My New Book: Prepare, Succeed, Advance

I am very excited to announce that Wipf & Stock has recently published my little PhD guidebook called:

Prepare, Succeed, Advance: A Guidebook for Getting a PhD in Biblical Studies and Beyond

This book is a detailed expansion of some of the work that I did on my blog regarding getting into a PhD program, surviving it, and beginning a career in academia. It comes at a very reasonable price of $19.00, with W&S selling it at $15.20. I wrote this book because I really wish I had something like this seven years ago when I was contemplating doing PhD studies. It maps out, as best as I can offer, the appropriate preparation for a PhD as well as tips on choosing a school. There are a number of other features of the book like how to publish an article and book review, how to present a paper, how to do good research in Biblical studies, how to interview at a conference, and how to publish your dissertation as a monograph. Please do check it out and recommend it to others!

If you are wondering whether it is a repeat of what I wrote in my blog post Interested in a NT PhD, it is most definitely NOT. I did not copy and paste it into a file and publish it. I started from scratch, now that I have some distance from my PhD work. I reconsidered some things, added loads of new information, and I called up a number of current and recent PhD students to offer more perspectives on what I was talking about.

I will say that it is in the same spirit as my Interested in a NT PhD post, though I have much more to say in the book. It may help you to know that that original post has been “clicked” over 15,000 times since I first wrote it.

Finally, I will say that the blog post is exclusively about preparing for a PhD (not about doing one), whereas the book seeks to be comprehensive, beginning years before entering a program, following you through one, and following up afterward. I would say you could refer to it for some time after you begin a job as it offers some early career advice.

I have decided to leave to blog post Interested in a NT PhD up even though it may detract from the book’s purpose because I want that information available to the public. However, I want to emphasize that about 75% of the info in the book cannot be found in that post and some of the overlapping content has been re-directed, clarified or even changed.