Questions for Current PhD Applicants

[kurayamino]

49 minutes ago, echo449 said:

Yeah, I'll just chime in to say that I would be worse of financially out of a PhD program right now, & that the insistence that a PhD is a uniformly bad career move is classist and awfully presumptuous of other people's financial situations. I would note, though, that I do in my personal life routinely discourage people applying to PhDs from applying to schools with stipends on the lower end. 

Yes. I agree with both of you.**BHR's quote got lost in the shuffle** The job isn't the carrot at the end of the stick that I'm constantly walking towards because grad school IS the job right now. I make more money and have better security than I have in my entire fifteen years of working. I view what I'm doing as a six year job that pays me pretty well and which, miracle of miracles, I happen to actually like. There was not one moment that I walked into this deluded and at the end, when I get my PhD and move on to do anything else in the world, I'll have gotten an education which means something to me personally.

 

 

 

Edited March 22, 2016 by kurayamino
Formatting

[A blighted one]

As a few others have said, graduate school allows me to escape (at the very least, for 4-6 years) working a job that I hate and which pays me so little that I am far below the poverty line. In exchange, I get paid more than 2.5 times the money and am able to do something I enjoy and that is genuinely valuable for both myself and my students. I wouldn't choose to go back to being a "customer service representative" in the food service industry, nor back to being "the help" as a nanny even if it paid more than graduate school--which it obviously doesn't.

Graduate school, for me, is an insane opportunity and a privilege that I don't take for granted. I'm not even expecting a job out of this at the end, and I don't care. Sheerly for the stability and personal fulfillment it provides, graduate school is a great option for me (and many others).

Edited March 22, 2016 by A blighted one

[__________________________]

Word.  Right on.  This is refreshing to read.  Nice to feel a little bit less crazy for once; that I'm not the only one who pretty much felt there was not really so much to lose in doing this.  

I'm not going to assume OP is an asshole since his/her responses have been infinitely more civil than previous people starting similar threads.  I'm going to assume OP is just genuinely curious to know people's thoughts going into this.  It's a legitimate question to ask why people dedicate 5-10 years of intense academic study for the possibility of not having any job to show for that sort of training. You don't go get an M.B.A. and then decide to use those people skills to go and be a social worker.  Other programs may vary widely, but I know for damned sure that the only sort of "professionalization" that my program really offers is for academic work.  And I accept that.  It's what I signed up for.  I feel bad for people who enter programs like mine with no job experience outside of academia, and/or who come from families of academics that might expect them to follow that same path.  That's the kind of background that my knee-jerk reaction would be to judge them for having more privileges and opportunities than me, but whose troubles are no less significant or valid.  Because if you count on a program like mine to get you a job in academia because you feel like you literally have no other option, that sucks. 

So, I mean, while I relate to a lot of these stories, it doesn't mean that I'm not nervous about what happens post-doctorate.  It doesn't mean I'm just so enamored with this amazing opportunity and privilege that I'm blind to the reality that I'm giving a lot of years and work to this program that probably won't get me the job that it's so myopically preparing me for.  Nor does it mean that I'm actively preparing a "Plan B" with daily or weekly dedication or have a solid plan.  So it's still scary, yes.  Grad school is cool, but it's also super stressful and alienating, even demoralizing, for kind of intense stretches of time.  I don't think it should be demonized, but I also really don't think it should be overly romanticized.  

Edited March 23, 2016 by mollifiedmolloy

[silenus_thescribe]

When you see that another forum with this topic is kicking off...

[ExponentialDecay]

Me personally, I'm just sick of people making the same tired shitpost on these forums and then justifying their behavior with "if I help just one lost soul from jumping into the pit of eternal despair, it will all have been worth it". I prefer the notion that OP has nefarious motives, because the alternative is that they are a 30 year old Doctor of Philosophy who seriously believes that trolling the internet counts as activism, mentorship, or guidance. OP and the ass-clowns that will certainly follow: if you're so totes passionate about saving people from going to gradschool, why don't you grab one of the gradschool-bound undergraduates who respect you so much as a teacher and mentor as evidenced by the teaching rewards you brag about, and take them out to coffee, ask them about their future plans, offer them your help (which, as evidenced by anyone who participates in this forum, anyone who is applying to PhDs sorely needs), and then share your cautionary tale. You know, put your money where your mouth is, instead of wasting time on internet forums and trying to convince yourself that You Did A Thing.

[ProfLorax]

I guess these posts don't bother me because this is what my colleagues and I discuss constantly. Three people left the program last year (not all from the same cohort, mind you) because of concerns about the state of academia. Also, yeah, I recognize that grad school may provide more stability for some people than others. And I 100% agree: I have major problems with narratives that describe people with PhD's on food stamps as inherently more tragic than people with GED's on food stamps.

That said, I am concerned with these echoes of grad school being a great place because of funding and stability and such. Yes, it may provide more security than other positions and fields, but it's still super problematic. Mizzou grad students just straight up lost their health insurance last year. Yes, they got it back, but it's still just the mediocre grad student plan. At the same time, grad students at Emory and Arizona State lost dependent health care. So if you're a single parent and in grad school, then you're fucked. Many stipends are below the poverty level for the geographical area. As my friend says, we are overworked and underpaid and preparing for jobs that don't exist. Because adjunctification is real, and it's devouring the academy as we know it, hurting both adjuncts and undergrad students. 

In other words, things are messed up. But my plea isn't to tell folks to get out. I'd be a hypocrite to do so, and part of me still holds onto hope that we can collectively change the direction of higher education. Instead, my question is always: what are you going to do about it? Be alert to the exploitation of academic labor, and all the unpaid labor you will be asked to do in your program. Be alert so, when an opening arises, you can organize and make your program a better place for you and for future academics. Be alert because, as stipends and tenure lines decrease, these changes will hurt the most marginalized scholars and potentially dissuade them from pursuing a career in academia. But we need a diverse professoriate! We need to make sure that our grad students can feed and house themselves. And we need to situate our labor concerns with larger criticisms of exploitation and poverty: what are the hourly workers on your campus making? At UMD, hourly workers can be paid less than the state minimum wage. How can we leverage our educational privilege and our anger about the turning tide of academia to make real institutional change?

[thinkingandthinking]

@ProfLorax, I definitely understand what you're saying, but I think the line in this thread is less that there's stability as such in grad school, but rather that there's no more or less security there than a lot of other places for people recently out of undergrad. Funding's being cut, insurance is being dropped, and people are underpaid in academia, but at the same time we're seeing the rise of exploitative zero-hour contracts, "gig" work, un- or under-paid but long-term internships--almost required these days for "experience"--, fixed minimum-wage in the face of stark inflation elsewhere, and employers that are trying to squeak by the "30hrs/week or more requires employer's provision of health insurance" rule in the ACA by limiting hours to 29/wk, while still insisting on split-shifts and other strange hours that make finding a second PT position (where the manager probably also wants to squeeze the full 29hrs out of anyone they hire) a stressful mess. 

Almost anywhere you go, you have to deal with similar things, which is to say I deeply agree with your point: we need to make institutional change, which is why we need to be aware of these issues, and discuss them. Not to just dissuade people from pursuing such a career, but to create informed cohorts that come in already thinking about issues that can be addressed, both institutionally and personally--'fixing' anything is clearly a pretty Sisyphean task, but, the more people talking and thinking about it within the system the better. The "just don't go" narrative isn't really helpful in terms of actually salvaging higher education--which I happen to think is an important thing to do--as then the only people there with the potential to make that change will be the naive ones who don't really understand there to be a problem at all; nor is it ultimately helpful, though, for the individual who "gets out" under the assumption that academia is a particularly or uniquely exploitative place to be, though, as institutional change is needed almost across the board; almost no matter where you find yourself, you're going to have to be on your toes about this. The treatment of academic labor, it seems to me, is symptomatic of more systemic, much more pervasive issues that need to be addressed irrespective of your particular place in the economy. It seems, I think, for example, that the fact that people with PhDs often have trouble finding employment outside of the academy is less a problem about actually having the PhD than it is a problem with the non-academic economy itself. It's an extension of the increasingly pervasive "you need 2 years of experience for this entry-level position!" issue that recent graduates face everywhere. Some unpaid internships require applicants already to have industry experience. I'd be a few years ahead in the "getting 'experience'" game if I skipped the grad school detour, for sure, but that's not a system I want to find myself uncritically participating in, either.

So yes, we need to keep talking and thinking about this issue--but not as if our suffering as academics is unique (which I don't think you were really saying at all, but rather seems to be the assumption of the "just leave!" people like [but maybe not specifically] OP.) The whole thing needs to be fixed, or else nothing will really ever recover.

Edited March 23, 2016 by thinkingandthinking

[ProfLorax]

@thinkingandthinking: yeah, you interpreted my post correctly. The whole system is broken, gosh darnit, so let's change the system while making tangible improvements in our little circles.

I'm out of upvotes, so you get a gif.

[thinkingandthinking]

3 minutes ago, ProfLorax said:

@thinkingandthinking: yeah, you interpreted my post correctly.

Happy to see that my interpretive skills--thanks, English courses and close-reading/rhetorical analysis practice therein! Hey: world! We need more people teaching these and with these skills! --are working and coming in handy...

[Dr. Old Bill]

Despite my initial qualms about this thread (and I apologize to the OP for my exasperated utterances), it is good to see some great thinking on this topic, other than the usual "you're making a terrible mistake" rhetoric that continually emerged on other similar threads in recent memory.

I get the sense that certain people who have made it through to having a Ph.D. in hand and then have difficulty finding work might have started out too close to the "ideal" side on the {ideal----------reality} spectrum. Six or seven years ago, that was par for the course, since the economic downturn had only just begun, and there was a wealth of optimism thanks to the election of an education-friendly president. Idealism is a wonderful thing, in a lot of respects -- it brings with it a kind of euphoria combined with ambition that can make external factors appear less important than they actually are. In the years since that time, however, the state of the humanities has gotten much, much worse, with the practicality of STEM and related fields garnering much wider appeal. This is nothing new to us, however...and that's my point. In the past several years, it is very clear that the worm has turned. It is impossible to ignore. As a result, people who are just now going down the Ph.D. path can be expected to be both idealistic and realistic. What annoys me about threads like these is that they seem to presuppose that people who are currently starting down this road possess the same over-idealism that might have prompted a surplus of Ph.D. applicants in the 2000s. I really don't think that's the case. I'm sure there are still many who believe that they can be among the rare few who obtain that vaunted-yet-elusive TT position, but I suspect the majority of people on this forum, at the very least, understand that the job market is brutal. I know that I pretty much take that as a given when posting and interacting with folks here.

The bottom line is that we all have our own, individualized reasons for pursuing an M.A. or a Ph.D. in a seemingly "impractical" field. I don't think it's fair to solicit those reasons for the sake of giving judgment and advice unless you really get to know each person's life circumstances. Likewise, I don't think it's fair to make any sweeping assumptions about anyone who is posting on these forums. It might not be a categorically excellent path to be on, but we're all on it...which should tell you something.

Edited March 23, 2016 by Wyatt's Terps

[heliogabalus]

22 hours ago, ExponentialDecay said:

@thinkingandthinking jsyk, you shouldn't make "getting a job teaching English at a prep school" into what "getting a job teaching at Wellesley" was a decade ago. Everyone and their dog thinks they're going to get a job teaching at a prep school nowadays. It's no certainty, especially if the gilt on your resume doesn't originate in high school.

I think the key to this one is write the hell out of your cover letter--in the prep schools I've taught at, we would get tons of resumes for openings, and often the PhDs would just kind of get handed to us through a placement service or emailed in with only the most superficial attempt at persuading us that they really wanted to teach high school or middle school. 

Next, be careful about applying for prep school positions in areas where there are lots of big universities around. In NYC, I feel like we would get half the PhDs from Columbia and NYU applying for a spot.

[__________________________]

3 hours ago, thinkingandthinking said:

The "just don't go" narrative isn't really helpful in terms of actually salvaging higher education--which I happen to think is an important thing to do--as then the only people there with the potential to make that change will be the naive ones who don't really understand there to be a problem at all; nor is it ultimately helpful, though, for the individual who "gets out" under the assumption that academia is a particularly or uniquely exploitative place to be, though, as institutional change is needed almost across the board; almost no matter where you find yourself, you're going to have to be on your toes about this.

 

2 hours ago, Wyatt's Terps said:

This is nothing new to us, however...and that's my point. In the past several years, it is very clear that the worm has turned. It is impossible to ignore. As a result, people who are just now going down the Ph.D. path can be expected to be both idealistic and realistic. What annoys me about threads like these is that they seem to presuppose that people who are currently starting down this road possess the same over-idealism that might have prompted a surplus of Ph.D. applicants in the 2000s.

Yup.  

5 hours ago, ProfLorax said:

 Instead, my question is always: what are you going to do about it? 

Just as I was in the ponzi scheme thread, I would be curious hear what people are actually doing, especially since I'm actually in it now.  It sounds like OP went to a really similar program as mine; most of the advanced candidates (in their 7th, 8th years) have a pretty similar tone when I've talked to them about shit like this (i.e., hopeless).  The department itself seems to think the answer is to be more ivy-like, providing more incentives to finish earlier like offering a nicely paid post-doctoral 2 year lectureship if you finish within a certain number of years that supposedly helps people on the market.  But I question the value of even this, even if it means better treatment for grad students (it's not like you can just make more jobs appear on the market by making people a little more competitive).  Right now, the big issue is how badly students are treated after their fellowships end, when they teach for adjunct rates and have extremely restrictive caps on their hours for campus jobs when they're trying to finish their dissertations.  People are also frustrated because advising is relatively hands off here and emphasizes slow, careful research, but now it feels like to a lot of students like the department is now trying to rush us through.  As a first year I've had the same professor tell me to be as inter-disciplinary and exploratory as possible and then two months later turn around and show serious concern that I wasn't trying hard enough to "professionalize."  Adjunct professors are completely invisible here.  Attrition rates are completely invisible, and the placement tracking is half-assed and opaque.  Students have very little say in hiring faculty (though some nominal, minimal concessions have been made this year) too, and while I was all but promised that there was going to be another hire in the period I study this year, it doesn't look like that's going to happen now.  Hard to "professionalize" when only 1/4 of the classes you take in your home department over a two-year period are in your field and only one of those is a Ph.D. seminar.

Students have been trying to unionize here, but it's also one of those things where the fellowship years, here, aren't that bad (it's a very privileged program in many ways).  Silly as it sounds, I sometimes wonder if students were more exploited if there would be more student power, since I can't imagine something like a student teaching strike having much influence here, since there is much less reliance on grad student teaching here than there is at larger universities with bigger undergraduate populations.

I guess I would be curious to hear if this account resonates with other peoples' experiences/observations and/or how theirs differ.  And, importantly, what people are doing about it.  

Edited March 23, 2016 by mollifiedmolloy
ETA: or, alternatively, if there's anything to be done.

[xolo]

Yes, I too would like to hear from people who have a PhD in hand as to how they are doing.

Although this is a detail, my program still provides me health insurance, but they dropped offering it for dependents. I'm glad they did, since Obamacare is way more affordable. Actually, if they dropped my coverage, Obamacare would really help alleviate that burden.

[rising_star]

2 hours ago, mollifiedmolloy said:

 Silly as it sounds, I sometimes wonder if students were more exploited if there would be more student power, since I can't imagine something like a student teaching strike having much influence here, since there is much less reliance on grad student teaching here than there is at larger universities with bigger undergraduate populations.

I guess I would be curious to hear if this account resonates with other peoples' experiences/observations and/or how theirs differ.  And, importantly, what people are doing about it.  

My experience (not in lit/rhet/comp) aligns with this. A few years ago, there a few of us were in a dispute with my PhD department about how they counted funding and their policies regarding external fellowships. The other grad students were really honest about not caring about our situation. Fast forward to about October 2015 when some of those same people who previously didn't care were being affected and now, all of a sudden, this is a huge deal requiring grad student association meetings with the department head and Graduate College. What's the difference? People realized they personally were being affected (there are also definitely some social/cultural differences between the group I was in and this more recent group). Have they gotten any changes? No. But, part of me wishes they'd started working on this several years ago because, if they had, this might've been resolved such that they were never personally affected.

To be clear, I'm not doing anything about the above situation. I fought for myself and my friends when we were getting screwed (in my case, two separate attempts to get screw me out of funding I was owed) but then got the hell out of there are quickly as possible. Should I have done more? Probably. I previously was part of an effort to make a grad student union at our campus. That failed in part because many of the STEM students weren't concerned with things like salary (they were getting almost double in annual stipend of what the grad students in the humanities were getting). Another case where solidarity would've been quite helpful. 

As far as PhD and getting a TT job, I never intended to go into academia when I started my PhD. I'm still not 100% convinced I want to be in academia, even though I am. The working conditions as faculty (VAP or TT, I'm not even touching adjunct work here) really aren't great in many cases. There's enormous pressure to get grants or teach a lot and have great evals (while doing all those "learner-centered activities" that are the buzzword these days!) and do service work at the department and college/university level. You actually have WAY more time to do research and teach what you want is a grad student than you do on the TT unless you're at a R1 where you have a 2/2 or lighter teaching load. Once you go to 2/3, 3/3, 4/4, 5/5, etc. and add in service and advising work, you realize that you only have a few hours left each week (if you're trying to stick to 40-45 hour work weeks) to do your research. And, regardless of the institution, there is pressure to work more than 40 hours a week every week, to attend activities in the evening or on the weekends, and to answer emails in under 24 hours (even on the weekend). I digress! For me, there's something very appealing about the possibility of a job where you just work 8-5 and then go home and don't have to answer work emails or go to events or whatever unless you want to. It probably helps that my mom has a PhD and has never held a post-PhD academic position so I've always known there were paths you can take besides becoming a professor.

[js17981]

On March 22, 2016 at 6:07 PM, bhr said:

You all have been far nicer to OP than I am about to be.

OP, you are an asshole. What motivated you to post this? Is it some sort of patriarical bullshit (or, more likely, a fear of competition in an admittedly tight job market) that caused you to post this? Is it a desire to mansplain something that any potential PhD student already knows because no one else listens to you? I know it isn't a case of "learn from my mistake" because you've failed to critically evaluate what your own mistakes even were.

If you tell me how I've failed to do this, I'm 100% willing to listen. What motivated me to post it, was, as I pointed out above, the hope that someone who resembled me 6-7 years ago, might hear it and (ideally) not apply to PhD programs.  In other words, it was a case of learn from my mistake. I made a huge mistake. That doesn't mean you did, or anyone else in this thread did. But I know a lot of other people who made similar mistakes. And I figure it's statistically likely that at least one of them lurks this thread. 

I'm out of the academic job market, have been for a year. So I'm not sure what my fear of competition would have to do with this. And I really don't have an idea of what the patriarchy has to do with this? 

I'm sorry, I suck at this board and don't know how to quote twice within a post: 

"I'm going to say something ridiculous here, and the OP is going to hate it: Getting a PhD is the best decision for me because it provides a level of security I have never had. I know that for the next four years I will have a regular paycheck,insurance, respect and responsibility. I still believe that I'm in a field that's generally "market proof" (it's not as good as it was even five years ago, but there were still more R/C jobs than English jobs this year, for a smaller number of graduates). I'm only considering programs with 90% placement rates (not hard at the top 20+ r/c programs, while making sure that I will have opportunities to teach business and technical writing, assume administrative responsibilities, and do other work that isn't as "pure" academically but better situates me for the market as it is developing."

 

I don't hate this at all. I think it's great, and I'm genuinely happy for you, and for anyone who's doing meaningful work that they're passionate about. My OP wasn't addressed to you; it was addressed to the people feeling uncertainty, who maybe are doing an MA/PhD like I did and have the chance to leave after the Master's. Or, like I said, the person who's considering grad school but is on the fence about it. I realize that's not you, or likely anyone who has responded here. But like I said, even one lurker reading it -- that's why I wrote it. 

 

"Maybe the question the OP should ask isn't why do we want to be like him, but what are we doing to avoid being the sort of sad, underemployed person who trolls people excited about the opportunity to go on."

This was not my intention, and maybe I should have been more clear about my intended audience in my OP. FWIW, I'm not a sad person, or underemployed. My adjunct gig is up at the end of the school year, and after that I'll be moving on. 

 

"It's the worst kind of ivory tower blindness that makes people think that their situation is somehow unique. I've worked in industries that collapsed, and saw people who worked 10, 15 years in the field fail to find jobs outside of retail. I've worked with adults trying to raise kids on $8/hr without any real hope of personal improvement or job advancement. I've been on the market as both a college dropout and a college graduate, and experienced difficulty finding 9-5 work in both situations."

 

I never said my situation -- or that of academia -- was unique. I also never said anything about my work history before academia. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[js17981]

On March 22, 2016 at 3:04 AM, DerPhilosoph said:

js17981 you mention regretting that you ever got a PhD. Out of curiosity, do you regret it more than you would have regretted not getting one if you had chosen to go another path? I think this is a hard question to answer (counterfactuals are always hard), but I think I know myself well enough to recognize that if were to chose to not even attempt to pursue a PhD, I would very likely spend the rest of my life wondering what if.

I recognize the odds of ever attaining a tenure track academic position are low, but I also think that I have the skill set to have at least as good of a shot as anyone else and I recognize that there are few careers that are as attractive to me. Given these facts I would much rather give it my best shot than always wonder if I could have made it. There's of course a point when this line of thought stops being tenable, and one should start surveying other options (and it's good to be cognizant of these goong in), but I'm not there yet and am reasonably confident that I can recognize it when/it I am.

It is a tough question to answer. I don't know that I can. I think I certainly would have wondered about it, too, but I also thought, when I applied to a PhD, that this was one of the very few lines of work that I would be happy in. 

That was a naive thing to think, I came to realize around two or three years into PhD. And not because I was hating grad work, but because I realized it was just sort of a limiting way to think about myself and my career options. 

[js17981]

On March 22, 2016 at 8:10 AM, ExponentialDecay said:

Out of interest, how did your cohort do? 

Also, you know why physicists/mathematicians/biologists/whatever discipline you fetishize get PhDs? Because they love research and they're getting paid to do what they love. There are no academic jobs for anybody (save a few specialities in economics/business and engineering). Yes, these disciplines have exit opps that don't leave you destitute and starting over in a new career with a boss who is 10 years younger than you, but nobody serves 7 years in a basement at Harvard to work at a quant hedge fund or Pfizer either. These people could've worked up to those jobs out of UG, and would probably be further ahead in their alt-ac careers had they done so. Most if not all of them are doing it for no reason other than that they love research and want to take the one in a million chance to make it their career.

The reason you and that other ass-clown aren't being taken seriously is because you've formulated some overly hysterical narrative of "oppression", the responsibility for which you then, in full contradiction to the fundamentals of your argument, try to pin on the individual. Like, I'm sorry, but not getting your dream job doesn't constitute exploitation. What, is every kid who worked really really hard in high school but didn't get into an Ivy exploited now? There are definitely programs that exploit their graduate students by not paying them a living wage or saddling them with insane teaching/service commitments, but your $25k/year fellowship summer stipend conference and archive funded gig is emphatically not that. You played the game and you lost, a game that most people will lose, a loss the financial and emotional devastation of which is impossible to imagine when you're just starting to play the game. Don't dress it up as some universal injustice. 

My cohort's still going. It was a small cohort (started at six, there were four of us after year three or so), and I'm the only that's graduated so far. I finished in six years, the rest of them are in their seventh year. 

I never talked about not my getting my dream job. I may not have been clear, but what I was after was a job with full benefits, a longer-than-nine-months contract, and some longterm job security. In other words, yes, tenure track. I applied to hundreds of TT jobs and there were definitely a couple dream jobs in there, which of course I did not expect to get. But I was, admittedly, a little shocked when I didn't receive an interview over the course of two full years on the market, including at many places that were basically the opposite of dream job. 

Quite honestly your response sounds a lot like the teacher-bashing I see elsewhere and wouldn't really expect here. It's my fault, not the system's. That's fine, I accept a large degree of responsibility here. Clearly other people got all those jobs that I didn't. And I'll reiterate, I feel pretty lucky. I came out debt free, I got to teach a bunch of great classes, I enjoyed the research I did. But the "you played the game and lost, loser" thing, while effective as a message board takedown, is just not reflective of reality. 

 

 

[js17981]

13 hours ago, Wyatt's Terps said:

The bottom line is that we all have our own, individualized reasons for pursuing an M.A. or a Ph.D. in a seemingly "impractical" field. I don't think it's fair to solicit those reasons for the sake of giving judgment and advice unless you really get to know each person's life circumstances. Likewise, I don't think it's fair to make any sweeping assumptions about anyone who is posting on these forums. It might not be a categorically excellent path to be on, but we're all on it...which should tell you something.

This is absolutely fair and I'm sorry if my first few posts came across as judgmental. 

My motivation, as I've mentioned a couple times, was simply that I wish someone had said this to me when I'd started. I understand that 2016 is not 2009 and you all are way more knowledgeable about the state of academia than I was then. But I was also, I'm not ashamed to admit, a pretty naive kid when I started my PhD! I was 23. And I don't mean to imply for a second that anyone here is naive, or is doing the wrong the wrong thing for themselves. As you say, I don't know any of you. 

What I'd hoped was that some similarly naive kid would see the post, but I also forgot that this is an established community where smart grad students come to discuss graduate school. So in that sense this was a bad forum for it, and that's my fault, and I apologize. 

 

[js17981]

On March 22, 2016 at 8:10 AM, ExponentialDecay said:

Like, I'm sorry, but not getting your dream job doesn't constitute exploitation. What, is every kid who worked really really hard in high school but didn't get into an Ivy exploited now? There are definitely programs that exploit their graduate students by not paying them a living wage or saddling them with insane teaching/service commitments, but your $25k/year fellowship summer stipend conference and archive funded gig is emphatically not that. You played the game and you lost, a game that most people will lose, a loss the financial and emotional devastation of which is impossible to imagine when you're just starting to play the game. Don't dress it up as some universal injustice. 

Seriously, just to put a finer point on it, cool off with this type of rhetoric. Not because it offends me personally but because I think it's seriously damaging to the thousands of graduate students and adjuncts who really are being exploited. 

[js17981]

17 hours ago, ExponentialDecay said:

Me personally, I'm just sick of people making the same tired shitpost on these forums and then justifying their behavior with "if I help just one lost soul from jumping into the pit of eternal despair, it will all have been worth it". I prefer the notion that OP has nefarious motives, because the alternative is that they are a 30 year old Doctor of Philosophy who seriously believes that trolling the internet counts as activism, mentorship, or guidance. OP and the ass-clowns that will certainly follow: if you're so totes passionate about saving people from going to gradschool, why don't you grab one of the gradschool-bound undergraduates who respect you so much as a teacher and mentor as evidenced by the teaching rewards you brag about, and take them out to coffee, ask them about their future plans, offer them your help (which, as evidenced by anyone who participates in this forum, anyone who is applying to PhDs sorely needs), and then share your cautionary tale. You know, put your money where your mouth is, instead of wasting time on internet forums and trying to convince yourself that You Did A Thing.

I've done this. Only had the opportunity to do so twice, though. One ended up going on to a PhD, the other didn't.

I'm not trying to convince myself of any moral superiority for posting on a message board. I was genuinely curious about why people get PhDs in the humanities. And I got some great, interesting answers. 

[js17981]

Anyway, I'm out. It seems like I made a mistake posting here, and I do sincerely apologize. To those of who you responded in earnest, even if it was to tell me how I'd made a dumb mistake, I appreciate it. There were some interesting responses and it's cool to hear others' experiences. My grad school experience, which was, believe it or not, really fun and fulfilling, was isolating at times, for reasons having to do with both my program and myself.  

To those of you who called me names...don't do that. Just as a general life rule, I mean.

See ya. 

[ExponentialDecay]

4 hours ago, js17981 said:

I never talked about not my getting my dream job. I may not have been clear, but what I was after was a job with full benefits, a longer-than-nine-months contract, and some longterm job security. In other words, yes, tenure track. I applied to hundreds of TT jobs and there were definitely a couple dream jobs in there, which of course I did not expect to get. But I was, admittedly, a little shocked when I didn't receive an interview over the course of two full years on the market, including at many places that were basically the opposite of dream job. 

Quite honestly your response sounds a lot like the teacher-bashing I see elsewhere and wouldn't really expect here. It's my fault, not the system's. That's fine, I accept a large degree of responsibility here. Clearly other people got all those jobs that I didn't. And I'll reiterate, I feel pretty lucky. I came out debt free, I got to teach a bunch of great classes, I enjoyed the research I did. But the "you played the game and lost, loser" thing, while effective as a message board takedown, is just not reflective of reality. 

A full-time job in academia is by definition a dream job. This isn't the only field where that is a true statement. Like, welcome to reality?

Also, come on, I was under the impression that I'm talking to an adult with a PhD, not a college freshman to whom I have to explain essential terms. I did not call you a loser by virtue of saying that you played the game and lost. I stated a fact. In other words, you took a big risk and the big risk didn't pan out. It has nothing to do with you and everything to do with mathematics. People lose all the time, and it's okay. People lose jobs, loved ones, money on the stock market - and it's all a part of life. It's not a judgment of your character, intelligence, ability, or whatever is important to you. It's also a neutral statement with regards to "the system": whether or not these probabilities are just and fair, these are the probabilities, and this time they did not work out in your favor. It's as non judgmental a statement as anyone can make in this situation. That you are a mature specimen and still can't deal with failure says everything about you and nothing about me.

It's really fucking rich that you try to paint me as some neoliberal shitlord, when you're the one who thinks this system will apparently be fixed by telling people not to attend grad school. That's sure as shit the definition of pinning responsibility on the individual and avoiding questioning the system. Maybe sex workers should starve instead of letting men objectify their bodies? The reality is, you don't understand how the system you're bashing works, you have no interest in understanding it, and as a result, your argument is tired and ineffective to an embarrassing degree. You don't have good intentions or any intentions at all outside of bitching about the bad hand life and society and professors and everyone else but yourself has dealt you. Guess what - you're not alone. 7.5 billion human beings feel the same way. It's interesting that you don't address your financial situation or give any specific examples of people being exploited, despite having responded to me with the same drivel 3 times already. Please, explain to me how you were or are exploited. Or do you have too much money where your mouth is?

Edited March 24, 2016 by ExponentialDecay

[WendyWonderland]

I have, maybe many others here have also, worked in other fields before seriously consider academia as a career choice. It may sound foolish, but academia for me is a career, not just a job. I like reading, teaching and feeling that I am making a change to the world. I am fine with no TT job, and I possess the thought that I will really enjoy myself as a visiting professor here and there. In that case, I can travel around the world and really do culture studies. To be honest, I don't even dream to land a tenure job right away. However, I believe that every field has exceptions for exceptional people. All fields are torturing and soul sucking in a way or another, however, it makes a difference between you choosing a job and  a job choosing you. Nothing is easy in the beginning, and I believe the only way to a miracle is being a miracle. I guess most of us know about the job market, but I am not in this for making money. Intellectual pursuit is a luxurious way to spend one's  life and can't be measured by a salary. As adjuncts I am pretty sure you only have to teach and have no publication requirements which means you will have more time to either do something else or get better in your field. It won't be worse than a TA salary, at least I believe so. Only my personal opinion. I am single, which means I have no one depending on me, and it is always easier  to fly solo. I have no loans. So maybe it depends on the individual. I hope your situation changes soon and don't forget your initial passion that got you into books. 

Edited March 24, 2016 by WendyWonderland

[Dr. Old Bill]

8 hours ago, js17981 said:

This is absolutely fair and I'm sorry if my first few posts came across as judgmental. 

My motivation, as I've mentioned a couple times, was simply that I wish someone had said this to me when I'd started. I understand that 2016 is not 2009 and you all are way more knowledgeable about the state of academia than I was then. But I was also, I'm not ashamed to admit, a pretty naive kid when I started my PhD! I was 23. And I don't mean to imply for a second that anyone here is naive, or is doing the wrong the wrong thing for themselves. As you say, I don't know any of you. 

What I'd hoped was that some similarly naive kid would see the post, but I also forgot that this is an established community where smart grad students come to discuss graduate school. So in that sense this was a bad forum for it, and that's my fault, and I apologize. 

 

No apology necessary, really -- I jumped down your throat right away, since there have been a few threads over the past couple of years that have had the "you're stupid if you go to grad school" rhetoric, and have spiraled out of control, gotten nasty and personal etc. It seemed at the outset that you might have been trolling or wanting to go down that same road, but the quality and tenor of your responses have shown that that's truly not the case, so it is really I who should apologize.

 

1 hour ago, WendyWonderland said:

I have, maybe many others here have also, worked in other fields before seriously consider academia as a career choice. It may sound foolish, but academia for me is a career, not just a job. I like reading, teaching and feeling that I am making a change to the world. I am fine with no TT job, and I possess the thought that I will really enjoy myself as a visiting professor here and there. In that case, I can travel around the world and really do culture studies. To be honest, I don't even dream to land a tenure job right away. However, I believe that every field has exceptions for exceptional people. All fields are torturing and soul sucking in a way or another, however, it makes a difference between you choosing a job and  a job choosing you. Nothing is easy in the beginning, and I believe the only way to a miracle is being a miracle. I guess most of us know about the job market, but I am not in this for making money. Intellectual pursuit is a luxurious way to spend one's  life and can't be measured by a salary. As adjuncts I am pretty sure you only have to teach and have no publication requirements which means you will have more time to either do something else or get better in your field. It won't be worse than a TA salary, at least I believe so. Only my personal opinion. I am single, which means I have no one depending on me, and it is always easier  to fly solo. I have no loans. So maybe it depends on the individual. I hope your situation changes soon and don't forget your initial passion that got you into books. 

Well put, Wendy. I'm one of those folks who had a lot of life and work experience before entering academia, whether that was pizza delivery (mid-teens) retail (late teens), music production (early-to-mid twenties), administrative assistance (mid-to-late twenties), arts administration (early thirties), or even cryonics (don't even ask)...I did a lot of things, and most of my creative and academic interests were relegated to the realm of pure avocation. For a very long time I never thought I could go down the academic road (I was a mediocre high school student in Canada, and Canadian colleges and universities are a different breed). Only after I immigrated to the U.S., and my wife encouraged me to start down this path did I realize that it was even a viable option for someone at this stage. Suffice it to say, going down this path has given me a "new lease on life," to use the old cliche, and while the so-called dream of getting a TT position at the end of it all is extremely elusive, that's really not why I'm doing it. I would be happy doing any number of things that a Ph.D. (or frankly, even just an M.A.) can afford me. But the process itself (getting paid to teach, study, research, and write), not to mention obtaining the admittedly pretentious "laurels" of an advanced degree, fill me with a sense of accomplishment that I never had in my teens or twenties. And to me, that is worth a lot more than a lofty position at an R1 institution.

 

[knp]

Nobody seems to think it's weird when idealistic young adults move to New York or LA to spend their 20s trying to make it in Hollywood or on Broadway, even though those industries are far more competitive even than academia. They could have spent those years establishing a career history in something more "sensible," but nobody seems to think it's weird that they'd give their dreams a chance. Film or theater is their Thing. So they go for it! Academia is my thing. Although I wouldn't make half the financial sacrifice my creative-industry friends do to pursue an artistic career, I've been able to get an institution to make a paid, long-term commitment to my training. With that support, why wouldn't I give it a try? You're right, OP, that this forum doesn't have a lot of people who are on the fence about graduate school, at least not who post. (The number of people who are unsure about graduate school but enrolled because of the possibility of a tenure-track job must surely have declined since the recession! One hopes.) But my outlook is perhaps shorter-term than yours was: I'm not going into this because I think a tenure-track position is worth trying out. I plan to try to get a TT job, but even if I end up on the losing side of the academic job market, academia, of which graduate school is part, was worth the attempt.

Edited March 24, 2016 by knp