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

What field are you in, Ed B?

Even now, I blanch a little when I look at the application forms for SSHRC research grants.

(sign that I'm in the right field, obv)

What's your field, Sund4r?

Music composition/theory. So I guess SSHRC application skills are actually much less essential than they are in other fields. Still does seem to be an important part of the whole deal.

I'm in Art History, the aformentioned postdocs that are all getting ~JOBBZ~ are assorted humanities people, though,

Aw crap, I don't think things are going to work out between me and this advisor. I can deal with all sorts of difficult people, honestly, but there's one type I can't deal with and I've got a sinking feeling that I recognize it here. I really don't want to spend four years angry after every meeting and having to hide it. I know I have to give it time, though. (And get to know other faculty in the meantime).

^^^do you really have to give it time? It shouldn't be this hard with your *advisor*. Get another advisor, stat, if you can! And if you can't, your program should really think about what a bad policy that is.

Anyhow, about a decade after sayonara to grad school for what I thought would be forever, hell if I'm not gonna do it again! Total career change: please prepare for quincie, MSW, LCSW-C

Fantastic, Q! Are you applying right now?

If I tried to skip over to another advisor now, unfortunately no-one would take me seriously because we're 6 weeks in. I think first I have to come up with a strong, executable dissertation idea that 'naturally' takes me to someone else. Also, that way minimises any potential politics and bad feeling.

That sounds like a sound strategy. I'm applying for Fall 2013, but I'll likely need to do an online course in human development--apparently my two bioscience degrees will not exempt me from this requirement! I'll do that next semester (oh god, I'm going to be considering time in semesters instead of financial quarters!!!). Would like to get all my application stuff in by end of January. Only applying to three schools (VCU, UMD, and BU). VCU and BU have distance/online programs; UMD I can do my first year in R'ville and my second year in Baltimore. Still not sure if I will do full time or part time. I guess, since I have to pay for this, I should do part time, meaning ~3 years too finish.

TO finish, not too finish. And work at the same time. Then take an MSW job at approx half the salary of my current corporate gig. But I'm very happy with this decision and am excited to go back to school!

Can you do lots of different types of jobs with an MSW? Do you have your eye on something specific?

I'm going with MSW because there are so many options! I know I want to work with adults, first and foremost. The adult areas I'm interested are end-of-life care/hospice; aging; and mental health. I'll definitley go for licensure because it opens up more job options, but am not hell-bent on private practice. Then again, the option to hang my own shingle as a counselor is not something I would rule out. We'll see how it goes! What about you??? I didn't get to ask about all of the details before you abandoned us for the Canadianas!

If I turn out to be any good, and if I'm very lucky, I'll continue on in academia. Plan B is a policy or funding job, but a narrower, more psych-focused one than the type of thing I just came from.

narrowing down a list of places to apply to from twenty to 6-8 is proving kind of difficult.

question.

are preliminary emails to professors in depts. i'm applying to a worthwhile use of my time? some people seem to say 'absolutely do this' but also i keep finding people on the internet saying 'i am a professor and i am behind on my email anyway all the time and this just demonstrates you will be a pain in the ass'

my guess would be number two. more effective would be looking at the work of those professors and tailoring each application to that.

and honestly a lot of that kind of stuff just seems like people trying very hard to find out how to control something that is way beyond their control.

I've heard both, but maybe it depends on the discipline. A historian friend said that this was the way to go, whereas philosophy professors have said to avoid at all costs.

has this been posted here yet?

http://100rsns.blogspot.com/

^good stuff

lol that is literally the last thing i need right now (spends rest of friday evening reading it)

i think i might send emails when there are members-of-depts. who are doing work or have done previous work that seems like it's very, very closely related to what i'm proposing, but when it's only sort of the same vague area it just seems sort of ... 'hi! i'm aware of you!'

that sounds like a good middle ground to me.

poor white males need not apply for tenure track humanities positions

This is my advisor's first lab, and I think we are her first PhD students.

I scrolled a bit upthread ... don't take this the wrong way, but this is the kind of thing you really needed to know before committing to join the lab. Also any advisor who starts a new lab from scratch and expects the students to come up with all the ideas from day one is a dick who isn't doing his or her job. Sounds like a bad situation if you ask me, I agree with what others are saying, you should get out if you can.

Yeah, I did guess it was the case before joining the lab based on her career stage/no reference to students beyond MA, and I realized then that it's a drawback - perhaps I just didn't realize how significant. I had good reasons to want to work with her. They are still valid - I just hope they're not overwhelmed by this other stuff. When I ask around, I get extremely positive things from people on the research side, and eye-rolling and it's-not-just-you looks on the social competence and keeping-on-top-of-things side. It's not that she's milking her students for ideas and not coming up with any herself; she has tons of ideas, and I'd rather she let us get on with ours and publish than only want to do her own thing. But she doesn't seem to want to *run* the lab or empower anyone else to do so, which means ideas get confused and no-one knows who's doing what.

I mean, I'm typing this calmly now because we just had a good meeting. But if you'd posted on Wednesday you would have got a response from me while sobbing and two whiskeys down. Still keeping a firm eye out for alternatives, but moving fast is not an option, and I need to do my research on the new prospects!

Sometimes an advisor can absorb new people and give them the freedom to find their own way if the lab is already well established. But with a new lab, someone has to take charge of nearly all the details big and small, and the advisor is the only person in the lab with enough experience to do that. But I'm glad to hear that things have been going better over the past few days. Anyway, keep doing what you're doing and keep your options open (cliched but true).

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/12/04/stanford-moves-ahead-plans-radically-change-humanities-doctoral-education

our doctoral program (humanities) only assures funding for five years now, as of this year, so we're already committed to this. article doesn't say what's special about Stanford's plan.

not sure why anyone would *want* to stay in grad school longer than that, but I've seen a lot of grad students drift in my time (obv they never get jobs in academia)

I've thought about developing our doctoral program into two tracks, one aimed at academic jobs (lol?) & the other at non-academic jobs, with the second requiring in the third and/or fourth summers a funded internship that the program finds for students. whether my colleagues will be open to that...

I think that is a good direction but there's sorta a mismatched incentive problem cause the depts that do it might be afraid of looking 'less academic'. stanford is a good place for stuff like this to happen because it doesn't have to risk looking non-academic it just looks stanfordy.

we don't have to worry about that either, as a university at least

I assure you Stanford philo would worry about looking less academic (having been "involved" there, let's say)

what sort of non-academic jobs do humanities phds tend to do?

excepting like international relations or whatever

yeah I can imagine I mean it still exists in the social world of academic philosophy. that's why the changes can only really come from above.

http://mylifeourhealth.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/golden-arches.jpg

no clue about english or lit or whatever

but if you do a thesis on global justice in the context of health care in a philo dept e.g. there are good paying "careers" in the health care industry

& actually our incentive is "getting jobs for our students", something we spend a lot of time worrying about

that doesn't really sound like philsophy? or is it applied moral philosophy

deems you must be thinking of the MPhil students

i'm thinking of the irish ones tbrr

applied ethics ⊆ philo

getting them academic jobs yeah, but getting them non-academic jobs? those are very different things

to me they're all jobs, jobs you wouldn't get w/o a Ph.D. as I said my colleagues may need convincing, but the newly shitism of the market is pushing ivory tower types a bit closer to the edge. & deans are paying attention too, which matters a lot

never having run a humanities department at a prestigious american university this is rather speculative but i'd guess a lot of them are loathe to think that their phd graduates couldn't even get a job at the university of cowfuck or whatever

getting a job at the university of cowfuck is fucking hard even for Princeton grads

I quit my PhD, btw. Seeing as academia was the only thing I ever displayed any aptitude for, I can now look forward to doing precisely nothing with the rest of my pitiful existence.

well yes, but i daresay they would rather not dwell on that xp

at my gf's prestigious american university the profs just don't mention the phd graduates

they just become non-people unless they make it big

why did you quit, Emily? Being in a similar field I'm kind of assuming a life of precisely nothing when I finish, whether that's avec PhD or not.

Mental health problems. Mostly depression, but agoraphobia-tinged anxiety doesn't really help when yr campus is 4 hours away by train. *sigh*

sorry emil.y that sucks (i mean, obv it sucks)

yeah, i'm sorry to hear that. have you thought about (or are you already) pursuing your academic interests in non-academic settings (blogs, independent publishing etc.)?