Dear English Graduate Student,

So! You’ve entered grad school.

This means you have aligned yourself with the educational elite and the academically privileged, and wish to position yourself as an intellectual leader of contemporary society. When you finish this program, you will join the five percent of American adults who have earned a graduate degree.^[1] Indeed a privilege!

And to paraphrase Voltaire^[2] (via Stan Lee and Spiderman’s Uncle Ben^[3]), “with great privilege comes great responsibility.”

This collection of pages seeks to orient you to the privileges and responsibilities of graduate study at La Sierra University’s Department of English.

As Grad Students, you are special to us. While we love all the students we teach (even those who have made the mistake of NOT being English majors), you hold a special place in our hearts: you are us a (very very) long time ago.

With this in mind, your faculty would like you to know two important points, central to your grad student experience:

1. We are here and eager to help! We enjoy your presence and participation in our classes and appreciate how you mentor and inspire our undergrads. But we also enjoy interacting with you outside the classroom and in our offices.
   
   At the same time, we are busy being the kinds of scholars, teachers and administrators you expect from a graduate program, so we’re not likely to hunt you down for an intellectually stimulating dialogue. So the rule of thumb I suggest is: take it upon yourself to get to know us!
    
2. Getting to know us (and our course materials) isn’t enough! Perhaps you’ll recall the increased levels of both freedom and responsibility you experienced when you left high school and began college. Expect a similar adjustment as you enter grad school.
   
   While our classes, for example, will help prepare you for the end-of-program Comprehensive Exams, they won’t provide everything you’ll need to know. Grad school requires that you increase your level of personal responsibility even above that which allowed you to successfully achieve your Bachelor’s degree.

You’ll read some great books and plays and poems (and some not so great ones). You’ll work with useful (and some not-so-useful) modes of literary analysis and cultural criticism. You’ll have stimulating dialogues with your grad school peers (and some friendly disagreements). You’ll get to know the strengths (and weaknesses) of your professors. Some of you will be teaching some of our students. Indeed a responsibility!

Your faculty hopes and prays you will have two years of intellectual stimulation and growth, that your knowledge of literature and life will expand exponentially, and that God will grant you a deeper sense of the purpose behind your existence on this planet.

Best wishes,

Dr. Sam McBride
Professor of English
Director of the M.A. in English program

[1] “Table 9. Number of persons age 18 and over, by highest level of education attained, age, sex, and race/ethnicity: 2005.” Digest of Education Statistics. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Online. 4 September 2013. <http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d05/tables/dt05_009.asp>

[2] Friedman, Brett. “Voltaire and Spiderman.” Gunpowder and Lead. 22 June 2012. Online. 4 September 2013. <http://gunpowderandlead.org/2012/06/voltaire-and-spiderman/>

[3] “Uncle Ben.” Wikipedia. Online. Sept. 4, 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Ben>