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

oh man, eaumaille, i remember that feeling. i left. fwiw in case you end up going this way, leaving isn't exactly easy, but things get better eventually. academic writing was just not a thing i could motivate myself to do enough of, at the end of the day. i regret the years of my life i spent stalling out on my dissertation; i think i would have been better at teaching college students than i am at my current job (it's easier, for one thing); i sometimes read things my friends who stayed in are writing and feel relief that i don't have to produce work of that nature at the pace that they do; i feel like the way i talk marks me as a big weirdo in my current work context and i honestly can't tell if that's just the way i talk or if ph.d. school permanently warped me. it's a mixed bag if you leave, but i think for me it was necessary. i never would have gotten an academic job.

I know a few people who attended grad school. One of them did a Ph.D in English literature and is now a prof in New Mexico; he said none of his Ph.D friends got a job teaching. He also said had he not started before the whole recession thing (though he did not study in the States) he would not have pursued grad school and would not recommend it.

Truth be told, getting a Ph.D in the arts only really is good for teaching, and even then, those jobs are becoming hard to find in highly desirable cities. One of my profs who had just gotten her Ph.D from UCLA would hop from city to city because her contracts were short.

I'm not trying to suggest anything about anyone. This is purely anecdotal: I always thought it interesting that despite receiving very high marks in my undergrad studies, I was never approached by anyone to pursue graduate studies, whereas I knew of others who under performed who were invited into grad school. In retrospect, I think these people had one thing in common: they did not have opinions of their own, agreed with the profs most of the time, or were not opinionated. I was the complete opposite. I always spoke out against my profs, ensured their logic was sound and called them out on dubious claims, which are known to happen in the world of the arts. When speaking in private to one of my profs, I remember she told me, 'Why are you even in university?' I told her I felt I could still learn valuable things from participating in the social norm that has become the middle-class in learning institutions. More of a meta observation, on my part.

The disclaimer is I don't like schools; universities to a certain extent, as well. The reason I went to one and got good marks was because I knew I would eventually want to speak out against the current model, and I know it helps my perspective to say I've experienced what a university has to 'offer'. I think most, especially when talking about the arts, have been affected by attrition. I've had debates with a couple of my profs (I'm talking hours of discussion) about the quality of a humanities and arts education. It's funny how the dynamics change when you're talking to a tenured prof or an Emeritus as opposed to an associate professor. Adjunct instructors are somewhere in between depending on their motives.

Now, as j mentioned (11 years ago?), the sciences, especially applied sciences, are a totally different beast. And I think they are more beneficial in the practical world--but it also depends on your motive for attending university.

And just so we're clear, I'm not trying to say I'm saying some new, revolutionary idea, just some regular person. And as Twain said way before our times:

Never let your schooling interfere with your education.

getting a Ph.D in the arts only really is good for teaching, and even then, those jobs are becoming hard to find in highly desirable cities.

They are hard to find even in undesirable cities.

iatee - is your gf a graduate student? not surprising we sound similar, as you often realize what an echo chamber your department is when you talk to other students. funny, though.

euler - yes, i would like to travel, and for the first time i may have the means to. small grants are available for conferences, but i'm not sure i have anything conference-worthy yet. also, i have to say i've been disappointed by the few i've attended, because, although i like learning about other people's work, it all seemed tied together by some very superficial unifying theme. i understand the practical purpose of this - everyone is studying something different (part of the point), but conferences also need to be inclusive so people can re-purpose their papers and avoid constantly writing new ones. (also, less cynically, i suppose you could say inclusiveness is in the spirit of the thing.) i mostly wound up feeling, though, like no productive conversations were had and no common ground was covered at all. genuine collaboration seems to be missing everywhere in my field, especially as people become increasingly specialized. the specialization used to have a clear purpose, it seems - now "saying something vaguely new" seems to be all the justification required. there are those rare moments when my deep and natural intuitions about the material i am studying (always my starting point) fortuitously converge with some new point of discovery. those are some of the happiest moments i experience. but they are unfortunately punctuated by long periods of horriblehorriblehorrible misery.

c##### (too lazy to c/p): yes, my thoughts on school have changed quite a bit since starting a PhD. (not that this is anything like "school" as i've ever experienced it.) surprised to hear that certain people you know were approached by faculty about becoming scholars. in my experience, lots of professors have felt it their duty to warn the academically talented to avoid an increasingly limited and exclusive profession.

Most faculty members I know who are under 50, do not recommend grad school. I was going to say "including myself" but my contract's up.

If you can pull off grad school with minimal/no debt and it is something you really dig, why not? The debt issue changes my opinion considerably. I was fortunate to do my first tour of grad school with funding (including a stipend I could live on), and even though I did not ultimately end up on the original path (Ph.D. --> postdoc --> associate prof --> tenure)--and in fact "dropped out" with an M.S. instead of Ph.D., I do not regret it at all.

Had I gone into debt for the same experience, I think I *would* have regrets.

Oh yeah, if you get enough funding, it can even basically be a 4-year job, better than many contracts you could get. I don't discourage it in those sorts of instances.

^^^^I know folks who made their Ph.D. programs a TEN YEAR full-time job (on which they raised childrens!). Average in my field was 7 years.

And fwiw (not much), once I was a corporate whore in a position to hire ppl for all sorts of jobs, having *any* master's degree (if it was in addition to solid, relevant work experience) was a big plus for a job candidate, and moved salary offers upward.

People got funding for 10 years?

Biomedical research assistance ships--cheaper even than a Chinese postdoctoral.

(^^^racist? Quite true, though)

Ok sorry, on typing on phone-- grad students, whatever their province, we're cheaper than postdocs from certain countries overseas, particularly China, which allowed the travel for postdoctoral training in the US.

iatee - is your gf a graduate student? not surprising we sound similar, as you often realize what an echo chamber your department is when you talk to other students. funny, though.

not only is she a humanities grad student but eaumaille is totally the type of screenname she uses online

To be clear, I also don't discourage it in the case of professional programmes or certain practical options (e.g. accompanying). I've actually not ruled out doing an MLS as a 2-year job myself.

sigh. yes, i have 5 years of funding, even a 6th if i wanted it. i should probably just stop complaining, because you're right, basically a five-year contract. the question is what happens afterwards. but maybe that's always going to be a question.

You could start planning for that: thinking about what transferable skills you have or could develop? Are there practical applications to the material you're studying?

"could you develop"

Ha, OK: " .... e.g. thinking... develop. Are..."

well, i speak a few foreign languages but i'm not developing them much in my program. and the material i'm studying honestly has no practical application, especially the way it's presented in my department...we pride ourselves on studying something with no practical application, that does not and NEED NOT HAVE ANY END BEYOND ITSELF, etc. etc. (yeah, lit people are annoying, but truth be told, practicality is the wrong way to think about it, and being "impractical" doesn't equate to having no value, etc etc.) but i know you were referring to applicability on the job market, not the value of the field. yeah, honestly, there's the whole superior communication skillz thing..probably something to avoid mentioning in job apps if it's now being parodied by the onion, and hard to demonstrate as requiring 5+ years off the job market to attain. not sure. considering taking a year off to explore some options, but it'd probably be assumed that i'd leave.

i read somewhere recently that the most common time to quit is right before starting the dissertation (or after a few false starts). and that sounds about right.

im pretty sure i would have given up even before that. i was pretty disillusioned and bored with grad school by the time i got to my phd program (had already done a masters and was disappointed with the experience, but applied to phd programs more out of inertia than anything else) but i got lucky and happened to find a prof at my program who really got me excited about these things for their own sake again. it's been a very good experience in that respect, though i doubt i'll have much to show for it in the way of a career when it's all said and done.

Because I have zero background in human development (despite bachelors and masters in biological sciences), I am having to read a human development text in advance of starting classes next month.

Why oh why oh why is this thing chock full of stock photos of babies and families? It adds zero academic content, and instead makes the thing look and feel like a high school text. At least a high school text would have been provided to me for FREE, and this thing cost me sixty bucks USED.

The actual content and writing is OK, if rather more basic than I would expect at the grad level, but ugh the design is killing me.

LOOK AT THIS PICTURE OF AN AFRICAN AMERICAN FAMILY HAVING A PICNIC AND GRANDMA IS THERE OH WOW

eaumaille, can you get involved in grant writing? like NEA proposals e.g.? or find a private foundation that supports people in your area? one career venue is to work with those grant or foundation agencies, & it helps to have some experience there before applying

Yeah, and at some agencies you can have a lot of involvement in shaping the grant portfolio, others less so. Get the right agency and it can be a way more satisfying career than you might think (though there's a certain level of bureaucratic bullshit to put up at every agency... but then, where isn't there?)

xp Q - there's a lot of this about in psych, and it make me wince. It makes me take the text less seriously than I otherwise would.

yeah if you're really averse to bureaucratic bullshit, academia's not your place

grant writing actually sounds sort of promising. i can look into it? i've applied for a few positions before, most of them eventually filled by people who had held similar positions before. but i've thought about it.

i guess the common thing to emerge from people's comments is that there needs to be something going on "on the side." just the impression of working toward something else will be helpful. i need some secret delight...for at least the next few months.

this is difficult, because in may ways i've grown tremendously since starting graduate school. i've done well in a challenging program, but i've also seen how little it matters. even in a field where my "skills" are apparently recognized, it seems like i could do everything right and still end up unhappy and unemployed, which shows me how little control i have in the grand scheme of things. in a sense, that's been the most valuable thing to learn. it's an unfortunate truth of being a humanities academic, but it's also kind of a good thing to learn for life, and something i feel like i may be realizing too late.

so much work. can only do so much. what i do doesn't really matter in the end.
so much work. can only do so much. what i do doesn't really matter in the end.
so much work. can only do so much. what i do doesn't really matter in the end.

**as i trudge along til 3 am for the third night in a row**

i need some secret delight...for at least the next few months.

hah hah, i thought being in grad school and studying what you loved and not having to work doing something you hate was the secret delight. : (

yeah if you're not at least minimally enjoying just immersing yourself in what you study then there seems almost no incentive or reason to stay.

Eaumaille, you're in the US, right? You'll probably be best placed to work at a grant-making agency if you get your PhD and publish one or two well-regarded things, and in fact even better if you then hold one or two of your own grants. But this might be less true of arts agencies than it is of the N$F, N1H, etc.

yes, the immersion bit is lovely. unfortunately, only a fraction of my coursework focuses on what i actually want to study, so i guess i should just bite the bullet and get past it. the question is whether i love the material enough to move just anywhere for a job. so yes, there is delight there...but endlessly qualified delight. so i guess i should just try to make my degree flexible for as many other things as reasonable possible, and grant-writing sounds like a feasible option. (yes, am in the US, ljubljana. will read up more on this, thanks.)

if you're still just in coursework then the real fun hasn't yet begun!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=You1z6H6Nvg

Prof. Stone otm

yeah--if incurring debt is not an issue i'd say power thru coursework and then do your dissertation on exactly what you want to do it on. i did that and it was a great experience for which i feel privileged. i got to read and contemplate most people have no time for. and it was personally enriching that way. i didn't do the best job setting myself up for a competitive job market (im afraid even if i were all around more impressive than i am as a job candidate i still dont know if most english departments would know what to do with me) but i am glad i got to do a phd.

http://wheninacademia.tumblr.com/

i am moving to columbia btw

haha read that as "whine in academia"

I put in an application on Monday, because I want to keep my options open, and I got an email that I was accepted on Tuesday. This school is a joke.

I don't have to decide until next month. I'm finding it really hard because this truly is my only option for grad school, at least for a good long while.

ph.don't!

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2013/04/there_are_no_academic_jobs_and_getting_a_ph_d_will_make_you_into_a_horrible.single.html

there's been so many articles like the above for the last several years that anybody who starts a PhD in 2013 and isn't aware that they're most likely doomed from the get-go simply hasn't done their due diligence.

satellite campuses of Midwestern or Southern universities of which you have never heard

feel like this tips you off on the writer's character

I hope search committees at those universities smile when they shred her application.

yeah she seems like a huge snob. but it's not like humanities grad programs are exempt from the extreme inequality in this country. don't you pretty much have to have grown up well-to-do enough to look down at "satellite campuses of Midwestern or Southern universities" just to get along with stuffy english professors?

Euler - I seem to remember from not too far upthread that if this is in any way a rule, your experience is an exception to it?

yeah my parents didn't go to college, & I get along just fine with my colleagues. in philo rather than English though, maybe we're less insecure

this article doesn't express my sitch but you can't express a niche which is its problem. nothing's "general" in grad talk. "the data doesn't lie" but the devil's in the details

to generalize i've always understood philosophy departments to be a lot more humane than english departments, or at least less infested with trustfund champagne socialists all concerned about the plight of the exotic subaltern while making fun of their dumb american tuition paying unit students

I won't lie: I'm not feeling too guilty about passing up the chance to apply to teach theory and aural skills for a year at Southeast Missouri State or Arkansas State this year.

there's been so many articles like the above for the last several years that anybody who starts a PhD in 2013 and isn't aware that they're most likely doomed from the get-go simply hasn't done their due diligence.

You're right, but I worry about programs with a dismal history of placing job candidates using that thinking to shift the blame to the student for not having known better. Tenured academics are always forthright about the difficulty of finding a job, but I wonder whether in acknowledging that and giving all the due warnings, they're just claiming moral license to continue admitting more students than can possibly succeed.

Tbh, despite being as insecure as any contract work, a f/t load of sessional teaching in Canada absolutely can provide an acceptable living (+ benefits if you're kept around past the first year).

tbh I'm happy that snobs don't apply to jobs in places "beneath" them; makes it easier for the good ones to stay in the game (since temp for more than three years, even at fancy places, & you're out of the game)(postdocs exempted up to a point)

Not sure if that's directed at me but I don't necessarily think it's snobbery if someone wants to exercise some level of choice as to where they have to move for a job. (Plus, the SE Missouri job was a one-year term position anyway; maybe if it were in an area closer to something I've specialized in, I'd consider it.)