• Dissecting a Text

  • Shore argues that to dissect a book, the reader must read for the thesis not just content and to do that, it takes 5 steps.
  • GC: “If you try to read every word of every book assigned, you will drown. You will not sleep. You will not eat. Instead, you will become one of the many Book Zombies—gaunt, sullen figures who haunt their department hallways.”
  • Step 1. Analyze the title and subtitle, Step 2. Scrutinize the table of contents, Step 3. Read the last section first, Step 4. Read the introduction, Step 5. Target the most important chapters of the book, or sections of an article.
  • While conducting the 5 steps a reader should, determine the authors thesis, and write down a restated version of the thesis and any important sentences in their own words.

• Critiquing a Text

  • Shore argues that professors assess a students intelligence largely through the critiques they make, so to be successful students need to know how to critique well.
  • To critique well a student should write down the question, premises, and conclusion a thesis is built on, and then form an attack on the thesis, methods, or sources.
  • To aid in this a student should re-write the premises and conclusion in plain language, and then identify the assumptions each premise is based on, and if the conclusion follows logically from the premises.

• How to Write

  • Shore uses Orwells writings and the Columbo principle to outlines things students should do / not do while writing.
  • 7 rules from Orwell: 1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print, 2. Never use a long word where a short one will do, 3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out, 4. Never use the passive where you can use the active, 5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent, 6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. 7. Get to the bloody point. Please.
  • Columbo Prince Three Formulas: 1) Make your first sentence the question you are trying to answer, 2) Make the first sentence your thesis, 3) Craft an arresting opening (be shocking)

• How to Speak

  • There are two goals when you speak, 1) engage your audience and 2) enlighten your listeners.
  • Speaking is not a test of what you know, but how well you convey it to others, to do this well start with a hook, then list your points, flag transitions (good pacing and catch up points), and conclude with a twist
  • Also practice practice practice

• How to Act

  • Great chapter putting instructors / scholars on blast, while arguing it is the students job to show up looking good, on time and ready to learn.
  • Academics job is to be a scholar, so most aren’t good at teaching and don’t understand if a student fails to understand a topic it is the teachers fault.
  • Argues a student should, Stay positive, be early, dress appropriately, manage impressions, and accept criticism well.

• How to Research

  • Every research goal should be to research a meaningful questions, and if there research is clear they should be able to say “My topic is X, my question is Y, and my answer (or thesis) is Z” with out skipping a beat.
  • 5 steps to find a question worth working on: 1) ask an expert 2) get the ten most recent books on your subject 3) get the next ten most recent books on your subject 4) ask if they make sense 5) ask an expert again
  • To have a good question, you must be able to ask it in 8 words. Question can be familiar, answer must be original in good research, and always be able to link your questions to something larger.

🥰 Who Would Like it ?

• SAASS students / instructors since they made us read it. But I do think it is a shorter / better primer for PME then [[1.0 Books/How to Read a Book|How to Read a Book]]

📚Related Books

• [[1.0 Books/How to Read a Book|How to Read a Book]]

☠️ Agree, Disagree, or Suspend

• Largely agree, only disagreement is with the how to act section. If meritocracy is the goal (state by the DOD), then how someone dresses or how they ask questions shouldn’t matter. If it isn’t then go with the good old boys system.

🗂 Thoughts / Quotes

• Still working on these book formats. Will put more here in the future I think.