hashslinger

I don't want to open a new wanky debate about the validity of rankings ... but anything ranked in the 100s is not considered good. That's not to say that people don't thrive in these programs, or that they don't get jobs or publish wonderful things. But it would be EXTREMELY difficult to do a national job search in English literature with a PhD from a school ranked in the 100s. Whatever you decide will have to do with your goals. If you're planning on returning to Saudi Arabia and teaching there, then perhaps the specifics of your American PhD won't matter--just that you have one. If you're planning on going into rhet/comp, then you might be in good shape (but again, I have no idea about the prestige of rhet/comp programs). But if you're planning on staying in the U.S. and doing a national job search in a literature field, then you might want to think twice.

I believe that Kent State and Ball State are more involved in rhet/comp rather than literature (one of my favorite rhet/comp professors got her PhD at Ball State). But I have no idea how reputable they are among all rhet/comp programs. For English literature, they are not recognized nationally. Most PhD programs take 5-7 years to finish. Most will require 1-2 years of coursework, exams, and 1-3 years of dissertation writing. I wouldn't pay too much attention to things like credit hours but instead look at the general progression of the program and the number of years it takes most students to get through.

I'm lost. What's wrong with admitting you're good at rollerblading?

Um, what? You think that an unmarried professor is walking around all secretly envious of a married student ... because lack of a spouse represents a "position in life" that one must be "grumpy" about? Why not take the next leap--this female professor is obviously bitter because she isn't getting laid. Please, we're grad students. Let's not perpetuate such sexist crap.

Great link, Two Espressos. I share the author's "so what?" sentiment. I worked throughout most of my twenties. I made good money and started a pension fund. But it was a dreadful job. I would be more upset with myself if I turned 35 or 40, locked in a career I disliked and possibly too old to go to grad school. (And I don't believe that 35 or 40 is old by any stretch of the imagination, but it becomes increasingly difficult to switch gears at that point--at 35/40 you might be talking about selling your home, uprooting your family, taking a huge paycut, and wading into a brand new job market that may not want you.) And that's the question any prospective grad student has to ask themselves: If you forgo going to grad school, are you going to have huge regrets? At 35 or 40, are you going to feel good about yourself if you're still sitting at your desk at Bank of America? Will you be more embittered by not having a grad degree than a mortgage? There's nothing wrong with wanting a good paycheck, a mortgage, and a pension. Many people have these priorities, and therefore they don't go to grad school, and I'm happy for them when they get what they want. I also realize that many people don't know what they want at 22 or 25 or 30, and therefore they can't foresee whether they will regret staying at Deloitte for 15 years. But for me, I felt like I was really missing something. I loved writing papers, so I tried a master's. And I found I was passionate about my area, so I went for a PhD. I've never regretted the fact that I don't have a mortgage. I would regret having sunk five additional years of my youth into a career I didn't like when I could have been making headway on a dissertation. Most of the PhD naysayers--everyone from Cebula to douchey Thomas H. Benton--are extremely naive about what actually goes on in the working world. What do they think people do all day? They see a "steady job" in the "real world" as a quantifiable certainty. They see the non-academic world as the antithesis of the academic world. Everyone who's not an academic apparently has steady, stable work and a multitude of opportunities. No one ever gets aged out or transferred somewhere unpleasant. No one ever gets demoted, or fired, or put in a basement. Everyone has benefits. And, oh yeah, non-academic jobs are apparently extremely easy to get. Right. All you have to do is send out your application, and everyone will call. "Just go do something else!" they say. "Anything else!" As if "anything else" is just hanging from trees. (And Cebula's "just go work in a museum!" is the most hilarious thing I've read all week. You could get an academic job ten times over in the time in takes you to break into secure, full-time, well-paid museum work. And working for the government--seriously?) What do these people think a job market looks like? When I was looking for work, the job market was for me much like the horrifying academic job market. Hundreds of applicants for each position. I would go to an interview, and I'd be the seventeenth person they interviewed that day, and it would be only noon. I'd go to a career fair, and the lines would be out the door. I'd send out fifty resumes, and I'd get one reply. And no, this was not during the recession. So ... why would anyone think an academic job search is any different? Why would I expect special treatment simply because I now have a PhD? Unsurprisingly, most of these PhD naysayers went to grad school in their early 20s. Their first job market was the academic job market. They have an absolutely ridiculous attitude about non-academic endeavors. They romanticized the academic world before they went into it--and now they romanticize everything but.

No one's every going to say they googled you, not to you or to anyone else. They're just going to google you and quietly make up their minds about you. It's going to be the first impression they have about you. As far as the application season, you're probably safe with your facebook profile pic--a professor would have to be very bored to hunt them down. But still ... if you're transitioning out of undergrad, it's time to start being an adult. I don't know what kind of pic we're talking about here--if it's merely quirky or flat-out embarrassing--but unprofessional facebook pictures are not cute and they do not make you an authentic individual. They're evidence that you're still stuck in an undergrad mentality. Also, keep in mind, members of your incoming grad school cohort DO have a lot of time on their hands, and DO spend time on facebook, and they will look you up on facebook shortly after (or perhaps even before) meeting you for the first time. Please remember that grad school is part of the adult world, not an extension of undergrad. Grad students strive hard to be taken seriously by professors. The snowflakey behaviors that make you endearing to other undergrads could make you a pariah among your grad cohort. I would judge a fellow grad student pretty hard if he or she had a profile pick of kicking a puppy or playing beer pong with their bros. I just ... don't want that person in my program.

Well, I don't think it's ever wise to have an unprofessional FB profile pic anyway. Seriously, just get a new one. I assume you're an undergrad? Start projecting a more professional online image now.

I have never liked tweed jackets. I have always been okay with erudite rubbish. Newsflash: The rest of the world works. I don't know why you thought that professors and grad students were somehow so exceptional that they could opt out of capitalism. Moreover, I don't know anyone who goes to grad school thinking that they're going to opt out of hard work, low wages, and an unstable job market. I think your expectations about grad school were almost as high as your opinion of yourself.

It really depends on what your motivation would be for doing a PhD. What do you see yourself doing in ten years? Do you secretly imagine yourself at an institution that's more research-focused? And more importantly, do you have a burning desire to write conference papers, articles, a dissertation? I'll be frank: The PhD is not a kind experience for people who *just* like to teach. To get through the "meat" of the PhD--exams, prospectus, and dissertation--you must absolutely LOVE writing and research. A lot of people ultimately end up at teaching-focused universities, but they still had to write and defend dissertations in order to get there. In that sense, a PhD is not the kind of degree you can just wander your way through in the hopes of getting to the other side. You really have to be intrinsically motivated and driven by your research. If you are going to do the PhD thing, I would recommend doing it rather quickly. As you get older, it gets more and more difficult to leave a well-paying job for a stipend. And there is a lot of age discrimination with both adcoms and job search committees. (It's the dirty little secret no one talks about very much--programs prefer to accept younger candidates into their programs, and schools like to hire younger faculty.)

As others have emphasized, $10k is low in this day and age. And $10k in exchange for a 2/2 load is really extreme. As a point of comparison, I live in a cheap area of the country, and I think the MFA students start out at about $14k for 1/1.

This is one instance where having high test scores is essential. High test scores can offset a lackluster undergrad GPA. Also, because you had a mitigating circumstance (one that is sympathetic and I assume has been resolved), you might want to address the issue somewhere in your application. But you have to proceed carefully here--you don't want to draw too much attention to the issue or make it seem like you're making excuses. You definitely want to ask a recommender for their advice or, better yet, have a recommender address it for you in a letter.

Two classes per semester is considered a rather heavy load. I have taught two classes per semester myself, and believe me, your writing time goes out the window. Teaching is extremely time consuming, especially if you are doing it for the first time. Most TAs I know do not have outside jobs. Most find that the stipend they earn is adequate to cover basic living expenses, minus anything fancy. What programs are you looking into? I would strongly recommend only applying to programs that will provide an adequate stipend for a moderate amount of teaching--usually a 1/1 load.

OP, your student has some serious entitlement issues. I also don't think an instructor is a "complete moron" for "failing to communicate" (whatever that means) the reason behind an A-. I always give A- students some tips on improving, but often the difference between an A and an A- is rather abstract--style, for instance, or originality ... or the fact that other students simply wrote *better* papers with the same prompt. I do the best I can in trying to convey my reasoning behind a grade ... but seriously, an A- is not a grade that needs to be justified to the ends of the earth. To say that one needs to justify an A- is to assume that an A grade is the default--that everyone starts off as an A student until proven otherwise. And that's not the case. Unfortunately, many of our students DO feel that an A is the default grade ... and that's why we get whiny emails over winter break.

Humility does not get one very far in grad school. In fact, it's a kiss of death. Round up.

Temple has a really bad reputation for jerking people around about funding. See this thread from a few years ago: There are some real horror stories floating around about funding at Temple English.

Some things that students always, always complain about: -The reading. It's always too much (even when it's very little) and it's always boring. -The length of class. Class is always too long and not entertaining enough. -Grading. It's always "subjective" from their point of view, or based on whether or not you like them. -The workload. You're always asking too much of them. -Tests and quizzes. How dare actually hold them accountable for doing the reading! -Attendance policies. If you actually expect your students to arrive on time for class (and count them absent when they're not there), you're going to hear about it. If you're getting complaints like this--congratulations, you're a college teacher. And your supervisors and colleagues are going to understand that you're a good teacher with standards, so of course you're not going to be popular.

I think this is very good and honest advice. And let me add that there ARE plenty of funded MA programs out there. It's not as though the only choices are to pay top dollar for an MA, swing admission to a PhD program, or forgo graduate school altogether. There are lots of schools that will admit you to a terminal MA program and provide you with a full tuition waiver and stipend. For this reason alone, I can't understand justifying taking on $30 or $60 thousand in debt just to do an MA at a prestigious university. I know that paying for an MA at a top university has worked out for some people. I know someone who, in her words, "blew tons of money" getting a degree from Oxford, and later ended up entertaining multiple offers from Ivy PhD programs. But acceptance to a top PhD program STILL doesn't necessarily translate into guaranteed job offers at the end of your program--and truth be told, the starting salary for most assistant professors is only around $50k (if that), not exactly the windfall you'll need to square things with your creditors. And most people in this market are spending at least a year--if not two or three--languishing on the job market without the protection of school and with very little income. In that sense, borrowing really heavily means taking quite a risk.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Buffalo uses GREs as a cut-off as rigorously as anyone else. I have it on pretty good faith that the committee doesn't read an application if its numbers fall below a certain score. Just like everyone else, Buffalo gets a lot of applicants, and they have to sort through them somehow. You're not going to get your application discussed at that contentious meeting unless you've already been vetted. My advice is to just get the scores up. Seriously. They matter. With grade inflation at an all-time high, GREs are quickly replacing GPAs and resumes as an indication of a student's intellectual performance. Get them up. No, they won't decide whether you get admited--but they will decide whether you get read.

To be honest, I'm not sure if anyone ever overcomes their fears completely. I still have a moment of nervousness before I step into a classroom no matter what point in the semester. I don't think this ever goes away. But here are some things I did: -A ton of lesson planning. You know those professors who go into their classes and ad-lib or lecture off the top of their heads? Yeah, that's not going to happen when you first start teaching. I compensated for my nervousness by obsessively overplanning my lessons--writing detailed lecture notes, structuring every moment of the class, and developing activities for the students to do. -Going along with that, you'll want to keep the class student-centered. Group work has its downsides, but it can be a savior when you first start teaching. It gives you a little "break" from the spotlight and requires that the students generate ideas, which means that you don't have to carry the whole class. If you're teaching composition, then in-class writing can also be beneficial. Have them write for the first ten or fifteen minutes and then discuss what they wrote. Or, if the discussion slows to a crawl, have them write about what they're thinking. -Know that you will have bad days, especially at first. Don't obsess over it. Don't take it personally when your students don't participate or don't act as you think they should. -Relatedly, don't care more about your students' educations than they do. Do your job well, but don't get sucked into thinking that you are personally responsible for your students' intellectual development and that you must make them care at all costs. You are a TA. Your responsibility is mainly to yourself. -Try to find someone in your program that you can confide in--preferably someone who is sympathetic and has some teaching experience. However, use your discretion here. You don't want to unload your problems onto someone who will blab to everyone that you're having "teaching issues." (I know this from experience.) -If you can, observe someone else's teaching. I found this helpful. (I also found it comforting--I wasn't as bad a teacher as I thought.) -Try to build a rapport with students by having them into your office for one-on-one conferences. If it's possible for you to do so, hold conferences in place of class. (You don't want to overburden yourself with a bunch of extraneous meetings.) -Above all--and I can't stress this enough--do not lose sight of the fact that you are a graduate student and you are there to get a degree. Do not sacrifice your own education for teaching. When you first start teaching, you will probably spend more time than you should lesson planning and grading. However, resist the urge to prioritize teaching and to pin all your self-worth on how well your students are enjoying your class.

Teaching a small class of 22 is a fairly standard workload, even for a first-time TA. I recommend that you just jump into it and get it over with. You might find someone willing to help you out (and I don't know if this is regular practice at your school) but I have to say that, from my experience, such a thing seems somewhat unusual. Your peers will also be struggling with their own workloads; they might not have time to coordinate co-teaching with you. They will be learning their own students' names, grading their students' work, prepping their own lessons .... I mean, think about it. Do you want to spend your own precious time (which should be spent on your coursework, by the way) learning 22 additional names and helping out with lesson plans that aren't for your own students? Do you really want to spend an extra hour or two in someone else's classroom when you should be devoting that time to your own work? I sympathize with you, believe me. When I started TAing a class of 20 at age 22, I had a crippling fear of public speaking and raging social anxiety. But I had to teach--it was part of my contract. I still remember my first day--my hands shook almost uncontrollably as I passed out the syllabus. (And my students were not nice, and they were not sympathetic.) But I had to just do it and get it over with and become good at it because I had no other choice. And trust me, it does get easier very quickly, a lot more quickly than you might expect.

Just relax. Flaky people are a dime a dozen in academia, and your professor has probably seen it all. Presumably, he also deals with undergrads on a daily basis, and undergrads regularly ask questions that are downright inane. I constantly get emails from undergrads asking questions that range from the completely unnecessary (a quick glance at the syllabus will tell you where my office is, what my office hours are, what is due tomorrow, what you missed last week, how to get onto the class website, what time the class starts, how many points the final is worth, and on and on) to the downright stupid (are you a hard grader? am I going to miss anything if I don't come to class next week? can you give me the answer to the question on this test? what happens if I "accidentally" plagiarize? I saw your rate my professor page, and I was wondering if what people wrote about you is true?). Relax. Your professor has already forgotten your gaffe.

I wasn't talking about adjuncting after you get your PhD. Unforunately, most newly-minted PhDs end up adjuncting at some point or another while they wait out the job market. At this point in your career, adjuncting is probably inevitable, and you really can't (and perhaps shouldn't) run off and get a job unrelated to academia if you want to stay current. And no, adjuncting doesn't make you more hirable. If you adjunct long enough, you may actually see your chances of getting hired diminish. Adjuncting might be necessary, but it doesn't guarantee that you "bring more" to a department or stay current. It means you teach a s-load of classes for low pay. If anything, this can cause you to fall behind in your research and be less "current." If you think it's difficult to go to conferences and get things published as a grad student, wait until you're teaching three or four times that load. Not to mention the fact that adjuncts don't get conference funding and other grad student benefits. The OP's question, however, was about the choice to adjunct between the MA and the PhD. It is my recommendation one shouldn't adjunct at this point, and that it really won't do anything for your PhD application. Taking a year or two to work instead--to make better money and get benefits--is probably the wiser choice in this situation for the OP's sake and for the sake of everyone else in this profession. Universities hire adjuncts because they can, because it's a buyer's market right now. Let's not rush to join that party. I'm not saying that one person's choice not to adjunct can really make much of a difference, but seriously, let's save the adjuncting for when we absolutely have to do it because we have no other choice. And ComeBackZinc is absolutely right--you guys are overthinking this. Your application to PhD programs is about your application--not about your work experience or your teaching experience. I know it's tempting to try to find a smoking gun for why you didn't get in (was my GRE too low? were my interests not a good "fit"? if I had taught more would they notice me?), but your teaching is really the last thing to focus on right now. In fact, many universities reward their best applicants with time "off" from teaching. Most people in my program didn't go straight through. Most of my professors didn't go straight through. However, many of my friends who did go straight through regret it. They feel like they put all their eggs in the academic basket--at 30ish they've never worked before, they're poor and in debt, they've never navigated a job market before, and so they need to find a job this year or bust. You are lucky to be protected by a union. Many grad students aren't. Some states even have laws against grad student unions. Just an FYI.

I'm sorry, but I can't recommend that an already-exploited population (grad students) actually sink MORE years into exploitive, minimum-wage-paying work. And I don't agree that time in grad school="lowest common denominator" or bare minimum experience. The training you get in grad school is much more extensive than what's expected of people training for other professions. Few other professions require you to produce a book-length manuscript, publish articles, and teach several classes before you get your first entry-level position. This takes most people 5-7 years. I don't think that we should recommend that people tack on another year or two of low-paying, exploitive work to this total before they even get accepted. And the PhD might be a job in itself, but it certainly isn't paid like one. Grad students are classified as "apprentices" by most universities, not professionals. This conveniently prevents grad students from unionizing, among other things. Moreover, I don't think that those who held well-paying jobs represent the lowest common denominator in this profession.

Are you serious? Wow, I mean ... just wow. I didn't know that anyone could be punished for actually choosing to have a life outside academia for a few years. That just smells like discrimination to me. Despite all that, I would actually recommend working a full-time job while you apply. As others have said, the benefits are better, and when you adjunct, you're pretty much contributing to a very exploitive system. I'm not knocking adjuncting--I'll probably be adjuncting next year myself--but I would not recommend doing it unless you HAVE to (i.e., no jobs anywhere else, or you're on the academic job market). Don't give the milk away for free unless you absolutely must. I also think that it's good to get experience in another field. I worked in a different profession before returning to graduate school, and I feel very reassured by that, like I have some experience navigating a job market and working in a field that's completely unrelated. If worse comes to worse and I fail to get an academic job, I can try to return to my previous field. As for applications, in my experience it didn't matter at all. Teaching experience (or lack thereof) doesn't seem to be a big factor in the decision to admit a prospective graduate student. I've seen people get into top programs who have never taught at all. Hell, I have a friend at a top program who, two years into her degree, still has yet to have any interaction whatsoever with an undergraduate student. Don't be afraid to work outside academia. You will be better for it on the other end.

Don't discount the GRE's importance just yet. While it's true that numbers are the "least important" part of your application, they still matter. And the GRE can be your best friend when it comes to compensating for a lackluster undergrad career or a degree from an unknown school. My friend credits his 1580 composite for taking the attention off his 3.2 GPA. Beyond that, the GRE can sometimes be crucial to securing fellowship money. But, as others have said, your writing will be the most important. Since you're applying to such high-ranking schools (even the mid-range ones are competitive), you need to be able to articulate how your project really, really makes you stand out among 500 applicants, many of whom have degrees from prestigious colleges, high test scores, and award-winning writing samples.