This book is not about graduate school, it will NOT cover: how to get into graduate school, how to get a graduate assistantship, how to finish your comprehensive exams, how to do an IRB application, how to finish your data collection, how to write your dissertation, how to publish, or how to get a job. Many books have been written on these topics already, but no one has written a book about graduate assistants. Why not? Probably because it is one of the most demanding, yet lowest paying jobs a person can ever have and those who went through it do not want to relive it by writing a book about it. However, I feel it is important to lay a foundation for future graduate assistants, so they can: 1) understand how being a grad assistant is like being a sharecropper, 2) see the negative and positive aspects of being a graduate assistant, and 3) decide if this is something they want to do. If you are a current graduate assistant, professor, department head, dean, or university, I hope after reading this book you can see the writing on the wall and change things for the better.
