GK Chesterton

It varies a lot by country. The current German rates of 750 / 800 eur a month for non-PhD research grants / ETA grants are not enough to survive on -- they are below the minimum for welfare in the country (about ~850 eur / mo).

Vienna. But I have a hard time believing there are places where 920 euro a month is anything other than "scraping by". Also, I believe the rates are set to a large extent independently by the Fulbright Commission in each country -- so while some countries do vary the stipend based on cost of living, not all do, and they certainly aren't varied across countries on that basis. France's Fulbright Commission pays substantially more than the German one (50% more or better), for example, regardless of where one lives Incidentally, the Italian grant that wildchartermage received is precisely one that doesn't vary based on the cost of living.

Thanks for your response -- it's a study / research grant. I talked to friends who have had Fulbright grants for Austria, and they report receiving 920 euro / month (which it is hard to imagine being enough to live on). I've now received a few letters from them, but still haven't heard an actual number on the monthly stipend.

Hi all, does anyone know what the stipends look like for PhD-level finalists who get research grants for western Europe? Mine is for Germany, but perhaps it's comparable with France, Italy and the UK?

Re: Berkeley rejection - does that belong to anyone here? I am sure I'm getting one and have been waiting on it for a while, but haven't heard anything.

I visited there last year and loved it. The downside would be that it's a bit of a drive to the nearest big airport in Indianapolis... about 100 miles to the airport. Still, great town, really good restaurant / food selection, campus is nice and pretty, lots of bars with good beer selections (i.e. microbrews). It reminded me of Chapel Hill, NC.

Gah. I hate, hate, hate reading article like those, because it's rarely pointed out that in this crisis of the humanities, university administrators' salaries continue to skyrocket. My school had to make tremendous budget cuts for the last two years, while conceding that yes, they had raised the Chancellor's salary to $600,000 to keep his pay competitive with other similar institutions. Every Dean makes more than the professors - even the registrar makes mid-6 figures. It's outrageous, and people seem complicit with the fact that this neo-liberal "Is this a marketable skill?" crap has pervaded actual institutes of higher learning. Blech. American anti-intellectualism is depressing, particularly with regards to foreign languages. It's not a matter of just learning to be bi-lingual (particularly not for the sake of aiding US troops in nightly raids), although there is admittedly something quite pleasing in being able to read and speak with people in a different language - it's a matter of taking affirmative steps to demonstrate that you are aware that your language and culture are not the only language in the world, and that university education is about a community of scholars all over the globe. It's a frightening monotonization of thought, that humanities and foreign languages are taking a hit while undergraduate business programs and sports marketing (give me a break) are flourishing. (Not that I am mad with JoeySssance - I think he probably knows where I am coming from on this.)

After a discussion in which it was claimed that the primary characteristic of paranoid thought is seeing fate where there exists only contingency. Spooky.

Ha, I just met cimalagon in a bar in a foreign country - totally by chance. Weird. Email from Princeton came and a call from Cornell - accepted! Super stoked about this (made apparent by falling back into my dirty childhood west coast slang .)

Well, congratulations then, mysterious stranger - what are your interests? I heard from somewhere on here that Berkeley did linguistics admits already, but I didn't know they had also done literature and culture stuff. Or are you also linguistics?

Anyone claiming the new Berkeley / Yale acceptances?

Well, you would have to tell us the two schools first. As a general rule, there is no general rule. However, rumblings that have made their way to me tend to be that Comp Lit is in a tough spot - sexy field for people in the humanities, but no love from the people who distribute cash. General emphasis has been comp lit graduates / programs are only successful jobwise if they're trained to join a specific language department when they graduate; otherwise, it's quite difficult. Which schools did you apply to? No fun if we can't match people to the results board.

Out of curiosity, is your name a reference to a Zizoke? Edit: I suppose I should clarify my bizarre terminology, in that a Zizoke is a Zizek joke. However, it now seems apparent that this is probably a reference to much more common red marking pens. Whoops.

Well, fair enough, but given that there's only one thread on this whole website for people who have applied to study German, to come in and say that there are no careers and everyone in the world said it was a terrible idea and that's why you aren't doing it is like finding a forum for pregnant women and writing about how everyone you know says pregnant people are unhappy, resent their kids, get post-partum depression, etc. and that's why you have decided not to have children. I guess it's just unclear to me what sort of a reaction you were hoping for with your original post - that someone would write "Yeah, you're right, there are no jobs, guess I'm an idiot for spending $1000 applying to schools and taking GREs"?

No offense, but I'm not certain that this is a terribly strong argument when one considers it as an argument for teaching positions in one foreign language as opposed to those in another. In terms of theorists and authors circulating in continental philosophy, film studies, comp. lit, etc., I haven't really seen a substantial pick-up in Spanish theorists or authors, whereas Marx, Nietzsche, Hegel, Freud, Kant, Weber, Schmitt, Heidegger, Gadamer, Benjamin, Adorno, Habermas, etc. (not to mention the countless German literary authors) still rule the day. Spanish as an actual academic discipline and not just a foreign language pedagogy program got almost no love from anywhere until quite recently, and I suspect that the mercurial winds of ignorance and enforced monolingualism in the cultural politics of American higher education will deflate those sails just as swiftly. Further, I think that it would be a resoundingly poor idea to try and pursue any degree in the humanities with an eye towards a "more favorable" job market, so if what you're really concerned about is getting a job at the end, why not just get an MBA? In short, to play a little game with the response to his own (premature) obituary from perhaps the best known enemy of the German language: "Die Berichte über das Ableben der deutschen Sprache sind stark übertrieben." Now watch me not get a job