Loving the idea of being something rather than doing something is a real problem, in general. I wonder whether anyone has examined this systematically.
Megadittoes to the last paragraph.
Aspiring grad students should also note that Weatherson made a mistake--he says that we know that the median outcome for people entering these programs was a decent job. Actually it's for people graduating from these programs--we don't know how many people left without a PhD.
Obviously there can be many reasons why people leave a program--maybe they find out it's not what they want to do--but that's the sort of thing you should find out when you're considering a program.
Important point, Matt. For those of us from cohorts with, say, a 10% completion rate, that distinction matters.
Brian's advice comes in a dangerous form. The thing is, what a lot of us are trying to discourage is the person who applies to grad school because it's there, or because they're looking for a career path and this one seems pretty well laid out, or even because they think they love English literature or philosophy or history, actually. The last idea is the most dangerous, because first, graduate school (mostly) does a pretty good job of viciously crushing such passions and then peeing on the remains, both by design and by accident, and second, because it's not enough to love an idea of knowledge--you also as you say need to think you'll like the actual labor involved in the profession, and to do that, you need to know what it's actually like, which your average undergraduate who thinks he loves philosophy or history does not know.
Aspiring grad students should also note that Weatherson made a mistake--he says that we know that the median outcome for people entering these programs was a decent job. Actually it's for people graduating from these programs--we don't know how many people left without a PhD.
Bingo! I know people who "left" after 3-5 years, and were none too pleased about it. John Emerson's comments in that CT thread were generally excellent as well.
Abstractly, I think there are two very different approaches that people take into graduate school, and which require different things be true for it to be a good idea.
Appraoch one: professional. You are seriously intending this as your future career, in which case it should be true that:
1. You adore the field
2. You are funded in grad school
3. You are admitted to a top 15 program, or you have other good reasons to believe things will work out for you
Appraoch two: experiential. You are entertaining the idea of it as a career, perhaps, but it will likely be enjoyable to do for a few years and it's not the end of the world if things don't work out. In which case the following should be true:
1. The opportunity costs are not severe
2. You have some low-transaction cost way to (re)enter the non-academic working world if things don't work out. (or, I suppose, if re-entering the non-academic working world is not important to you because you are rich or desire to be a full-time parent)
But how will the average undergrad find out if they like the labor? I think, and I'm a bit of a broken record on this, that what we ought to be encouraging is for people to take MAs and then proceed to PhDs if they've found out that they like it and are good at it. That would require a major restructuring of grad schools, perhaps, so it isn't germane to this argument.
Jeez, baa, we agree. I may have to reconsider Fred Bassett. Part of my advocacy of MA programs is that I think they'd make the experiential approach more feasible--if you decide to leave academia you've incurred fewer opportunity costs and, with luck, have a smoother transition back.
And of course Tim is exactly right as well (cross-posted). An important question to answer is: what is the appropriate role of intellectual pleasures in my life. Lots of people -- and particualrly lots of bookish, college students -- tend to define themselves through their contact with the life of the mind. This isn't the place to question that kind of self-definition. It is certainly essentail to note, as Tim does, that even if intellectual pleasures of (say) literature is *really important* to you, it does not in any way follow that you should focus your professional life around the academic discipline of literature.
Weatherson's advice seemed most useful to students in a top-20 undergrad philosophy programs who could expect to be funded at a top-20 grad program. I'm not sure that it's good advice for anyone at all going into English or history.
For a generic humanities BA, the message is still, "Don't go to grad school".
I've been saying for awhile that in humanities fields the present system is not working, and that people should be thinking of alternatives.
That's pro forma, though. What I expect is for the present system to limp along indefinitely, Easter Island-style, until all the trees are gone and the survivors are trapped on the island forever.
(Metaphor stolen from Jared Diamond. It may not be valid per Easter Island itself.)
Rules I've come up with.
1. Don't take any debt.
2. Don't study things you're not interested in for the sake of the credential.
3. Build up chops -- even if you don't continue in the field, foreign languages and statistics, for example, are multiple-use.
4. Have some alternative career plan established, preferably by having job skills before you enter grad school.
5. Keep your eyes open while you're in school. Everyone else is in the same position as you, and maybe they will have solved your problem for you.
I can't think of any aspect of my graduate program that was *designed* for this purpose.
Except the part where all the faculty literally peed on me after my generals. Forgot about that.
Any passion-crushing I experienced was the result of reasonable requirements.
Labs is such a tool of The Man....
"When all the faculty literally peed on me after my generals...."
What was this, Biker Studies?
most useful to students in a top-20 undergrad philosophy programs who could expect to be funded at a top-20 grad program.
I don't think that's true--no matter what your undergrad is like, you can still apply only to programs whose placement record is good enough to make it worth your while, and not go to grad school if you don't get into any of those programs. And there are a reasonable (if not proportionate) number of students from non-top 20 undergrad schools in the top 20 grad schools.
The precepts in 10 sound good though.
Sentences dropped from FL's initial draft:
"Some of the seemingly strange requirements made by professors are really just teaching tools hewn by experience; graduate students will see the wisdom of them when they are teaching their own students. For example, I wouldn't have thought it true, but I really do think better with my shirt off and all oiled up."
Totally agree on the MA thing, Matt. The people in my department who had done precious MAs were, in general much better fits for the PhD life.
Previous MAs. Although I would not rule out pervious MAs.
More advice to humanities students: stop being weenies and learn math.
I should clarify--as things stand, if you get into a good philosophy MA program and a good philosophy PhD program (with funding and all), you should completely go to the PhD program. It's possible that you might not get into the PhD program next time around. What I want is a change of the culture of the discipline, in which MA programs are much more common and better funded, and PhD programs are shorter and more selective. And a pony.
"the faculty literally peed on me after my generals."
At least you got the first turn.
I wouldn't have thought it true, but I really do think better with my shirt off and all oiled up.
I don't know- that would be cold, and I'd be angry about my oily shirt.
However, here's my $0.02: graduate school is pretty much what I expected from working in a lab during undergrad. What I didn't realize coming into it was that only idiots seek out untenured (though tenable) advisors- they're way too intense.
re advisors--- you have got to work with a tenured one, absolutely. There can be no other option. Furthermore, you need to work with someone in the department who has a good profile in the discipline. That will open doors for you and you will learn from them in all sorts of ways. You should arrive to a program *knowing* who the person is who you will write your diss with (and if that does not work out, the program should have enough intellectual firepower so that you can choose someone else who will fill the bill).
Besides the problem of "Is academia a good career for me?", the grad school questions relates to "If I want to do interesting intellectual and scholarly work, is academia the way to go?"
From the point of view of the latter question, the answer is, "At best, it absolutely is". If you end up being tenured at a research university with a moderate teaching load and interesting courses and students to teach, that's heaven.
The problem is that the odds against any given individual getting that position are very long. I think that there are always a few, blessed by the gods, who are sure things (Kripke whan he was 18), but they know who they are and aren't asking questions here. But there are a lot of people who have some chance of that -- too many of them, which is why each of them has such a small chance.
So the next question is, is it possible to do intellectual work outside the university? I've been working on that. The short answer is that it's possible, but you'll always be short of money and time, your family life will almost certainly suffer, and there will always be doubts about your status, at least at first.
Any advice for those of us who just love the idea of sitting around being tweedy? Like, what's the best brand of pipe tobacco?
One piece of advice I don't see often enough is to work for a little while before starting grad school. Don't go straight from undergrad to a PhD program. I took a couple years off and did really interesting (although not well compensated) work. Basically, I tried other things and decided that I liked academia better. So far, two years into a PhD program, I'm happy with my choice.
Also, I did my homework when applying, so I ended up in a top 10 program with guaranteed funding for four years. (And you've never heard of the little liberal arts college where I did my undergrad.) I wouldn't even have gone to grad school if I hadn't gotten funding from a top 20 program.
26: I'm not in an archive-searching mood right now, but baa gave w-lfs-n that exact advice when he was thinking about what to do. I have gone directly from undergrad to law school (which is a professional, not graduate school, as has been pointed out to me), and half way through think that was the right choice. On the other hand, just last week I was wondering why I didn't spend from June of 2004 (college graduation) through the end of that year working on the Kerry campaign. I suppose that's not really relevant to the idea of getting work experience before your humanities degree though.
Any advice for those of us who just love the idea of sitting around being tweedy? Like, what's the best brand of pipe tobacco?
I dunno, but these are supposed to be excellent razor blades.
I'm actually in the social sciences, and the work I did was in the realm of attempting to save the world rather than white-collar jobs in skyscrapers. But I think baa's advice about working was spot-on. I really missed school and read academic work in my spare time. I think working has made me a better grad student too. I grew up a lot, especially in that first year out of college.
I didn't intend for that to apply to people in professional programs. The people I know in law school all took a year or two off, but I have a couple friends who went straight to seminary, and I know it was the right thing for them.
I think it works for law school too -- I hung out mostly with other law students who had some post-college work experience, and we were both much more relaxed and happier about the law school experience, and over-represented in the upper echelons GPA -wise.
I do think that institutions have a duty to their humanities majors to help them get other skills that will help them in the job market.
My undergrad degree is in Classics, a field I loved, although I knew that I didn't want to be an academic in it. I might have considered divinity (even an academic career in that), because--if you do it right, you're also ordained and can get a job working in a parish; but I lived in Massachusetts which has more Episcopal priests than it needs. And the Episcopal chaplain at Harvard was pretty awful, so there were no real mentors.
I needed to take about 18 or 19 courses in my concentration to prepare for my general exams adequately. I took 9 core courses (Ec 10 takes twice as long as the other options in Social Analysis), and expository writing and 3 electives. (Two of the electives were for the concentration in Renaissance History and Literature that I dropped. The other was accounting at MIT.) I also took a year of German which I fit in by taking 5 classes, but introductory German only really required showing up to class. It was easy for me.
I was totally unprepared for anything other than law or divinity or possibly management consulting. I think that the liberal arts are hugely important, but the fact is that fewer and fewer employers are willing to train people who are just smart and liberally educated.
Right now, I'm really passionate about health policy, but I'm totally untrained for it, and I know nothing about statistics that couldn't be explained in 5 sentences.
I think Tim is right that too many people think that they should go to grad school, although sometimes this is encouraged by their professors. One professor I knew wasn't interested in any of his students who weren't planning to go to graduate school. Another refused to write a recommendation for a former student unless he finished law school and practiced for a while, because with a law degree the guy was employable.
Maybe somebody in career services ought to work on helping people figure out what they want to do with their lives and what they need to do to do it. Right now, they just facilitate on-campus recruiting.
Also, I think that there are certain pure mathematicians who just can't do anything else.
Hey Bostonian girl, you should definitely go into health policy -- fascinating, fascinating field! And don't worry, the quality of analysis is so abysmal currently that just by being smart and curious you'll do great. Also, as far as I can tell a MPH is about the most painless advanced degree to acquire, and you can learn all the stats there. Just promise me you won't be like Marcia Angell...
FL--The student in question was already in law school, and the professor wanted him to finish before he would write the kid a recommendation for a doctoral program in Classics. I think that's reasonable.
This thread makes me feel better about my decisions to go to, and more recently, to leave (tentatively) grad school. I just wish I'd build up a better work profile. It doesn't help that the company I worked for ceased to exist two or three years ago.
If you're still showing up for work, that is a problem.
Is that why security keeps escorting me out of the building?
There was an awesome story about some people who did a lot of work for Apple after they'd been fired. The next round of lay-offs was awesome, because they got to use the office space.
Delong linked to it, when he was still using movable type.
Yup, that's the one. Thanks eb.
Megadittoes
When did you stop listening to Limbaugh, Matt?
It's that ol' irony, like calling yourself fair and balanced.
Hey Matt,
Though I agree with your plug in 6, it's paradoxically self-undermining for us -- given our positions -- to plug the MA route like that. Think about it (both placementwise and recruitmentwise).
A toast to mediocre PhD programs!