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

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)

xp to lamp:

i get the impression it's ok for, e.g. me if i leave. the vast majority of those who leave academia after an astronomy phd are fairly sophisticated computer programmers and numerate in a way that is quite useful in a lot of industry/government.

but unlike biochem/pharma, there is not a "private astronomy" industry, so the prospects for continuing to "work in astronomy" professionally are nonexistent (outside some niche public outreach stuff: planetariums, publishing, pop. sci journalism etc.)

one exception: about 1/3 of students do instrumentation, which is essentially optical/electrical engineering and solid state physics, with a token unpublished astronomy chapter in your thesis. if this is you when you leave astronomy you are sorted for life and will never want for anything, especially if you are cool with the military.

haha no way can you be sure about getting a tt job, unless maybe you graduate from a top 5 dept with a pretty standard specialization and are completely willing to live anywhere, perhaps at an institution that you'd o/w consider beneath you, especially after spending time at a top 5 dept.

xp to iatee

xxp to self: there used to be a bit of a treadmill from physics phds to quant. finance, which i guess has slowed down a bit in the past couple of years, but those guys are retarded and will employ anyone who can solve a differential equation with a computer (which i suppose is true of most of science these days), so there's always that.

i shouldn't be in debt when i'm done, because i've gotten through my teaching and by living frugally (relatively speaking). and, to be honest, my mother buys big things for me (like when i need a new computer). so i can't pretend to be totally independent.

i do worry, enormously, about the lack of jobs. but i'm too old to do anything else; i've invested too much time and energy on this. and unlike, say, a computer scientists, the skills i've picked up are not very transferable.

the irony is that right at the point when you need to kick things into high gear (after coursework is over and you start work on a dissertation), i've become completely burned out. need to rekindle my intellectual enthuasiasm pronto, start writing and publishing and giving conference papers.

i do think i would give any undergrad curious about grad school those chronicle articles. if they still want to try it, cool, but they should know the odds.

one big problem is that i entered grad school at age 27, and i actually think i missed my years of peak intellectual energy. i feel a lot dumber now, at 32, than i did a decade ago.

thanks for the france thoughts, euler.

wrt to French programs in the USA: my impression is that European modern language specializations are in danger right now: declining enrollment in secondary school French + German means less demand for undergrad teaching means less demand for new hires in modern language departments. Plus modern languages is pretty politicized as a discipline as I understand it, and so you have to worry about rightwingers ransacking universities on political (in)correctness grounds and killing those departments. I know that at some schools they're considering moving toward focusing on European language training rather than European lit training, which also changes the composition of those departments and their future hiring plans.

i do think i would give any undergrad curious about grad school those chronicle articles. if they still want to try it, cool, but they should know the odds.

― by another name (amateurist), Wednesday, February 10, 2010 4:02 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

it was always awkward when my undergrad students would tell me they were interested in grad school and did i have any advice. i tried to give them a corrective perspective like the one in those chronicle articles but i'm not sure they bought it coming from me. the way i used to hear that lecture pre-grad school was that you could overcome all of that if you were just good enough.

to self: there used to be a bit of a treadmill from physics phds to quant. finance, which i guess has slowed down a bit in the past couple of years, but those guys are retarded and will employ anyone who can solve a differential equation with a computer (which i suppose is true of most of science these days), so there's always that.

haha i partly asked this bcuz when i worked in finance (2002-2006) there were a bunch of physics dudes across p much all the institutions i dealt with. also i was curious if like nasa/esa/whomever employed some of u guyz ~ its a little early for me but im thinking of aiming for some gov't stuff in the future. i think even being in a really good program an academic position is mb out of grasp *shrug*

one big problem is that i entered grad school at age 27, and i actually think i missed my years of peak intellectual energy. i feel a lot dumber now, at 32, than i did a decade ago.

I can sympathize with this, but looking back, I don't think I was "smarter", just better at churning out work in an extremely structured environment. The days of being an assignment-writing machine are over, if I look at stuff I wrote 10 years ago I guess I'm just surprised at how much more efficient I used to be.

At tt job interviews with grad students one standard component of the interview is a lunch with grad students. I think I'd usually end up with a negative vote from them b/c I'd say very realistic things about their chances (e.g. "you'll be horribly lucky if you even get a tt job with a 3-3 teaching load in the midwest").

my impression is that nasa/esa mainly employ engineering people. most of the "science" is done by academics outside those institutions, and the in-house scientists they do have are a tiny fraction of their workforce (and a small number in an absolute sense relative to the academic market)

i feel like people realise whether an academic career is possible fo them (never mind whether they want it) in the last 1-2 years of their PhD. until the subject clicks for me as a landscape, i didn't know where i stood. tbh i still have my doubts, but i'm keen, and a big part of persisting is so i can leave europe because it look interesting.

I can sympathize with this, but looking back, I don't think I was "smarter", just better at churning out work in an extremely structured environment. The days of being an assignment-writing machine are over, if I look at stuff I wrote 10 years ago I guess I'm just surprised at how much more efficient I used to be.

― NoTimeBeforeTime, Wednesday, February 10, 2010 9:09 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

totes. first year or two of my phd i literally did not work.

But "efficient" is a bit of an ill-defined word here -- it's not as if I'm doing the same stuff now as I was then, so it's hard to compare "efficiency" across disciplines with completely different goals and different measures of "success".

xpost to me

the way i used to hear that lecture pre-grad school was that you could overcome all of that if you were just good enough.

friends of mine from undergrad that have gone on to do grad work all felt like this i think. its mb part of what hes getting @ in that article - u get a lot of praise and a sense of importance from going to a top 10 undergrad school and its p easy i think to seem exceptional and capable - its too easy to imagine yourself as the exception

first year of my Ph.D. program was the worst year of my life: never had I experienced such tremendous self-doubt, realizing how stupid I am. That has helped me a lot, though: this academic life is regularly publicly humiliating (which is what someone pointed out above), in that you put your work out there and others read it and then argue that you are completely wrong about everything in front of your peers. And that's all good! b/c people are reading and talking about you. You also have to get used to being treated like a rookie all over again, just when you think you did something important in finishing a Ph.D.

well i simply am so exhausted from the work i have to do that i find myself turning into a slug in the time i should be spending doing my own research for my dissertation, etc. whereas i think when i was younger i would be more productive in that so-called "free time."

xpost

yeah and i think one problem is that you are of course speaking to professors who DID luck out. the top schools don't tend to have people hanging around who spent years without getting tenure-track appointments, so you don't get that side of the story.

i'm not terribly afraid of being told i'm wrong, i'm more afraid of there being literally nobody who is the slightest bit interested in what i write.

basically i should kill myself.

I'm glad I found ILX/started posting on it - it's pretty much everything I liked about college (jamming about books/movies/other pieces of art) and none of what I hated (writing papers, kissing up to profs)

it was kind of depressing getting an email from one of my TAs last fall being like "so glad you're considering grad school! but for some perspective check out this long list of schools I applied to for jobs and am still waiting to hear back from" *bunch of small state schools in the middle of nowhere*

time has come for my fun AHRC application-making. PhD in (continental) philosophy. LIKELY. I'm in the midst of my Masters now and getting good grades, although my big concern is that my failure to present any papers at conferences or get anything published will stand against me - even though it's not very common at Masters level I'm sure it's something the AHRC love. Currently I'm lucky enough to have my tuition fees covered and working part-time earns me £7000 a year which is juuuuuust about enough to get by, but the working really bites into the academic side. Not a balance I've managed to work out to my satisfaction. So in the likely event I'm rejected here, I guess I'm off to full-time work and saving up for a few years. Anyone got any tips for the proposal process? The main one I've heard so far is that the AHRC are real impressed with talk of CREATIVITY and NEW DIRECTIONS and INTERDISCIPLINARITY and such, which I feel pretty cheap about doing but hey I'd kill a man for £15k a year.

"i'm more afraid of there being literally nobody who is the slightest bit interested in what i write."

i've found this is not a worry limited to grad school/academia, if it makes you feel any better.

xpost - 'Creativity' and 'new directions' are helpful. 'Interdisciplinarity' is very helpful, though it's hard to say what form of words might work for you - I know bugger all about philosophy. It's really worth considering 'impact'. I know, I know. But the the definition is getting broader and broader. They will be happy if you talk about *potential* impact, and for this potential to be all about, for instance, wellbeing or critical thinking (whether for social groups, for public policy, whatever) rather than about the UK economy. Basically, they are looking for people who are thinking ahead about how they might engage people/organisations with the research beyond academia - they will expect you to be realistic and flexible about how that works in practice. They just want to see that you've considered it carefully and shown what difference that might make to the way you approach the project.

Having said that, I know more about all this in relation to research grants than I do in relation to PhD training.

None of the above has anything to do with my personal opinion about the impact agenda - just information about what's sought after as I understand it.

I can sympathize with this, but looking back, I don't think I was "smarter", just better at churning out work in an extremely structured environment. The days of being an assignment-writing machine are over, if I look at stuff I wrote 10 years ago I guess I'm just surprised at how much more efficient I used to be.

Wow. My experience is exactly the opposite. Studying for comps and especially teaching has made me far more efficient than I've ever previously been.

"have made"

Merdeyeux, does your Uni have a central research development office where people help you with proposals? Someone with a good deal of experience should be able to help you put in some buzzwords. Also (you've probably done this already) look at their research mission statements eg http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/About/Policy/Pages/FutureDirections.aspx

I guess it goes without saying that IMPACT is where its at, although from memory AHRC have been less keen to define it than perhaps other RCs.

I wouldn't worry too much about the emerging themes - they're unlikely to affect decisions on PhDs, just to define future areas for top-down calls. Definitely worth looking at the buzzwords though. Lots of impact stuff at http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundedResearch/Pages/ImpactAssessment.aspx. In the early 'impact' days, AHRC was one of the keenest RCs because it had the most to prove.

I have actually been through the AHRC (or AHRB as it was) funding process. I had a place to do an MA in History of Science (rand corporation, game theory in war, etc.) in London, but didn't get the award so spent a year in publishing. It probably wasn't in my favour that I can't write in full sentences and had a v. straightforward physics background, but I and the dudes at UCL thought my application was pretty strong. I had no trouble at all with the STFC the following year. So I guess my point is, I don't envy people going through the ARHC for money. Good luck!

Appropos of nothing in particular, this link was posted on one of the STS mailing lists I subscribe to. Offer of 2 phd studentships in Norway. 3 years at $60,000 a year, bring your own (Zero emissions buildings) research topic and make your way to Trondheim:

https://secure.jobbnorge.no/job.aspx?jobid=64830

That 'Benton' "Big Lie" article seems a bit ridiculous to me. The basic premise that a PhD in comparative literature does not offer the widest range of career opportunities seems pretty obvious but this article comes off as OTT fear-mongering. If he were supporting his argument with the statistics he encourages students to find for themselves ("the rate of attrition, the average amount of debt at graduation, and, most important, the placement of graduates...") or with actual interviews with actual graduates, I could take it more seriously. AFAICT, though, he seems to argue his point primarily by relating a fictional sob story about a hypothetical student (whose blue-collar or middle-class family enthusiastically supported her decision to pursue a comp lit PhD - as all such families presumably do? - because of the ever-pervasive lie that this was a ticket to a comfortable career). Anyone who lives in MI should be aware that economic times are tough and jobs are scarce for the working class as well, despite the success of the hypothetical student's hypothetical brother. And even if a PhD does need to go to a community college or a professional college to get certification in something other than comparative literature and does end up working under people younger than her or less educated than her, that does not strike me as something that should necessarily be a totally demeaning, soul-crushing fate. Writing skills are valuable. And, yes, comp lit != all the arts or humanities.

right but ten years getting a doctorate, to have that just boil down to "writing skills", that IS pretty soul crushing imo

he implies a very unfavorable numbers game but he doesn't provide the numbers himself, it's true. it would strengthen his argument if he did. i always kind of assumed that the number of people who get a PhD from an American university in 1 year are probably enough to fill ALL of the openings in ALL university departments in that field. it's a huge pool of qualified applicants for a tiny number of jobs. and that's true of every industry these days, but the time and effort and cost that goes into becoming a qualified applicant really really magnifies the gamble.

thx for the advice guys, I will give you 10% credit if I'm successful and 100% blame if I'm not.

If everything goes to plan, I'm gonna graduate this August! w00t! But holy fuck this semester is driving me absolutely crazy.

(I suppose I am critiquing Benton's argument more than his premise.)

I've just been accepted for an English PhD. What the fuck am I getting myself into?

congratulations!!

congratulation!

Haha, thanks you guys. I'm kind of terrified, but it's something I really want to do, and also I have no transferable skills to the outside world so it keeps me away from the even scarier prospect of working in a shitty office again.