After supervising graduate students for about ten years (in a field in the social sciences), I’ve started giving new M.A. students a similar bit of advice: atte

After supervising graduate students for about ten years (in a field in the social sciences), I’ve started giving new M.A. students a similar bit of advice: attend research conferences, both to hear the presentations and to meet other researchers, and join academic societies. It took me a while to notice this, but I gradually came to see that students who eventually succeeded in academia—finishing their Ph.D.s on time, publishing papers, getting jobs—had usually gotten involved early in the broader academic community, while many who stumbled had had trouble breaking out of the undergraduate mentality of just taking classes and studying in the library by themselves.