If you are currently an important person by conventional standards, you may want to skip this because I’m speaking to myself at age….oh, fourteen or so upward.
I know you because I was you. Raised on Indian land currently occupied by white people. Raised by extended family rather than a mother and a father and not knowing anybody who finished high school.
Honestly, I had few encounters with white people who flat out did not like Indians. However, being known as who I was meant that I was destined to work with my hands unless I could be an artist of some kind. The people who assumed that did not mean me any harm but directing me to classes and activities for which I had no talent was not helpful.
I’ve heard people say they didn’t know they were poor. That’s the case unless somebody tells you, and plenty of people let me know I was poor. It did not take me long to figure out that most of the other kids did not have commodities and they lived in houses with light switches on the wall rather than a bulb dangling in the center of the room and several cords running away from that one connection so that the wires were often hot to the touch.
There’s never any shortage of adults who want to tell you what to do, right? Do they still show you Indians in the textbooks that were either savage or stupid? I hope not. If so, I hope your folks give you stuff like the book I had about Will Rogers, an Indian who was smart and funny.
They tell you your life is over if you can’t finish high school, even though school is one teenage horror after another.
You might live with grandparents who have nothing except Social Security and a VA pension. You need to work. You are ashamed of being a burden. You see what you need to do. What could I possibly tell you?
Well kid, I’ve just retired from my second career as a university professor. My first one was state court judge. Since I got my school loans paid off, I’ve had a middle class life, the kind of life I used to think of as “rich.” My kids never missed a meal and never took charity. I drive a truck that starts. Every time. My light switches are on the walls.
What they say about finishing school—that your life will be over if you drop out—is nonsense. I quit in the ninth grade and my only regret is that I didn’t quit sooner, but it is true that you must have an education unless you are just incredibly talented. That is, the great Indian artist. If you are that, you probably know it by now.
It will probably be easier for you if you stay in school, but if you do stay in school you need to know that your grades matter. If I had stayed in high school long enough to get a transcript, I would probably not been able to talk my way into the University of Texas, because my grades were horrible.
If you are smart, you are interested in how the world works, and if the school won’t teach you the things you need you will have to teach yourself. Whether your school works for you is something you probably understand better than the adults in your life. Since you are me, the schools are not working for you, so I have one word that will save your life: read.
I seldom got caught skipping school because the last place they would look for a truant was the public library. I read books by the shelf rather than by author or topic. It was a small library.
I delivered the Oklahoma City Oklahoman and Times and the Tulsa World and Tribune and I read every one of those suckers front to back every day. I did not understand at the time how awful they were because I had nothing with which to compare, but reading crap is better than not reading. Speaking of reading crap, my grandparents had a trunk full of old Reader’s Digests. I read them all, including the “condensed books” which are to books as condensed soup is to soup.
Starting then and continuing to this day, whenever I run across a word I don’t know, I either dog ear the page or make a note on a piece of paper I use for a book mark if I don’t own the book. Then I go back and look up all the words that I had not recognized.
When I got to the university, I knew more words than the high school graduates, although I often did not pronounce them correctly. While I thought Camus was pronounced K-Moose and Goethe was pronounced Goth and that embarrassed me, being familiar with their ideas was more important. Besides, looking back on it, being made fun of was a handy reminder not to forget my origins.
Read. Everything. Even stuff you do not yet understand. If you manage that, other survival skills will come to you.
Some that came to me were looking up the publications of professors, going to the bookstore to see the assigned books in advance and trying to get more than one class with the same books (that had to do with money, but it turned out to be a useful learning tool as well), knowing when to drop a class and when to bear down.
I also used stuff I already knew: stuffing newspapers in shoes with holes, pocketing untouched dinner rolls off the rich kids’ plates in the cafeteria, using an older edition out of the library when I could not afford textbooks.
You may need to quit school to work. That does not mean you give up your education. Lots of folks still think Indians are stupid and people from the boondocks are stupid. You and I know better. Don’t listen to them. The future is waiting for you. Go grab it by the scruff of the neck.
American Indians are the least successful people in education. The numbers say we lead in all kinds of dropout statistics but our life experiences tell us the same thing even more clearly.
I am no exception. I ditched school in the 6th, 8th, and 9th grades. The first two times, they caught me and made me go back. My first arrest was for truancy. None of my immediate family graduated high school, although I had an aunt who did.
There’s a certain kind of person who gets no honor in our communities, and therefore is of little interest to our children. I never knew one who would admit to it, although I can see some in hindsight. If you claim it out loud, the best thing people will call you is an arrogant bag of wind.
Intellectual. There, I said it. Should you learn to say it? If you are giving serious thought to graduate education, you had better answer with a fairly enthusiastic “Yes!”
There are many reasons for going to college in the first place, but graduate school is a different kind of undertaking. To understand why, it is necessary to explain some things about undergraduate education in the United States, things that you may have begun to suspect if you are considering graduate school, but things we don’t normally discuss in polite company.
America lives by the myth that anyone who is graduated from high school is ready to absorb a university level liberal arts education. European education follows a more overt “tracking” scheme, and if you get off the college track early it is almost impossible to get back on. I am a high school dropout with three college degrees. That is unlikely in the United States, but it would be almost impossible in Europe.
As a result of America’s dedication to paper equality, a European college degree means a lot more on its face than a degree conferred in the United States. The European college curriculum is fairly demanding wherever you encounter it. Here, it is not absolutely necessary to be fluent in the English language, let alone any other language or mathematics, to put the B.A. after your name, but in the job market everyone understands that some degrees are B.S.
American education is in fact highly stratified. The distinction between high quality private universities and public universities is fairly well known. The advantages of small liberal arts colleges are common knowledge even if the wide variance in the quality of those colleges is not.
Less well known is that even among state universities, some schools are “research” or “flagship” institutions while others exist on a different level. For a professor, the difference is whether you teach two classes or three or four per semester. For students, the differences are more important.
Community colleges, formerly called “junior colleges,” are a separate thing entirely. They serve the primary purposes of teaching technical vocational skills and allowing students to pick up universally required lower division courses on the cheap. They are not about creating intellectuals and the teachers carry loads that make research difficult to impossible. Most tribal colleges, responsive to the immediate needs of the communities they serve, follow the community college model.
Another function of community colleges is to provide a way for high school dropouts to prove they can do college level work, because admission requirements are practically non-existent, at least for older students.
A community college degree, the “associate,” can be acquired in two years and with careful course selection can wipe out a lot of required work at the university level. This is not a terrible disadvantage, because at big universities those required freshman courses are usually taught by graduate students rather than by professors. While community college credits often transfer to a university, community college grades do not.
In most universities, your grade point average (GPA) starts getting calculated when you transfer in. If that’s how you come to the university, you only have two years, or 60 semester hours, in your GPA calculation. That means you can afford no C grades and very few B grades.
Because the “real world” knows that anybody can get an undergraduate degree, big corporations do most of their recruiting at schools considered to be “competitive.” So do the best graduate schools. One of the facts that kicked off Hopwood v. Texas, the first major victory for those opposed to affirmative action, was that Cheryl Hopwood’s 3.8 undergraduate GPA was discounted by the University of Texas School of Law because it was from California State University at Sacramento, which was not considered to be a competitive school.
American students, particularly minority students, are poorly prepared for this stratification. We are taught to think that if we have a college degree, particularly with good grades, doors will open for us. Maybe and maybe not.
The first thing to understand about graduate school is something you probably did not understand about your undergraduate degree: reputation is everything, for schools just as for people. One way to gauge the quality of your undergraduate education when you begin to think about graduate school is to ask yourself with whom you would like to study. Not where, but with whom. If you cannot easily identify the cutting edge thinkers in your field, your preparation leaves something to be desired.
The second thing to understand is that, unlike your undergraduate course of study, graduate school is a lifetime commitment. Whether you are pursuing a PhD, a J.D., or an M.D., the pursuit will not end when you get the credential. Law and medicine and all the arts and sciences are moving targets. As to law and medicine, you will not retain your license to practice unless you continue your education. As to the arts and sciences, you will end up teaching somewhere “not competitive” unless you have an active research agenda.
In a word, you must decide to become an intellectual.
Having decided that, you must prepare yourself for graduate education.
Having done that, you must convince an admissions committee that you are prepared.
Each of these steps is something you must do yourself. I do not deny that there are external factors. Luck helps. Sympathetic professors help; pathetic ones do not, and if you cannot tell the difference, you are in deep trouble. The external factors that are most important, parental connections and money, are not there for most minority students.
These external factors are generally not within your control. The internal factors are numerous but they can be summed up in the word “grit.” It has always appeared to me that our people historically displayed a great deal of grit in the face of policies by the US government designed to keep most Indians ignorant and therefore dependent. As Chief Justice John Marshall put it, the relationship of the United States to Indian nations was that of guardian and ward.
The first step in reversing that relationship is totally under your control. You must decide to do your part, to gut up and resist dependency. There are many fine white doctors and lawyers and professors, and some of them are willing to help Indians. It takes nothing away from those people to decide that Indians need to help themselves.
If you have decided you want to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a professor, you may have noticed by now that graduate school is like heaven in that old gospel song: everyone singin’ 'bout it on Sunday ain’t goin’ there. The more desirable the graduate school, the more applicants for a limited number of seats. There are a number of things you can do to maximize your chances of being in one of those seats.
For most minority students, and for that matter white students who are the first in their family to get to college, the first hurdle is the otherworldly quality of the whole idea. A visit to academia was improbable and now you are thinking about living there. You must get over the idea that being an intellectual is a bit like being a Martian or that making a living with your mind rather than your body means “thinking white.” There are only two ways to think: poorly and well. Choose the latter.
After you get past that obstacle in your own self-image, a major hurdle is going to be a standardized test. We do not do well on them as a group. That does not mean that you cannot do well as an individual, and every minute you spend whining about the unfairness of the GRE, LSAT, or MCAT, is a minute you are not going to spend getting ready for it.
The day you decide to head for graduate school, sell your television set (which you will not have time to watch anyway) and buy the preparation software for whichever test is in front of you. Then park yourself in front of a computer and take that test. And then do it again. Once a month for four years would not be too much. Or every two weeks for two years. If you only have a year to get ready, I hope you don’t have much else to do.
The key to standardized tests is not knowing stuff, except the stuff about how to categorize the questions. The tests consist of certain kinds of questions, and because the numbers of ways to test your reasoning ability in a multiple-choice format are limited, those kinds of questions remain fairly constant. The questions change but the format does not. You need to learn the attack skills for each kind of question.
The standardized test scores will be more important than your undergraduate GPA to the graduate school because there is so much variation in the quality of undergraduate schools. Near a university where I used to sit on the graduate admissions committee, there was a small church-affiliated school where, I would surmise from comparing their students with their transcripts, the only way to avoid getting an A would be to bounce your tuition check.
The reputation of your undergraduate school might affect the weighting of your GPA in a close case. However, if you are reading this it is probably too late to do anything about the reputation of your undergraduate school. You do need to understand that if you are coming from a non-competitive undergraduate school and hoping to get into a competitive graduate school, you had better have a very impressive GPA or you will have to blow the top off the standardized test.
If you are headed to medical school, you know how competitive the classes are, and organic chemistry was either difficult for you or not. Your course selection is limited.
If you are headed to law school, though, I have a strong recommendation for an undergraduate major: take something you love, something that makes it a delight to come to class. If you love it, you will have higher grades.
If you must know where the courses are that are most pertinent to success in law school, I will tell you that they are in the English and Philosophy departments. There is some evidence that having taken undergraduate mathematics courses predicts higher LSAT scores. The basic rule of the road is that since you get to pick your undergraduate major, you had better do well. Law school entering classes usually have higher undergraduate GPAs than medical school entering classes, but not because the students are smarter.
If you want a PhD, your undergraduate course of study has to give you a good grounding to do research in your graduate field of study. This does not mean that your undergraduate and graduate majors always have to match exactly, but it often helps if they do, starting with your ability to get someone within your proposed field of study to give you a strong recommendation.
Medical schools produce doctors and teachers; law schools produce lawyers and teachers; graduate schools produce researchers and teachers. Since teachers do not generally make much money, it is good to be clear about your goals in graduate school.
The Masters degree serves three functions. In some jobs, it will get you a pay raise. It is a qualification to teach at a community college. And it is the gateway to candidacy for the PhD. If you seek the Masters for the first or second reasons, it would not hurt to keep your options open on the third by doing well in graduate school, writing a whizbang thesis, and publishing an article or articles in the professional journals based on that thesis. I got six publications out of my thesis. If you choose a Masters program without a thesis requirement, you lose this opportunity as well as a practice run toward writing and defending a PhD dissertation.
You must have adequate scores on standardized admissions tests and good undergraduate grades to get into the serious applicant pool. So does everybody else. The next hurdle becomes how to get your application to the top of the stack.
Recommendation letters are important, but a different kind of recommendation letter than for undergraduate school. Your character is no longer a major issue. Do not bother with family friends unless they practice the profession you wish to enter. The recommendation letter needs to speak to your skills in using the tools you will need in graduate school, primarily the English language and sometimes the language of mathematics.
As a writer of many recommendation letters, I can offer one very important tip: DO NOT let a professor who is recommending you to graduate school get blindsided by some negative on your application. If you got a C in your undergraduate statistics course, the professor needs to explain that to the admissions committee. If you did not do as well as you had hoped on the admissions test, the professor needs to know. Perhaps, for example, you did not do well on your undergraduate admissions test either but still had an outstanding undergraduate record. There is no way the graduate admissions committee would know that unless they were told, and the professor would not know to tell them unless you have put your weak points on the table.
The personal statement is your opportunity to tell the admissions committee why you and not somebody else with excellent test scores and grades. You need to tell them in terms of what having you in the classroom will bring to the program. Ask not what the graduate school can do for you (because the answer is obvious)—ask what you can do for the graduate school.
Affirmative action programs have been dismantled in much of the country and that trend is likely to continue. However, most top shelf schools in all parts of the country retain a lively interest in having a diverse student body. This does not mean simply that you should tuck the disclosure “I’m Indian” somewhere in your personal statement.
What difference has it made to your life that you are Indian? What do you bring to a class discussion that a non-Indian would not? What will you bring to your proposed profession that a non-Indian would not? If you come from a rez, will you return there to serve an underserved population? If you are a PhD candidate, do you want to do research that relates directly to the lives of your people? Are you fluent in your Native language? Tell them!
There is another hurdle but, trust me, if you get over the others this one will seem insignificant: money. Do not worry too much about money when picking a graduate school. The more competitive the graduate school, the more likely that whoever gets in, gets out.
The PhD program where I taught was in a state school, but it was not cheap, and all the PhD candidates were on some kind of financial aid. You apply where the best education is and you turn in your financial aid application at the same time. As a graduate student, if you have to work for your money the chances are good that you will be either teaching undergraduates or assisting a professor with research—invaluable experience.
If you get accepted to more than one school, consider the reputation of the school and the financial aid package. How much debt load will you be carrying if you graduate from School A v. School B? Is the difference in reputation, or the difference in being able to study with a particular professor, worth it? Keep in mind that you can often get a professor from another university to sit on your dissertation committee, if you have either a pre-existing relationship or a really interesting dissertation proposal.
There is one more thing that I hesitate to mention but I must. If you get accepted at a top school--for example, an Ivy League school—go, but go as who you are. We do not live in a classless society, and if you attend an elite school you will at some point say something that will betray your class origins even if you have light skin. Something as simple as asking “Where did you go to high school?” rather than “Where were you prepared?”
Just remember that you can look those people who feel they were born to the Ivy breed right in the eye. You belong there, and in a sense you have more business there than they do. They are there because they were born rich. You are there because you were born excellent. Don’t bother to tell them, because they will not listen. Show them, and you will be one more ‘skin proving that American Indian students are individuals, not statistics.