Graduate Students and Service

There has been a flurry of discussion on academic blogs these past few days about the subject of academic meetings: how burdensome are they actually for faculty? How does one run a good meeting? How much does service count for tenure? Why do some faculty end up with more meetings than others? And so on.

I haven't yet seen any graduate students chime in on this, so I thought I would add my two cents. We all know that most doctoral programs do a much better job of training the research, rather than the teaching, side of being an academic. Yet, from what I gather from this discussion and from my own professors' whining, service seems to make up a huge part of the daily life of being an academic. But that is one skill that is almost completely absent from our training. When does a graduate student learn how to behave at a meeting? To write a report? To lead a meeting? And probably most importantly, when do we learn how to juggle these three simultaneous academic roles, rather than just the two we juggle now?

In my program, we have a few opportunities for graduate students to develop service skills. There is a student representative to the faculty who "gets" to sit in on faculty meetings every two weeks. There is a small group of 2-3 grad students who administer a visiting speaker series. A few brave students have volunteered to serve on university-wide committees, or have taken leadership roles in our TA union. (Don't forget to vote to authorize strikes this week, kids!) And probably most significantly, our department sponsors an online journal, completely run by graduate students. This last opportunity is probably the closest experience to actually being an academic in a functioning department. We have weekly meetings, there are tasks to be accomplished outside of those meetings, and there are opportunities for leadership. I'm currently one of the editors of the journal, and although sometimes the whole thing seems awfully silly and amateur, it's easy to remind myself that learning to keep a meeting on track (I find Dean Dad's advice very useful), to delegate responsibilities, and to be a responsible adult about the whole thing are all skills I need to develop if I want to have a happy academic life.

But doing any of these service tasks, as a graduate student, requires a fair amount of initiative. It's certainly not a requirement of the program, and although there is some mild pressure to help the department out when things need doing, it's hard to fault people for not volunteering to spend their busy time doing often-pointless work. I don't really want my program to require service for graduate students, 'cause that seems like it could be a disaster. But it is something I think we grad students need to keep in mind--come real life, we're going to be thrust into the world of service, and that's something we need to prepare for as much as research and teaching.