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

^^^ disagree completely, 100%

oh man really? or is it a humanities thing? as much as the school matters, and i would never argue that its negligible, i do feel like your work is going to be the biggest determining factor in your job prospects after graduating. but obv you have a better sense of these things...

i mean maybe we're collectively underselling the value that going to #1 has, and the worse the job market gets for your discipline the greater the value that is, but i have (yet, lol) to regret transferring out of an ivy league school to a less prestigious but more welcoming one

have never understood why it's gauche to do your phd at your alma mater - seems like some kind of bullshit arbitrary made up criteria, like "oh look! that candidate is wearing blue socks...she can never be as good at me at reading proust"

idk if it's gauche but it does mean you have limited institutional experience? given every university has its own systems and culture.

i am doing a phd at my alma mater - mostly cos this one guy here seemed like the ideal person to supervise me, and we have an excellent library - and sometimes i really feel like i should have moved, there was something a little too-safe about just returning to familiar ways.

I'm keen to hear Euler's perspective on this, I'm a computer science person so I'm willing to believe things are different over in the other culture.

In my field the main goal during a PhD is to get noticed - you do this by writing papers and presenting at conferences. Obviously your institution has a big influence on this, e.g. in who you get to collaborate with, who comes to visit, and so on but ultimately it's the quality of your work that people notice.

i think institutional prestige is probably more important in the humanities (not that science is a meritocracy).

idk if it's gauche but it does mean you have limited institutional experience? given every university has its own systems and culture.

that's basically it. i mean there are people in the world with worse problems than having to go to oxford twice, but i do feel like it is (rightly) held against me, and i would have found the job market nowhere near as tough if i'd have left the uk for my phd.

euler will know better, but i think in the sciences in france you basically have to leave france immediately after your phd if you want to get a permanent job in france one day.

ok done teaching for the day; gonna work upward now in this thread

In my experience French mathematicians move right from French Ph.D.s to French post-docs to permanent positions in France. The same is true for philosophers.

It's def. unwise to go to the same place for grad & undergrad, mostly because it's uncommon & so search committees will wonder what the deal was. I doubt it would be a gamebreaker but it could tilt the balance in a close case (& they're usually close cases).

Now that I'm reading this more slowly I want to correct something I said. Institutional prestige matters a lot less than departmental prestige. My Ph.D. is from a non-Ivy but in my discipline my department ranked higher than most Ivies, even though institutionally it's below an Ivy. But *departmental* prestige matters a shit-ton (this is what I meant to say earlier). Your work will stand on its own but how it's received by others is based on where you came from & the means by which those others receive it. Sure, if you can publish it in a top-shelf place on your own then yes, it'll stand on its own, but grad students rarely pull this off (I said *top-shelf* place). Usually it's a matter of word of mouth, and so it matters who the mouth is. People at other universities want to protect their students, and so aren't likely to deliver good word of mouth to you as a student competing with their students (that'll happen in time if you're good enough (say, by tenure time), but not at the start, when differentiation b/w students isn't so clear). You want your promotors, in particular your advisor, to have as much weight in the profession as possible. And this is generally reflected by departmental reputation. Certainly if you don't know who's hot shit a priori, knowing that they've got a job at a top-shelf department is a good guide. This word of mouth thing is so crucial in philo & in math---yeah, even in the latter, b/c what search committees care about is ~trajectory~, & what you've done needs to be ~interpreted~ in order to gauge that. Your letter writers will be doing that interpretation, at least at the start. Later you'll be doing that for yourself by writing more, getting on the conference circuit, etc. But at the start you're completely at the mercy of others: it's what your reputation is, and you want your advisors & other letter writers, with their studly reputations, to identify you with that studly reputation.

gonna start a new para b/c that's getting long but look: another thing is that this profession, academia I mean, is "I scratch your back, you scratch mine". Your department Beta hires a student from department Alpha, and Alpha is going to hire a student from department Beta; and maybe even professor Aleph at Alpha is going to hire a student of professor Beth at Beta, and they'll personally reciprocate. You want into that. If your advisor is someone you relate to well (which is super critical, don't get me wrong, I love my advisors like parents) but who isn't in the backscratching business, then get ready to watch this shit going on & feel helpless. That's why going to the hottest place you can is a good idea. I mean if there really is no one she can envision working with at place #1, then she should be wary, but I'd try to make that happen. If this weren't the internet I'd talk to you more about this, but in a ton of ways I really lucked out in this process (like, I picked my dept. w/o knowing anything & it totally was a great choice in all the ways I'm talking about). It's better not to luck out. So when I talk about placement being critical, I mean: can you find out if they're on the backscratching circuit? Have her ask the grad students at the various institutions, esp. the oldest ones. The profs will lie or at least dissemble, but the grad student'll know what's up. If she can hack it, ask profs at other unis about these depts---hell, even ask people at her alma mater about placement at these other places.

ok this bullshit is way too long now but that's what I've got for now

the real problem is that it's hard to know what the hot department is in this particular discipline. we know which schools were harder to get into. but there aren't really current rankings that anyone accepts as truth. a lot of the people at other schools badmouth school #1, today she heard it being called a 'cemetery'. but this is a really small world, even as far as academia goes, I'm not sure a ranking would even make any sense.

from what we're seeing it look like school #4 is gonna get some of the other top students purely because they want to go to 'school #4'. but that doesn't actually seem like a top department for other reasons.

what's really frustrating is how little important info is available for someone not yet in grad school, these schools all have horrible website.

There are a lot of bad websites out there, it's true, but if you're thinking about going to school there, you're not going to make a decision based on what you learned from their website. If possible, you really need to visit there and see the place for yourself and talk with potential future colleagues.

the real problem is that it's hard to know what the hot department is in this particular discipline. we know which schools were harder to get into. but there aren't really current rankings that anyone accepts as truth.

And why would there be? Kanye West finished ahead of Janelle Monae in the 2010 Pazz and Jop poll, but not everybody accepts those rankings as truth. No shit!

Forget about objective, or even halfway reliable "rankings" of departments or schools, they don't exist and even if they did they would be fluid because research goals change, people come and go, new funding comes in or old funding runs out, etc. It might be boring and old fashioned, but you really need to list the pros and cons of every possible school and rank them yourself based on what's most important for you.

w/ the websites I more meant that it's sometimes not possible to even find simple things like 'list of current grad students'. at this point she has done the official visits for all 5 of the schools that she's seriously considering, talked w/ professors etc.

(she's also read this thread now.) I think school #3 is probably falling out of consideration.

It's only March so the deadline for acceptance is still a ways off, right? maybe it depends on the discipline.

There's nothing "objective" about rankings but people act like there is, and that's what matters.

In my discipline pretty much all the great students at the top five universities get jobs. That's not true in the next few tiers. Once you're past the top fifteen or so, students who are the "best in a few years" have a pretty good shot, but for the rest it can be a long shot. And this is true whether you're talking about teaching or research jobs.

Talking frankly to people about this now should be interesting, as there are hiring freezes all over the USA & deans are treating tt lines like diamonds. I imagine there's quite a feeling of desperation. I'd also suggest talking to people outside the NYC area (my recollection is that that's where you are; no idea why I think that) b/c ime students in NYC, LA, & the Bay Area tend to fixate on staying where they are, and so overestimate their job chances since they're willing to settle for lousy temp work in those places. Those people will never get real jobs & they don't really care, but if your gf does, then she might not be getting a clear picture of how real/dire things are.

yeah w/ nyc, and yeah we're not harboring any delusions about job prospects and relocation. *any* job is a good one for someone in humanities.

oh & what I meant to say about "feeling of desperation" was in particular wrt modern languages jobs b/c unis are edging those out these days; also worth talking to people about. There have been a few high profile cases of this recently.

did she apply to anywhere off the coasts? it might be worth getting an inland perspective since those people are all counting on / hoping to move, and might have a wider understanding of the prospects around the country. No offense but I've noticed myopia amongst students in the big coastal havens & I've seen very few of them get real jobs & I guess they're happy! living in those places is something a lot of people want; but real jobs are pretty great too.

of course if she can get a confidant-type prof to talk about these things, at a research university preferably (b/c they're attuned to discipline gossip daily, that's what we live on), that'd be great too.

the only top non-coastal departments for this seem to be emory and duke (if that counts) but no didn't apply to them. but generally this field is pretty coastal, sorta makes sense though.

I though you said it was French? or is it more specialized than that?

yeah c'est ca. looking at random faculties you def see an overwhelming number of ivy phds and school #1 does seem to be the most present. but that also has more to do with its historic rep than its present rep. mostly just keeping it anon for online safety though these can't be hard to guess at this point. it's actually quite possible that one of the students who got rejected there this year did cause he was loud and obvious in the big online grad school forum and they read it.

ime students in NYC, LA, & the Bay Area tend to fixate on staying where they are, and so overestimate their job chances since they're willing to settle for lousy temp work in those places.

looool I know some people for whom this is totally true :/

I dunno your day to day life matters! some people might be happier with a job in a place they love than a career in a place they hate.

def! but I guess there are other ways to live in places you love w/o having to babysit trust fund kids. idk don't mind me

once I realized that there are like 10 people total who do what michael douglas does in wonder boys, grad school stopped being appealing to me

going to any of these schools is effectively getting paid to babysit trustfund kids...

haha yeah there is no amount of money you could pay me to go back to school

totally! that's why everyone's gotta sort out what they're looking for. I know several adjuncts in those places who teach 4/4 or 5/5 loads with no chance of wider public recognition for their work (since they've given up research to cope with those loads), but they're living their dream otherwise in a big cool city. The delusion is thinking a priori that you're gonna get a good tt job, or even a tt job at all, in one of those places. And once you choose the non-tt route, you're almost certainly never going to get a tt position. You get a few chances at the goldmine & that's it.

happy to keep things anonymous ('tis my game here after all) but since we're clear on the discipline now: there are Ph.D. programs in Fr3nch outside the coasts. Or did I misunderstand what you were saying didn't exist outside the coasts?

noo I just meant that any top 10 list would be almost entirely coastal

(for fr3nch)

Watching my partner go through the experience of trying to find an academic job in the social sciences Rank doesn't have nearly as much bearing on placing, as institutional support in the job hunting process. Her department gives pretty much none although some advisors are quite good at this. It would be worth talking to some of students who did place recently and some of those going through the Job market process right now. It's not just about good letters its about a getting good apprenticeship as a professional academic over the course of the Phd and having a committee that will market you to their networks. If #2 is placing people then they are clearly doing something right but it would be worth digging deeper.

lol so i was talking to a couple of friends who are going to be looking for academic jobs in the near future & one (h1story) sd p unequivocally that school #1 was the right choice. the other (b1o) sd school #2...

If #2 is placing people then they are clearly doing something right but it would be worth digging deeper.

yeahh this is one of the things that i wonder about like, as much as i get euler's point about dept. prestige & working your way into the backscratching network in the end you still need to be in a position to profit from those connections w/ faculty in the 1st place, right? like, you can end up at a school w/ a great reputation, good placement record, access to networks &c &c but if its not a place your going to be comfortable or where your own goals wont be met, than what good is it? idk, really

also i guess your gf should be p clear about her own goals from this - how badly does she want a tt position, how does she feel about teaching &c

yeah there are some more variables too. school #1 has a pretty brutal 1st year and you're already teaching in the 2nd year. also as much as school #2 might be better for her current interests, it's important to point out that she's not 100% on those interests and sorta needs time to figure out what she wants to focus on.

there are some people she can/will meet with who have strong connections w/ both schools and I'm hoping that'll make this decision more clear. that said (I'm speaking for her at this point but she does read this) I think her #1 goal would be tt.

really wish I could easily make a spreadsheet w/ placements and non-placements for every school! I'm trying to get her to demand as much from the schools but 'how many failures did your school produce' is a kinda huge factor! we recently saw someone w/ a business card that had a fr3nch masters from school #1 - this school does not offer a terminal masters. etc.

I dunno, failure at getting through grad school comes down in a big way to your personal skills: smarts, drive, motivation, focus. There can be other factors, but I'm guessing she has a pretty good idea at her abilities (though I gotta say, in my absolutely savage first year of grad school I feared daily I wouldn't make it---you folks might think I'm an asshole now but you should known me before being humiliated daily for an entire year)

But failure at getting a job after making it through, that's something you don't have as much control over. You can do everything right & still get fucked. That's why you want the forces aligned with you: as Ed says, you want a place with programs in place for placement, but you also want faculty who are in the network, fight hard for their students, and have a record of success doing so.

yeah i think the thing that is difficult is that while there are differences btw schools it can be hard to definitively know the differences, like if the TOP SCHOOL is going to have a placement rate of x% whats the difference btw that and the fourth or fifth ranked schools? 5%? 15%? and what percentage chance should you be willing to sacrifice to study in a place that seems better suited to your own research interests, & what value does working with ppl & in a place youre most comfortable have, both immediately & in the quality of work youll be able to do?

im so glad i have no interest in a tt position, i think it wld have made me crazy

yeah esp in the humanities. I told her to go into this w/ no expectation to get one as the future is gonna be even more brutal than the present. she has good reason to believe she's one of the top prospects in the country this year but there's no way of knowing how well her skills will translate into serious research.

oops she corrected me after reading this, school #2 (the possibly less prestigious one) has the brutal first year

it's looking like it's probably gonna be #1

#2's first few years are needlessly brutal. huge difference between the workload there than at #1.
+
#1 does have the 'best students' (not just word of mouth, something she observed there)
+
#1's rep seems good enough that even if she might not get tt at harvard, she's gonna get *some sorta job* as one of the only students at the most selective school

yah go to where the best ppl are. feel like the most valuable part of any school is the 'academic environment' it puts you in. the actual larnin' you can do anywhere.

a letter of application outlining my potential contribution? fu guyz. one of these days i really ought to learn how to sell myself.

actually no srsly, it's only a phd application. what am i supposed to say? "i'll do my work and other people will be doing kind of similar stuff and we'll talk about it and it'll be cool and shit"?

Contribution to what? To the university community? Your field of research? Do you have a research topic and/or a potential thesis advisor? You can always go the route of "I believe my background in X makes me a strong candidate for pursuing future research in Y". Try to highlight something in your CV that you're particularly proud of -- from the I'm sure you're bringing some academic skills to the table that the typical student is not.

Argh, memories of scholarship applications coming back: "Please outline how your proposed research will benefit your country"

http://www.thenation.com/article/160410/faulty-towers-crisis-higher-education?page=full

one of my favorite writers

I think the problem is not 'higher education is dying' but 'america is dying'

Not a bad article, a lot better than most articles on the subject, but you can summarize the whole thing with this line: "Yet the liberal arts, as we know, are dying." College enrollment continues to skyrocket because people have realized that they're better off spending two years in college and coming out of it with a clear vocation and marketable skills than spending four years in uni (plus several more if you continue to grad school) and not having a clue what you're going to do with your life. All disciplines are affected by this, but liberal arts especially. Universities should aggressively promote "practical" disciplines, protect their intellectual property, and use that income to help underfunded departments (as well as things that benefit all students like dorms and students centres, which Dereisewicz thinks are wastes of money because they don't have anything to do with teaching or research).

Some of his claims are real howlers though ... like the notion that university admins and presidents only care about the "stock price" and don't have their institutions' best interests at heart? That's like saying politicians only care about the next weeks' poll numbers. Once you reach that level, padding your resume becomes a lot less important than building a "legacy", IMO. And this is straight-up BS: "A scientific education creates technologists. A liberal arts education creates citizens: people who can think broadly and critically about themselves and the world."

i haven't read the article yet, but "university admins and presidents only care about the "stock price" and don't have their institutions' best interests at heart" caught my eye and reminded me of this http://chronicle.com/article/The-College-as-a-Philanthropy/125176/

universities have always been corporations first and foremost - don't let any noble ideals get in the way of that

always? everywhere? if that's true then they're pretty much the worst corporations ever, at least in britain and europe, but even in the u.s.

I don't think 'always' - but certainly there's been a trend over the last decades toward something that emulates market competition - schools are competing w/ their 'product' (4 year experience + what the name/degree can do) rather than w/ their education. like, just cause they're non-profits doesn't mean that the operation can't trend in the direction of a private corporation - from the top (CEO salaries and perks) to the middle (economically efficient hiring/teaching = adjunct/ grad student world) to the bottom (tv ads/image/aforementioned 'product')

there's still not price competition, for the most part, but I think there will be, inevitably.

Not a bad article, a lot better than most articles on the subject, but you can summarize the whole thing with this line: "Yet the liberal arts, as we know, are dying." College enrollment continues to skyrocket because people have realized that they're better off spending two years in college and coming out of it with a clear vocation and marketable skills than spending four years in uni (plus several more if you continue to grad school) and not having a clue what you're going to do with your life.

yeah otm, I think this is at the heart of it. I think the semi-universal liberal arts education was, overall, a competitive advantage for the american economy but also maybe not built on a structure that will be sustainable in coming decades.

Some of his claims are real howlers though ... like the notion that university admins and presidents only care about the "stock price" and don't have their institutions' best interests at heart? That's like saying politicians only care about the next weeks' poll numbers. Once you reach that level, padding your resume becomes a lot less important than building a "legacy", IMO

are those things (considered to be) unrelated? the 'stock price' seems to be quite related to the general idea of what an institutions' 'best interests' are (rankings, money, talent) and 'legacy' is going to overlap with that too. whereas what we might consider the true 'best interests' (a serious increase in tenure track positions, huge cuts in high-level admin salaries) isn't happening anywhere.

always? everywhere? if that's true then they're pretty much the worst corporations ever, at least in britain and europe, but even in the u.s.

― caek, Monday, May 9, 2011 7:23 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

haha I was taking the piss (think I'm using this birriticism correctly) a little. on cynical days I think that the business of all private universities is long-term horseracing.

endowments don't fund themselves (well, they did until the finance market crashed! ha ha, take that david swensen.)

I think the semi-universal liberal arts education was, overall, a competitive advantage for the american economy but also maybe not built on a structure that will be sustainable in coming decades.

agreed.