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

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.

i shd have gotten into

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

like all the other dudes i went to uni with

to hell with that- if i had it all to do over i'd work on my left foot, stay fit and i'd now be looking at 4 years til retirement from a distinguished lower level league career (and a WC finals appearance)

i'd work on my left foot

you're doing it wrong

eh, i've decided to just roll with the fact that i probably won't ever work as a professor at some school. all of the people i respect who teach are adjuncts, anyway, at least at the grad level.

anyway, i had my first review, and it went REALLY well. so well that i almost started crying (for real). so, yeah. still have a lot of work to do, but that's cool, i'm excited about it!

ok so instead of reposting the same Thomas H. Benton article again, he's got a new one up!

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Big-Lie-About-the-Life-of/63937/

(haven't read it yet)

I'm not sure what to think about this article, or his previous one for that matter. Because on the one hand he's right that the odds are stacked against you if you seek an academic career, I know from personal experience that it's not impossible to make it through a doctoral program in the humanities and get a job, without being independently wealthy or ending up in debt. However, if you're not in a top 15-20 doctoral program in your discipline then I think what he's saying is critical. But for grads of top places, I think he's overstating the hopelessness. Well, he's talking about English / comp lit in particular as "the humanities", and I don't have any experience of how hopeless those areas are.

English/comp lit is that hopeless. this past season was apparently brutal: the people i knew who were on the market either got one interview or none. it was a top 15-20 program, last i checked.

Philo is pretty hopeless this year too but it's a weird year and I don't think "Benton"'s advice is meant just to apply to *this* job market.

yeah, fair enough

the whole endeavor is based on -- not a side effect, but BASED ON -- the basically uncompensated labor of people who will not get a reward at the end.

you are paying (ie borrowing money) to work for 5-10 years and the chances you will get your money back (ie pay that money off) are extremely low, let alone get any of the other intangible rewards (respect, 'life of the mind' etc)

all of this is somewhat personal & freudian to me, cos my dad is an unhappily tenured academic, and i flirted briefly with that life and then turned away. what i regret most is that brief flirtation, tbh. so glad i got no deeper.

I don't know anyone who paid anything to go to grad school, though. In the Ph.D. programs I'm familiar with, everyone either has a fellowship or teaches, and so actually makes money. Not that much money! But definitely not debt. Keep in mind I'm talking only about philo + math and the hard sciences. I don't know much about how things are in the other humanities or the social sciences.

Why are you glad you didn't get any deeper, goole?

funding was less than guaranteed at the program i left, and even for the fully-funded students, fellowships weren't guaranteed past the fourth year. i'm sort of amazed that you say that Euler; almost everyone i knew was in debt. also, the ones who made their livings teaching did an absurd amount of work for a pittance. i briefly flirted with this life for five years, though, so i'm still pretty bitter.

xps re: debt: i'm thinking of ppl who did MAs as an entree to PhD programs -- maybe you get TAships during those, maybe you don't. either way you're living like a pauper during that time, so supplemental loans or credit cards loom large during that time. and 2-4 years spend earning very little may not be worth what you get back from having another degree when you're done.

this is speaking entirely in $$ terms tho. you can always argue for the intangibles of spending your life doing something you love. but i basically agree with Benton that the "life of the mind" justification is bait for the hook.

ksh are you dense

ksh is a sock

Like I said, it's just philo + math + hard sciences that I'm familiar with. And only Ph.D. programs; no idea about masters' programs. At my grad school I taught at most one course a term and made pretty good coin, I thought (for the midwest, granted; I don't know how people survive in NYC on grad student stipends, but in the midwest it was enough to live on + save + travel all over the world; and friends bought houses). Funding was guaranteed. It was a private research university.

At the university I teach at (a big public research university again in the midwest) the grad students teach a bit more than I did and make less money, but living expenses are still low enough that they can avoid debt at least.