If only
If only someone had given me advice like this as an undergraduate and forced me to take it seriously. Some highlights:
“The Modern Language Association’s own data — very conservative and upbeat in my opinion — indicate that only about one in five newly-admitted graduate students in English will eventually become tenure-track professors.”
“Are you the one in five? Really? Well, that’s what the other four think too. Take my advice (I secretly care about you as a person): Don’t go. ”
“Grad school is not all fun and personal enrichment for many people. It can involve poverty-level wages, uncertain employment conditions, contradictory demands by supervisors, irrelevant research projects, and disrespectful treatment by both the tenured faculty members and the undergraduates (both of whom behave, all too often, as management and customers.) Grad school is a confidence-killing daily assault of petty degradations. All of this is compounded by the fear that it is all for nothing; that you are a useful fool.”
Am I bitter? Hell yes. Every word in that last quoted paragraph is applicable to my experience in grad school. Most every word in the whole article is applicable.
Go to grad school if you want to, just don’t do so blindly.
June 5th, 2003 at 8:58 am
I so agree. I have an MA in English. In a way, I’m grateful that I was following the old-school method of BA from school 1, MA from school 2, doctorate from school 3, because that made it easier to abandon the path when it became painfully obvious it was a bad fit.
This paragraph really jumped out at me:
“I hardly know anyone who was a grad student in the last decade who is not deeply embittered. Because of my columns on this site, a few people have told me how their graduate-school years coincided with long periods of suicidal ideation. More commonly, grad students suffer from untreated chronic ailments such as weight fluctuation, fatigue, headache, stomach pain, nervousness, and alcoholism.”
I don’t necessarily blame the ulcers I had at the time on my English department, but there is some comfort in knowing I wasn’t, apparently, alone.
I found my experience in grad school the second time around, in a professional program, to be very different. This may be because the job outlook for someone with an MLS is much better, and it may be because the course of study was based more on the practicalities of the “real world” and we weren’t breathing rarified ivory-tower air.
I’d suggest that anyone thinking of pursuing an advanced degree in the humanities to take a year or two away from school and then see if you still burned for indentured servitude.
June 7th, 2003 at 3:27 pm
I dunno…I found this article hyperbolic. Sure, grad school may not be the best option for a lot of people who take it, and far too many people treat graduate school as a fifth year of college. In my program, the happiest of us are the ones who took several years off between undergraduate and graduate education, that is enough time to realize that graduate school is a job, not a nurturing nest. But that being said, in the humanities you generally get to keep your own hours and read/study whatever you want to. Sure, the pay’s lousy and the job prospects in academia dim, but as I said before, there’s plenty of other career paths for humanities PhD’s, and you get to spend a few precious years of your youth out of the stultifying atmosphere of corporate life. To my mind, you can’t beat that with a stick.
It’d be very good for grad schools and especially the scores of miserable people who populate them if people entered graduate education with more realistic expectations. But the Doomsday approach taken in this article just makes it seem as if the author wants to cut down grad student #’s solely to help the job market.