Trained professionals in graduate-student counseling services, Shanok and Benedicto Elden gather the voices and perspectives of clinical psychologists and faculty members who share their expertise and experiences managing graduate work and mental health effectively. Graduate students, faculty, administrators, and mental health professionals who support graduate students will all find something useful here. Contributed chapters are devoted to topics like dissertation writing, paying for graduate school, being a trans grad student, parenting while a graduate student, and being an international grad student. There are also chapters covering imposter syndrome and wellness. The writing is clear and jargon free, making it useful for graduate students in any field and for faculty and administrators looking to develop graduate student support services. At the end of each chapter, there are takeaways and suggestions for graduate students, faculty, administrators, and mental health professionals to consider. Readers interested in pursuing graduate school or trying to understand today’s graduate student's needs and opportunities will find this book very timely and helpful.

Booklist

Over the years, higher education has been trying to encourage more students from historically marginalized backgrounds to attend graduate school, but education systems—especially grad school—aren’t particularly built to be a welcoming and nurturing climate for such students. Dr. Benedicto Elden and Dr. Shanok's Thriving in Graduate School: The Experts Guide to Success and Wellness is a big step toward the right direction, as it explores common struggles faced by historically marginalized students—such as impostor syndrome, microaggressions, multicultural competence, and funding—and provides practical ways to help students not only succeed in graduate school, but also do so while keeping their wellness. Graduate programs throughout the country should have a copy of this book to share with their students.

E. J. R. David, associate professor of psychology, University of Alaska Anchorage, author, “Brown Skin, White Minds: Filipino -/ American Postcolonial Psychology”, “Internalized Oppression: The Psychology of Marginalized Groups”, and “The Psychology of Op

In the midst of pandemic and austerity, swelling evidence of anxiety and depression, thrilling movements for racial and gender justice and higher ed in free fall, Thriving in Graduate School offers a jazz of voices that will comfort, resonate, infuriate, and offer up brilliant strategies for moving through—with scholarly lust, activist passions, with babies, and partners (who do and don't get it); thriving and confronting racial microaggressions, homophobic texts, and neoliberalism; with rent overdue, some harassing faculty, a few amazing mentors, secretaries who are underpaid and hold the academic world together—in the midst you will find a lava like fountain of academic purpose. Or at least the energy to write another 300 words a day and care for yourself. The essays read like poetry for the almost PhD—some pieces will invite you to laugh, others to cry, a few to write nasty emails (that you won't necessarily send)—but on these pages—even in lock down—you will meet sisters and brothers and trans-colleagues who recognize and name the journey through an institution as oppressive as it can be liberating. Arielle Shanok and Nicole Benedicto Elden offer you a GPS for navigating the joyful and infuriating pathway to graduation and to remember your intellectual projects of desire and purpose. Bravo to the editors, authors, and the students who lay in bed wondering if it's worth it!

Michelle Fine, distinguished professor, CUNY Graduate Center, and founding faculty member, Public Science Project

Thriving in Graduate School is an outstanding volume that should be read by those applying to graduate school, those enrolled in graduate programs, faculty, and administrators responsible to educate graduate students and mental health professionals committed to providing psychological services to students. This volume brings together an incredibly diverse narrative of actual lived experiences, relevant research evidence that applies to a range of common graduate school experiences across a wide spectrum of academic programs as well as the diverse individual identities of students. Realistic and optimistic suggestions, or takeaways, are offered at the end of each chapter, about how to manage consequential relationships and the unique challenges of the graduate school journey.

Robert Keisner, PhD, professor and former director of the clinical psychology doctoral program, Long Island University

Thriving in Graduate School: The Experts Guide to Success and Wellness is a refreshing book for graduate students. Through a simple, engaging, and casual language, the authors demystify the experience of graduate work normalizing it and validating the tough experiences lived by students. Issues such as impostor syndrome, procrastination, and anxiety are presented in a candid way offering self-reflection exercises, and wisdom tips to empower students to overcome these and other challenges. The book offers suggestions for students, faculty, administrators, and mental health providers in the support of graduate students. This way, the authors offer a holistic approach easy to follow. This is a great book for first-generation graduate students. Last but not least, cultural diversity is addressed with great sensitivity. This is a great book not only for graduate students but all staff working in academic settings serving students.

Dinelia Rosa, PhD, professor, director of the Dean-Hope Center of Educational & Psychological Services and clinical training at the Resilience Center for Veterans & Families, Teachers College, Columbia University

So true to what I’ve been hearing for decades from graduate students, this astute book touches all the right chords in addressing the stressors that students across multiple graduate programs inevitably encounter. Its tone is perfect: written in an accessible, non-academic, user-friendly manner and focusing not only on the enduring problems of graduate students—too much work, too great a degree of perfectionism and too much identification with imposter syndrome, and too much uncertainty regarding one’s relationship with one’s mentor---but also issues more central to the emerging and salient issues of our time, issues related to multi-culturalism, identity, privilege, meaning, and work-life balance. There are multiple true-to-life examples in every chapter as well as hands-on exercises and strategies pulled from a diverse range of psychotherapeutic and other healing traditions. The authors within this edited volume also reflect a wide range of backgrounds and traditions. In sum, this is a book that will surely be of great value to students, academics, and administrators, all of whom have been searching for new and better ways to cope with the enduring problems that always co-exist with the rewards of graduate education.

Barry A. Farber, PhD, professor and former director of clinical training at Teachers College, Columbia University's Program in Clinical Psychology