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

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!

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/04/graduate-school-advice-impossible-decision.html

That's a really good article.

I liked it too but if there's one thing I could do without in this genre it's the de rigueur "lol maybe my brain is addled from too much critical thinking" reassurance of the audience.

there's this nearly universal presumption that academic thinking/writing prioritized ambiguity and vagueness when if I learned anything it's about how to be very precise in what I'm trying to communicate. this is a valuable skill, even!

How much more unhappy are graduate students than other people? (About fifty-four per cent of graduate students report feeling so depressed they have “a hard time functioning,” as opposed to ten per cent of the general population.)

haha what do they mean by 'functioning'

yeah that seems like a reasonable point of view, & it's in sync with something I said here (or on some other thread here) recently: if grad school is fun & you don't go into debt, then it seems as a good a way to spend your twenties as what lots of people do in their twenties, & maybe, if it's really fun, even better; & if you end up getting a job because of what you did, then even more better

re unhappy grad students: isn't some of that the kinds of people who are attracted to grad school right out of undergrad rather than going into the "real world"?

Yeah that strikes me as correlation more than anything.

well it's probably a combination, isolate already-neurotic people from society and give them endless work, hmm they seem unhappy

endless work aimed at gaining status within their peer group

like the status games are a big part of unhappiness for the egomanaics making up your average grad program, after all they got this far on smarts alone, how can they suddenly be just average or even subaverage

haha that's true and probably why the job market is such a shock to many despite all evidence to the contrary. Those statistics always apply to someone *else*

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/on-quitting/

http://backupminds.wordpress.com/2013/05/12/savage-minds-interview-sarah-kendzior/

i really liked her (possibly counterintuitive) point that grad schools need to move away from a careerist mentality and prepare students for working outside the academy. will pannapacker recently tweeted something about the humanities needing to move away from a model which essentially trains undergrads for graduate school.

Application for career break submitted today. Reason (c) to pursue further education opportunities.

(Y)

what ya doing?

Conversion masters to turn a useless business degree into a hopefully in-demand IT qualification. Have sussed out the course and my subsequent prospects with good industry contacts, the fees are heavily EU subsidised and subject to aforementioned career break the only thing stopping me is enough of a bank loan to survive as a student for 9 months as barriers go it's not going to get much easier so now or never really.

I'm gonna limit my all-out rant to the 77 grad school thread, but I cannot resist saying here that ALL OF YOU BLOVIATING ACADEMICS WITH YOUR TERRIBLE WRITING AND CONVOLUTED THEORIES OF THE BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS CAN SUCK IT

yeah suck it!!!!!!!!!!!

aw man but i don't wanna :(.

i am a good writer and have clear and concise theories of the irreducibly complex. im a rebel.

your theories can suck it too, separately

ALL THEORIES CAN SUCK IT. I choose reality.