I'm a first-generation graduate student. Here is a thread of things I didn't know when I started my program. 1/

I didn't know that citing your undergraduate thesis was a bad idea and would get you ridiculed in a department workshop. I thought I was signaling experience and skill development. 2/

I didn't know how specialized academia is and that there would be no expectation to take core courses in all subfields of my discipline or to know anything about subfields other than my own. I assumed the opposite in a seminar discussion & got an "oh honey" look from the prof. 3/

I didn't know that service work was devalued and something I’d be taught to actively avoid. My department now has an informal rule against first-years serving on committees…because of me. 4/

I didn't know that I wouldn’t learn any "factual" information unless it was about the math behind a statistical tool. If I didn't already know how the IMF worked, no one was going to teach me. That ship had sailed. 5/

I didn't know that logistic regressions were things. I told a professor I could "run a regression" (which was true, for OLS) without knowing there were different kinds. 6/

I had never seen the word "endogenous" before. 7/

I didn't know that side jobs were a universally acknowledged but unspoken truth. I calculated my budget for my first year, gulped, & wrote a prof about the availability of grader positions. I was told there would be "no time" for such things. (You make time.) 8/

I'm sharing these things, some of which still embarrass me, to let you know that you are not alone if you also don't know these things, or others. The people who know all the things? They went to R1s or have academic family members. 9/

Faculty: you have students who do not know all the things. They are not ignorant for not knowing these things. When they ask you questions, please do not respond with disbelief or chastisement. Please practice not making a face. Please, just help. 10/

Departments: you have students who do not know all the things. *Teach them* the things, especially the things you think are very basic.

We don’t need to know how to get tenure as first-year students. We need to know the ins & outs of our new situation *now*. /fin