Interested in a Terminal M.A. In Classics

[Omeros]

I am an undergraduate at a state school interested in doing a PhD in Classics, but feel that I need to do a terminal M.A. 

My Latin will be better than my Greek but I didn't start Latin in high school, so I feel at a disadvantage. I also have multidisciplinary interests, which I think is disadvantageous.

 I have looked at most (if not all) of the M.A. programs and have strong interests in some. Specifically, Tulane, Univ. of Arizona, Washington & Louis and Notre Dame.

For those that can speak to any of the above (or omitted): Are funding packages livable? What do you like and dislike? What do you wish you had known? Do I have to read Thucydides? 

 

[pro Augustis]

I should state up front that I have attended none of these programs—I did a post bac and then was lucky enough to get into a doctoral program. That said, I applied to two on your list, WashU and Notre Dame, along with Minnesota,  My undergraduate advisor thinks highly of the WashU faculty. Notre Dame I can't speak for here, as I learned of my acceptance to my current program before the interview and so withdrew my application. 

Some final notes: I don't think you need to feel bad about not having Latin in high school. More than half of my cohort started Latin in college, me included. Would I like to have had three extra years of the language or whatever? Sure, but not enough high schools offer it for it to be, in my experience, a necessity. As for interdisciplinarity, at most of the Classics programs I have experienced, that would be seen as anything but a hinderance. Lastly, if you end up in any sort of Greek survey course, Thucydides will certainly make an appearance. That would only be for a session or two though, and I doubt you will be forced to take a Thucydides seminar if you would prefer not to. 

[Pius Aeneas]

I did my MA at the University of Arizona before starting my PhD, and when I was first applying (this was ~5 years) it seemed that most of the Classics MA programs worth attending covered tuition/fees/insurance and provided some kind of stipend.

At Arizona, tuition and fees were covered through serving as a TA and the College of Humanities paid for health insurance. The stipend at the time was around $3700 per semester (I have no idea if it's the same now or has gone up or down)  and was just barely enough to cover rent and utilities if you were lucky enough to share a cheap house/apt. If you were dumb enough to live in the university's grad housing, there was no way you could afford their highway robbery prices on the stipend alone. And of course, there is no summer funding unless you're attending some kind of summer seminar, excavation, etc.

Short version: the stipend on its own really isn't livable despite the low cost of living in Tucson, so you will have to supplement it with savings, loans, or parental largesse.

Overall though, Arizona is an excellent program. The faculty have diverse interests, are all competent scholars, and in general they are willing to do what they can to make sure their students succeed. The placement record into top PhD programs is also stellar, which is a concern more than ever in the wake of the collapse of Classics and the Humanities more broadly. Tucson is also a great city and the cost of living is dirt cheap.

As far as not having started Latin in high school, you shouldn't worry about it. I was lucky enough to start as a sophomore in high school, but I attended a college prep so we had a more diverse array of language options than most high schools. As long as you have 3-4 years of one language and 2-3 of the other you should be fine. Moreover, having multidisciplinary interests is NOT a disadvantage. If you attain a strong grasp of the languages and you have a specialty or two which are fairly standard, having other interests should help rather than hurt you down the road.

Long and rambling post, but hopefully it's helpful!

 

 

[Omeros]

Many thanks to both of the replies. I appreciate the nuts and bolts insight into both the PhD and terminal M.A. programs. 

I'm not going to take out loans to complete an M.A., so I'm glad to know up-front that some programs may have the unrealistic expectation that I might. I'd happily skip the M.A. but I just imagine that I would struggle doing both Latin and Greek (and prepping for German and Italian) at an especially expeditious clip. 

I would be interested to hear what programs value interdisciplinarity. Apart from Comparative Lit programs, I haven't turned any that would support my intersection of interests. 

 

 

 

[knp]

I've heard of very few graduate programs these days—in the anthropology/classics/history/area studies fields I have some familiarity with—that don't value interdisciplinarity. Some do so more in practice than others, but it tends to be a plus on the job market, so they're all at least moderately supportive of some work in that direction. (I am speaking more to the PhDs you're hoping to end up in rather than the terminal MAs, though, because I know more about the former.)

However, this evaluation does depend on the fields you're interested in combining. The spectrum ranges by degree of risk, I think. On one end, most classics graduate programs will have strong support for work in the classics + art history kind of intersection, for example—but that intersection is common enough that it might be net-neutral on the academic job market, not a plus. In the middle, there are fields that everyone recognizes go well together, but aren't that common, like (in anthropology), anthropology + science and technology studies. I think this is how most interdisciplinary work would be described (because the rarity makes people recognize its interdisciplinary nature more than they do for the more common combinations.) Way on the other hand are the "go big or go home" kind of projects, where, depending on the success of your book, you either get hired at Harvard or find a new line of work. (The guy a couple years back who did a strongly cognitivist reading of Homer would be an example of the latter, I think.) The latter would give you the fewest strong program options—my interests lie somewhere between "rare but interesting" and "but what are you doing", myself, and I kind of liked how that simplified my list of applications—and the former would provide the most.

This is all a long way of saying, in short, that to answer your question properly, we need to know what fields you'd like to combine.

Edited November 9, 2016 by knp

[Omeros]

I appreciate your reflections on the subject. 

I'm glad to hear that Classics does value some interdisciplinary work, although I think that you confirm for me that some combinations are more valued than others. Personally, I think I'm left of even the cognitivist. The reduction of Classics education to grammar is frankly numbing. Apologies if that is offensive to anyone. But the historical contraction of Classics to an adjunct of linguistics or to the articulation of grammar - along with the professional bag-checking of everyone's grammatical facility - is dispiriting from a research side. (Yes, grammatical facility is paramount, but that has become the end and not the means). There's only one person outside of a Comparative Lit program that does anything close to what I'm interested in, and I have been told that he is discouraging his dissertation students from following in his interdisciplinary foot-steps. 

That said, I may not even do a PhD - or a Masters - at this point.

With Trump president and a Republican controlled Senate and House - and a vulnerable, de-regulated market - I'm not sure if its prudent to do anything else but work while I can. 

 

[knp]

23 hours ago, Omeros said:

I think that you confirm for me that some combinations are more valued than others. Personally, I think I'm left of even the cognitivist. The reduction of Classics education to grammar is frankly numbing. Apologies if that is offensive to anyone. But the historical contraction of Classics to an adjunct of linguistics or to the articulation of grammar - along with the professional bag-checking of everyone's grammatical facility - is dispiriting from a research side. (Yes, grammatical facility is paramount, but that has become the end and not the means). There's only one person outside of a Comparative Lit program that does anything close to what I'm interested in...

What are you talking about? Frankly, I left the field a while ago, but all of the recent research I liked in classics beforehand was interdisciplinary: mostly I'm thinking about performance studies perspectives, but also some queer theory, theories of built space, and heck, even bioarchaeology of disease and environmental contamination. What are your actual interests? If you think naming them specifically would out you, you will still get much better advice if you name them at the most specific level that doesn't reveal who you are. Otherwise, I am afraid we are at an impasse, because we cannot recommend any programs for you without some more help from you. A departmental commitment to "interdisciplinarity" doesn't help you at all, if every single faculty member has interesting, innovative, interdisciplinary project that does not overlap with your interests.

[pro Augustis]

On 11/9/2016 at 11:52 PM, Omeros said:

I appreciate your reflections on the subject. 

I'm glad to hear that Classics does value some interdisciplinary work, although I think that you confirm for me that some combinations are more valued than others. Personally, I think I'm left of even the cognitivist. The reduction of Classics education to grammar is frankly numbing. Apologies if that is offensive to anyone. But the historical contraction of Classics to an adjunct of linguistics or to the articulation of grammar - along with the professional bag-checking of everyone's grammatical facility - is dispiriting from a research side. (Yes, grammatical facility is paramount, but that has become the end and not the means). There's only one person outside of a Comparative Lit program that does anything close to what I'm interested in, and I have been told that he is discouraging his dissertation students from following in his interdisciplinary foot-steps. 

That said, I may not even do a PhD - or a Masters - at this point.

With Trump president and a Republican controlled Senate and House - and a vulnerable, de-regulated market - I'm not sure if its prudent to do anything else but work while I can. 

 

I don't know your specific research interests, and I am, from what I do know of them, in a very different part of Classics. It is surely possible that your interests are not well accommodated within the discipline. Nonetheless, the bolded has simply not been my experience. Neither at my undergrad, nor at Columbia, nor at UT where I presently am, nor (so far as I could tell) at the other programs I visited while applying has Classics been reduced to a matter of grammar.