ZeChocMoose

It is not clear to me what happened. Did she copy one of your posts word for word? Or did you discuss your answers beforehand and she decided to post what you discussed? If it is the former - I would think that it would be obvious to your professor that she is just copying you and not adding anything to the discussion. Time stamps are your friend here. I am not sure why you think you would get in trouble for it. If it is the later - I would suggest not discussing your answers with her before you post. Sure - you can tell her that you are upset that she posted what you both talked about (if you want) - but I would probably just let it go and chalk this up to learning that she is someone that I wouldn't trust in the future with my academic ideas. It is a fairly cheap lesson, honestly, given that this is just an online forum and she didn't steal your idea for a research project or something more serious.

Have you thought about academic affairs? They might be more friendly towards you given your previous experiences. Some other areas to look at are: writing centers or a center of learning and teaching since you have previous experience teaching/tutoring. Academic advising might be another option but sometimes can be tricky depending on the university in terms of degree requirements - sometimes they want a master's in a related area that you are advising on. Have you thought about advising undergraduate students in a school of education? My good friend worked as an academic advisor in a school of education advising future teachers and he really liked it. You can leverage your previous teaching experience too which I think would make you competitive. Since you have community service experience through AmeriCorps- do you have any interest in working with college students in a volunteering/civic engagement office? RE: AmeriCorps. I do know you can get a bonus stipend if you have exhausted the ed award options. It is not as large though and maybe not make financial sense since the living stipend is low.

To me, the go to job in your situation is an admission counselor. That being said - admission has very cyclical hiring cycle. Right now, they are still crafting their class so to speak and doing a bunch of open houses to yield students - but I imagine in the next couple of months you will see many postings for admission counselors because typically they like to hire and get them trained in the summer before people go on the road in the fall to start recruiting students to apply. There tends to be a bunch of turn over too because the constant travel can be difficult to maintain over several years and honestly, the pay usually isn't very good. It does get your foot in the door though and you'll gain a bunch of insight into higher ed. (I GAed in an admission office for both years of my master's degree.) Another option might be to look into AmeriCorps programs to gain experience if you find that you aren't getting anywhere on your applications. There are several programs that they offer that either place you at universities/community colleges, non-profits, or high schools (depending on the partner organization) to work with first generation and low income students to help support them to either enroll in college or complete college. Since you are interested in admission work and have experience working with high school students that might be a really great fit for you. If you go here: https://my.americorps.gov/mp/listing/publicRequestSearch.do and put in "college" in the program name box, a bunch of options will come up from all across the US. All the positions are a little different depending on the partner organization so you'll want to dig into the details on it. I did an AmeriCorps position for my first higher ed job and I was placed at a college. It was through Campus Compact and it was working in a civic engagement office in a college. I really liked it and it gave me the necessary experience to get subsequent higher ed jobs afterwards. While the pay is usually not that great - you do get an education award that you can use to either pay off loans or put towards future tuition if you want to enroll in the master's in higher ed later on. My college also paid for a portion of my rent and allowed me to eat in the dining halls for free - which was super helpful because of the low stipend I received. Although, I am not sure how common that is if you are not placed at a college.

I wouldn't drop it because I imagine this is going to come up again and again given that your advisor seems unresponsive to emails and doesn't come to the lab frequently. I like knp's script on how to proceed about asking her which method she prefers you to send those reminders. Another way I try to curtail this is the language I use in my follow up reminders. What do you say in your reminders? Usually what I do if my advisor hasn't answered my email after a week and she hasn't been in the office due to travel - I send a follow up email saying something to the effect that I sent her an email last week and I haven't heard back so I am just checking in to see if she can [state what you need your advisor to do.] This part is essential because it reminds your advisor, hey MonstersUTerp has tried to reach me already and I haven't responded - maybe I should do something about that. If the deadline is super pressing - I would call my advisor if she was not responding to my emails, hasn't been in the office, and I wasn't sure if she had even received my multiple email requests. As a grad student you need to learn how to professionally advocate for yourself and this seems like a good time as any to do it. You don't want this occur in the future especially for a high stakes opportunity such as her dropping the ball and forgetting to submit a recommendation for jobs or funding.

I also in the higher ed policy subfield and you definitely want a PhD and not an EdD. The policy subfield of higher ed is super focused on statistics, data, and research. The way that most EdDs are set up, you won't get enough research training to be competitive for jobs when you graduate assuming that you are going to try to get a policy research position. This is super broad and to be honest, I am not exactly sure what you want to study. Are you concerned about their lack of college knowledge? financial barriers? academic preparation? Lack of institutional support when they come to campus? Cultural transitions especially in the case for some international students? I suggest for you to narrow your research interests down and actively target faculty that you want to work with at schools that you want to attend. It is not clear to me how you targeted the schools that you listed in your post.

I worked for 2 years full-time before my master's in higher ed and then for 3 years full-time before my PhD. Honestly, it made me much more competitive in the admission process and I had a more solid idea of what I wanted to get out of graduate school experience. An added bonus was that I was able to get assistantships for both my master's and PhD that paid for my tuition, gave me healthcare, and a monthly livable stipend. I would recommend along with the other posters to get a job first and then think about applying for the master's if you find that you need it.

It doesn't sound like a PhD program would make that much sense for you. Usually, you would enter one because you want to learn how to become a researcher or at least be able to consume the research literature. Since you talk about wanting to be an administrator -- I think it would make much more sense to get a job in higher ed first and then think about a EdD later after you have some solid experience and know more about the direction you want to go in. Have you looked at academic advisor positions in English departments or Schools of Arts & Sciences (if they don't have professional advisors at the department level)? You should be able to leverage your MA in English and your current teaching experience into being able to advise students quite nicely especially at the school that you are currently teaching at.

I also disagree a bit with what nashville0808 has written. I sat on the admissions committee for one cycle each at my master's school and my current PhD school both in higher education. While each admission committee did the process slightly differently, it was clear to me how much faculty contact mattered. So yes, I would reach out to faculty and/or the department chair to ask how to improve your application especially given that you were interviewed at one school. That means that you were really close and it would be helpful to have those insights whether that be they didn't see you as a good fit or if you need to improve x, y, z in your application to make you more competitive compared to the other people in the pool. Publications. This is tricky. It is not really the case any more that no PhD applicants would have them or they would be rare. I sat on the committee 2 years ago and the more competitive applicants would have them or at the very least would be presenting at education conferences. Although the type of publications that would usually have is a chapter in an edited book or a lower level education journal. No one really expects that you would have a publication in one of the top education journals. Also, one year is a tight time frame to start writing an article from scratch and expect that it would accepted in time to be in on your C.V. next year. I do agree with nashville0808 that experience is critical. Everyone in my PhD program had either worked in education or an education adjacent field for at least three years -- usually a lot more with progressing levels of responsibility. Personally, I had 4 years of full-time experience in higher ed and 2 years of part-time experience in higher ed (when I was a GA as a master's student) before I applied. I ended up being on the younger side of my cohort too! Since you only have one year of experience (I think?) -- you might want to hold off for a couple cycles and then apply. You'll be much more competitive and you'll have better postgraduate outcomes too given how the field values experience so much.

Have you asked older students in your program how they have approached it? Usually in my department, you submit a 5-6 page prospectus to your potential committee members and then you meet with them each individually to talk about the project and see whether they are interested in being on your committee. I am in the process of forming mine at the moment and the way that I am approaching it is to have 1-2 who are solid on the methods and 2-3 who are solid on some aspect of the content area that I am researching. (There is some overlap among the roles and everyone is familiar enough with the method.) If my research was really theory heavy, I would probably add someone who knew my theory really well but since I am doing policy research-- theory tends to not play as large of a role. I know some of my cohort mates have added people who are good at offering emotional support when things get rough. If that is important to you - that might be something you will want to think about. But I agree that you should form a shortlist yourself and run it by your chair before you approach anyone. You want to make sure that your chair gets along with these people! You might also want to have a couple of alternatives too in case someone is not able to be your committee for various reasons. One of my cohort mates had to ask three people to secure his last committee member. And make sure you read the rules set by either your department or school so your committee will get approved.

Given that the academic job market isn't very good, I don't think it is a great idea to attend a PhD program soley to become a professor. It often leads to disappointment. The questions I would want to know is what are the non-academic job opportunities for a PhD in Sociology? If they are not good - that would give me major pause as I wouldn't want to bank on getting an academic job given the state of the market. How many years does the program guarantee funding? If it is not enough to complete the program -- what happens once you run out of funding? What is the median time of degree? I am also in a social science PhD program and they can take a fair amount of time-- 5, 6, 7+ years. I think you would want to be very sure that this makes sense for you in the future or at least reasonably sure before you attend. Alternatively - can you transfer to another department in the government that might make your happier at your job?

At my university - they now require everyone to do a background check for assistantships (RA, TA, and GA), but each individual faculty/staff member decides whether they want to hire you based on what they find on your background check. So Lab X could pass on you due to your DUIs and marijuana possession charges - but Lab Y could not care. It's hard to know.

They also might be talking about international degrees because there are some countries that have standard 3-year bachelor's degrees instead of four.

I don't think you have enough information to make a decision right now. Some questions that I would want to know is what is the funding situation and who would be your advisor at Curry. At minimum, you would want at least guarantee funding though coursework. Ideally, you would want guaranteed funding in your dissertation years too but that can vary a lot by programs. You also want to work with someone who is well aligned with the research that you want to pursue. Ideally, there would be a couple people that you are interested in working with in case you find that your working styles with your first advisor doesn't match. Since funding and advisor selection are pretty critical components of a doctoral program, I would wait until you get more information to decide. You want to enter a PhD program that is a right match for you and will be able to place you in a job that you want when you graduate. At Vanderbilt - could you get involved in research? I know in a lot of higher ed programs - faculty tend to prioritize doctoral students when it comes to research opportunities. This seems a little bit more flexible in MPP programs depending on the size of the doctoral cohort (if they have one). If you can't get involved in research, I would be hesitant to accept that offer either. Also how do you plan to pay for the other 2/3 of tuition and living expenses?

Do you need the degree? Given your constraints, the easiest seems to be find another chair and committee at your current school. You might have to switch topics to find suitable people to supervise your dissertation, but it seems like you might have to do that anyways as the legislation change may force you to do that. I am not sure why your preferred solution is to change schools. Would you switch to another online university since you are location bound? I suppose you could shop around and reach out to schools that you would want to attend, but there really isn't such thing as transferring at the doctoral level. Usually, you would have to redo the course work and qualifying exams at your new school. In my opinion that isn't worth it unless you can't find anyone at your current institution to direct your dissertation. And if you can't find a replacement chair and committee then I would also imagine it is going to be difficult to get recommendations to switch to a new school which leads me back to -- do you really need the degree? Since you are already gainfully employed - how much trouble is it worth it to you personally to finish? Could you just leave with the master's? It might be better to cut your losses now if finding another chair and committee is going to be impossible.

I agree with the other posters - you really want to work in the field for a couple years before you go back and get your MA in student affairs/higher ed. Usually, the way that programs are set up, it assumes that you have some full time experience in the field and I am not sure how much you get out of it if you don't. And similar to teaching, a lot of student affairs professionals leave the field within the first couple years on the job so you want to make sure you at least like working in an university before you invest more time and possibly money in another degree. Since you have prior residential life experience, I would look at residence hall director jobs. I would also look at admission counselor positions because they are targeted towards people right after their bachelor's degree. Usually, it is the easiest to get a position at your alma mater or a school comparable to your alma mater. You may also find that you don't need a master's in student affairs/higher ed to progress. The field values experience a lot and since you already have a master's - it might not be necessary depending on the school you work at.

I would suggest another tactic. Instead of making a plea for these group conversations to be in English because I don't think that is going to get you what you want, I would instead try to invite a couple of your cohort mates for 1-on-1 outings to get to know them better. It could simply be coffee, drinks, lunch, attending a school event together, some hobby you know he/she likes, etc. Basically, if you can have a couple of these "dates" with at least 2-3 cohort mates, you'll get to know them better and might help ease the awkwardness in group situations. The key point though is they need to be 1-on-1 so you'll mutually get to know each other better. Another suggestion is that you can try to start another conversation with some of your cohort mates that don't seem to be participating much in the group conversation that you can't understand. Usually when a group becomes a certain size, it's difficult for everyone to be equally engaged so find the people that don't look like they are actively participating and try to engage them in a conversation. This is much easier if you have already had 1-on-1 time with them and you know something about them. One huge caveat is sometimes this works and sometimes this is a huge bust. If I was going to try this, I would probably say something like "Hey X - did you read that y article? Wasn't it [insert some adjective]? Did you get the part about [insert something here]? What did you think about the Z part?" Target the least participatory person in the group conversation and go from there. If s/he answers back - awesome. If s/he doesn't engage - I might drop it and try another person on another day. Good luck!

Education is one of those fields where the PhD can translate into industry jobs and academic jobs fairly easily. This is super unusual compared to more traditional fields especially humanities as t_ruth mentions in hu post. In my subfield of higher ed, more PhD recipients get industry jobs as they are more plentiful and the pay tends to be better. Usually, people will work in higher ed administration, education policy research groups, state systems of higher ed, education non-profits, federal or state departments of ed, educ lobbying agencies, educ consulting, educ membership organizations for specific types of institutions, education test agencies, etc. Honestly, the list goes on and on.

I agree with your dept chair -- you should really switch. Do you want to work for the professor that the dept chair suggested? If so - I would meet with that person and get it sorted out. Once that is done, I would meet with your PI and tell her that you are leaving the lab. I honestly can't think of a good reason for you to stay. Your PI, even if she does get an extension, will have no power in the dept and probably is not going to be a great resource for you on the market as people will know that she has been denied tenure. You don't want to be affiliated with that as people are going to assume you won't be able to hack it either. It sucks and it is harsh - but protect yourself. I would just tell her straight forwardly and professionally that you have thought about it, but you have decided to leave the lab. I really don't think you need to go into all the reasons as that might be awkward and uncomfortable. I would then switch to talking about when is your last day and how she wants you to handle the transition of the projects i.e. who to give them to and how she wants you to document their current status. Your PI unfortunately seems in denial about the whole thing which I am sure is awful and horrible and throwing her life into chaos -- but that is not for you to solve or even really deal with. I would believe your dept chair that she is not getting an extension. I won't believe her when she says that your current unfinished projects are only going to take a year to publish. Unless your review process is super speedy, this seems really, really unlikely especially since it sounds like she hasn't had much success with getting articles published and neither one of them are complete. My advice is to mitigate this fall out by getting out asap and joining a lab that has a successful track record.

Right now, you have two hypotheticals that haven't come true yet and there are so many ways that this could play out so it is hard to predict what is going to happen with the information that you currently have. You may (a) get a job offer and get a grad school acceptance, (b) only get a job offer, (c) only get a grad school acceptance, or (d) get neither in the next couple of months. Personally, I would keep on applying for jobs and putting in grad applications and see how this plays out. In my experience, some fields take a long time to hire so you could know about your grad school acceptances before you get any job offers. You may also get grad school acceptances, but decide not to attend because you didn't like the program when you visited or the financially aid package was weak. To answer your question - usually in entry-level, office type jobs (assuming that is the type you are applying to) they assume you are going to stay for at least a year because the time it takes to train and get a person up to speed takes a while. Usually, a good rule of thumb is it takes a person about a year to really understand their job for entry-level positions and longer if your job is more complicated and has more responsibility/autonomy. I personally wouldn't take a full-time permanent entry-level job if I knew before hand that I had to leave in 5 months. If I wasn't sure about my grad school decision yet -- you just have to make the best decision with the info that you have and be prepared to deal with the fall out if your work does take it badly. What you could do instead if you do know that you'll be headed off to grad school in a couple months is to apply to temp jobs. There is no assumption that you are going to stay for long term and it allows you to make decent money. I did this for 4 months after I graduated from my bachelor's and before my full-time position was available in October. I worked as a research assistant in a hospital and it worked out really great as the PI was only looking for a short-term person. You could also apply to either retail or food service positions as there are much more turn over in those fields, there is not generally the assumption that entry-level people stay very long term, and it will allow you to make some money. Please note that all this advice is under the assumption that you don't need the money from the job to survive. If you do need the money to put a roof over your head and to eat since you are not being financially supported by family/partner/friends, my advice would be to take the job as basic survival is more important than professional concerns about leaving a job too early.

Reif - I put my comments below in red underneath your questions:

The hiring committee for a mid-level to upper level job will be looking for a skillset that you can't gain in part-time student positions. Don't get me wrong - student positions are great for introducing you to the field and giving you a taste of particular subareas of higher ed. However, hiring managers for mid-level to upper level positions will want to see that you have a track record of making difficult and successful decisions that affect the unit, supervising professional staff members, working with faculty and staff members in other units, and managing a budget for at least a project - if not a subsection of the unit. Part-time student positions just don't have that level of authority attached to them - nor should they! First and foremost you are a student and since most offices understand that and the fact that you come to the position with limited experience, they set up those positions to be fairly straightforward and manageable while you are attending school full-time. At the doctoral level - the assistantships tend to be either research or teaching positions which neither one is going to help you gain more administrative experience. Sometimes you can get a graduate assistantship as a part-time staff member, but generally you are considered to be entry level and not given the authority you need to gain the experience that mid-level to upper level hiring managers are looking for. What you might want to do is look into working full-time while doing an EdD part-time. In EdDs, you tend to learn a lot more practical skills than you would in a PhD that is more applicable for administration. Honestly, if you don't want to be an independent researcher or at least train to become one, completing a PhD might not be worth it.

You sound like you are off to a good start -- but you'll need about 3 - 5 years of full-time experience to get into a competitive Higher Ed PhD program. The typical PhD student for Higher Education is usually in his/her late 20's to early 40's. (I was 29 when I started my program and I was one of the younger students in my cohort.) It is not a discipline where you go straight through (unlike other social science disciplines) as the field will expect that you'll have a decent amount of professional experience to draw from in the classroom and to shape your research interests. It is also would be kinda odd to be job searching for an admin job with a PhD and no full-time experience. I imagine you would have a hard time finding a job as the field really values experience! I would suggest to try to get a job in admissions and see how you like it before deciding that you want to go back for a PhD. It can be a long haul. Sure, send me a PM and I'll answer your questions about my program. I'm not familiar with the two programs that you mention. I know much more about the higher ed programs either on the East or West Coasts because I applied to a bunch of them, lived on both coasts, and worked with graduates of those programs. For the Midwest, I am only familiar with some programs in Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana because I know people who have attended or are attending them and/or I have met graduate students from those programs at academic conferences. The important thing at the PhD level though is you want to apply to programs that have faculty members doing the type of research that you want to do so you can learn from them. Ideally, you'll want a couple faculty with similar research interests so you are not in a difficult place if that faculty member decides to leave/retire. In both of my master's and PhD programs, faculty members have left/retired. You'll be miserable and have a really difficult time trying to complete a dissertation without someone who knows your literature well enough to supervise your dissertation. And you'll want a faculty member who uses similar research methods as you do. These don't have to be the same people, but both are really important for a happy PhD student.

Higher Ed is one of those disciplines where a lot of schools have departments (I imagine) because there is a demand from students and they are relatively cheap to run compared to other programs in the academy i.e. engineering and other STEM disciplines. It does mean that there tends to be a huge range of quality among the programs. You mention that you want to be a higher ed administrator, but that is a pretty vague job title that can encompass a lot of different areas. Which specific area do you want to go into (e.g. student activities, academic affairs, admissions, residential life, institutional research, etc.)? Usually to become an administrator you don't need a PhD - just a master's degree and relevant experience. You may need a PhD eventually if you are looking to be the director of an office or a vice president level administrator especially at large research intensive universities, but you are not going to jump out of a PhD program and into one of those positions unless you came in with pretty substantial amount of experience before the PhD. To get into a competitive PhD program in higher ed - you'll typically need a master's degree and a good 3-5 years of experience at least somewhat related to education. Do you have this? If not, it would be better for you to look at master's programs. To answer your question about employability -- I am currently in a well regarded Higher Ed PhD program. As far as I have seen (being here 4+ years now), PhD students that want to go the administration route do well on the job market. In fact, some decide to leave after they reach candidacy and finish their dissertations from afar because they either get recruited by different organizations or because a dream position opens up and they just can't pass it up. We do tend to have small cohorts (8 - 10 people) and PhD students come in with good amount of higher ed experience. If you decide to go to a non-selective Higher Ed PhD program -- I am not sure how well they do on the job market especially if their experience is weak to begin with.

In this limited resource environment, I would take a state systems approach to this question and go back to the 1980's when public institutions within state systems were doing a better job at centralizing their governance and degree programs. It might not make much sense for all or even half of the public universities in the same state to offer the same PhD program especially if the combined number of academic and industry jobs for that degree is low. Instead of reducing cohort sizes of programs, I would suggest to just directly cut PhD programs at some schools especially if the program is doing a poor job of socializing their students and teaching them to become independent scholars/researchers. How to implement it? While I would advocate for this approach, I also think this would be a chaotic mess given the research I have done on why universities close their programs. Sometimes it has nothing to do with quality and more to do with political power of the department chair and/or faculty. How to mitigate this? One option would be to not replace T/TT lines when faculty retire in the program and not accept any more incoming students. While this could be the "easiest" method, it would be a long death and I imagine create a pretty poor environment for the current students who are trying to get the hell out and graduate so this doesn't seem like the greatest solution either. And what to do with private universities? This solution doesn't address them because it is more difficult to change institutional behavior for these type of institutions because they don't rely on the state for money so some of the typical policy leverage points are gone. However, if there were one or two pioneering private institutions who took up this idea and saw good results, hopefully they could influence other private institutions to adopt this policy and eliminate PhD programs in their institutions that are struggling. I am not particular hopeful this will happen unless there is some type of national event that spurs universities to change. Right now, some institutions are reducing their class sizes and focusing on time-to-degree issues in their doctoral programs, but it tends to be the more elite institutions who have the resources to do this. It also tends to be piecemeal efforts that don't necessarily think about unattended consequences of some of their policies.

This would be hard to answer without knowing more about your skill set and experience. Which statistical programs do you know right now ( R, STATA, SPSS, SAS)? How well do you know them? How advanced is your statistical knowledge (i.e. what models can you run)? Usually, bare minimum is multiple regression, but now I am also seeing psychometric and econometric models wanted in certain types of entry level job postings usually measurement for psychometric models and policy analysis for econometric models. How much experience do you have translating statistical analyses into language that anyone can understand? Essential at any level, but really important as an entry level analyst. What type of research experience did you have in undergrad and how closely does that relate to education research? If you worked in a psyc lab that is probably not going to be particularly helpful unless you were the one running the data because the research skill set can be quite different. (I worked in a neuroendocrinology lab in undergrad -- not particularly helpful to the educ policy research I do now.) If you are not able to answer most of these questions - I would say forgoing the master's degree is probably not possible/advisable. Typically, most people will have just finished their master's that are looking for an entry level educ research/policy jobs. (You also will see some PhDs too looking for entry level positions in more competitive areas as well.)