ExponentialDecay

take up crew. http://pennstatecrew.org/recruiting/life-of-a-rower/

Moreover, a job that has been disappearing since its inception, and still refuses to die. Perhaps people in the States have been blinded by the post-war economic boom, but academia has never been a good deal for the average academic. The difference between STEM and humanities PhDs is that STEM PhDs can find relevant employment outside of academia (this is inversely related, btw, to the mathematical rigor of the PhD, with physicists and economists having the most options and botanists the least, etc), whereas humanities PhDs typically cannot. If you take that out of the equation, you find that the proportion of scientists who are tenured at R1 institutions is negligibly different from the proportion of humanitarians or social scientists or whatever have you. Most people with PhDs will not be superstars, and will rot away on small salaries in temp jobs. It has always been this way. I am frankly not buying your notion that the average graduate student is unaware of this. The media sensationalizes stupidity, but most people are not, in fact, stupid. We know our options. We're taking calculated risks.

Okay, I don't know how it works in life sciences, but in my field, 1) your interests may change as you go through grad school, 2) while your advisor is important, your cohort, other professors, and the financial support the school can provide are equally important. and, in my field, the sweatshirt factor is paramount. i don't know what it would be like to be stuck in a lab i hate for 5 years (though the lab you like at no-name right now might turn out to be terrible for a multitude of reasons - who knows), but that you find other grad students to be inadequate is a red flag to me. if you're in an environment that doesn't intellectually stimulate you for whatever reason, you might get depressed or slack off. ultimately, you don't know what the school is like until you matriculate there. i would go for Fancy School if i were you, because there are fewer intangibles - but those intangibles may be hugely detrimental. what are you willing to gamble on, in the end?

Okay, which one is it? Because these goals cannot be achieved concurrently. If you want a job in the states, a one-year program is probably-to-definitely not right for you. You will not be getting a job straight out of school, for one, because H1B1 visa quotas open in April and fill up pretty quickly, and employers are only allowed to request an H1B1 for an employee who already has the degree. If you get an F-1, you can, of course, stay on OPT, but if you get a J-1, which I think is possible in MA programs, though I'm not sure, OPT is not one of your options. Finally, you're right that one year is probably not enough to find employers or references. On the other hand, it's good that you're looking at programs in major cities such as Chicago and NYC, since more rural areas have fewer hiring opportunities. Also, do you know what kind of jobs people with MPPs or Economics of Education MS's get? For the latter, I suggest you ask Columbia for placement records. For the former, it has always been my impression that MPPs are good mostly for civil service jobs. As an international you are, of course, ineligible for civil service jobs. Finally, hiring international students creates an extra cost for employers, because they need to file papers, pay some fees (I think? Never been hired yet), etc. You can't go into this assuming that any private business will hire you: you will have more success with big corporations, because they file such paperwork routinely, and you will have to make sure that the industry you are going for does not require agents to have security clearance, because that will not be given to internationals. Some people just don't want the hassle. Your best bet for getting hired in the US is to possess an exceptional or highly desirable skill set. Do you have that? Will any of these programs give you that? Now, for the PhD. Are you aiming for a PhD in public policy or economics or what, specifically? If the latter, you need to make sure that the program offers enough math and stats classes and has a research component (important!). Of course, if your math background is sufficient, you should undertake a research-based MA such as the one offered at Cambridge (is that the one you applied for, though?) and gain LORs and research experience. An MPhil from the UK is unlikely to help you find a job in the States, however. Why are you applying to an MA if you intend to go on to the PhD? If you are sufficiently competitive from your undergrad, I would urge you to apply straight to the PhD. It's cheaper and incurs less time and hassle, plus there's the yearly shitstorm on these boards regarding whether MA students are more or less desirable to PhD adcomms. I don't know anything about any of these programs specifically, but I think you have a lot more thinking to do before you need to get to the detalistic nitty-gritty.

Noam Chomsky

Goddamit, why am I always late to the flame party? I love that you can speak with confidence on issues which you consider beneath your intellect. Actually, a couple other things, namely culture and society, are responsible for the self-preservation of western societies. The west's dominion actually began with trade (I recommend you read Thomas Mun if you are interested in the mechanism of that - Mun was a merchant, not an academic, so I think you'll like him). The ability of the west to trade successfully is rooted in the Enlightenment, in which humanitarian academics produced a set of values that allowed for capitalism and scientific method, among other things. Absolutely, we owe much to shipbuilders and navigators and other such tradesmen, as we owe much to scientists of the age, but do we owe them 100%? The Khalifat, which was dominant in the 6 centuries prior to the rise of Europe, was very advanced in the sciences and mathematics. They invented your favorite middle school subject, algebra. But why did they not conquer the world? Because they didn't fund their engineers enough? No, because a number of cultural and social factors did not come together for them, so that they may conquer. Once again, I am astounded at your ability to use jargon the meaning of which you do not know, such as "society" and "return on investment", in a way that makes sense in a sentence. What do they teach you engineers these days? Does producing a bunch of mediocre engineers give society a better return on its investment, though? This question has inspired a bunch of economic literature. I am reading Edward Glaeser (Harvard) at the moment, and I like his perspective: the United States' greatest export (non-basic industry, for y'all educated folks) right now is innovation. Indeed, this innovation is led by scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and anybody else who can work a computer. These people are paid a ridiculous amount of money, and they are paid it because they are so few. However, once they are paid their $3 million bonuses, they go out and spend it on restaurant cooking, fashionable clothes, yoga instructors, modern art, private schools for their children, dog grooming, newspapers, concerts, and other things created by detestable humanities majors. It is the latter part of the economy, not the former, that generates most of the USA's GDP. You are correct that innovation is the reason that that latter economy exists - and that is why promising STEM students have so many opportunities compared to promising humanities students. But you are incorrect in saying that if we give yet more opportunities for STEM, we will create more STEM students, and therefore more innovation. Here's why. The economy doesn't need engineers. It needs ideas. The reason companies like Google have extreme hiring practices and extreme salaries is because that salary is an advance (such as one paid to a writer) payable to a person who can maybe, hopefully generate a profitable idea. There has been research done regarding whether throwing money at people magically makes them more able to generate profitable ideas, and that hypothesis has not held. Only the talented STEM students matter for social efficiency; average STEM students have no marginal benefit relative to average anybody else. The reason for that is the reason so many Chinese and Indian students study computer science and engineering - middle-level science and engineering jobs have been outsourced to BRIC countries. The developed economy labor market is hollowing out, meaning that there are a lot of opportunities for highly qualified people, engineering students at top-10 programs such as yourself, and a lot of opportunities for low-skilled people, such as waiters and babysitters. If you are semi-skilled, a programmer or a shitty civil engineer, for example, you have a better chance finding a job in Bangalore than you do in the United States. Finally, the United States is unprecedently efficient at attracting top talent. I will reiterate: top talent means the very, very, most talented labor, not a dude with a random CS degree who can fix bugs in css. The programs that the US uses to dredge the globe for talented people have been in place since the 80s. Within this framework, I will discuss your statement: We give money to public universities for a reason - its an investment we make on ourselves (mostly an economic benefit) You are again right both in your use of technical vocabulary ("money", "economic benefit", "investment"), and in your general conclusion. But there is a lot of logic in between the statements "we give money to public universities for a reason" and "it is an investment we make on (sic) ourselves". Have you ever wondered why some students are able to attend the world's best universities for free (need-blindness in the Ivy League), or why some students, regardless of their economic background, are given hefty "merit scholarships", when other students, with very acceptable or even excellent credentials, are given smaller stipends or forced to take out loans? Because the public's interest, in regards to university, is to: 1) identify the students most likely to generate profitable ideas, and 2) to nurture those students in every way possible. As such the student population is divided into two classes: the people who are getting paid to go to school, and the people who go to school in order to pay for the first group. I myself go to a very good school on a very good scholarship (though not as good as I could've gotten if I had been in STEM), and I understand very well that my friend, who goes to the same school I do and who is, by the way, a physics major, is paying the college 60 grand a year so that the college can basically give that money to me. Do you think that my friend, because she is in STEM, should be given a small remittance on her tuition, which should be taken out of my scholarship, because I am a non-STEM major? From society's perspective, that would be inefficient, because she is stupid and I am smart, so the marginal benefit of any money society spends on her is always going to be less than the marginal benefit of any money that society spends on me. In my professional opinion, the United States won out against the USSR for one reason: Americans understand that, to make a successful product, you not only need a product, but the context that surrounds it - packaging, marketing, market strategy, financial forecast, company culture, PR, human relations. The USSR built rockets and reactors, but her people were bogged down by starvation, deficit, and censorship, and eventually they were like, fuck this, and called the whole thing off. Engineers and scientists make the product, sure, and without the product, the whole choochoo train is unnecessary, but you are ignorant in assuming that the product is the only thing that makes an economy go round. Necessary, but not sufficient, bro. Thanks for reading, everybody, and I hope y'all gonna be truly talented engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and literary scholars, and not fucking R monkeys. #partyhard

i would be wary of asking for advice on gradcafe regarding non-Anglo-American programs.

Yeah, there's a dating site that you can sign up to and people can pay you to travel with them. You should check it out. Might bag yourself a manzzz.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/opinion/sunday/leaked-harvards-grading-rubric.html?_r=0 but actually, my college's average is 3.3

I hope you didn't go out to the Rio beaches after sunset, because even a US Army battalion wouldn't have saved you. And I think OP means more pedestrian discomforts, like eating alone in restaurants or not being able to split the hotel bill or having no one to share worries and frustrations with. In this sense, traveling alone is a personality thing. I personally hate traveling in big groups because everybody wants different things and it's so disorganized - but I'm cool with traveling with one or two close friends, or even with a big group that has a specific goal in mind. I have friends who swear by traveling alone; I have friends who have bought a one way ticket to a country where they've never been, and ended up staying there for six months working illegally in a restaurant. Okay, I have only one friend like that and she's crazy. But she's still alive. OP: if you're really determined to travel on your lonesome, start small. How comfortable are you going to bars alone? Parties where you don't know anyone? If you have the funds, try going on a month-long immersive language course or something like that. At least that way you have somewhere to sleep and something to do.

they also limit your employability to the handful of universities and colleges whose philosophy departments are amenable to continental philosophy. philosophers are a lot cliquier than philologists (largely why the philosophy programs are harder to get into), and continental philosophy, at least on this side of the atlantic, is SO not in vogue.

Well, sure they do. Terminal MAs, mostly, but nonetheless. However, the OP does not provide us with what program they're looking to apply to; nor do I suspect that the OP has even googled graduate school before posting on here. Otherwise they would have known that graduate school rankings =/= undergraduate school rankings. Or asked ridiculous questions about the University of Phoenix, for that matter.

which, surprisingly, also take only the one-two best undergraduates. i guess you could argue that if you go to a rigorous undergrad, you can realize early that your strengths aren't competitive enough to make it in academia.

I would urge you to consider that prestige (of the undergraduate or graduate institution) is weighted differently in different fields. In the OP's field, admission straight from UG hinges very much on a) a proven track record of engagement with critical theory, and b ) a successful undergraduate thesis. Many prestigious institutions require a thesis or its equivalent for graduation, and many prestigious institutions can provide a breadth and quality of faculty from whom to choose your first and second readers (though size of school is also a factor). In addition, I have encountered undergraduates at colleges which do not have a theory requirement for Literature majors, or colleges where the theory requirement is not rigorous. Adcomms can assume, as I'm sure many do, that a student coming from a prestigious undergrad will have, by means of a and b, been exposed enough to the world of real academic research in the humanities to be able to gauge their own interest and ability level, which surely reduces the risk of wasting funding on a student who might fail their comps or decide they don't like it and drop out a year later. It's extremely bad form to look down on people from lower-ranked institutions, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that the (perceived or actual) difference in academic rigor between Harvard and Ohio State is negligible.

My department is small, so the comp. lit professors do teach languages, but many of the language departments have lecturers to teach the languages as well. Comp Lit here isn't a department; it's a program. So the new hires are expected to be able to teach the language and the literature of a specific region, rather than just theory.

"but you don't have an accent!"

Well sure individualized majors are a gamble, but they are necessary at least at small LACs, where relatively few majors are offered. I mean, it's not like you're gonna go around saying that biochem isn't a legit field. Maybe it's not popular enough to warrant its own department at a small college, but it's legit. But you need to be a self-starter, which is why I am wary of schools where everybody must have an individualized major.

Looks like we should all subsist on air...

I get where you're coming from, and we've all been there, but I enjoin you to consider that your opinion is rooted in ignorance. What is, pray, "useful"? Is it something that we can make a product out of? Is it merely something that can be sold? Does it have to be useful now, or is it still useful if it becomes useful many years later? I ask because the notion "'useful" derives its meaning from 1) the contrast to "useless", and 2) the contextual parameters in which you define it. I can't deconstruct your argument until you answer these questions, but I can give a couple pointers re its founding assumptions. Your first point. You are perhaps implying that 'Abraham Lincoln studies' and 'Socrates Interpretation' are too esoteric or too historically removed to be "useful". However, is everything esoteric and removed necessarily "useless"? HEP is pretty esoteric and pretty removed, given that it's founded on a theory invented 200 years ago, which might be wrong anyway. Academic geometry is pretty esoteric, since it is very needed by those same high-energy physicists but more or less by nobody else. My own degree is in economics, and oh man, I can tell you, unless you're doing quant finance, whatever you're doing is some high-octane bullshit. But your own degree, engineering. I know an engineer who's building these little flying things out of spy movies that are super cool, but otherwise the only use they have so far is inspiring a very detailed model of the mechanics of insect flight. I imagine in engineering, as in other professional fields, the hivemind is closer to yours, but in general academia, I have yet to encounter an academic who has a gripe with study being useless, as long as it is original and elucidatory. To your second point, the market will decide us. However, a caveat: the market system operates by consumer demand, which reflects consumer preference, not usefulness of the good traded. Of course, sometimes we want things because they are useful in general, like food or oxygen, but other times - indeed, most times in developed economies - we want things for other reasons, ie because they are useful to us. Perhaps that will clear up your confusion as to why this humanities bullshit is being funded. Further, I would like to remind you that, in recent history, the sciences have been privileged for a lot of good reasons, and a lot of bad reasons too. One reason for privileging STEM in the states, and pretty much the main reason for the higher education complex and the ridiculous salaries professors get, is the Cold War arms race. I mean, yeah, building nuclear bombs and putting Neil on the moon is really cool - but is it, by your definition, "useful"? There is a rhetoric in the United States that if you pour money into the sciences, they will eventually come up with a way to cure cancer or invent Atlantis because scientific inquiry is incremental and accidental - at least, this rhetoric has been explicit in my K-12. But it is, nonetheless, a rhetoric. There is no essential reason why the sciences must receive more (or all, according to you) funding than other fields. Indeed, in many countries, the sciences do not receive such funding, or they do not receive funding at all. That's why for so many people grad school in the states is such a good deal. Lastly, it seems to me that you know very little of what people in the humanities actually do. The R1 researchers are cultural theorists of some sort. It sounds corny and a little communist, but bear with me: they contextualize social movements within the dominant social belief system, so that we may understand what is going on in the world. Of course, that's just the couple hundred researchers at the very top of the hierarchy. The rest pretty much teach. That's basically the "crisis" in humanities hiring in a nutshell.

I think the schools I've encountered that don't have an individualized major program are in the minority. Apparently at the bigger DI schools, they're used to basically graduate the basketball players, but the kids who have self-made majors at my place are all pretty hard-working, majoring in either legitimate stuff that the college doesn't offer (like linguistics and geography), or essentially specializing early (we had a peace and conflict studies major and a computational neuroscience major last year). I'm not even sure that doing away with majors is such a bad thing. I mean, if you go to any more or less competitive undergraduate institution, you'll find the English majors exposed to a lot of philosophy, and the economics majors exposed to a lot of math, etc. I would even say that I spend more time satisfying major requirements than I do doing shit that will get me into grad school/get me a job. The liberal arts system is kind of this dissatisfying amalgam whereby you're given the illusion of being able to take lots of classes in different disciplines, but actually you're very constrained by the trajectory of your major, which nonetheless does not prescribe enough core requirements to meet a satisfactory standard of depth and general level of preparation across the cohort. So you end up taking a bunch of bullshit classes because you either didn't get the requirements in early enough to take the classes you want, or because you need those bullshit classes to graduate.

Hawthorne, c'est moi.

but seriously Graditude, I'm not glad you're going to grad school. I'm worried you might find it too hard.

Do you not see how your improper metaphors could be grounds for inflammatory and ridiculous statements? If you don't want me to say that fat people are not cancer, do not compare fat to cancer. It's that easy.