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

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.

yeah i have no idea how someone does nyc on a grad student stipend + part time job=would drive me crazy

it's possible my friends and i were just spendy, but teaching one course a quarter was not enough to cover living expenses + what i would consider reasonable incidental luxuries (beer, eating out once in a while)

i can imagine math and hard sciences programs pay grad students better; heartened to hear philosophy does too

grad school in the UK is paid enough that i managed to survive a year without funding because i saved for the last two years i did have funding (and this was in an expensive town). there's opportunity cost, sure, but getting into debt is just nuts.

grad student stipend in the UK is fixed by government and is the same for humanities and sciences (although there are significantly fewer humanties studentships available (and if you get your funding from someone other than the government, which a minority do, then all bets are off))

Funding in philo is a little worse than math but not much worse, at least at the places I'm familiar with.

I think debt is nuts too given what everyone's saying about indentured servitude but I have colleagues 10+ years out who still have grad student debt. I don't get it at all.

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.

im in the hard sciences and i only have partial funding atm and am living pretty much in poverty although i dont have any debt and my job prospects are (hopefully!) p good. although the fact that i make less than i do i was 19 and will continue to do so for the near future and the fact that my younger siblings own their own homes is making me a little regretful

the point he makes abt guilting students w/the life of the mind stuff is really good - the reason i left my job and went back 2 school was p much this - although it was more abt feeling like i was doing something of use to the world at large and that i cld be happy w/ ~~ thats such a powerful tool

the grad students i knew who didn't get their master's first, but came directly into the Ph.D. program didn't plan on going into debt; there was just a mismatch between funding and living expenses that grew as the years went on. and a bunch of magical thinking that most grad students in English literature are predisposed to, given what we studied.

friend of mine came from the u.s. to do her phd in the uk. powered through it in < 3 years, paid for by her folks. not debt, but it still didn't make much sense to me. she wasn't really competitive on the job market (although she got something she likes and stayed in astronomy).

is anyone here in a french phd program? curious about what the job market would be like for someone who graduates from say, a top 5 program.

you mean in France? or in French / modern languages in the USA?

interested to hear euler's thoughts on that too. my impression of french astronomers is that they exist in this parallel job market that the ROW knows nothing about, and it is essentially a closed shop, unlike pretty much anywhere else in astronomy except maybe japan. so i have no idea.

either really! but probably america

(but I mean studying french lit in either case)

haha, xp, i mean france the country (if you have time/opinion)!

like i share an office with two french final year grad students and i have never even heard of the jobs they are applying for.

yeah my impressions of french academia was that it was basically its own world, interesting if that held true for science too

Now that I'm in a tt job, I've def. have to adjust my expectations for standard of living compared to my friends who didn't go to grad school. They do stuff/have stuff I can't do, wrt cash.
xp

my (prob not-too-well-informed) opinion on the entire US ed system (from pre-K up) is that the incentives, funding mechanisms and emphases are totally fucked up and backwards. we dump money, time, and sweat into people (and take it from them) between the ages of 18 and 22, which is basically a waste at that point if the earlier stages haven't been done right. everything between age 4 and 18 is a gamble at best and a shitshow at worst. the whole game is a colossal misuse of resources and human talent.

my preferred model is much greater intensity in educating children, and a much narrower and less universally-insisted-upon route through a university afterwards. basically south korea for kids, and, i dunno, the UK in the 30s afterwards.

i didn't learn much of anything in college that i couldn't have done as a teenager.

xp lol essentially ANY structure of french life is a "closed shop" amirite? not just being an astronomer...

the grad students i knew who didn't get their master's first, but came directly into the Ph.D. program didn't plan on going into debt; there was just a mismatch between funding and living expenses that grew as the years went on

this is my situation - im adjusting by living cheaper than i did b4 but its hard

caek im always curious when u bump that thread - what do you think the mkt for non-academic jobs for some1 in your field wld be like? i think most of the ppl in my field get non-academic jobs is that true in astronomy as well?

as far as sciences are concerned, where output/experience is important, the uk model for grad school (same in australia) is a problem when u.s. (and to an extent european) programmes are so much longer. those programmes exert inflation on ours, which is starting to make them longer.

(but they are still long done by age 30! i got lost on the way to college, so i'm 28, but most people are < 25 when they finish.)

I don't know much about the academic job market in France but let's just say that I am learning (can't say more on this right now, mum's the word etc.). It is a very closed job market b/c it's a closed academic world, but you can get in from the outside. Things are changing rapidly here wrt its closedness, though not without pains. I have lots of views about why this is a closed place, based on half-asses speculative theories about French national character, but they're better suited to pub talk than online.

I know lots of students here who've finished their degrees and then kinda floated around b/w various European post-docs w/o much luck in job finding. But they don't seem to consider going to the USA for jobs. France is a great place but employment is an even better place, even if it's the midwest. Although I'm not sure it's that they're committed to staying in France, but more that they don't realize that they can be competitive in the American job market, if their game is good enough.

xp

but basically I'm asking for my gf, who has an essentially perfect academic CV - is thinking about getting a phd (in french)- yay, stipend, studying etc.

I think if she knew for SURE that by going to the right program and working her ass off for X years that she could get a tenured position at a decent university, she'd be willing to do whatever it took. but we've done the research and it's like...you can never be sure. which is where the doubt comes in. those articles, the numbers, decline of tenure in academia...

but any closed academic world has different standards for what counts as good game, so this is part of the growing pains of opening.

(sorry, just finishing my thought)