Older undergrad just starting to dip a toe into the scene here. Personal spiel / request for advice

[downwardisheavenward]

Hi all.

So like title says, I am an older undergrad (25) just about to start second semester of my junior year at a large state research institution. I hadn't really imagined that graduate life would be so appealing to me as it has become over the past few semesters or so -- the endgame initially was LSAT, not GRE. But since coming back to school, I have developed a huge crush on the academic life / community in English depts / humanities depts in general. Also, I wrote a paper for criticism / theory course that a prof was really nice about and, apparently, very impressed with. It was about as unexpected as it was totally rewarding and neat and potentially game-changing with respect to my academic priorities. 

I've just been accepted into honors program, and I am also trying to develop a kind of mentor relationship with another professor who has strongly intimated that he would advise me during honors / undergrad thesis process.

I plan on writing both honors and department honors theses. I haven't begun thinking about GREs. But, still, I do have my interests developing in areas like but not limited to: Southern Italian literature; comparative modernisms; marxism / critical theory; american postmodernism, just 20th c American novel generally..

Just at a point where I'm wondering if its even all that mentally healthy to put as much thought as I have been into the possibility of attending graduate school in an English dept ?????

Getting into a great law school is apparently a lot easier then sealing the deal -- with funding-  at a great program for MA or PHD English, and asking for any advice anyone is willing to doll out here to an interested guy who's trying to understand what this could be all about.

Thankss and god bless !

(also, sorry if this comes off as really presumptuous in any way) 

[jungThug]

Do English if you're open to the idea of not making as much money as a successful lawyer. Also do English if you have an idealist/romantic streak in you. If you're serious about English graduate school, try and read a few recent journal articles in the fields that you're interested, read a few chapters from academic books as well. Ask yourself -- am I willing and able to read/write this stuff for the next decade or so. These might help you make a more informed choice. 
 

As for your concerns about your age, I wouldn't let that hold you back. Nearly everybody in my graduate program in English is 30+.

[Warelin]

First off, it's great that you're considering all your options. I think becoming a professor is the end goal for many of us here and we've been forewarned about how bad the job market is. As disheartening as it is, many (most) of us will not end up with a tenure track position.

I'm not sure if you know this or not but:
-Adjuncts and other nontenured faculty now make up three-quarters of college and university teachers.
-In many fields, from the humanities to the sciences, universities are accepting far more Ph.D. students than there are tenure-track openings.
-https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1438-so-you-think-you-want-a-tenure-track-job
-https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/01/08/economist-offers-critique-job-market-phds-english

While there are a number of MA programs with no funding, there are some that do pay with a stipend. However, this stipend is low compared to the amount of income a full-time job has the potential to make. (Things to consider: Each year of working is less money saved up for retirement)

My goal here isn't to scare you away from becoming a professor but rather to inform you that getting a PHD does not guarantee you a position in Academia. If you find that your passion is still there after reading this, by all means, continue.

I currently teach at 2 colleges (while applying to Ph.D. programs) and my teaching experiences have taught me that there is nothing I'd rather do in life. I realize that there may not be a teaching job at the end of the tunnel and I'm okay with that but I'm going to give it my all.)

[rhetoricus aesalon]

It is not a fun thing to share, but it is important to share that higher education is in a labor crisis, and it stands to only get worse now that our government has become ultra-conservative. Getting a graduate degree in the humanities is difficult enough, and even if you do finish there are a mountain of obstacles awaiting your future as a professional.

With that said, law school graduates don't have it all that much better -- perhaps even worse since, statistically speaking, you are about as likely to land a job as a law school grad now as you are an English graduate school grad but are more likely to have amassed much more debt in law school.  

I don't share this to dissuade your choice. I love grad school. I love what I do; I am personally fulfilled and feel I do important work. But you (and any partner you might have) should be knowledgeable about exactly what you're getting yourself into no matter the choice you make. 

[Romanista]

2 hours ago, Chadillac said:

With that said, law school graduates don't have it all that much better -- perhaps even worse since, statistically speaking, you are about as likely to land a job as a law school grad now as you are an English graduate school grad but are more likely to have amassed much more debt in law school.  

 

I don't doubt this, but law is still a more secure path than academia for me, because with the former you can always solo. It's difficult to do as a newly minted JD and there's the threat of malpractice but plenty of people do it despite the bad job market. There are far more solo practitioners than there are independent scholars. Both fields have the same problem of transitioning away from that specific type of labor if they can't make a living because prospective employers see you as a failed lawyer or professor and not as someone with an interesting set of skills to apply to whatever.

[bhr]

I'm in R/C. At 26/27 you would have been the second youngest member of my cohort (with half being a decade older or more)

[Dr. Old Bill]

Just adding to the chorus here, but...I started my Bachelor's when I was 32, started my Master's when I was 36, and I will have turned 38 by the time I start my Ph.D. There have been moments of awkwardness and embarrassment over being older, and I do have some regrets for not going down this path earlier, but ultimately I think that life experience and a lengthy non-academic background can give you a lot of perspective, and can ground you quite a bit...and I've heard from several people that adcoms know this. In other words, being an undergraduate at 25 (and a grad student at 26, 27, 28 etc.) is probably not going to hurt you, and may even help you.

All of the job market posts above are (obviously) completely accurate and on point, and there's really no way to argue with the bleakness of the numbers. I'll just add two side points, however (I nearly called them "alternate facts"): the first is that, while the downward trajectory has been somewhat consistent, it's nonetheless difficult to predict the lay of the land in six or seven years. These are scary times for arts, science, education (and many, many others), but my other point is that if you can afford to live on a fairly slim stipend, there's a lot of appeal to being paid to get an education. I'm not even meaning the pie-in-the-sky "life of the mind" notion. Just on a basic level, getting paid to study literature, teach college students, attend conferences etc. and come out of the process with an advanced degree isn't a bad way to spend two to seven years. There are many who will disagree with this stance, which is completely fair and valid, but I've now spent most of my thirties in academia after spending most of my late-teens and twenties in a series of mediocre jobs and false starts...and I couldn't be happier. I don't make a lot of money as a grad student, but I love the environment, love the constant challenges, love the research, and love the teaching. And yes, I love the feeling (false or no) of increasing prestige. If these things sound to you like a reasonable trade-off for a lot more money and stability (and if you have the kind of long-term persistence and depth of focus that academic work requires), then grad school is definitely a great option for you.

[anxiousphd]

On 1/25/2017 at 8:47 AM, Warelin said:

I currently teach at 2 colleges (while applying to Ph.D. programs) and my teaching experiences have taught me that there is nothing I'd rather do in life. I realize that there may not be a teaching job at the end of the tunnel and I'm okay with that but I'm going to give it my all.)

THIS. I'm going to start handing out business cards with this printed on them so maybe someone somewhere will understand why I would ever pursue a PhD in English.

[crugs]

37 minutes ago, anxiousgrad said:

THIS. I'm going to start handing out business cards with this printed on them so maybe someone somewhere will understand why I would ever pursue a PhD in English.

YUP. I'll go in on a mass-ordering of these...

[ExponentialDecay]

Second semester junior year is prime time to start preparing your thesis proposal, fyi, so I'd be going beyond the strong intimation stage with that prof if I were you. I would also talk to your professors about grad school. Ask your questions here, browse this site (on this board, I recommend "Graduate School Ponzi Scheme" and like 10 threads riffing off of that, but on all the humanities boards as well as the frou frou social science ones, there is at least topic about how miserable the TT market is and how people getting PhDs are idiots, so read those), go on the internet, read the Thomas Benton articles and the rest of that fodder, read the MLA job reports, The Professor Is In, familiarize yourself not only with the grad school application process and its Law counterpart, but with the process that happens during grad school (comps, ABD, dissertation committee, publications, conferences, teaching) and what you can expect afterwards on the job market, and then go to your professors with all this information in mind. The idea is to both to be able to ask more pertinent questions than "lol what is an SOP", and to be able to focus your attention less on the technical aspects and more on gauging what these professors think about your potential specifically. Few people even today will outright tell you not to go even if they think that you can't crack it - instead they'll tell you about the job market and how hard it is and so on and so forth, which will do nothing to deter you. Likewise, few people, if they are responsible, will tell you outright to go, even if they think you're the best student they ever had (which should be taken with a grain of salt proportional to how many undergrads this professor has successfully sent to grad school). In the end, academia is pretty solitary and can be a shark tank, so you need to rely on your own judgment, and inform your judgment to the best of your ability. 

[FeetInTheSky]

I'm just going to toss out a little idea on timing... it's very stressful to finish your PhD applications. I work a 9-5 job and spent an hour or two after work every day for three months researching programs and working on writing samples and preparing for the GRE and all that noise. I loved my undergraduate days, but if I recall correctly, I 100% did not have the available time to put together the applications that I put together this year (and I'm exactly raging with confidence in them anyway). If you're planning on writing a thesis, then it's possible that you won't have that available time either. I encourage you to at least entertain the notion of just focusing on your thesis next year and then finding a job the following year that you can hold down while you work on your applications. It's a bit clunky, but it made my life much easier.

One of the students I work with (I got a job at the university that I graduated from, which is great because it means continued access to research resources and my old professors/letter writers) is applying for anthropology programs and has decided to take the route that I did because he got very overwhelmed his senior year. 

I'm not saying this is the only way to be successful, I'm just saying you should give it a think. 

[imogenshakes]

3 hours ago, JeremyWrites said:

I'm just going to toss out a little idea on timing... it's very stressful to finish your PhD applications. I work a 9-5 job and spent an hour or two after work every day for three months researching programs and working on writing samples and preparing for the GRE and all that noise. I loved my undergraduate days, but if I recall correctly, I 100% did not have the available time to put together the applications that I put together this year (and I'm exactly raging with confidence in them anyway). If you're planning on writing a thesis, then it's possible that you won't have that available time either. I encourage you to at least entertain the notion of just focusing on your thesis next year and then finding a job the following year that you can hold down while you work on your applications. It's a bit clunky, but it made my life much easier.

One of the students I work with (I got a job at the university that I graduated from, which is great because it means continued access to research resources and my old professors/letter writers) is applying for anthropology programs and has decided to take the route that I did because he got very overwhelmed his senior year. 

I'm not saying this is the only way to be successful, I'm just saying you should give it a think. 

I absolutely second this. I took a year off between my MA and PhD apps (working adjunct at my uni right now...not ideal but it's something) and I'm so glad that I waited. I had plenty of time to revise my WS, to draft and redraft and redraft my SOP, to meet with my mentors regularly, build my CV, etc., all without the stress of homework and three papers at a time and my TAship responsibilities looming over me. And ESPECIALLY because so many deadlines are near the end of the semester. I absolutely think that if I had tried to apply to 8 programs during the last year of my MA, I wouldn't have gotten into a place like UW Madison, because my work (both application materials and my MA work) would have been sloppier and more rushed. It was great to focus on success in my MA, then graduate and focus on success in PhD apps.

Of course, one of my friends from my MA cohort didn't do this, applied to 15 programs his last MA year, and got into almost all of them (mostly top 15-20 programs). He was miserable for a couple of months, but obviously it paid off. So it's not impossible, but I certainly couldn't have done it. You'll just have to ask yourself whether you'll have the time, energy, and mental space available.

On 1/26/2017 at 8:29 AM, crugs said:

YUP. I'll go in on a mass-ordering of these...

YES. Count me in! 

[Space_Girl]

I'm an older grad student. Can't say much about the experience, it's just been fine. Let that be the least of your worries.