episode 7 - Why is it so hard to ask for feedback on your work?
Why is it so hard to ask for feedback on your work? And why is it sometimes even harder to get the kind of feedback we WANT on your work, when and how you want it? This episode is all about one of the biggest (and hardest) skill jumps a grad student has to make - going from seeing feedback as a grade, to seeing it as a tool to develop work.
A few resources on reading and evaluating writing, in case they're useful!
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
There's still time to join us in AcWriMo. And there'll be more details about that at the end of this podcast.
When I started to plan for this podcast, I knew I had to have an episode about asking for feedback, because this is one of the hardest things that grad students do. And it's also one of the most mysterious things. We have a sort of narrative that people get feedback on their writing, but who really knows how much, what kind, at what frequency, from what people...
All of those questions are really idiosyncratic. They vary wildly from discipline to discipline from sometimes even supervisor to supervisor. So let's zoom out a little bit and think about why the process for asking for feedback can be so difficult. And what things you might want to do about it.
The first reason that asking for feedback is really hard is because we're not often used to feedback as development. We're used to feedback as evaluation. If I were to ask many young grad students in the beginning of their programs what feedback means to them - most of them, I have to bet would say, "oh, it's the comments at the end of the paper. It's the work that I get on my exams when I turn it in so that I can do better for next time."
Which is a model of feedback where your work is judged against a standard. And the feedback is meant to show you where you fallen short in some ways or what things you've done well so that you can take that knowledge into a new class, into a new project.
But often as a grad student, you're working on a complex project with many parts over the course of years often, and the feedback is meant to help you develop the project instead of evaluate it. The feedback helps you pick a better research question or narrow down the variables for your experiment. But if you're used to that feedback coming as a, "did I do a good enough job on this? Yes or no?" kind of frame, it can be really difficult to get that feedback. And ask for it because it feels like asking to be graded on purpose.
Another thing that can be really difficult about asking for feedback is that you might not know what's possible until you hear the range of feedback that's being offered to other grad students in your department, in your university, around the world. I sometimes hear from clients that they have one single source of feedback: that they can only share drafts in progress with a PI, or with a chair of a committee. And then I know other people who live in a department culture where the entire committee gathers to discuss a chapter in progress and you get a rich, robust, beautiful conversation with five or six or even seven people. Sometimes some departments have a culture of helping develop work in pro seminars or in colloquiums or in workshops for feedback. But other people really only work with one person. And if that one person isn't giving you the feedback that you want or need, it can be hard to imagine a world beyond what you've been given. Or to feel like you can ask for something different if it's not being offered to you.
And lastly let's be real, not all mentors or supervisors or the people giving you feedback are skilled at giving feedback. So one or more bad experiences - feedback that's not helpful, feedback that's really harsh - can really turn you off to the idea of like, yes, I volunteer as tribute for more of this criticism, please. And because we don't often train supervisors. Into the very difficult role of how do you see somebody else's work? How do you not push them exactly into the way that you would do it? And develop what's strong about what's already there - that's a high level skill that a lot of people aren't getting training in. So it both makes sense that people aren't great at it off the jump. And it also makes sense that lots of people are a little bit hesitant to ask for more.
So get your notebooks out, take a deep breath, and let's think about some questions that might help you figure out where your own stickiness is when it comes to asking for feedback.
What are the hardest parts of your writing process? Where do you tend to get stuck the most? Is it in the idea generation phase? Is it in the site citing other pieces of literature phase? Is it in the revision or the argumentation stages? But where do you tend to get stuck the most? Or what are the parts that you find to be the hardest?
What feedback experiences - for good or for bad - have stuck with you? How was that feedback given? How much time or space or support were you given in processing it? What is the model of feedback that you're applying to every one of these interactions moving forward as either the gold standard? Or the very much not gold standard?
And lastly, if you're a teacher. What kind of feedback do you offer your students? What do you notice about the process of giving feedback of grading, of evaluating of helping to develop works in progress that you can maybe use to think about what feedback is being offered to you? Because let's be real. You are also still a student.
Now some experiments to try, because I'm not just going to say, "wow, all of this is hard. Good luck out there, kiddos." The first one is getting specific about the kind of feedback that you're actually requesting. It's not nine times out of 10, but maybe five or six times out of 10. I see that people are able to get more of the feedback that they want by being able to more accurately name what they're looking for. So maybe imagine a rubric for graduate student writing. And if that's something that's hard for you to imagine, I've put some resources in the show notes for you. But think about what kinds of feedback we evaluate writing on? Is it structure, is it flow? Is it argument? Is it cohesiveness? Is it comprehensiveness?
And then I think about what level of feedback are you looking for? And how much time do you have to implement it? The kind of feedback that I'm looking for on a Friday when the chapter is due on Monday is very different than the kind of feedback that I want when I have maybe a few weeks or a couple of months to develop this paper or this chapter. And I'm actually looking for feedback about which ideas seems most promising. As opposed to what are two or three things that I can do today before the end of the day before I send this chapter off. So think about what kind of levels you're looking at, maybe what kind of levels of feedback you're lacking so that you can be more specific with the request that you ask for, whether that's with your supervisor.
Or. With the people that you identify in experiment two. Which is something that I'm calling, creating a feedback Rolodex. If you've never seen one before. Rolodex is an old fashioned way to keep track of people's phone numbers. It was a sat on desks. You maybe you've seen them in a variety of period television shows, but basically you would flip through it and it would help jog your memory of all of the people in your network. So this idea is for you to create a team, so to speak a feedback team.
And just like in any team, you're going to say, who is good at what? Maybe you have a friend who's an amazing copy editor. They're going to be a great person to help you proof a manuscript right before it needs to go to a journal.
Maybe you have a friend from a couple seminars ago that really loved the same things that you did, that are now the foundational texts of your work. And so you think about what they might help you with in terms of idea development or understanding of the literature or citing some of these authors.
You make this list and you say, okay, who are these people?
What are their superpowers? Who are these people on your feedback team? Who can you barter with? Maybe you set up a draft exchange with that really good friend who's great at using the same literature is you and you both agree to read drafts whenever the other person needs to, because that kind of foundational idea generation isn't really happening with your supervisors.
I really recommend that grad students create this team, not just of faculty members of mentors, but also their colleagues. Some of the best feedback that I got was from people who were underneath me in the program, because they were working in coursework with all of the foundational texts that I was drawing on. So it felt really fresh to them. So be creative and create that Rolodex so that you feel like your ability to get feedback doesn't hinge on just one person or just one specific group of people. And you have more places to go.
And our last experiment is to practice giving feedback yourself. I mentioned before that I think that a thriving economy of grad students supporting grad students is something really helpful. I think it's helpful to help people see that they're not alone. Writing groups for example, are really good for this.
Like writing, feedback is a skill. And the more you practice it, the better you get at delivering it. So you become a more valuable member of other people's feedback teams. Always something that's helpful to offer your scholarly community, but you also can be more adept at figuring out what kinds of feedback you're actually looking for.
The more you think about the process of giving feedback, the easier it becomes to specifically request the kinds and types and frequency of feedback that you're actually looking for. And if you don't have a scholarly community and let's be real pandemics have made a lot of that, a lot more challenging.
You can also think about your feedback process as you're grading, if you're in a process or a position where you teach people. I learned so much about what I was looking for in terms of feedback, by giving feedback to my students. It really helped me see, "oh, wow. It is really overwhelming if somebody gives you every thought in their head while they read a draft."
It is really frustrating if I tell my students two days before the deadline that, "oh yeah, this outline's not really going to work" . So giving more. Feedback, both as a reader and receiving it as a writer helps the whole ecosystem go round.
I am in no way here to undercut how sensitive it can be to put your work on the line and ask for people to look at it and tell you what's good about it and what things could be improved. But I think that it's one of the biggest skill jumps that grad students make - is this idea that when we ask other people for feedback, it's not because we want them to grade us.
It's because we want them to help us develop the work and that if you need help, developping a complex idea, then that's not a failure, that is making scholarship happen in a community. We all make scholarship happen in a community, whether that's asynchronously through sharing work, reading other people's writing, or in person or slightly more real time exchanging drafts.
Nobody does this alone. And the more that you can build a system of supportive feedback for yourself, the easier it is to see how and where other people are developing this work too. Until next time!
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com, where you can also sign up for AcWriMo 2022, a free month of writing support and resources. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!