what the fuck am i getting myself into with this grad school stuff

well people with bachelor's degrees and master's degrees are making relatively more..........

"relatively more" lol

i mean just sayin that plotting the change in earnings isn't as useful for grad school or no grad school decision making as, say:

difference in earnings between levels of educational accomplishment v. difference in cost (both $$/time) for achieving levels of education

and that only holds water if you're making your educational decisions based on earning potential, which anyone considering an advanced degree in the humanities likely isn't doing

i make all decisions based on my earning potential

no, you should do it for the sweet robes:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/05/14/us/18obama2blog.jpg

from my alma mater (I didn't buy the robes b/c lol @ $2,000 but my mom said she would buy them (before she knew the cost); one day I'll take her up on it).

i thought the school you teach at pays for those when you get tenure, guess it depends on the school

Bear in mind the period encapsulates a time where there has been an expansion in the number of advanced degrees that lead to less lucrative outcomes. (MFAs, english literature phds etc.). There's also be a massive expansion in MBAs at the lower end in the spectrum.

but at the end of the day, greater supply means prices will fall.

They rent them for you if you want to wear them at graduation or convocation, though you still have to pay a bit each time. At least it's been that way at the two places I've taught since grad school.

OKAY:

so i get back from a little relaxation, did a bit of writing (project specific) over the period...

and i found out that A ROUGH DRAFT OF MY THESIS IS DUE TO MY COMMITTEE TODAY.

and i though i had two more weeks.

wtf, thanks for being explicit with deadlines, shit-ass janky grad school.

*thought

dude! can u swing it?

i mean, luckily, this is only the 'preliminary' meeting in two weeks. i'm supposed to have approximately 60 pages by may 1st. right now, i probably have half of that? of clean and polished stuff. since i believe i'm able to add more, or at least give explanation to why my thesis is so thin, i should be okay.

still, i'm like scrambling through notebooks, going through my illustrator archives (some of the stuff is more concrete poetry), and racking my brain like wo right now.

wait what do you need by today?

well i'd hope that if nobody told you, the deadline isn't important to them either...guess that depends on other people being decent and not flakes though.

i need a rough draft of the thesis. which can mean 'really rough.' but in the next two weeks, the whole thing is going to change. so i'm sort of like, "uhhhh, why do i need this to be done now?" especially since my committee is made up of people whose lives are so busy that they probably won't really do much but skim it until the final review, which is in the last week of april.

that said, my thesis committee consists of three heavy hitters whose work and lives i respect a lot, and i don't want them to think i'm some slacker.

that seems annoyingly administrative. good luck.

Man this applying to grad school is pretty tough... I'm worried what it will be like when I'm actually in it.

less stressful, imo! then you just get to start applying for grants.

my problem at the moment is that i have so much going on outside of my program that it's difficult to focus on what i need to be doing. on top of the thesis (which is lol poetry, yeah):

- i'm writing these fake 'translations' of an invented japanese gay man for this anthology.
- i'm acting in a joe brainard play that goes up on the 22nd.
- i'm getting ready for a deejay gig that is also on the 22nd.
- i'm writing actively for XLR8R magazine, which involves insane emailing and constant connectedness.
- i'm writing my own (somehow very popular again) music blog.

i ain't giving shit up for no motherfucking thesis, either, except for nights of drunken debauchery, which is probably best for my hurting liver anyway.

FWIW, University of Windsor pays sessionals $5500/course (a bit low for Ontario) and you do get (good) benefits after teaching for a year. A full-time course load is a shitload of work but it does afford a reasonable living. It's not at all secure (and I'm not f/t in my second year here) but it is also a long way from being "below minimum wage".

just finished laying out the rough draft. now to do a SHITLOAD of photocopying, after a shower and a smoke.

i am getting wasted tonight, btw.

congrats!

http://www.polperro.co.uk/FireworksAnimated.gif

indeed, congrats!

this is juddering to a gruesome, premature conclusion, and the realisation that i have wasted my life, my parents' money, and my own abilities

fuck

I wonder if that is a better or worse feeling than wasting your own money.

I'm thinking maybe better?

the rest, as they say, is unemployability

guilt & regret = bigger waste of time then even grad school

last semester already o_O

Yikes:
http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846/

reality check (there are no shortage of these, esp. for people considering the humanities):

http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846

As things stand, I can only identify a few circumstances under which one might reasonably consider going to graduate school in the humanities:

* You are independently wealthy, and you have no need to earn a living for yourself or provide for anyone else.
* You come from that small class of well-connected people in academe who will be able to find a place for you somewhere.
* You can rely on a partner to provide all of the income and benefits needed by your household.
* You are earning a credential for a position that you already hold — such as a high-school teacher — and your employer is paying for it.

Those are the only people who can safely undertake doctoral education in the humanities. Everyone else who does so is taking an enormous personal risk, the full consequences of which they cannot assess because they do not understand how the academic-labor system works and will not listen to people who try to tell them.

― caek, Tuesday, November 24, 2009 5:48 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark

http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the-Huma/44846/

Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go

― chartres (goole), Thursday, January 7, 2010 1:20 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark

Ah sorry, thought it was new.

i think it's now been posted three times

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/01/2009013001c.htm

― kamerad, Sunday, February 1, 2009 9:52 PM (11 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ha, difft url

yeah, pretty memorable article though. did the rounds among my colleagues and i.

It honestly makes me feel a lot better about never having pursued graduate work. All of those bullet-point reasons people give for why they want to do it really resonated with me, or at least how I felt right out of college. The main reason I didn't go forward with it at the time is that I thought my interests were too scattered and interdisciplinary for a single program, and then, after a couple of years, I realized that academia did not have a monopoly on smart, curious people and that I could apply my interests and skills elsewhere, without the debt. The only irony is that a humanities graduate degree would actually probably give me a leg up at my current job, though I think that might be starting to change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XViCOAu6UC0

today was the first day of classes for my second semester of grad school, i'm all excited about it (and still a little buzzed from the post-class bar trip) and would not want to be doing anything else right now! opportunity cost is something you look back on, but quality of life is something to appreciate in the present, too.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/feb/01/university-teaching-budgets-slashed

i shd have gotten into

-banking
-management consultancy (etc.)
-the law
-the civil service

like all the other dudes i went to uni with.

curse you god for making me this way.

it's marginally better pretty much everywhere else in the developed world at the moment, at least in science. leave britain?

yeah i want to set up somwhere else. shd become a dr this year, which would help. want to move to US.

yeah i want to set up somwhere else. shd become a dr this year, which would help. want to move to US.

― the highest per-vote vag so far (history mayne), Tuesday, February 2, 2010 12:05 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

then i'll get to say "this is a house of learn-ed doctors" and my lyfe will be complete.

you guys probably saw this but apparently King's College London has begun firing distinguishing senior faculty in philosophy (I guess there's no tenure in the UK) and University College London is set to follow. This will affect the humanities broadly, according to what I've read, but I'm attuned mostly to philosophy cuts.

I had lunch a couple of weeks ago with a distinguished British mathematician who was despondent about the future of British universities, esp. research in pure mathematics. This guy is in his 60s so it won't affect him directly much, but his students are screwed, and plus we all care about the future of our disciplines even if it's not our ass on the line. Evidently the UK is moving to a "star system" model where they'll only fund stars. This mathematician's point was that research is rarely carried out solely by stars; if nothing else you need legions of workers (I'm talking about full professors here, not just grad students---but not "stars") to confirm stars' research (by carrying out further "minor" work in the stars' programs).

my mum works as an office manager in an important part of an important university, and they've been preparing for a tidal wave of shit since this time last year.

problem with a star system, i'd have thought -- and im all soft-subjects -- is that you become a star by grinding your bollocks off aged 27. afterwards you're less willing to piss hours away on empirical research. which is fair enough, but the system is unfairly weighted and there are a lot of casualties along the way. i'm saying this from personal observation in a small field, and it isn't valid beyond that.

at least in the US everyone who even has a chance of getting a job works their ass off from about halfway through grad school on. Stars result from tapping into some latent area of huge interest and doing a lot on that. Well, at least stars as we've known them in the 20th century on: these are different times and giants no longer walk the earth.

yes, lots of casualties along the way and it is terribly unfair. I know tremendously talented people who didn't get anything after grad school. Even temporary appointments are lucky.