Angela K. VandenBroek, PhD Anthropologist of Innovation (and all the hype that entails)

PhD Year One

Post archived from How to be an Anthropologist. Jun. 9, 2014.

I recently finished my first year of my PhD program in anthropology at Binghamton University. Now, I am course complete and working on bibliographies for my qualifying exams. This post is a look back over this year.

This year I have taken six courses, three each semester.

Diagram of six courses. Fall Semester: History of Anthropological Thought, Digital Anthropology, and Ethnographic Analysis. Spring Semester: Current Issues in Anthropology, Materiality and Agency, and Human Biological Variation

Between August 26 and May 14, I went to 109 class sessions for a total of 276 hours in class.

Infographic with a woman sitting at a desk 109 times.

Reading

In 262 days I completed 160 reading assignments: 129 articles and 31 books. (Not including reading for research.)

Infographic with a stack of 31 books and rectangles representing 129 articles.

That is 12,380 pages total.

Infographic: 12,380 pages could cover 2.9 tennis courts.

Approximately 47.25 pages per day.

Infographic with 47.25 rectangles representing pages.

Approximately 2,063 pages of assigned reading per course.

Graph: History of Anthropological Thought, 1875 pages; Digital Anthropology, 1986 pages; Ethnographic Analysis, 2614 pages; Current Issues in Anthropology, 1934 pages; Materiality and Agency, 2249 pages; Human Biological Variation, 1722 pages.

Writing

In 262 days I wrote 29 graded papers. That is total of 197 manuscript formatted pages or 52,830 words turned in.

Infographic with rectangles representing papers and pages and tiny words with a magnifacation showing 52,830 words.

However, grad school writing is never just the words and pages you turn in. Including discarded drafts, conference papers, and other academic writing, I wrote a total of 337 pages or 84,611 words.

Infographic: To type 337 pages (84,611 words) would take 25.7 hours at 55 words per minute.

That means I wrote approximately 12 pages or 2,918 words per week while classes were in session.

Infographic with rectangles representing 12 pages per week.

I wrote approximately 51 pages or 12,862 words per course.

Graph: History of Anthropological Thought, 4472 words; Digital Anthropology, 11886 words; Ethnographic Analysis, 29962 words; Current Issues in Anthropology, 11728 words; Materiality and Agency, 15480 words; Human Biological Variation, 3645 words; other academic writing, 7438.

My Top Words

Word Cloud described by list below.
  1. Ontology (119)
  2. Human (70)
  3. Social (66)
  4. Theory (64)
  5. Compute (58)
  6. Thing (57)
  7. Material (53)
  8. Practice (52)
  9. System (52)
  10. Use (50)
  11. Technology (49)
  12. Anthropology (46)
  13. Experience (43)
  14. Science (42)
  15. Epistemology (41)

Other Pursuits

I presented at two conferences (AAA13 & TtW14).

Skylines for each conference. American Anthropological Association 112th Annual Conference; Chicago, IL; November 20-24, 2013; Being a Curious Potential Collaborating with Muslims on Ethnography and Conversion. Theorizing the Web; Brooklyn, NY; Aptil 25-26, 2014; Tweeting Sweden Complicating Anthropology Through the Analysis of the World's Most Democratic Twitter Account.

I worked 748 hours as a web developer.

Infographic with a fake HTML tag <work> written 748 times.

Final GPA: 4.0

Boss GPA Level 4.0. Illustration of the three story Mario castle with the flag pulled down.

And, who knows how many coffees and lost hours of sleep there were.

Infographic of coffee cups that get smaller and smaller into the distance with a question mark over them.

Thoughts

At times I felt like I wasn't going to make it. This year has been the most difficult and challenging bit of my career to date. However, now that it is over I am glad that I did it. I have learned a lot, made some great friends, and feel like I have accomplished something. More importantly, I started this program because I knew I had research questions I wanted to explore. Questions that needed more time, dedication and knowledge to answer than I was able to give on my own. This year has prepared me to ask those questions and begin exploring the answers.

In other words...

A disco chicken rotating and saying I regret nothing.

Addendum

More than a few people have commented on my program's requirements. Binghamton University's anthropology department requires more than one year of courses for a PhD. However, unlike many students, I started the program with a completed BS and MA in anthropology, three years experience as an anthropology adjunct, and six years of applied anthropological web development experience. Thus, I was able to reduce my course requirements (those required to earn an MA on the way to a PhD) and have a fairly well established dissertation project from day one. Also, I am lucky to be gainfully employed while pursuing my PhD and, thus, I did not apply for departmental funding. This means that I do not have to maintain a full-time course load as a condition of accepting departmental funding. So, I took all of my required class in one year. That way I can focus on preparing for qualifying exams and my dissertation requirements without needing to worry about taking classes too. If you came to this page because you are considering a PhD, keep this in mind. My road through academia is mostly atypical. If you have just finished your bachelor's degree, you should expect to take more years of coursework and have to fulfill additional requirements for the MA. Most programs have their requirements listed on their website. That said, this infographic is, in my experience, a good representation of what a year of graduate school course work looks like in anthropology.