Abstract
Composed in the form of a letter, this chapter is a fictional exploration of the thinking that tends to animate graduate advising in German graduate programs. Addressed to an unnamed “incoming graduate student colleague,” the letter expresses a composite of hopes, experiences, caveats, and uncertainties that the author has gathered, as a seven-year Director of Graduate Studies for a department with both MA and PhD programs. In this, the piece intends neither to be reassuring, nor dissuasive. Neither does the letter seek to reflect the author’s own department or university setting, so much as a general sketch of graduate mentoring as a holistic intergenerational experience that blends one’s own memories of graduate training with the current challenges of the post-Great-Recession academic labor market and the general call to decolonize educational endeavors in this age.
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Gramling, D. (2020). Dear Incoming Graduate Student Colleague. In: Criser, R., Malakaj, E. (eds) Diversity and Decolonization in German Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34342-2_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34342-2_17
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