merry night wanderer

I benefited a lot from reading the statements of people on the forum willing to send theirs to me, so I'm happy to pay it forward and send mine to anyone here - just send along a DM. Good luck everyone!

Just want to chime in to second Bumblebea on the point that you don’t need to have “relevant” job experience. The modern economy changes constantly and is forever inventing new positions and even just new names for positions that sound trendier. (My old position has about three different names, and I made a point of putting all of them on my resume, lol.) It means jack. Everyone, even people who currently have jobs, needs to be updated in a general sort of way about where the industry is going, what the new (and generally idiotic) lingo is, and what software skills are required going forward. Some tech valley nonsense startup might be calling a perfectly viable position for you “Solutions Ninja.” You never know. (This reminds me of one of my most Office-Space-y stories, where one of the absolutely essential members of my department at a very big company, a web developer, told me he’d been on contract for seven years because he hadn’t realized that they were calling web developers “Communications Analysts” for some reason and hadn’t seen any benefitted web developer positions available at the company!) You don’t need to overcomplicate researching jobs. Just literally go into Indeed and type in keywords of skills you have. “Writing” and “content” are a good start, but don’t shy away from learning some basic software so you can do something more specialized or getting a certification. You just do need some kind of job experience, so get that for yourself one way or another.

As they say, "Office Space is a documentary," lol. It really sounds like you did luck out, and that's deeply worth valuing and sticking with. If you like the place where you have to spend 40 hours a week, and aren't pushed to spend more, there's not much more to reasonably ask for. I have many issues with the way industry works under capitalism. However, that doesn’t mean that every company will crush your soul or that you can’t find yourself with good colleagues, interesting work, and reasonable working conditions. Your point later is well taken that there’s a big bias against the private sector among academics, and while I completely understand why that’s the case (since we tend to think in big-picture, systemic terms), it’s also true that those conditions *can be* more humane and opportunities *certainly are* more plentiful there and they shouldn't, for reasons of survival, be discounted. Just as you wouldn’t want the person who got lucky and made it to be representative of the academic prospects of the people here, I wouldn’t want people to think that white collar work is a proverbial field of free time and job opportunities and good salaries. It *can* be that. But it fully depends on how you machete your way through a hostile economic jungle, and how lucky you are. You could also end up in an awful, dehumanizing situation with abusive bosses and incredibly tedious work. So you have to do your best to minimize those chances. My major point here is the one that there are tradeoffs for everything and people need to think carefully about what kind of working life they can find tolerable. Do you need job security? Don’t freelance. Do you hate commutes? Maybe freelancing is worth the job security tradeoff for you. Do you want meaningful, helping-the-world-be-a-better-place work? You will probably want to work with nonprofits (though the nonprofit industrial complex is another ethical minefield as well). Do you really need stellar benefits? You probably need a public sector or solid white collar job, unfortunately. Just as academia is a huge tradeoff in terms of time spent, salary, meaningfulness of the work, and job prospects, so is everything else, and because you need an alt-ac plan no matter who you are, you should consider what you’re willing to give up and what you need. I think perhaps I haphazardly stuck nonprofits (which have overworked/underpaid issues) with public sector jobs, which tend to have the problems you're listing. I've worked as a contractor for government organizations and have generally found them my most pleasant (if not well-paying) jobs, but I'm not surprised to hear your report. If, in your personal calculus, you like benefits, job security, and work with a mission better than innovation, flexibility, and keeping busy, you might find it better. Or not! It depends again on the situation. I don't personally mind downtime (there is always personal reading to do!), but I certainly don't like process and procedure-based work and would have likely been miserable there too. I would say the one thing you're never going to be able to fully avoid is interpersonal drama. That everyone is likely to have to confront at one time or another in any job situation. But everything else is worth thinking about as you try to angle the alt-ac resume all of us are going to need.

Everything is a tradeoff in the capitalist hellscape we're in. There's some good advice in this thread. Although I'm absolutely in the "she's a skeeze" camp, both the video and Ramus' posts speak to conditions that seem accurate to me, and echo what I've heard from other late stage grad students or post-academics. It is very worth taking to heart. I know universities are pushing to do alt-ac better, but they're not good enough to be truly helpful yet. I will also say that what Sigada says about the private sector is true. In this, I can put on my own wearied veteran hat, and add: The work is typically mind-numbingly mundane. The corporate world is, largely, a very stupid and vacuous place. Prepare yourself for things like content mill writer jobs that prioritize mediocrity, vacuity and speed over quality, having to speak corporate-ese, working for horrible impersonal corporations that try to mask their cutthroat capitalism with nauseating veneers of humanity, and being subjected to backhanded gossip, token diversity statements, and all the social toxicities people complain about with academia - except with even less genuine effort at ethical behavior. Have you ever spoken to a really terrible business major? It's like that at least 40 hours a week. You may or may not have the time and means for vacation and hobbies; if you do have the time and means, it may or may not be scarce. I have friends who have, largely, pretty engaging and well-paying jobs who regularly have to work 60+ hours for deadlines, have 10 vacation days a year, and the like. And again: the work tends to be mildly offputting at best. The tradeoff is generally more job security, but you still don't necessarily have a whole lot of that. I have learned to never treat a job as secure. What I can be secure about, I guess, is that I can typically find another job if the present one doesn't work out. Ramus, I hope your tech job continues to work out for you, but I have to warn you that after a couple more years you may feel as I did: as though your brain is melting out of your ears. I had a reasonable job that I was good at, too - flexible schedule, a modicum of creativity to keep things a bit interesting sometimes. Still absolutely mind-numbing at the end of the day. I would gently suggest that lionizing the middle-class white collar life based on your experience at a single job is a bit tone deaf. A lot of people, even among the middle class - who are so much luckier than those in the lower-class or gig economies - are struggling mightily. There are jobs with more meaningful work to be found in the nonprofit, publishing, high school teaching, or public sectors. They can be great, and they can also be unbelievably overworked and underpaid. It's up to the individual to decide if you think going for that is a good idea, or if you think you can get one of the better positions. For my part, I am ecstatic to have 5-6 years out from the workforce, and if I don't get a TT job I will go back to what I was doing. I know that even if retirement takes a bit longer as a result, I will be happy I made this choice. Regardless, the best piece of advice here is that you need to be proactive. Start working on your alt-ac contingency plan now, and the most important thing is to get job experience. Do internships, basically. My university has an internship program especially for humanities PhDs that funds internships that would otherwise be unfunded. Take advantage of things like this - or, just take advantage of your summer stipends to get internships. Entry-level jobs require experience and you need to get it before you graduate. Discuss with career counselors and just look at job descriptions on Indeed or what have you. Take a look at the requirements and the skills section. Decide on what you think you can tolerate, and work at gaining those requirements and skills. Don't rely on your professors and don't postpone this. Basically, dedicate a couple of summers to internships, and cultivate skills and your network throughout. I'll add one final thing: this entire discussion dodges the systemic and political dimension to all of this. Academia needs reform: the tuition problem, working conditions, societal devaluation of the humanities and obscene "professionalization" and corporatization of everything are all huge problems that need our activism, whether or not we get TT jobs. The answer to academia's problems, in this broader scheme, is not "encourage the people who want to get PhDs to join the white collar workforce," even if that makes sense to some degree from the personal angle. However we hack it, the key is to try to wrangle a livable working life out of an economic system that is not designed in our favor. Best of luck to all of us with that.

Do you want an academic job? If so, a PhD in literature will make you more versatile. However, there's inescapably going to be some creative writing time sacrificed by doing a lit dissertation instead of a creative project. A lit MA before a PhD of any sort is just fine.

Good luck to all of this year's applicants! It was a grueling set of months for me last year, and I can only imagine that covid is making it even more chaotic and uncertain for you. However, I'm very glad I took the chance and applied. And I hope you're all in a similar place come next year. If anyone has any questions about JHU, feel free to let me know.

Reiterating here that JHU no longer requires either GRE.

The Comp Lit department here is extremely philosophy focused, specifically in Continental. I suspect (though a phil graduate student might know better) that English and Comp Lit departments are where Continentals hide out in America these days! I don't know about "primarily" (since you will still have to take literature coursework and be familiar with literature texts), but I plan on incorporating plenty of philosophy into my work and numerous people here are of a similar bent. It seems to be quite possible.

With so many schools ditching the GRE, I would have rediverted 100% of that energy to getting even more abreast of the field and refining my writing sample. To the first point, SEL provides overviews of trends based on era that I found incredibly valuable, though I'd imagine you will already have a leg up as a Master's student, and teachers in your area can help as well. To the second, I'd work on writing sample extensively (of course) and give it not only to your mentors, but to people in the dept outside your area, if possible. I only gave mine to a newly-retired prof in my field and I regret it because (while I value his opinion tremendously) I think I pigeonholed myself a bit. Your readers are going to be all over the place in terms of specialty, theory, etc, so you want to be able to make yourself understandable and ideally appealing to as many as you can. Not hedging your bets on a job seems wise, of course. Not specifically to you, but to anyone here: please don't go into academia because you can't think of anything else to do with your degree. Data shows we humanities folks do just fine on the job market after an adjustment period (and if you ever want to talk about the vagaries of getting a job in corporate America, let me know). But I'm also deciding to do this with plenty of middle-class job prospects elsewhere (I'm an older student) because frankly, it's way more meaningful. So I'm not personally going to discourage you. If the school you get into is a good one, they'll also provide resources for alt-ac trajectories.

Just dropping in to mention Johns Hopkins waived the GRE general and subject test requirement.

If you are applying to MFAs, I would also look at the MFA Draft group on Facebook. The subforum here seems just fine but the Draft is extremely active and has plenty of good information (just beware getting sucked into the whirlpool of anxious applicants posting too much, as with anywhere!). Just search for "MFA Draft '21."

I'm also happy to send my SoP to anyone who thinks they'd find it useful.

This is great advice, and actually, almost every school that accepted me mentioned it as something interesting; the people I talked to sometimes asked further questions about how my creative/critical work were intersecting. One prof even said he particularly liked MFA students. I suppose the only thing to mention is that I did feel like I could have benefited from the deep dive of a master's thesis, and for me I had to do my writing sample from scratch. It wasn't quite a seminar paper and it wasn't quite a thesis. But hopefully your lit mentors can help you out here.

There's a genuine possibility it won't happen, so you're not catastrophizing! We need to get used to it, but it would be heartbreaking for all the reasons you mentioned. If they're still open by the time I get to sign up, I'm going going to be taking a fascinating-looking course on Kafka, theory, and philosophy (by a prof who holds joint appointments in the German and philosophy depts, whose general approach to literature seems incredibly exciting to me), German Idealism (pretty much have to understand this as a Romanticist, and looking forward to flexing my philosophy muscles again!), and Jane Austen and the Novel. The last one almost makes me laugh - Jane Austen is undeniably good, but she was really shoved down my throat as a homeschooler, and I'm not naturally that drawn to realism, so she's just not my cup of tea and I never thought I'd take a course on her. But a POI is teaching it and I have never studied her or novel theory before, so it seemed like a solid choice. Tbh I always end up loving literature class if the teacher's a good one so I'm looking forward to reading her in depth and developing a better appreciation for what she has to offer. It's so hard to choose just three. What are other people taking??

I feel you. I just picked out the courses I want to take (which is one of my favorite things in the world to do) and I'm so excited about the idea of being in a classroom with these people and it's just- lord. The letdown will be unimaginable. I think I will be okay with it if there are waves of quarantining/social distancing, as some people are proposing, but the whole semester? I don't know that I'd defer because, being older, I want to get a move on in my program. But under other circumstances I might do it.