How to Prepare for Graduate Education

1. How to Prepare for Graduate Education Eileen Doyle Crane, J.D. Utah Valley University

2. Maxims for your progression • It’s not the grade, it’s what you know • Faculty Mentors can help you • Research and writing skills make all the difference • Oral advocacy—if you can’t explain it, it doesn’t matter how smart the idea is • Publishing as an undergrad—put it in print • Build a network of professionals who do what you want to do • Read the literature in your field at the professional level • Research graduate programs in your area of interest—all programs are not created equally • Find your heroes who do what you want to do

3. Grades v. knowledge • Within 3-5 years of graduation, no one will know or care when you graduated or what your grades were • They will care about what you KNOW • And how the knowledge you have can help them • Solve problems • Create solutions • Address issues • Give value-added to their organization, company, product, goods, or services

4. Faculty Mentors • Faculty members have studied in their field of expertise for at least 8 years before you see them in the classroom • Faculty members have a firehose of information to give you • A 3-credit semester class equals 48 hours of face time in the classroom • Faculty members know MORE than what they can teach in one semester • Curriculum design requires faculty to teach a broad sector of their topic • But the depth of their knowledge is MUCH deeper • Act interested and they have MORE to give you!

5. Research & writing skills • Law is very interesting; you could spend hours researching something that you can not bill the time for to clients • Managing/supervising partner will not be interested in ALL that you can learn about a topic, at least initially • Since the creation of the Internet, an information explosion has occurred • The ability to find what you need exactly and quickly will save you in billable hours

6. Research & writing skills • Knowledge of strict grammar rules is a MUST • Seek critical feedback of writing from professors • Buy this book and read it, use it • Mark it up and put tabs in it for rules on commas, semi-colons, etc. • There are special punctuation rules in legal writing • Bluebook Citation Manual

7. Oral advocacy • Many graduate programs are writing based, oral secondarily • Broaden your vocabulary: www.merriam.com Subscribe to an email Word-A-Day • Read broadly to expand your command of ideas and timeless philosophies • Practice oral presentations in front of friends and family • Law, for example, is an oral occupation ONLY secondarily • No oral presentations until AFTER the writings • Even in negotiations, writings such as demand letters come first • Court visits take up very little of most attorneys’ time, unless one is in the litigation section of a large law firm

8. networking • Contact each of the two other attorneys • Invite each to lunch, breakfast, as above • Ask specific questions about the profession • Ask for names of two other attorneys to meet • Write/email/call the 1st attorney and thank him/her for the referral and share what was learned in subsequent interviews • Continue till student knows 100 attorneys • Collect and file business cards as well as create and share one’s own card; write notes on the back of details that will help you remember something about this particular person

9. Literature in your field • Start with a macro search on your field • Discover what the specialties are that exist within it • Do some self-discovery to identify your particular interests • Discover who the experts in those areas are • Read their work and learn what the issues are in those areas • Arrive at graduate school with some idea of the past, present, and future concerns of the field are

10. Graduate programs • Identify where graduate programs are in your field of interest • Discover a way to systematically compare and contrast programs • Create a spreadsheet of the variables involved • Research the various programs, filling in the spreadsheet with information • Compare within schools for breadth and depth of offerings • Compare across variables for breadth and depth of offerings

11. Post-graduate school work • Most graduate programs lead to a variety of employment options • Explore the options currently most subscribed to by graduates • Discover necessary data about those positions, e.g. pay, hours, travel, benefits, work settings and situations, professional development, advancement opportunities, leadership training • Post-graduate training/degrees: are they necessary, negligible, optional

12. Heroes in your field • Identify those who laid the foundation for the field you are interested in • Find out who the current leading actors are in your field • Contact them, if they are still alive • Assume that they will be interested in hearing from you • Ask those who respond intelligent questions which show that you have done your homework • Thank them for their time and attention