Statistics for English MA or PhD??

[scratchedrecord]

So I've been working with a professional admissions advisor to help me with my applications, and one of the things they recently recommended was to take graduate classes as a non-degree-seeking student, with a STRONG recommendation to take a statistics course. Their reasoning was that, in a graduate program, I'll always be working with data, and so taking statistics will be necessary no matter what program I'm working in.

The thing is, though... I'm applying to English programs. There's no data collection. There's no experiments to be conducted. What am I going to do, calculate the standard deviation of the length of Henry James novels? It feels to me that my advisor has a fundamental misunderstanding of what exactly English research is, and while I'm sure taking a statistics course would certainly be helpful in very specific instances, I can't imagine that it could come in much handy in a humanities program. I'm open to being wrong, but I just can't see it. Is there any justification for why statistics might be helpful in an English program?

[WildeThing]

In all but the rarest of exceptions, no; it will be a useless competence (from a professional/academic perspective). 

[Indecisive Poet]

I could see it being helpful if you are planning to go into the digital humanities, but even then it is very far from necessary. I would not spend your time doing that. If you feel you have major gaps in your coursework record somewhere in the major fields of English literature (medieval, early modern, C18, C19, C20/contemporary, a general literary theory course) then you might audit a graduate course in that field to boost your CV/educational background. But as long as you have taken a range of classes in English already, I don't think that even that's necessary.

Edited October 26, 2020 by Indecisive Poet

[Ramus]

I would split the recommender from the recommendation.

Yes, I think you're right to assume this advisor doesn't know the standards of English departments. The reason they're recommending you take statistics is that it's a prerequisite for a lot of graduate programs: PhD students in political science, sociology, economics, psychology, public policy, education, history, business, and engineering all routinely take stats. Statistics are often fundamental to their methodologies, and it's often on the basis of their methodological (and thus statistical) knowledge that they gain employment after graduation. Take it from me: I work full-time in a department of data scientists, most of whom are ex-academics in the aforementioned fields.

Now, setting aside the fact that your recommender doesn't know diddly about the norms of English grad programs, I think you should take the recommendation more seriously than those posters above have. There are a couple of reasons for that, one relatively short-term and one relatively long-term. The short-term consideration is that there are a ton of opportunities to do serious work with big data in English literature, and there is comparatively little competition for this kind of work because of the generally accepted math-phobia among humanities types. The technical threshold for doing that kind of work isn't nearly as high as you would think; a few Coursera classes and a stats class and you'd be set.

The longer-term consideration is more important: the latest estimates are that less than 10% of humanities PhDs will secure tenure-track positions after they graduate, and so humanities grad students need to think early and often about how they can build out a transferrable job toolkit. (And, believe it or not, employers don't really give a shit if you've taken literary theory or not.) Stats courses may not seem that attractive or interesting now, but they're exactly the kind of thing that can give you a leg up in the non-academic job market. Even if you're not ready to accept the near impossibility of getting a good, secure academic job, it won't kill you to hedge your bets a little and build out a more comprehensive skillset. I know that I wish I had when I was in grad school. 

Edited October 27, 2020 by Ramus

[Bumblebea]

15 hours ago, Ramus said:

I would split the recommender from the recommendation.

Yes, I think you're right to assume this advisor doesn't know the standards of English departments. The reason they're recommending you take statistics is that it's a prerequisite for a lot of graduate programs: PhD students in political science, sociology, economics, psychology, public policy, education, history, business, and engineering all routinely take stats. Statistics are often fundamental to their methodologies, and it's often on the basis of their methodological (and thus statistical) knowledge that they gain employment after graduation. Take it from me: I work full-time in a department of data scientists, most of whom are ex-academics in the aforementioned fields.

Now, setting aside the fact that your recommender doesn't know diddly about the norms of English grad programs, I think you should take the recommendation more seriously than those posters above have. There are a couple of reasons for that, one relatively short-term and one relatively long-term. The short-term consideration is that there are a ton of opportunities to do serious work with big data in English literature, and there is comparatively little competition for this kind of work because of the generally accepted math-phobia among humanities types. The technical threshold for doing that kind of work isn't nearly as high as you would think; a few Coursera classes and a stats class and you'd be set.

The longer-term consideration is more important: the latest estimates are that less than 10% of humanities PhDs will secure tenure-track positions after they graduate, and so humanities grad students need to think early and often about how they can build out a transferrable job toolkit. (And, believe it or not, employers don't really give a shit if you've taken literary theory or not.) Stats courses may not seem that attractive or interesting now, but they're exactly the kind of thing that can give you a leg up in the non-academic job market. Even if you're not ready to accept the near impossibility of getting a good, secure academic job, it won't kill you to hedge your bets a little and build out a more comprehensive skillset. I know that I wish I had when I was in grad school. 

I was actually going to recommend the same thing. For one thing: statistics may not seem useful for an English PhD, but I've seen some innovative dissertations in the past few years that make use of quantitative analysis and data mining. (If you're doing a project on, say, how a periodical changed across time, then statistical analysis may indeed be helpful. English people do tend to be math phobic, so a lot us are "blown away" by someone who can combine math with literary analysis.)

And for another thing--yes, quantitative analysis is a hugely desirable skill in the nonacademic workforce and the nonacademic workforce is, in fact, where most people are headed. The 10% figure everyone's been quoting for how many PhDs will get tenure-track is probably a generous estimate--I've heard the percentage is more like 6%. 

[madandmoonly]

Yeah, no.