Neist

Howdy!  

The program I'm entering has a good placement record, but it's deliberately kept very small. I had a discussion this weekend with a faculty member here, and he told me that they've actually been criticized for being too small. The department's counter was that there was no way they could ever hope to place that many graduates, and it would be irresponsible to on more.

I still don't know what my odds are. I'm hopeful, but you never know. I have my library degree to fall on if all else fails. One can do a lot with a library degree.

Yeah, I think I've been working in academic libraries for a decade. I'm leaning towards leveraging my experience into a job instead of hoping that I'll get a PhD history faculty position will magically appear gift-wrapped for me.

I wouldn't if I had to pay for it, but I'm also already 32. I'll be almost 36 when I finish my masters, so I'd be 40 before I completed my PhD, even if it was paid for. And all of that work would over qualify myself in a lot of career paths.

You can be a research librarian with only two masters, so sometimes I wonder what's the point of completing a PhD in either library studies or history. There's very, very few jobs in history, and almost the only point of a library PhD is if one desire to teach library science. The MLIS is considered terminal.

A PhD gets more unattractive every day...

To be honest, the more I learn, the more I lean towards stopping with my two MAs after I finished the program I've been accepted into.

It's a much more sound career decision, and there's plenty of opportunities for me, given my experience.