queenofkings7

Hi all,
A word of warning for anyone trying to figure out whether to attend OSU for 18th century British lit: don't do it.
I spent 5-7 years at OSU English, and I have either already received my PhD or I'm about to receive it. I'm sorry for being so vague; I would like very much not to be identified from any info in this message. (I created a new account specifically to post this message.) I can say that I am basing the rest of my message on a lot of evidence. I can also say that my intention is not to slander any aspect of OSU's other grad programs, but to warn incoming graduate students in the 18th century.
It's been at least 5 years (but likely more) since an 18th c. student finished their PhD. In that time, at least two quit, one has experienced an incredible lack of support from the 18th c. faculty (and I suspect will quit), and yet another has struggled to navigate the politics between members of the 18th c. faculty (and I suspect will quit). I have nothing against the faculty personally: I've had very pleasant interactions with 2 of the 3 specialists in 18th c. Brit lit, and by all accounts, their research is strong. However, their mentoring of students is abysmal; the relationships between faculty and grad students can feel sadistic, vindictive, and/or weirdly personal. 
While the 18th c. faculty are friends with each other, they disagree very strongly in committees, which results in impasses that hurt the progress of the student to degree. Graduate school is incredibly difficult as it is, and nearly half of all graduate students nationally report struggling with mental health and wellness at some point in their tenures. In this context, trying to pacify hostile committee members and repeatedly brokering truces between them makes an already challenging task Herculean.
If you're interested in British 18th c lit, I would first recommend you look at the job wiki in that field for the last two years and consider making a switch in your focus. That said, if you want to push forward with a PhD, don't do it at OSU.
NOTE: I don't really check Gradcafe all that much, and I don't plan on responding to any replies.

As someone who knows or knew @Ramus irl (and as someone still in academia), these are words of wisdom. As an English major, you have a range of skills. Don't buy into the foundational myths of academia. An undergrad English degree adds value and $ to your life and career trajectory; English PhDs do neither of those things. I don't expect anybody will really pay heed, because the intellectual validation of academia is so alluring, but I admire @Ramus and others for persisting with this message, even as they, like a generation before them in 2014-16, get downvoted and mocked for these posts on this forum.

There's a lot of great advice on this thread. In the spirit of giving advice in brief and moving on, here's two things about academia and grad school that aren't usually mentioned in these threads:
1) Academia operates according to a prestige economy. Many of you are already familiar with the gist of this prestige economy in your worries about getting into highly ranked schools. But it's also important to understand that you, as a PhD student, are a commodity within this prestige economy. Part of the criteria to be awarded an "R1" designation is the number of doctorates produced by the university. Many faculty members like teaching graduate courses as these courses line up with their research and offer more productive conversations than advanced undergrad courses, and advising graduate students can be a important aspect of professional development if you are looking to move from a tenured job at a less prestigious university to a more prestigious one. As undergrad majors in English decline in number, so too do upper division literature courses...making graduate courses all the more desirable from a professor's perspective. The existence of a grad program adds some intangible value to the prestige of an English department at a public university. This is more true of public universities, especially less prestigious ones, than it is of the Ivies, where the level of prestige is already high. What is true of both public unis and the Ivies is that the research agenda of a professor gets a certain glow or buzz when students they advise, and whose ideas might closely reflect theirs, move on to jobs at other universities. As a professor, you never stop being a part of the prestige economy, so it is natural to want this sort of buzz. Now, do all professors actually articulate to themselves these ideas about how graduate students add to their value within the prestige economy? Absolutely not. And several professors may make intentional decisions to resist the prestige economy's moderation of their desires. I say all this so you know the faculty's incentives are not your incentives. They have incentives to attract you to their program, to keep the number of graduate students admitted high, and to encourage you to stay in academia. Your incentive to get a PhD is very different. Keep this in mind from the moment they woo you when you visit, when they talk about the department like it's a family, and when your department acts like the faculty are constantly looking to good by graduate students.
The only way the "system, political" change that @merry night wanderer rightly points to will come about is if tenured and tenure-track faculty mobilize, strike work, etc., in protest of cuts to the budget and hiring freezes. This will never happen. The faculty (will) only strike work if the university proposes to cut tenure/tenure-track faculty positions. And, whatever, I don't blame them. They have mortgages to pay. Their academic identity is a big part of their self-identity. Cool.
2) Don't let the job market reach backward and influence everything you do from the minute you enter grad school. To my mind, the biggest challenge of grad school isn't that new cohorts of graduate students aren't aware of the job market, but that they are hyper-aware of the job market from the moment they enter, and it hangs over them from semester 1. You feel the need to publish as much as possible, and you push yourself to devote time and energy to this in order to make yourself competitive on the market; you may feel the pressure to go to as many conferences as possible; you may feel the need to take on certain professional development activities or service assignments purely based on how that might play to a search committee. Negative feedback from faculty and peers can weigh you down even more so than normal. When you feel this pressure, ask yourself: is this why you wanted to go to grad school? You cannot outwork or outachieve other candidates. Most of you know the academic job market is not a meritocracy, but many probably don't know that all sorts of small, bureaucratic things determine which candidates are hired by search committees. Most institutions prioritize a certain kind of "fit" and it's almost impossible to say in advance what that fit is: a department may hire so they have someone to teach a very specific course on their curriculum; they may hire to expand their research or teaching diversity in a specific way, they may NOT hire a certain candidate because that candidate expressed a desire to teach a course that another faculty member already loves teaching; they may hire a certain candidate because that candidate can also be a 25% hire in the department of Gender and Sexuality Studies or History or Middle-Eastern Studies since those departments have the budget for that 25%. As this is a buyer's market, search committees will have no trouble finding whatever mix of qualifications they want in a capable candidate. 
So, if you choose to go to grad school knowing the risks, spend your 5-6 years actually doing what you find intellectually satisfying, in addition to preparing for an "alt-ac" job in the ways OP and other posters suggest. The "normal" work of grad school is stressful enough. Don't get into grad school telling yourself you'll do everything you can to be as competitive for an academic job as possible.

There's a lot of great advice on this thread. In the spirit of giving advice in brief and moving on, here's two things about academia and grad school that aren't usually mentioned in these threads:
1) Academia operates according to a prestige economy. Many of you are already familiar with the gist of this prestige economy in your worries about getting into highly ranked schools. But it's also important to understand that you, as a PhD student, are a commodity within this prestige economy. Part of the criteria to be awarded an "R1" designation is the number of doctorates produced by the university. Many faculty members like teaching graduate courses as these courses line up with their research and offer more productive conversations than advanced undergrad courses, and advising graduate students can be a important aspect of professional development if you are looking to move from a tenured job at a less prestigious university to a more prestigious one. As undergrad majors in English decline in number, so too do upper division literature courses...making graduate courses all the more desirable from a professor's perspective. The existence of a grad program adds some intangible value to the prestige of an English department at a public university. This is more true of public universities, especially less prestigious ones, than it is of the Ivies, where the level of prestige is already high. What is true of both public unis and the Ivies is that the research agenda of a professor gets a certain glow or buzz when students they advise, and whose ideas might closely reflect theirs, move on to jobs at other universities. As a professor, you never stop being a part of the prestige economy, so it is natural to want this sort of buzz. Now, do all professors actually articulate to themselves these ideas about how graduate students add to their value within the prestige economy? Absolutely not. And several professors may make intentional decisions to resist the prestige economy's moderation of their desires. I say all this so you know the faculty's incentives are not your incentives. They have incentives to attract you to their program, to keep the number of graduate students admitted high, and to encourage you to stay in academia. Your incentive to get a PhD is very different. Keep this in mind from the moment they woo you when you visit, when they talk about the department like it's a family, and when your department acts like the faculty are constantly looking to good by graduate students.
The only way the "system, political" change that @merry night wanderer rightly points to will come about is if tenured and tenure-track faculty mobilize, strike work, etc., in protest of cuts to the budget and hiring freezes. This will never happen. The faculty (will) only strike work if the university proposes to cut tenure/tenure-track faculty positions. And, whatever, I don't blame them. They have mortgages to pay. Their academic identity is a big part of their self-identity. Cool.
2) Don't let the job market reach backward and influence everything you do from the minute you enter grad school. To my mind, the biggest challenge of grad school isn't that new cohorts of graduate students aren't aware of the job market, but that they are hyper-aware of the job market from the moment they enter, and it hangs over them from semester 1. You feel the need to publish as much as possible, and you push yourself to devote time and energy to this in order to make yourself competitive on the market; you may feel the pressure to go to as many conferences as possible; you may feel the need to take on certain professional development activities or service assignments purely based on how that might play to a search committee. Negative feedback from faculty and peers can weigh you down even more so than normal. When you feel this pressure, ask yourself: is this why you wanted to go to grad school? You cannot outwork or outachieve other candidates. Most of you know the academic job market is not a meritocracy, but many probably don't know that all sorts of small, bureaucratic things determine which candidates are hired by search committees. Most institutions prioritize a certain kind of "fit" and it's almost impossible to say in advance what that fit is: a department may hire so they have someone to teach a very specific course on their curriculum; they may hire to expand their research or teaching diversity in a specific way, they may NOT hire a certain candidate because that candidate expressed a desire to teach a course that another faculty member already loves teaching; they may hire a certain candidate because that candidate can also be a 25% hire in the department of Gender and Sexuality Studies or History or Middle-Eastern Studies since those departments have the budget for that 25%. As this is a buyer's market, search committees will have no trouble finding whatever mix of qualifications they want in a capable candidate. 
So, if you choose to go to grad school knowing the risks, spend your 5-6 years actually doing what you find intellectually satisfying, in addition to preparing for an "alt-ac" job in the ways OP and other posters suggest. The "normal" work of grad school is stressful enough. Don't get into grad school telling yourself you'll do everything you can to be as competitive for an academic job as possible.

This. 
I'm right there with you, @helloperil. I told myself I could have until the five years of funding were up and that I'd bounce if I hadn't finished by then. Now I wish I had yanked the cord earlier. My advice on this point was, alas, of the "do as I say, not as I do" variety. 
Yes, yes, yes. It really sucks, and I feel for those who throw up their hands and say, "I just don't have the time or energy." At one point, I was working 45 hours a week, TAing and working an internship at the same time (and commuting 6 hours a week to the internship, to boot). It was absolutely exhausting and, needless to say, I got virtually no writing done that semester.
I wish more universities would experiment with different ways to get their grad students experience by way of their guaranteed funding. At OSU, we had for a time a one-semester fellowship you could apply for that hooked you up with a local alt-ac internship in lieu of teaching. (This is how I got connected with my non-profit internship.) I haven't heard of any other schools using this model yet, but I thought it was a great idea to get students alt-ac experience without forcing them to chose between taking on multiple jobs and ditching their guaranteed funding / tuition remission to work outside the university. 

Having been around for both the original (2015 was my first year of my doctorate), and being currently on the job market (30 applications, 1 interview, 8 outstanding, in case you want to know how that is), some thoughts in no particular order:
A PhD from a program with substantial resources (note: this is not equivalent to a top program, though there is substantial overlap) is still a worthwhile experience in and of itself. $30-35k yr plus good health insurance isn't nothing in this pre-postapocalyptic hellscape. Plus, I've had multi-month paid trips to Europe each year. My teaching load was light but engaging, and I thoroughly enjoyed the process of researching and writing my dissertation. The experience wasn't stress free, but it wasn't a bad sort of stress. A PhD in the humanities takes more than 5 years. Make sure you're funded accordingly (part of the first point). Going to a program without those resources, one where you have to scrape and claw and hustle to get even your basic needs met, is not a worthwhile experience. It's just volunteering to be exploited based on a lie as to future possibilities. The actual line between the two situations is a bit fuzzy, but err on the side of caution. Do not apply to programs just to make sure you go to grad school. I have very little sympathy for those who have recently finished their PhD and are left jobless or in adjunct hell. This includes some of my own friends. Yes, that's more than a bit brutal to say. But at this point, if you didn't know what the academic job market looked like going into it, that's on you. There are abundant resources that not only provide ample warning as to what lies ahead, but that also explain how to set yourself up for a non-academic career outside the academy, or at least outside a traditional professorship track. If the state of the world on the other side of your degree blindsides you, that's because you ignored several hundred flashing neon warning signs accompanied by air-raid sirens, or thought that, for some reason, they were trying to warn everyone else besides you. Have a plan for your post-degree future before you apply. That plan should both identify several possible career paths, most of which should not be "be a professor", and have intermediate goals that set up those career paths roughly mapped out.  Do not adjunct. Do anything other than adjunct. Hopefully that's useful.

@Ramus yeah, that's the thread. It shouldn't surprise any of us that things have become much, much worse since then. Also unsurprising: the current cohort of applicants have the same enthusiasm...and maybe the same conviction that things will be different for them. They will be more "professionalized," they aren't in this for a tenure track job, they really care about the intellectual work for its intrinsic value, and--they know it--they will be the exception.

I definitely had flashbacks to "The Graduate School Ponzi Scheme" thread when making this post. Have I become VirtualMessage?! Maybe so, albeit without the vitriol.
For the noobs:
 
 

While I caution y'all from placing too much stock in anecdotal data, allow me to share two brief examples of other recent PhD outcomes from my subfield. I imagine you all know the stories about those who end up in adjunct hell, but I wanted to share these two stories because they help illustrate what can happen even when you do everything "right."
Person A: Graduated from the University of Michigan three years ago with two publications in hand, had participated in one of the keynote panels at the national conference in our field, and was well connected with all the big names in our historical period. A brilliant, brilliant guy. Person A won the lottery in his first year on the job market: he got a TT position at one of the better programs hiring that year (an R2 in the Midwest). But Person A has been absolutely miserable in his job. He lives in a place without the intellectual life he enjoyed in Ann Arbor; he lives in a place without any kind of city life; and he's stuck with students who aren't terribly smart or engaged. Every time I talk to person A, he talks about how he wishes he could leave his job but that he feels like he has no way to escape. The takeaway: even when you get achieve "the dream," you may realize that, in reality, it's not quite all it was cracked up to be.
Person B: Is graduating this year from Yale University with two publications and multiple national conference presentations. Person B struck out entirely on the academic job market this year (which isn't saying much, as there were three jobs posted in our subfield). Person B is now scrambling to accomplish the transition to an alternative -- which he had always thought would be an easy one. He's now in a position to graduate with no job lined up, having struck out thus far on "alt-ac" jobs, too. Person B, who had dreams of being the next Stanley Fish, resorted to calling me a couple months back to ask how to break into technical writing, and he now seems resigned to volunteer to gain experience, taking on personal debt in the process. The takeaway: don't buy into "you can just do something else if it doesn't work out," as though employers are waiting around to hire English PhDs. Moving out of higher ed takes time, dedication, and hard work, often requiring you to seek and participate in internships or learn new skills before you can find a job. Though it often gets framed as the easy back-up option, it can take months or years to develop the kind of resume that would make you competitive for the jobs that can put you on a path toward stability.

Sorry you feel that way. Feel free to ignore and continue on the path you're on. I wish you well, and I hope you end up in a stable, well-paying position that brings you security and happiness. Unfortunately, the likelihood of you or anyone else on this forum finding such a position in the professoriate is next to nil, which is why I'm compelled to "proselytize."
I'm not looking for an apology, as things worked out fine for me. Please reserve your condescension for someone else. 
I think you're missing the point. It's not that people aren't intelligent. I was a smart undergraduate, too, just like many on this site. I read about how bad that the job market was before I went. And that wasn't enough to deter me (though it should have been). The issue, I think, is that there is this impulse on the part of professors to encourage their smart undergraduates to pursue PhDs because, well, that's what smart undergraduates should do. They tell their undergrads (as I was told) that they're smart enough to be the exceptions to the trend, or that they can always do something else if it doesn't work out (and you don't need a PhD to do any of the alternatives). The truth is that virtually none of you will be exceptions to the hiring trends, and, if we can agree that's the case, I would argue that pursuing a PhD in the humanities at this time is a mistake.
But, as your reply evidences, most will ignore such warnings anyway (and, for good measure, will likely look on such warnings with derision). Again, I can say that from experience! I was stubborn and self-assured then, too, similarly arrogant in my refusal to listen to those who made it through the process and came out the other side cynical or defeated (so I perceived them then). For those who are like I was then, I reckon there is no getting through. My hope is that if there's someone out there on the fence, wondering if pursuing a PhD's worth the extraordinary degree of personal risk and uncertainty, that that person will simply pursue another option for their future. 
 

Whether you think she's a saint or a skeez, Karen Kelsky is more forthcoming about the fucked up state of academia -- its people, its job prospects, and its insane value system -- than any of the professors I had in undergrad or in my PhD program. For all those considering a PhD, I recommend you spend ten minutes of your time on this video:
While I imagine most of you have heard the horror stories of the job market -- which really has gotten vastly worse in the last year -- I think Kelsky does a better job than most other explanations I've seen in presenting how the whole psychology of the academy works and how professors groom their underlings into trying to stick the whole thing out.
Fwiw, I got out and am much, much happier now. I only wish those of you out there would make the decision that I was too cowardly to make: don't do a PhD at all, and if you're in a PhD now, get out ASAP for your own sake (just say no to the sunk cost fallacy!).

As someone who knows or knew @Ramus irl (and as someone still in academia), these are words of wisdom. As an English major, you have a range of skills. Don't buy into the foundational myths of academia. An undergrad English degree adds value and $ to your life and career trajectory; English PhDs do neither of those things. I don't expect anybody will really pay heed, because the intellectual validation of academia is so alluring, but I admire @Ramus and others for persisting with this message, even as they, like a generation before them in 2014-16, get downvoted and mocked for these posts on this forum.

As someone who knows or knew @Ramus irl (and as someone still in academia), these are words of wisdom. As an English major, you have a range of skills. Don't buy into the foundational myths of academia. An undergrad English degree adds value and $ to your life and career trajectory; English PhDs do neither of those things. I don't expect anybody will really pay heed, because the intellectual validation of academia is so alluring, but I admire @Ramus and others for persisting with this message, even as they, like a generation before them in 2014-16, get downvoted and mocked for these posts on this forum.

Hi all,
A word of warning for anyone trying to figure out whether to attend OSU for 18th century British lit: don't do it.
I spent 5-7 years at OSU English, and I have either already received my PhD or I'm about to receive it. I'm sorry for being so vague; I would like very much not to be identified from any info in this message. (I created a new account specifically to post this message.) I can say that I am basing the rest of my message on a lot of evidence. I can also say that my intention is not to slander any aspect of OSU's other grad programs, but to warn incoming graduate students in the 18th century.
It's been at least 5 years (but likely more) since an 18th c. student finished their PhD. In that time, at least two quit, one has experienced an incredible lack of support from the 18th c. faculty (and I suspect will quit), and yet another has struggled to navigate the politics between members of the 18th c. faculty (and I suspect will quit). I have nothing against the faculty personally: I've had very pleasant interactions with 2 of the 3 specialists in 18th c. Brit lit, and by all accounts, their research is strong. However, their mentoring of students is abysmal; the relationships between faculty and grad students can feel sadistic, vindictive, and/or weirdly personal. 
While the 18th c. faculty are friends with each other, they disagree very strongly in committees, which results in impasses that hurt the progress of the student to degree. Graduate school is incredibly difficult as it is, and nearly half of all graduate students nationally report struggling with mental health and wellness at some point in their tenures. In this context, trying to pacify hostile committee members and repeatedly brokering truces between them makes an already challenging task Herculean.
If you're interested in British 18th c lit, I would first recommend you look at the job wiki in that field for the last two years and consider making a switch in your focus. That said, if you want to push forward with a PhD, don't do it at OSU.
NOTE: I don't really check Gradcafe all that much, and I don't plan on responding to any replies.