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

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.)

(I applied to a tonne of other places in the South and Midwest btw.)

couldn't tell from the tone; why would a one year on say the West Coast be better though? anyway you look at it you lose

god your sparta + grapes of wrath schtick is more tiresome than a thousand of these articles.

i mean at least it was fun to read. not everyone is scarface, you know? people are entitled to varying degrees, academia is kind of fucked up rn, one does not negate the other.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/ etc.

couldn't tell from the tone; why would a one year on say the West Coast be better though? anyway you look at it you lose

Well, a move to (many places in) the Northeastern US does seem more appealing for a number of reasons: I'm more familiar with the area and climate, I know people there, closer to family, big cities around with activity in new music + things to do + fairly diverse communities,... The couple of places I've been to on the West Coast have been beautiful, diverse, and culturally active. Plus, if it's anywhere near Vancouver, I'd be closer to people I know, again.

I have been supporting myself with a mix of sessional teaching, freelance composing/arranging, private teaching, and office temping, all of which I enjoy. The future is uncertain but I didn't see a reason to believe that a year of lecturing at SE Missouri State would bring me greater happiness than trying to keep this up. I guess this does mean that my chances went down from 0.6% to 0.57% or something. I have a friend in the same field who applies to EVERY position and spends 2-4 h/day working on job applications; I have no desire to do that.

My old colleague's husband got his Ph.D. in English from UBC. I think I mentioned it already, but he and a bunch of others applied to universities all over the US and Canada. Apparently, none of them got work except him, in Las Cruces, New Mexico, of all places.

You're brave for wanting to juggle all those things at once. Does freelance composing and arranging actually contribute a substantial amount to your monthly income, if you don't mind me asking? And how do you even find people who would want to pay you a fair amount?

Grants

So atm, the majority of my monthly income (will change soon)

+ connections.

made through (uni or private) teaching, in two current cases.

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.

― HIGH-FIVES TO ALL MY COWORKERS AT THE QBERT SEX SWING (silby), Saturday, April 6, 2013 9:01 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Seriously! I mean, who are the journalists/editors who put these articles out thinking that they're doing anything but flogging the same deadest-of-horses for the millionth time? As if they're exposing some heretofore undiscovered truth and breaking the silence with these hard-hitting and challengingly original exposees?

Academia is a black hole, I get it. Moreover, what the fuck do you want me to do? Drop out and stop my entire life because some liberal politics and culture magazine wrote the 20th article in 10 months telling me not to get a degree?

I'm not going into debt, I'm not qualified to do any jobs at this point in my life anyways, and I actually enjoy school. Please let me ruin my life in peace!

i imagine those articles are popular because the audience for those websites are exactly the kind of people who have either gone, considered going, or want to go to graduate school in the humanities--so everyone can approach it with their own particular kind of bitterness or schadenfreude.

as long as you're not going into to debt (& why would you go to grad school if you did?), then I think grad school's a good way to spend your twenties, esp compared to how lots of college educated people spend their twenties

it's not like most twenty somethings start businesses or whatever

i imagine those articles are popular because the audience for those websites are exactly the kind of people who have either gone, considered going, or want to go to graduate school in the humanities--so everyone can approach it with their own particular kind of bitterness or schadenfreude.

― ryan, Saturday, April 6, 2013 6:08 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

heh this is way otm for me. sorry about the crazy attack earlier euler.

boy did i wash out on my phd apps this year, incidentally

time to learn a trade i guess *produces adze from pants pocket, spits on hands*

Annual faculty pay averages $84,000.
http://chronicle.com/article/2013-AAUP-Survey-Table/138291/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Meanwhile, average adjunct pay is $2,987 per three-credit course.
http://chronicle.com/article/Adjunct_Pay_Conditions/136439/

Tenure-track and tenured faculty of the world, unite!