To be a successful academic today, you must be a hedgehog. Academia tells us that narrowing in on one topic is the path to success.Īnd this is true. Even if your plans are now to leave academia, you have spent enough time within its hallowed walls to absorb its culture. You overcame the hurdles to gaining admission into grad school.

In the odyssey of graduate school, you are either excitedly embarking upon this voyage, in the murky depths of it, or struggling to just finish the thing, doggy paddling ashore with a leathery sunburned face and a deflated volleyball as your companion. However, this book could be one of the most important works you read in your graduate studies. Range is not a book about pedagogy, psychology, or graduate students, so it may seem like a strange fit as an entry in the Society for the Teaching of Psychology’s Graduate Student Teaching Association blog. “There is this feeling of frustration…that I should be doing something more specialized” Swanson explains (p. When she teaches undergraduates, she needs to think and talk and learn about more than Aristotle. Swanson, however, viewed her academic career quite differently. Of the forty-four articles and books listed on her webpage, each one had “Aristotle” in the title. When David Epstein introduces us to Judy Swanson, a professor of political philosophy, in Chapter 8 of Range, she was at a conference about overspecialization in the social sciences. By Suzanne Wood, Ph.D., University of Toronto

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