Historiogaffe

De-lurking to adapt an old chestnut: don't judge an envelope by its girth! I received a thin SSHRC envelope in Vancouver this afternoon with a fellowship offer — my application scored 13.7.

De-lurking to adapt an old chestnut: don't judge an envelope by its girth! I received a thin SSHRC envelope in Vancouver this afternoon with a fellowship offer — my application scored 13.7.

De-lurking to adapt an old chestnut: don't judge an envelope by its girth! I received a thin SSHRC envelope in Vancouver this afternoon with a fellowship offer — my application scored 13.7.

@unræd, honestly, I think the constant disrespect senior posters get when they speak from their experience is one of the reasons we have trouble getting them to stick around and continue posting. We created the entire "Officially Grads" section a few years ago in an effort to promote that but, it hasn't entirely worked for any number of reasons. Jumping down someone's throat, calling them names unnecessarily, and being clearly hostile isn't helping at all. I know that I've also been told that I'm wrong on here by those applying to graduate school when talking about things like the job market and its associated realities (see the previous drama thread about this from last year). As a result, I've basically stopped doing it, for better or worse. It's just not worth it to get attacked by random people on the internet when I'm trying to be helpful.

A full-time job in academia is by definition a dream job. This isn't the only field where that is a true statement. Like, welcome to reality?
Also, come on, I was under the impression that I'm talking to an adult with a PhD, not a college freshman to whom I have to explain essential terms. I did not call you a loser by virtue of saying that you played the game and lost. I stated a fact. In other words, you took a big risk and the big risk didn't pan out. It has nothing to do with you and everything to do with mathematics. People lose all the time, and it's okay. People lose jobs, loved ones, money on the stock market - and it's all a part of life. It's not a judgment of your character, intelligence, ability, or whatever is important to you. It's also a neutral statement with regards to "the system": whether or not these probabilities are just and fair, these are the probabilities, and this time they did not work out in your favor. It's as non judgmental a statement as anyone can make in this situation. That you are a mature specimen and still can't deal with failure says everything about you and nothing about me.
It's really fucking rich that you try to paint me as some neoliberal shitlord, when you're the one who thinks this system will apparently be fixed by telling people not to attend grad school. That's sure as shit the definition of pinning responsibility on the individual and avoiding questioning the system. Maybe sex workers should starve instead of letting men objectify their bodies? The reality is, you don't understand how the system you're bashing works, you have no interest in understanding it, and as a result, your argument is tired and ineffective to an embarrassing degree. You don't have good intentions or any intentions at all outside of bitching about the bad hand life and society and professors and everyone else but yourself has dealt you. Guess what - you're not alone. 7.5 billion human beings feel the same way. It's interesting that you don't address your financial situation or give any specific examples of people being exploited, despite having responded to me with the same drivel 3 times already. Please, explain to me how you were or are exploited. Or do you have too much money where your mouth is?

I've done this. Only had the opportunity to do so twice, though. One ended up going on to a PhD, the other didn't.
I'm not trying to convince myself of any moral superiority for posting on a message board. I was genuinely curious about why people get PhDs in the humanities. And I got some great, interesting answers. 

Seriously, just to put a finer point on it, cool off with this type of rhetoric. Not because it offends me personally but because I think it's seriously damaging to the thousands of graduate students and adjuncts who really are being exploited. 

My cohort's still going. It was a small cohort (started at six, there were four of us after year three or so), and I'm the only that's graduated so far. I finished in six years, the rest of them are in their seventh year. 
I never talked about not my getting my dream job. I may not have been clear, but what I was after was a job with full benefits, a longer-than-nine-months contract, and some longterm job security. In other words, yes, tenure track. I applied to hundreds of TT jobs and there were definitely a couple dream jobs in there, which of course I did not expect to get. But I was, admittedly, a little shocked when I didn't receive an interview over the course of two full years on the market, including at many places that were basically the opposite of dream job. 
Quite honestly your response sounds a lot like the teacher-bashing I see elsewhere and wouldn't really expect here. It's my fault, not the system's. That's fine, I accept a large degree of responsibility here. Clearly other people got all those jobs that I didn't. And I'll reiterate, I feel pretty lucky. I came out debt free, I got to teach a bunch of great classes, I enjoyed the research I did. But the "you played the game and lost, loser" thing, while effective as a message board takedown, is just not reflective of reality. 
 
 

I guess these posts don't bother me because this is what my colleagues and I discuss constantly. Three people left the program last year (not all from the same cohort, mind you) because of concerns about the state of academia. Also, yeah, I recognize that grad school may provide more stability for some people than others. And I 100% agree: I have major problems with narratives that describe people with PhD's on food stamps as inherently more tragic than people with GED's on food stamps.
That said, I am concerned with these echoes of grad school being a great place because of funding and stability and such. Yes, it may provide more security than other positions and fields, but it's still super problematic. Mizzou grad students just straight up lost their health insurance last year. Yes, they got it back, but it's still just the mediocre grad student plan. At the same time, grad students at Emory and Arizona State lost dependent health care. So if you're a single parent and in grad school, then you're fucked. Many stipends are below the poverty level for the geographical area. As my friend says, we are overworked and underpaid and preparing for jobs that don't exist. Because adjunctification is real, and it's devouring the academy as we know it, hurting both adjuncts and undergrad students. 
In other words, things are messed up. But my plea isn't to tell folks to get out. I'd be a hypocrite to do so, and part of me still holds onto hope that we can collectively change the direction of higher education. Instead, my question is always: what are you going to do about it? Be alert to the exploitation of academic labor, and all the unpaid labor you will be asked to do in your program. Be alert so, when an opening arises, you can organize and make your program a better place for you and for future academics. Be alert because, as stipends and tenure lines decrease, these changes will hurt the most marginalized scholars and potentially dissuade them from pursuing a career in academia. But we need a diverse professoriate! We need to make sure that our grad students can feed and house themselves. And we need to situate our labor concerns with larger criticisms of exploitation and poverty: what are the hourly workers on your campus making? At UMD, hourly workers can be paid less than the state minimum wage. How can we leverage our educational privilege and our anger about the turning tide of academia to make real institutional change?

Yes, me! I'm a medievalist! I'm interested in British history-writing after the Norman Conquest, and the intersections of landscape and memory therein.
I'll be attending UBC, up here in Canada. Pretty stoked.
Grettir and sstrickland — congrats on your acceptances! And best of luck to everyone else!

Some great and helpful advice regarding the presentation of conference papers in the humanities, from the CGU Student Success Center:
(Hyperlink not working for some reason, here's the location of the original: http://www.cgu.edu/pages/864.asp)
 
Presenting Conference Papers: Humanities
BEFORE YOUR PRESENTATION
 
 
 
 
FOCUS
 
 
CLARITY
 
PRESENTATION

That was also me! (I may or may not have only applied to Canadian schools.) I did not apply for the CSPT concentration.

You also asked for some tips on keeping expenses down! Here are some that work for us:
1. When I cook dinner, I try to cook something that will make 6 meals (feeds 2 people three times). We eat it for dinner and then for 2 of the lunches during that week. Cooking at home costs something like $2-$3/meal but eating out is easily 2-5 times that much.
2. Bundle insurance! Getting all of our insurance from the same provider saves us a bunch.
3. Buy in bulk and know the sales cycles. We do this especially for Costco. I've gotten their flyers for a long time now and basically almost every item is on a 3 or 4 month cycle (i.e. if it's on sale in January, it will be on sale again in May). Each item is on a different cycle though, but if you get it on sale, you can easily save $5-$10 per item. Whenever we go to Costco, we try to only buy items that are on sale and we buy enough to last until the next time it's on sale. Sometimes you're off-cycle and you run out of toilet paper (for example) when it's not on sale---of course, we would still buy it because it's a necessary item!! But, then if it goes on sale next month, we would buy more, enough to last us the next 4 months so that we can get on-cycle next time. We only do this for the big items that we use a lot of (e.g. toilet paper, paper towels, etc.) or items that cost a lot of money. We save several hundred dollars per year this way, more than the cost of Costco membership.
4. Similarly, with groceries and other items, we establish a shopping route and try to get the "loss leader" items in flyers each week. So, we might do our groceries across 3 stores to save money and we also stock up when staples like beans etc. go on sale. I also plan the dinners for the week based on what's on sale. We establish an efficient route (i.e. plan out all of our errands for the whole weekend and do that with groceries too) so that everything can be completed in 1.5-2.0 hours. I think it saves us something like $700 per year. 
Each of these save us only a few hundred dollars per year, but the combined action of all the efforts can save several thousand dollars. For a grad student stipend, this can add up to 10% or even 20% of your total income, which I think is totally worth it!

"I hear you haven't yet responded to thebeatgoeson.  When will he be notified about the status of his application?"

Also, if I could get a home address and a list of food allergies for everyone accepted into programs I am waitlisted that'd be great. Thanks!

"Postmodernism is dead"? Stop while you're ahead, man.

abstraction and theory in my post about abstraction and theory in defense of the study of abstraction and theory. for shame.

Yes, I am disillusioned with the humanities.

If only there was a space, somewhere in society, where I could talk about this disillusionment. If only there was somewhere I could analyze and write about that disillusionment and general disillusionment, and it would even be a part of my job to do so. Somewhere I could gather with others and talk about the types of cultural references to disillusionment, such as literature and film.

If anybody knows of such a space like this, please let me know, especially if it even holds the possibility that I could gather with others and have discussions and maybe even PROFESS my own questions or beliefs.

We could call this space, Peopleology, or Person-anities.

The only reason you even have an idea of what practical means is thanks to the humanities. Your entire frame of reference—including the ideas that “change” is valuable, desirable, and the idea of the import of social significance—comes from what we now call the humanities.

Let me try to work by way of analogy—which, you’ll note, is a linguistic device, and thus fair game for the humanities: the JD. What is it? You get to be a lawyer, maybe a judge, a politician? And what will you do—read and write things that will only be read and written by other lawyers, judges, politicians? “Yes, but what they write directly affects the little guy!” Put down the vodka tonic and come back to me, love, we’re not finished. Specialized work is specialized, and if you’ve any thought that the work done by people in any field is for something called “change,” trickles down to the general public, then you simply haven’t been reading your humanities very well. Take a law, or a legal agreement, generally just bureaucratic nonsense, so much obfuscation and red tape, more a hindrance than a help, really. The system perpetuates itself systemically, it alters not just the lawyers into wanting to be lawyers, into existing in enough bulk that we unconsciously, systematically create the work for them to do; no, it also alters you into believing in your heart of hearts that this is for the better, that their work is proper and yours (mine, lets be honest) is not. Plenty of people will tell you all about this, have written marvelous tomes and lurched us forward an inch a decade if we’re lucky, hard work, true work, disastrous, messy, heart-full work. But we can just label it humanities and throw it aside because it doesn’t produce something of commodified value oh wait we’re back in theory again, back in the way humans and their societies operate, back in the structures and presuppositions that the humanities govern. So much work, so little time.

If anything in society trickles down, it is not governance, it is not the promise of the explication and avoidance of a system that is propped up in perpetuity by those dangling the strings of escape, and it is certainly not wealth—the answer is knowledge, undistilled and genuine, the product and driving force of a honed and natural curiosity, an incisiveness that can draw upon anything and direct itself anywhere. Systems can be felt out. They can trick or rot or beat down, but the only true way to affect anyone or anything for the better is to do so as a human. And guess who we study!

Language. “Big words” that express “little ideas.” Not every scholar is Shakespeare, sometimes they fail or struggle a little, but every one of them operates in a field with terminology, and the idea of terminology is to encapsulate certain known quantities, certain signifieds (or, indeed, certain signifiers) so that everyone isn’t running in a circle unaware of what the other means. Sometimes jargon or form overwhelm the writer or the reader and collapse, great, sometimes cars crash into trees and explode, what are you going to do. You can’t win until you try, and you can’t try until you build a framework willing to support the effort. I get it, sometimes you read about the movement of a sentence in a 17th century French play you’ve never heard of and it’s three in the morning and you start to daydream about what it would be like to wake up one day in 2032 and realize that all of a sudden that’s you, that the play itself could burn tomorrow and the kids in Africa are still dying and the students in row three are still using their terrible brains to stumble into ways to de-legitimize the entire enterprise you’ve submitted yourself to. Well, that’s not just life, but your shitty situation is in fact one of the few capable of producing a third of a ticket out, because the second you see the system around you, you have some license to poke around at its edges, see how it works—and hell, that French play, the words you wrote about it, read about it, the methods you used and created, the fact that you’ll think and talk about these things, these structural things, the machinations of human thought and experience—that’ll you’ll engage them every day you’re willing, that’ll all come into play. And now you’re prepared for another direction. Because human intellect and work are not zero-sum games, you aren’t compartmentalized, you don’t start over. It’s an endless, endless horizon, that of human experience and creation, and I promise it’ll only work out for you the second you want it to.

Take it from me, I mean this to be nice, lord knows it’s rare enough: if you aren’t happy doing this, you won’t be happy doing that either, whatever “that” might be. As much as I do not believe society as it exists is something we should even be bothering to benefit, seeing as it has no desire to benefit any of what you might try to define as “us,” unless “us” is “rich white people,” the only way to benefit it as an individual, on an individual level (the only level), is to be happy and content and quite alright with the boundaries that define who you are. One more sodding JD who has tricked herself into thinking that tricking people that are not herself into thinking that she’s worth it will make her worth it doesn’t have anything on the poor English sap reading his books and genuinely believing that someone somewhere once wrote something that was worth preserving, that might in some way provide a scrap of what it means to be human.

If you think academics is supposed to be about however you define change, and if you think that your “pointless analysis” is only ever worth doing because it proves that you are alive and better than someone else, then you’re doing it wrong. And not “doing it wrong” because you’d be the only one in that club—no, there are quite a large barrel full of You at every school in the world, believe it—but because this talk of “change” and “practicality” and “usefulness” and “determination” to hold this or that series of letters after your name is endemic, it is socially inscribed, it is everywhere, it is indicative of the kind of social loss that one might find a home investigating in the humanities from any number of perspectives, including new ones. If you’re looking to see the tricks and falseness and the “success” here you will also see it there, because the problem isn’t us or them, it’s you.

I’m done apologizing. Save it for the people who created the culture that expects it.



Irony. You're not helping.

Please drag politics into this! The crisis of higher education is deeply political. How we spend money as a nation reflects our values, and higher education and the humanities specifically are being quickly tossed aside as bourgeois frivolities rather than social necessities. And as the infographic illustrates, this is about so much more than our employment prospects; adjunctification and decreased education spending affects students. Unfortunately, no one, at any level in education, is able to just teach anymore; now, we must also be lobbyists and advocates, each year desperately proving the worth of our programs and positions in the face of budget cuts.

The best starting point: author stalking.

What books or articles have bowled you over in the Modern American Lit field? If someone called, say, Georgina Wu wrote something that stoked your nerdy flames, Google her. (If it's someone with a name more like John Brown, maybe type "John Brown professor".) See where they are, and where they got their PhDs. Which of these universities have you heard of before? Which ones do many PhDs seem to be coming from? That should start you off.

You can also plumb the archives here for "american lit" or whatever; posters often list the schools they have applied/are applying to in their signatures, so you can go on over to those institutions' sites and see if you like their gist.

Edit: Solid GPA and GRE scores. 3.5 should only preclude a few Ivies and West Coasties. If you feel that having relatively few ENGL courses on your transcript could hurt you, you may want to check out (funded) terminal MA programs in English lit.

I know someone who did a PhD and MLS concurrently. The PhD program knew about the MLS degree, but he did it at a different school. Considering the state of the job market right now, it's really not a terrible idea. My program actually had an info session for PhD students on earning an MLS, because it might be helpful in the job search.

I definitely would give yourself the first year or two to just focus on your PhD program, to get a sense of the expectations and work load. I would also suggest you look for an inexpensive option, because Library degrees really are not as name-conscious as PhD programs. My friend who did both really regretted the $$ he invested to go to a top program, because he realized he could have gone to a lower ranked program for less $$ and the same benefits. Also, here are a number of reputable online programs (which are based in a brick-and-mortar school, so we're not talking UPheonix here) that could really help you with the time-management side of things.

On one level, it's a crazy things to do, but then isn't he PhD program in and of itself a little nutty? Be careful that you don't bight off more than you can chew with coursework or finances.

To put my two cents in, these are the primary concerns you might face with this process and how to make things easier:

1) You want to not get scammed by fake listings or other people that could take your money and run. Going with a sort of housing "company" or big, well-known landlord can give you more assurance about this. Many will have a website or will have listings on Google etc. with reviews, or people in the department you're going to might know them, so you can know ahead of time that they're legitimate. Sublets or dealings with individuals can work out well too though. Just make sure to collect enough little pieces of information about the person that you can verify their identity (especially in the case of sublets) -- enough to be able to track them down if they were to disappear with their money, like a legitimate Facebook link, an academic/professional/personal website, some verification of their workplace, non-edited looking photo of them with their driver's license, or whatever. If you have information like that then it would be foolish for them to disappear beyond that point. A lease or written sublease agreement can help that sense of security too.

2) You want the apartment to be good on the inside after you secure a place and move in. Email or call and ask for photos of the apartment's interior. If the landlord doesn't have any on hand (this happens, even with good landlords offering good apartments), see if you can get someone in your new school's department to go visit for you and take photos (offer them money like someone here did).

3) You want the apartment to be good on the outside as well, i.e. good neighborhood and location. Grad students at your new school can of course be a big help for this. There's also an extremely useful City Guide forum on this site which has Q/A topics for many cities, with big archives of posts. Search for your city and make sure there's not a topic for it already before posting a new one -- even some pretty small towns have lots of info already. For bigger cities, I guess an additional useful resource could actually just be travel guides like wikitravel.org, since they'll probably talk about which places are safe, which are fun, etc. Of course you want a place which is a good location for you (perhaps with respect to your school, perhaps with respect to restaurants and bars) and which is safe. However, don't forget other factors like the character of the neighborhood -- for example, lots of colleges (especially in small college towns) have "undergrad ghettos" which are very close to the campus and sometimes/often very safe as well, but are noisy as hell with rowdy frat boys partying all night Thursday through Sunday.

That's all I have to say. Good luck moving. I'm looking for a sublet for the Summer from afar (albeit a place I lived in another Summer which I already know well) with a tough market. It's fairly frustrating...

I know UVa has some people who are really interested in DH.

EDIT to add: DH will very likely play a huge role in all of our futures, in one way or another. If you end up at a school where there isn't that much DH activity going on, be responsible for starting it. Then put on your resumé that you started X DH project.

<--- professionalization sunglasses