Graduate students, preparing for careers in and out of anthropology, often find themselves caught between training based in the past, and present, of the discipline and a need to become a different future. This is increasingly the case when it comes to questions of decolonizing, decanonizing, and decentering. While the theme of this year’s annual meeting signals the growing interest in these movements, many within anthropology still struggle to make space for alternative pedagogy, inclusive citational practices, critical race theory, transnationalism, and Indigenous scholarship. Graduate students, in particular, do not always have the resources, communities, or flexibility to participate in moving anthropology to take responsibility for its pasts and radically redefine its possible futures. As we work to meet the demands of the departments and institutions that train us, we also struggle to learn and promote a different anthropology, a yet unfulfilled anthropology, an erased, ignored, or appropriated anthropology, an anthropology that better resembles us and/or the people we work with, an anthropology sometimes at odds with the one we are being taught. This roundtable, therefore, brings together graduate students from different departments and subfields to discuss the various trials they’ve encountered and tactics they’ve deployed in studying anthropology with an eye towards also reshaping it. Writing this abstract in the wake of so many who have graduated with anthropology degrees but chosen to leave the discipline and with the continued resonance of Audre Lorde’s declaration that “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house,” the question of how we become anthropologists and what it means to do so is all the more pressing. Who do we read and cite as graduate students? What can we do when we find our coursework lacking people of color, Indigenous, lgbtq, and other non cis-gendered, white scholars? How do we create collaborative communities in and beyond our departments and institutions? How do we recognize gaps in our training and in our own understandings of anthropology? And what do we do when we do recognize these? To whom are we beholden as graduate level anthropologists? For whom do we write? Teach? Learn? And how do we write, teach, and learn once we answer these questions? How do we reconcile our academic and anthropological aspirations with our belonging to and/or participation in settler-colonial and colonial states and regimes of knowledge production? While focusing on how graduate students navigate these issues--ones that we hope are of concern more broadly within the discipline and beyond--we speak both to other graduate students in similar positions and to the faculty and departments that seek to help, train, and eventually hire us.