A Field Guide to the University of Kentucky Graduate School

Having now collected two graduate degrees myself, and been related many stories by friends and acquaintances doing grad school at UK, some advice for those behind me.

UK’s graduate school is the absolute archetype of the rule of thumb that, at UK, every individual you deal with will be nice and helpful, but as an organization they’re the most useless, obstructive motherfuckers you’ll ever have the displeasure of dealing with. You will never find an individual to punch in the face when something deserving happens, because responsibility has been diluted sufficiently that there isn’t usually an individual bad actor responsible for whatever bullshit is going on; the problem is that there are half a dozen overpaid people with inflated titles not dealing with the thing, and an assortment of folks in lower-titled, public-facing positions having to scramble to make things work around the administrative dysfunction.
The fact that UK just went into administrative bloat overdrive by dissolving the faculty senate with no concrete plans to replace their functions, then started hiring random assholes who don’t even have the context to know how things have to work to take over matters the senate used to handle has made it even worse this year than usual.

Detailed Notes Below

0. To reiterate: No individual you deal with is likely to be ill-intentioned or even impolite.
   • Everyone I’ve dealt with has been quite pleasant and done their best to work with me.
   • That doesn’t mean they’ve been actually helpful.
   • Don’t be confrontational until you have to; save that outburst for when it’s required, it will have more impact.
1. Bring an advocate
   • Make friends with your DGS and/or department student student resource officer. Each of my degrees can be directly attributed to occasions of one or the other calling bullshit on something the grad school did or failed to do on my behalf.
   • You are less likely to get bogus answers if someone who interacts with the graduate school regularly is clearly watching. This is especially true if the person you are talking to is afraid the person you CC will make their life hard.
   • Ideally your advisor does some of this, but they probably won’t be adequate – mine did some critical advocacy behind the scenes, but didn’t nearly cover all the things I needed someone else involved in.
   • Keep your advocate in-loop in as much of your communications with the graduate school as is practical.
2. The graduate school doesn’t know, much less follow, their own rules
   • At some point, a representative of the graduate school will lie to your face express an earnest misunderstanding of the relevant regulations.
   • If you rely on a posted date, even if it’s on the graduate school website, make sure you keep a paper trail, because they’ll claim ignorance later.
   • Be prepared to cite regulations regarding requirements. With links and/or screenshots and/or appeals to authority. You will get quoted policy that doesn’t exist and/or tortured interpretations, and you need to shut that shit down if you want your degree.
3. Keep receipts
   • This comes out in a the other points, but deserves its own.
   • In addition to receipts for “I was told X by Y” and “I did this according to the rule posted at X”, retain your communications especially confirmation messages when steps are complete.
   • I’ve had the grad school lose records and ask me and/or my advisor if we had them on more than one occasion.
4. Timeline insanity
   • There are a series of poorly-documented, ever-changing scheduled steps you have to clear at specific times in specific order to collect your degree. At least a semester before you plan to graduate, work a list of them with your advocate and follow that schedule, under points (1,2,3) above.
   • Understand these requirements like “You must slaughter a chicken with an obsidian blade before the first full moon” type bullshit, not a coherent policy, and play along as best you can.
   • Schedule issues on your actual work are also an issue: Don’t expect external schedule pressure toward your degree; the more useful you are to the people around you, the more they will try to occupy your time with things that don’t get you closer to a degree. Those things are likely more interesting and developmentally valuable than the work that leads to a degree, but you still need to get that degree.
5. Formatting bullshit
   • The actual document preparation process is poorly specified but extremely picky.
   • They only offer a M$ Word template that supposedly complies with their rules and … good luck with Word if you’re doing anything technical.
   • Fortunately, back around 2008 Erik Stokes rigged a LaTeX template that – at the time – satisfied the graduate school, and shared it. I’ve hacked that template for my MS and my PhD. It looks like the Math department has been updating and maintaining it, start with the latest release from there if you want to minimize runaround. I started from the old version of the thesis template I used for my MS instead of re-basing on a newer dissertation template, and that caused annoyances.