Free & Open Access — Published July 2026
The Joys of Learning, Creating, and Finding Your Way with AI
Author: Robert Klitgaard
Year: 2026 (first edition, open access)
Publisher: Self-published, open access
License: Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 — free to share with attribution; no commercial use
ISBN: 979-8-9971940-1-7 (PDF) · 979-8-9971940-0-0 (EPUB)
Topics: Generative AI, Graduate Education, Teaching & Learning
About This Book
Graduate students are being handed a strange new power. In one window on a laptop, you can now summon a patient tutor that never tires, a coach that lets you rehearse the meeting you dread, a research partner that helps turn a vague itch into a doable project, a critic that finds what your draft is missing, a data analyst that speaks plain English, and a career counselor that asks questions you may never have asked yourself.
This is thrilling. It is also dangerous. Used badly, AI can hollow out graduate education — helping you fake the work, outsource the struggle, and produce smooth pages with no pulse. Used well, AI can do almost the opposite: it can make graduate school more personal, more demanding, more collaborative, more creative, and more alive.
The book is built around six enduring goals of graduate education: mastering your field, working with integrity, asking better research questions, collaborating across boundaries, communicating with impact, and discerning your calling and next steps. Its prompts and exercises — tested with graduate students in fields from music to mathematics, management to religion, public health to psychology — do not replace deep reading, critical thinking, creativity, judgment, or courage. They help you practice them.
A revised and expanded print edition is in the works. The open-access edition is free to download and share — no sign-up required.
Suggested Citation
Klitgaard, Robert. 2026. Graduate School, Augmented: The Joys of Learning, Creating, and Finding Your Way with AI. Open-access edition. https://gradschoolaugmented.com.
Related Work
Readers of this book may also enjoy Graduate School Meets Generative AI, Co-Intelligence Applied, and ChatGPT in Education.