So you want to go to grad school (in the academic humanities)?(acoup.blog)
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So you want to go to grad school (in the academic humanities)?
https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-to-grad-school-in-the-academic-humanities/
73 comments
Creative Writing is a mixed bag. At least at the postgraduate level, a lot of programs do, at first blush, seem to be revenue hubs first and useful training second. Those, of course, you don't want.
But there are good ones out there, and I would say the good ones are candid from the start that you're highly unlikely to write a bestseller as a new author (or ever) and they actively disabuse applicants and students of unhelpful ideas like that.
I did one recently and I'd say the quasi-apprenticeship model described in the source post is pretty accurate. The overall purpose is professional polishing - the degree acts as your calling card. The program isn't meant to teach you how to write, since admission is essentially premised on being able to write at or very close to a publishable level from the start.
My tutors have said bluntly that if you are interested in publishing commercially, editors often greatly prefer submissions from authors who have their Masters. It's a bellwether that the manuscript has a better chance of doing well and that the author has a clue about how the industry works and will be easier to work with.
But there are good ones out there, and I would say the good ones are candid from the start that you're highly unlikely to write a bestseller as a new author (or ever) and they actively disabuse applicants and students of unhelpful ideas like that.
I did one recently and I'd say the quasi-apprenticeship model described in the source post is pretty accurate. The overall purpose is professional polishing - the degree acts as your calling card. The program isn't meant to teach you how to write, since admission is essentially premised on being able to write at or very close to a publishable level from the start.
My tutors have said bluntly that if you are interested in publishing commercially, editors often greatly prefer submissions from authors who have their Masters. It's a bellwether that the manuscript has a better chance of doing well and that the author has a clue about how the industry works and will be easier to work with.
Congrats on finishing grad school.
I don't doubt that there are exceptions to every rule, which is why I qualified the above in terms of undergrad programs, which I've seen first hand to be a rather complete waste of time.
Even if someone wanted to go into a creative writing specific graduate program, they'd be better served getting other humanities fundamental learning from their undergrad courses, in my opinion. Everything I saw in undergrad creative writing could be learned in a couple of months.
I don't doubt that there are exceptions to every rule, which is why I qualified the above in terms of undergrad programs, which I've seen first hand to be a rather complete waste of time.
Even if someone wanted to go into a creative writing specific graduate program, they'd be better served getting other humanities fundamental learning from their undergrad courses, in my opinion. Everything I saw in undergrad creative writing could be learned in a couple of months.
Seems to me that there is essentially no evidence that following any given course of study materially increases your likelihood of being a successful author. Neither creative writing courses nor the humanities courses you advocate are known to help with that outcome.
The other humanities courses give you a glimpse of what you don't know. It's a bit of a Dunning-Krugger scenario. You can't know what you've never heard of, and can't begin to self-teach yourself a thing if you don't even know it exists.
Or, perhaps another way of saying it is: I think it's safe to say that no one in the 21st century has heard of "The Seven Types of Ambiguity" outside of an academic setting.
Without a frame of reference to start from, I don't know how anyone would progress past a sort of floundering beginner stage of writing ability.
It should not be left out that these humanities courses at the latter end of the undergrad level and into grad school are not 200 people sitting in front of a lecturer in an auditorium, either. They're more like a moderated philosophical discussion with the professor guiding the discourse among a dozen to 20 people. If you get nothing else from them, you get "how to analyze a thing, present your opinion of it, and defend that opinion to others." If you aim to convince others that your words have some sort of meaning of worth to them, that's a pretty obvious basic qualification.
Or, perhaps another way of saying it is: I think it's safe to say that no one in the 21st century has heard of "The Seven Types of Ambiguity" outside of an academic setting.
Without a frame of reference to start from, I don't know how anyone would progress past a sort of floundering beginner stage of writing ability.
It should not be left out that these humanities courses at the latter end of the undergrad level and into grad school are not 200 people sitting in front of a lecturer in an auditorium, either. They're more like a moderated philosophical discussion with the professor guiding the discourse among a dozen to 20 people. If you get nothing else from them, you get "how to analyze a thing, present your opinion of it, and defend that opinion to others." If you aim to convince others that your words have some sort of meaning of worth to them, that's a pretty obvious basic qualification.
> First, let us dispense with the first lie you will hear: ‘this doctoral program is a five year program.’ What that actually means is that the program has five years of ‘guaranteed’ funding. I am sure that somewhere there is a student who went from having a BA to a PhD in five years. I have not yet met them.
I guess engineering must be a lot easier. I started my PhD program with only a BA from a different field and finished in 5 years. That by no means made me an outlier.
I guess engineering must be a lot easier. I started my PhD program with only a BA from a different field and finished in 5 years. That by no means made me an outlier.
In my math PhD program I have not heard of anybody finishing in the 5 years allotted.
I got through a PhD in algebraic combinatorics in five years, but was definitely an outlier.
I had also taken and/or crashed a lot of grad classes during my last two years of undergrad (out of six, total, spread over five schools), so was probably a bit better prepared for the early years than others in my cohort. (There was also a funny system of allowing incoming students to take the first year prelims if they thought they could hack it. I aced algebra and bombed analysis in a legendary fashion, but didn't have to take the algebra test the following year as result. This /significantly/ reduced my stress load in the first year.)
Add in my undergrad time, though, and I graduated at a totally normal age...
I had also taken and/or crashed a lot of grad classes during my last two years of undergrad (out of six, total, spread over five schools), so was probably a bit better prepared for the early years than others in my cohort. (There was also a funny system of allowing incoming students to take the first year prelims if they thought they could hack it. I aced algebra and bombed analysis in a legendary fashion, but didn't have to take the algebra test the following year as result. This /significantly/ reduced my stress load in the first year.)
Add in my undergrad time, though, and I graduated at a totally normal age...
I know several brilliant people who each spent between eight and eleven years getting their MSc and PhD in computer graphics. In theory, the MSc should take two years and the PhD should take four, but it always takes longer.
That's just absurd for computer graphics with how much has changed in the past decade.
Technology moves quickly, but is irrelevant to most computer graphics research. In practice, graphics is often similar to pure math, physics or biology. The fundamentals change slowly, and that's where academic work is usually done.
That said, it is indeed an absurd length of time. A decade is a significant fraction of your life.
That said, it is indeed an absurd length of time. A decade is a significant fraction of your life.
Depends on which country and which exact field. If you sit in front of a computer for most of your work, it’s possible your field has shorter graduation times.
It depends on field and more importantly, country. I was the last person in my year (that I know of) at CMU to get a PhD, a whopping 9 years after we started. A friend had to re-enroll to get his 10.5 or 11 years in.
Meanwhile, I knew tons of people who got PhD's in CS in 4-5 years back in Australia. They typically did zero coursework or breadth stuff, and they were able to start dissertation work within a few months of the clock starting on their degree, without the undignified business of having to propose their thesis formally in public or even defend it in public.
The process of getting a PhD isn't order-of-magnitude different from field-to-field or place-to-place, but there's definitely a good factor of 2-3x between the most arduous process and the least (which does not mean that one degree is 2-3x better, of course).
Meanwhile, I knew tons of people who got PhD's in CS in 4-5 years back in Australia. They typically did zero coursework or breadth stuff, and they were able to start dissertation work within a few months of the clock starting on their degree, without the undignified business of having to propose their thesis formally in public or even defend it in public.
The process of getting a PhD isn't order-of-magnitude different from field-to-field or place-to-place, but there's definitely a good factor of 2-3x between the most arduous process and the least (which does not mean that one degree is 2-3x better, of course).
p.s. Extraordinarily gifted and organized students at CMU were referred to be "on the 4 year plan". Interestingly, some of the most speedy completers of their PhD work were among the least well prepared for the MSc coursework - there was very little correlation between people who blitzed tons of coursework fast with high grade (the 'hares', like me) and the 'tortoises' - who seemed to struggle with the breadth requirements but had solid research ideas that they plugged away on from Day 1. So a woman who didn't have a formal CS background and completed her MSc requirements slowly was the first person to get a PhD in our year.
Yes, engineering is a lot easier. You can look at published statistics on average graduation times and you'll find that engineering PhDs graduate people on time very often while humanities PhDs can struggle.
This is the article I needed to read eleven years ago. I graduated as the valedictorian from a good liberal arts college and ended up in a top-ten PhD program in English lit. My undergrad dept. was very much an old-school one at the time: most of my work was producing careful close readings of texts with only minimal engagement with new research. This made me a great reader but a poor scholar. My best professors had gone to grad school decades earlier when the pressures were very different. I was a naive 21 y/o who just assumed that “being good at school” was a sufficient condition to succeed in grad school. And most of my undergrad mentors assumed the same thing, at least implicitly.
Consequently, I was thoroughly unequipped for the realities of grad school and the shape of the contemporary discipline. It was a miserable experience. I realized almost from the outset that I didn’t really belong there: I lacked the absolute commitment to the discipline to be willing to make the necessary sacrifices for it. (And, once I started working with the contemporary scholarship, that commitment flagged even more.) I bumbled my way through to ABD status before leaving without ever having written a word of my dissertation.
There were also personal factors working against me. I didn’t know it at the time, but I also have ADHD. I was also a tremendously emotionally immature twenty-something who mostly just wanted to feel like an intellectual without having to do the work to be one! (I’m sure I was completely insufferable—more so than I even am now…) All of that virtually ensured that I probably couldn’t have executed the project even if I’d had the drive to do so.
I came out with no debt and an MA after five years, which was good. I also realized what I did not want to do with my life, which was even better. But I also came out with a fairly unhealthy relationship with alcohol and some anxiety issues.
Would I still have done it if someone had had a frank conversation with me on the level that Devereaux offers in this article? I’m not sure. I was stubborn. But it certainly would have helped me to be more realistic about my odds of success.
Of my starting cohort of ten, three of us ended up finishing. I’ve gotten past the shame and regret that I felt for the first few years after leaving. I finally gave up on the idea that I am going to finish it someday. I ended up in a field that I actually love (but one in which I won’t be pursuing a PhD!). I have nothing but respect for those who make it through, but damn if it isn’t a brutal, strange, and at times humiliating system. (And one that only gets worse once you start applying for jobs.) In some respects, it obviously should be very difficult; after all, there are not nearly enough academic postings for the humanities PhDs we produce, so attrition at some stage is desirable. But I would like to imagine there is a way to create a system that can do that without the human costs.
Consequently, I was thoroughly unequipped for the realities of grad school and the shape of the contemporary discipline. It was a miserable experience. I realized almost from the outset that I didn’t really belong there: I lacked the absolute commitment to the discipline to be willing to make the necessary sacrifices for it. (And, once I started working with the contemporary scholarship, that commitment flagged even more.) I bumbled my way through to ABD status before leaving without ever having written a word of my dissertation.
There were also personal factors working against me. I didn’t know it at the time, but I also have ADHD. I was also a tremendously emotionally immature twenty-something who mostly just wanted to feel like an intellectual without having to do the work to be one! (I’m sure I was completely insufferable—more so than I even am now…) All of that virtually ensured that I probably couldn’t have executed the project even if I’d had the drive to do so.
I came out with no debt and an MA after five years, which was good. I also realized what I did not want to do with my life, which was even better. But I also came out with a fairly unhealthy relationship with alcohol and some anxiety issues.
Would I still have done it if someone had had a frank conversation with me on the level that Devereaux offers in this article? I’m not sure. I was stubborn. But it certainly would have helped me to be more realistic about my odds of success.
Of my starting cohort of ten, three of us ended up finishing. I’ve gotten past the shame and regret that I felt for the first few years after leaving. I finally gave up on the idea that I am going to finish it someday. I ended up in a field that I actually love (but one in which I won’t be pursuing a PhD!). I have nothing but respect for those who make it through, but damn if it isn’t a brutal, strange, and at times humiliating system. (And one that only gets worse once you start applying for jobs.) In some respects, it obviously should be very difficult; after all, there are not nearly enough academic postings for the humanities PhDs we produce, so attrition at some stage is desirable. But I would like to imagine there is a way to create a system that can do that without the human costs.
What a great essay, I'm going to show this to my kids.
As someone who didn't do a PhD I always wonder what it would be like. I could never have done it in Humanities but I reckon a fair few of his observations are the same. At the time my main concern was the self-starter aspect of it: if I'm not given a specific task to do like I have been since the age of 6, how will I get anything done? I was also eager to go make money, largely to do with my background as a refugee kid. It also didn't seem to fit the common life plan of having kids sometime in the decade after university.
Specifically, how do you grapple with contributing something new? It occurred to me that that is a bit a of a lottery. You need to be digging somewhere that has something new, and you need to find it. But then I've also read a thesis or two and thought "hmm this is totally unsurprising and adjacent to this-or-that idea".
As with everything else that's enjoyable, it's ruined by politics: finding the right advisor, getting in the right program, being comfortable with living on a tiny budget, competing with all the other smart kids.
Seeing others doing and talking about PhDs, mainly in sciences, seems to have confirmed my main attitude on the idea: it's only a matter of effort to learn something that's established, eg I can read about quantum physics or relativity from someone who's spent decades digesting it, and thanks to diminishing marginal returns I'll be reasonably close to the edge without causing myself a mental health breakdown. It means I'll never know the cutting edge until it has become the establishment, but the upside is I can know the current orthodoxy on a wide range of subjects.
As someone who didn't do a PhD I always wonder what it would be like. I could never have done it in Humanities but I reckon a fair few of his observations are the same. At the time my main concern was the self-starter aspect of it: if I'm not given a specific task to do like I have been since the age of 6, how will I get anything done? I was also eager to go make money, largely to do with my background as a refugee kid. It also didn't seem to fit the common life plan of having kids sometime in the decade after university.
Specifically, how do you grapple with contributing something new? It occurred to me that that is a bit a of a lottery. You need to be digging somewhere that has something new, and you need to find it. But then I've also read a thesis or two and thought "hmm this is totally unsurprising and adjacent to this-or-that idea".
As with everything else that's enjoyable, it's ruined by politics: finding the right advisor, getting in the right program, being comfortable with living on a tiny budget, competing with all the other smart kids.
Seeing others doing and talking about PhDs, mainly in sciences, seems to have confirmed my main attitude on the idea: it's only a matter of effort to learn something that's established, eg I can read about quantum physics or relativity from someone who's spent decades digesting it, and thanks to diminishing marginal returns I'll be reasonably close to the edge without causing myself a mental health breakdown. It means I'll never know the cutting edge until it has become the establishment, but the upside is I can know the current orthodoxy on a wide range of subjects.
> At the time my main concern was the self-starter aspect of it: if I'm not given a specific task to do like I have been since the age of 6, how will I get anything done?
A good program will treat the PhD process like an apprenticeship. You owe your supervisor support and/or a small number of papers in exchange for a salary and training. While there is some leeway for independent research, you use existing work as a starting point for your dissertation.
A good program will treat the PhD process like an apprenticeship. You owe your supervisor support and/or a small number of papers in exchange for a salary and training. While there is some leeway for independent research, you use existing work as a starting point for your dissertation.
This is less true in the humanities where labs, funding from advisors, and coauthored papers with advisors are more rare.
> I had one course where the reading assignment for the first meeting (as in the first time we’d met as a class; we hadn’t even gone over the syllabus yet) was an 30-page article, and the entire text of Thucydides (which to be clear, is 548 pages in the Landmark translation.
Aside from the Herculanean task of so much reading, Thucydides is one of the most difficult books I have ever read. The Landmark Translation took me almost 2 years to read, and I was not coming in blind, having already read Herodotus and many of the ancient greek plays. Reading that book in a month would be almost impossible. a week, I cannot imagine.
Aside from the Herculanean task of so much reading, Thucydides is one of the most difficult books I have ever read. The Landmark Translation took me almost 2 years to read, and I was not coming in blind, having already read Herodotus and many of the ancient greek plays. Reading that book in a month would be almost impossible. a week, I cannot imagine.
My wife has a history PhD. For her quals, her reading list was over 300 books (okay, some of these were just scholarly articles but the bulk were books). To prep, she read about 2 a day with one day off per week for six months.
I just laugh when I compare my quals in CS, which was two tests each covering one textbook and a discussion of about 10 papers.
I just laugh when I compare my quals in CS, which was two tests each covering one textbook and a discussion of about 10 papers.
As a somewhat traditionalist physicist, and having grown up around university campuses, I love university libraries, and probably use them more than most scientists.
It was a bit of a revelation to me when my partner, a historian, casually complained about the limits on simultaneously checked out items being a nuisance. Until that point, I had always assumed that the usual limits for scholars at university libraries, often over 100 books, were just there to prevent extreme abuse, not with the expectation that anyone would regularly reach them.
It was a bit of a revelation to me when my partner, a historian, casually complained about the limits on simultaneously checked out items being a nuisance. Until that point, I had always assumed that the usual limits for scholars at university libraries, often over 100 books, were just there to prevent extreme abuse, not with the expectation that anyone would regularly reach them.
This was my experience as well. Every single historian I know has piles and piles of books currently checked out from the library. And boy howdy are they unhappy when the books are recalled to be lent to somebody else.
Some more nuggets of advice about grad school that I heard or came up with grad school friends over my decade (this mainly applying to engineering programs):
1. It’s almost always okay to quit. Quitting grad school is probably the smarter decision to make for the majority of grad students even if it’s two years before graduation. Your sanity and self worth are more important and surprisingly your career success follows.
2. You can have a work life balance if you are either extremely lucky with your project and advisors, or you’re off the books smart (like you can read an entire book overnight smart). Some fields (computer related) might be exempt.
3. Unless you’re trying to also use it as an immigration ticket to a 1st world country, if you can’t make it to a top school (top 20 for US, 5 elsewhere), don’t bother. A masters would end up taking your career to a higher place in the same time you spend on a mediocre phd.
4. Don’t marry another grad student! (This was unsolicited advice from a professor friend lol; mainly with regards to the difficulty of finding jobs in the same town for both people, one of you will be compromising).
5. As the article says, if you’re already an anxious person or having other issues in life (parents to take care, complicated family situations, if you have a spouse having a spouse who’s not there to take care of everything at home, significant money issues, etc) then grad school is that much harder. Unless you really want to prove yourself to someone it’s not gonna be fun in all likelihood. Note that the majority of the professors you see would typically have had a fairly privileged upbringing, if not in terms of wealth at least in terms of a stable supporting family.
6. If you’re not poor and are bored with things in life, and are certifiably smart and are generally stable up there in your head, then grad school is definitely a great experience. Especially in sciences. You learn a lot of life lessons and honestly the rest of your career would be a cakewalk no matter what you decide to do. While many many people around me absolutely struggled and suffered through grad school, I and a few of my friends absolutely loved it even though we went through one of the worst labs you can find in operation today. I will not advice it for anyone but at the same time I do not regret a single moment in that choice for myself.
7. Don’t get cancer, or MS, or have your lung collapsed. Your advisor won’t like it and 50% chance they will try to get you fired.
1. It’s almost always okay to quit. Quitting grad school is probably the smarter decision to make for the majority of grad students even if it’s two years before graduation. Your sanity and self worth are more important and surprisingly your career success follows.
2. You can have a work life balance if you are either extremely lucky with your project and advisors, or you’re off the books smart (like you can read an entire book overnight smart). Some fields (computer related) might be exempt.
3. Unless you’re trying to also use it as an immigration ticket to a 1st world country, if you can’t make it to a top school (top 20 for US, 5 elsewhere), don’t bother. A masters would end up taking your career to a higher place in the same time you spend on a mediocre phd.
4. Don’t marry another grad student! (This was unsolicited advice from a professor friend lol; mainly with regards to the difficulty of finding jobs in the same town for both people, one of you will be compromising).
5. As the article says, if you’re already an anxious person or having other issues in life (parents to take care, complicated family situations, if you have a spouse having a spouse who’s not there to take care of everything at home, significant money issues, etc) then grad school is that much harder. Unless you really want to prove yourself to someone it’s not gonna be fun in all likelihood. Note that the majority of the professors you see would typically have had a fairly privileged upbringing, if not in terms of wealth at least in terms of a stable supporting family.
6. If you’re not poor and are bored with things in life, and are certifiably smart and are generally stable up there in your head, then grad school is definitely a great experience. Especially in sciences. You learn a lot of life lessons and honestly the rest of your career would be a cakewalk no matter what you decide to do. While many many people around me absolutely struggled and suffered through grad school, I and a few of my friends absolutely loved it even though we went through one of the worst labs you can find in operation today. I will not advice it for anyone but at the same time I do not regret a single moment in that choice for myself.
7. Don’t get cancer, or MS, or have your lung collapsed. Your advisor won’t like it and 50% chance they will try to get you fired.
> It’s almost always okay to quit. Quitting grad school is probably the smarter decision to make for the majority of grad students even if it’s two years before graduation. Your sanity and self worth are more important and surprisingly your career success follows.
This, although it depends on if you're in a terminal graduate program or you're going for your PhD. If you only have a year left to get your MA, try to stick with it if you can.
> Unless you’re trying to also use it as an immigration ticket to a 1st world country, if you can’t make it to a top school (top 20 for US, 5 elsewhere), don’t bother. A masters would end up taking your career to a higher place in the same time you spend on a mediocre phd.
Not true. You're much better off doing a PhD under a respected advisor at a lower ranked institution than you are doing a PhD under a less capable advisor at a top ranked institution.
This, although it depends on if you're in a terminal graduate program or you're going for your PhD. If you only have a year left to get your MA, try to stick with it if you can.
> Unless you’re trying to also use it as an immigration ticket to a 1st world country, if you can’t make it to a top school (top 20 for US, 5 elsewhere), don’t bother. A masters would end up taking your career to a higher place in the same time you spend on a mediocre phd.
Not true. You're much better off doing a PhD under a respected advisor at a lower ranked institution than you are doing a PhD under a less capable advisor at a top ranked institution.
Everyone joining a lower ranked institution thinks the same - they’ll simply go to one of the top labs! But then turns out so does everyone and a lot of times the top labs don’t even take that many students! This is like saying every med student can choose to become exactly what specialist they want.
> Everyone joining a lower ranked institution thinks the same - they’ll simply go to one of the top labs!
They do? Generally you know what group or lab you're joining before you start your PhD, since university administrators want to know who's paying for your salary.
> This is like saying every med student can choose to become exactly what specialist they want.
No, but having a computer vision expert as your advisor, presenting conference papers on computer vision, and writing your dissertation on computer vision increases your odds of getting a post doc doing research in computer vision.
They do? Generally you know what group or lab you're joining before you start your PhD, since university administrators want to know who's paying for your salary.
> This is like saying every med student can choose to become exactly what specialist they want.
No, but having a computer vision expert as your advisor, presenting conference papers on computer vision, and writing your dissertation on computer vision increases your odds of getting a post doc doing research in computer vision.
> Unless you’re trying to also use it as an immigration ticket to a 1st world country, if you can’t make it to a top school (top 20 for US, 5 elsewhere), don’t bother.
Every qualified person I've heard talk about this said the opposite. "Top-20 school" isn't how professors or large industry labs evaluate a PhD, they will look at the advisor's reputation and the specific lab.
> A masters would end up taking your career to a higher place in the same time you spend on a mediocre phd.
1. This is definitely wrong for someone aiming for research jobs. If we're talking about accumulating money irrespective of the job, then sure, a master is probably better. 2. A "mediocre" PhD is obviously a bad thing career-wise, but if your definition of "mediocre" is "from a non-top-20 school", that definition is absurd.
Maybe your comments stem from going "through one of the worst labs you can find in operation today". Or maybe it's US-specific, I don't know.
Every qualified person I've heard talk about this said the opposite. "Top-20 school" isn't how professors or large industry labs evaluate a PhD, they will look at the advisor's reputation and the specific lab.
> A masters would end up taking your career to a higher place in the same time you spend on a mediocre phd.
1. This is definitely wrong for someone aiming for research jobs. If we're talking about accumulating money irrespective of the job, then sure, a master is probably better. 2. A "mediocre" PhD is obviously a bad thing career-wise, but if your definition of "mediocre" is "from a non-top-20 school", that definition is absurd.
Maybe your comments stem from going "through one of the worst labs you can find in operation today". Or maybe it's US-specific, I don't know.
For sure your advisor and pubs matter the most, but given you can choose your advisor directly at the least you want to go to a place where there are more “top advisors” aka a better institution. For sure some small places have great programs so I should definitely amend my suggestion to be a top-20 program. I myself did my PhD in UT southwestern which is just a med and grad school but in the top lists for just the PhD programs.
> at the least you want to go to a place where there are more “top advisors” aka a better institution
Yes, I forgot that I had a European point of view. Here we don't usually apply to graduate schools, we apply to specific positions where advisors and topics are already chosen, so the reputation of the school itself takes a backseat.
Yes, I forgot that I had a European point of view. Here we don't usually apply to graduate schools, we apply to specific positions where advisors and topics are already chosen, so the reputation of the school itself takes a backseat.
> Every qualified person I've heard talk about this said the opposite. "Top-20 school" isn't how professors or large industry labs evaluate a PhD, they will look at the advisor's reputation and the specific lab.
While I think this is technically true, academics care a great deal about pedigree, in the “he/she went to $FAMOUSLAB, they must be a great scientist” kind of way. The most productive, well-funded, and well-known labs tend to be at the top institutions. I wish it wasn’t this way, but that’s how it is. If you want to maximize your chances of being successful in academia post-PhD, then you have to go to one of these places. For industry, I don’t think it matters as much.
While I think this is technically true, academics care a great deal about pedigree, in the “he/she went to $FAMOUSLAB, they must be a great scientist” kind of way. The most productive, well-funded, and well-known labs tend to be at the top institutions. I wish it wasn’t this way, but that’s how it is. If you want to maximize your chances of being successful in academia post-PhD, then you have to go to one of these places. For industry, I don’t think it matters as much.
> if your definition of "mediocre" is "from a non-top-20 school", that definition is absurd.
My guess is that they are talking about a program that is Top-20 in a particular field, or even large sub-field, rather than the overall university ranking. This can be quite different than an overall ranking. For example, SUNY Stonebrook and University of Minnesota are powerhouses in topology and combinatorics, respectively, but certainly not amongst the most prestegious in other fields.
With the qualifier of "within a a field", this comment is far from absurd. The exact cut-off, of course, differs from field to field. In Near Eastern Languages, don't waste your time outside the Top-3. In CS, even graduates from programs in the Top-50 have a chance a faculty job.
My guess is that they are talking about a program that is Top-20 in a particular field, or even large sub-field, rather than the overall university ranking. This can be quite different than an overall ranking. For example, SUNY Stonebrook and University of Minnesota are powerhouses in topology and combinatorics, respectively, but certainly not amongst the most prestegious in other fields.
With the qualifier of "within a a field", this comment is far from absurd. The exact cut-off, of course, differs from field to field. In Near Eastern Languages, don't waste your time outside the Top-3. In CS, even graduates from programs in the Top-50 have a chance a faculty job.
Unfortunately, I have to confirm #7. One of the students that started their program with me has gone through exactly this. It was especially jarring when a neurodegenerative disease researcher reacted with hostility to a student’s diagnosis of MS.
Unfortunately, even though academics are smart, highly educated people, this does not guarantee interpersonal and management skills, or empathy. Equally frustrating is that even with the support of your department and institution, a soured relationship with your academic advisor can still ruin your time in graduate school.
I think most students pick their supervisor using the heuristics of prestige or academic “productivity”, but a bigger contributor to a students grad school success is probably the soft skills which get often overlooked in academics.
Unfortunately, even though academics are smart, highly educated people, this does not guarantee interpersonal and management skills, or empathy. Equally frustrating is that even with the support of your department and institution, a soured relationship with your academic advisor can still ruin your time in graduate school.
I think most students pick their supervisor using the heuristics of prestige or academic “productivity”, but a bigger contributor to a students grad school success is probably the soft skills which get often overlooked in academics.
The "Top-20 school" is bad advice for disciplines (like life sciences) where the expectation is that you will do a post-doc. There are post-docs at high profile institutions that came from lesser known schools, but had a great graduate career, pubs, and recommendations. In those fields, your post-doc is at least as important as your graduate school.
And most good life sciences departments do not offer a Masters program -- you get a masters if you decide at some point to stop pursuing the PhD. Most Master's programs cost money, and, at least in the life-sciences, you are better off working in the field (CS may be very different).
And most good life sciences departments do not offer a Masters program -- you get a masters if you decide at some point to stop pursuing the PhD. Most Master's programs cost money, and, at least in the life-sciences, you are better off working in the field (CS may be very different).
A Postdoc in a higher school than where you graduated is definitely par for course, but honestly it’s one more gambling step with at best 30% chance of netting you a good academic career. Your postdoc can still be underwhelming and also unless your PhD was stellar, you’re not betting a postdoc in a top lab anyway. The point is, given that you can’t explicitly choose the lab you want to do a PhD in, it’s just better to try and increase your chances by going to a top institution. If that’s already a hard proposition then the competition only keeps getting worse over time.
Well, from my point of view, elite-level education in humanities for most of the history was a privilege reserved for the elites (to define "elites", I will use a narrow definition of "not having to work for living", though there are some exceptions). So if you consider obtaining a PhD in humanities, you need to _plan_ that you won't be "working" for the rest of your life, either by the "virtue" of being born in a wealthy family, or by networking and targeting the privileged sinecures.
The system is unfortunately _designed_ to work this way.
The system is unfortunately _designed_ to work this way.
The author has an essay arguing why we shouldn't allow the humanities to go back to being the purview of the idle elite: https://acoup.blog/2020/07/03/collections-the-practical-case...
The excruciating detail here is commendable.
The sciences are also very much like this, particularly life sciences, physics and chemistry.
The article doesn’t go into it much, but another important question to ask oneself is why are you doing it. The answer, for most students and I daresay most tenured academics, is generally vanity. Putting aside the consequences of this vanity, which may of course include curing cancer and unravelling the nature of the universe, being motivated by vanity will almost always end badly for the individual. A lot of nonsensical academic behaviour (the perverse devotion to prestige, the viciousness, the obviously harmful publish or perish mentality, acquiescing to exploitative closed source publication models) can be explained if you accept academics are motivated mainly by vanity.
The sciences are also very much like this, particularly life sciences, physics and chemistry.
The article doesn’t go into it much, but another important question to ask oneself is why are you doing it. The answer, for most students and I daresay most tenured academics, is generally vanity. Putting aside the consequences of this vanity, which may of course include curing cancer and unravelling the nature of the universe, being motivated by vanity will almost always end badly for the individual. A lot of nonsensical academic behaviour (the perverse devotion to prestige, the viciousness, the obviously harmful publish or perish mentality, acquiescing to exploitative closed source publication models) can be explained if you accept academics are motivated mainly by vanity.
I like doing research, it's fun and always changing and it's cool developing new techniques. Publishing and prestige are sort of like the "have-tos" of research, to me. Kind of like doing coding sprints and JIRA tickets are have-tos for developers.
> All of which is to say that the work load of graduate school is not like an extension of the undergraduate experience, but a quantitative change massive enough to be a qualitative change; the work-load is massively heavier.
It's a massive change IFF you didn't spend part of your undergraduate experience gaining genre literacy in the given field.
E.g., compare a grad experience of:
1. Weekend's assignment: annotated bibliography of the complete piano sonatas of Beethoven.
2. Weekend's assignment: annotated bibliography of articles about Native Americans from the Journal of Ethnomusicology since its inception in the 50s.
Your subjective experience of either of these depends on your own history with the topic. If you've site read most or all of the Beethoven sonatas, it probably feels like a gift to be getting paid a stipend to document your own formal analyses of them (or whatever we define "annotate" to mean in this context). If you spent your childhood reading everything you could get your hands on in the local library on tribal politics, annotating those Ethno articles is going to be a breeze.
Btw-- #1 is probably much more difficult and time consuming than #2-- it's over ten hours of music if you listened to it continuously. I write it there because I've done both #1 and #2, and #2 felt like so much more work because a) I didn't have genre literacy in ethnomusicology and b) even though it was a valuable experience, at the time I would have rather been analyzing Beethoven sonatas.
It's a massive change IFF you didn't spend part of your undergraduate experience gaining genre literacy in the given field.
E.g., compare a grad experience of:
1. Weekend's assignment: annotated bibliography of the complete piano sonatas of Beethoven.
2. Weekend's assignment: annotated bibliography of articles about Native Americans from the Journal of Ethnomusicology since its inception in the 50s.
Your subjective experience of either of these depends on your own history with the topic. If you've site read most or all of the Beethoven sonatas, it probably feels like a gift to be getting paid a stipend to document your own formal analyses of them (or whatever we define "annotate" to mean in this context). If you spent your childhood reading everything you could get your hands on in the local library on tribal politics, annotating those Ethno articles is going to be a breeze.
Btw-- #1 is probably much more difficult and time consuming than #2-- it's over ten hours of music if you listened to it continuously. I write it there because I've done both #1 and #2, and #2 felt like so much more work because a) I didn't have genre literacy in ethnomusicology and b) even though it was a valuable experience, at the time I would have rather been analyzing Beethoven sonatas.
Another thing to keep in mind: you probably aren't going to get a job at an R1 school even if you got your phd from one. I went to an R1 school in the Big Ten conference and while everyone that I know that graduated eventually got jobs, only one of us has one in an R1 and she worked her way up. I'm at a community college and I like it but it isn't where I expected I would be when I entered grad school.
I think it is important to point out that the author is describing the graduate student experience in the humanities. If you are reading HN, you are more likely to be looking at a degree in the sciences or engineering.
Some important things to remember:
(1) do not pay for graduate school. Good graduate (not professional) programs offer full support for 5 years, though that may include a teaching requirement.
(2) in the sciences, you will be done with courses in 2 years, perhaps sooner. Most science graduate students make it out in less than 6 years.
(3) many graduate programs have a shortage of students, so you should be able to pick from several labs (you all do rotations the first and possibly second years to get a sense of what different labs/advisors are like). When ranking your choices for graduate school, try to find programs that have several faculty doing research that excites you. You don’t have to pick an advisor before doing a rotation with them, but you do want to pick places with multiple options.
(4) be aware that a PhD program is very different from undergraduate. As a graduate student in the sciences, your goal is to make discoveries. You may take some courses to help you learn how to make discoveries, but mostly it is apprenticeship. You will learn by doing experiments that fail. It is not uncommon for your thesis and publicationsto be based on your last 18 months of work. Making discoveries is hard and unpredictable, but most graduate students graduate.
Some important things to remember:
(1) do not pay for graduate school. Good graduate (not professional) programs offer full support for 5 years, though that may include a teaching requirement.
(2) in the sciences, you will be done with courses in 2 years, perhaps sooner. Most science graduate students make it out in less than 6 years.
(3) many graduate programs have a shortage of students, so you should be able to pick from several labs (you all do rotations the first and possibly second years to get a sense of what different labs/advisors are like). When ranking your choices for graduate school, try to find programs that have several faculty doing research that excites you. You don’t have to pick an advisor before doing a rotation with them, but you do want to pick places with multiple options.
(4) be aware that a PhD program is very different from undergraduate. As a graduate student in the sciences, your goal is to make discoveries. You may take some courses to help you learn how to make discoveries, but mostly it is apprenticeship. You will learn by doing experiments that fail. It is not uncommon for your thesis and publicationsto be based on your last 18 months of work. Making discoveries is hard and unpredictable, but most graduate students graduate.
An important addition is that all these discussion are strongly country dependent. While the difference between engineering/science and humanities MAs and PhD exist everywhere. Specifics vary quite strongly between countries. One example: in Australia most PhDs only require an honors year (a fourth year in the bachelor, which is even normal for many engineering degrees) while any several other an MA is required.
I’d like to add to your points
4) Graduate programs are indeed different from Post Graduate programs. Before your doctoral degree, you were given a question and asked for an answer. Perhaps sometimes, you were also given questions for which known answer existed. In your doctoral degree, you will most likely come up with the question and the answer. That’s a shift of mind, you may need time for adjusting.
4) Graduate programs are indeed different from Post Graduate programs. Before your doctoral degree, you were given a question and asked for an answer. Perhaps sometimes, you were also given questions for which known answer existed. In your doctoral degree, you will most likely come up with the question and the answer. That’s a shift of mind, you may need time for adjusting.
It was clear to me when getting a graduate degree in a humanities field that these programs produced mostly academics whose only viable job was going to be teaching the next generation of academics. And by viable, I mean viable for the luckiest one in ten. In other words, it was already an island of cannibals with no other food source than itself, and none likely to arrive. That system cannot run forever.
Twenty years later, nothing has changed my opinion, and I agree with the author's conclusion here: that a graduate degree in the humanities makes sense only for the wealthy. That's how liberal arts education began, and how it'll probably end. This return to origin should appeal both to students both of history's long rhythmic structure, and of literary narrative, and so maybe it will provide some value to the private scholars of the future.
I also partly disagree with the author, in that I don't think an undergraduate degree in the humanities is all that useful. I have one of those too, and I wouldn't get one again. I can't speak to history departments, but English departments don't have a lot to offer students anymore that a library card and an internet connection wouldn't do better. That's not because studying Literature is easy or worthless, but because that's not what English departments do well anymore.
Twenty years later, nothing has changed my opinion, and I agree with the author's conclusion here: that a graduate degree in the humanities makes sense only for the wealthy. That's how liberal arts education began, and how it'll probably end. This return to origin should appeal both to students both of history's long rhythmic structure, and of literary narrative, and so maybe it will provide some value to the private scholars of the future.
I also partly disagree with the author, in that I don't think an undergraduate degree in the humanities is all that useful. I have one of those too, and I wouldn't get one again. I can't speak to history departments, but English departments don't have a lot to offer students anymore that a library card and an internet connection wouldn't do better. That's not because studying Literature is easy or worthless, but because that's not what English departments do well anymore.
I started reading the article and I appreciated the effort to convey the truth.
To be blunt, graduate humanities education should be treated as a dangerous life choice by default. While people making this choice are old enough and should intellectually "understand" that it is not going to be a lucrative path, I suspect they are mainly not equipped to really get what that means.
It's one thing to say "I am going to make less money than my orthodontist dad by going the humanities route" but it's not the same as viscerally understanding what it means to lack financial security, struggle to afford housing, vacations, etc. for the rest of your life. People who've never known poverty are not able to adequately understand what it means to condemn themselves to it.
I can't blame them. We all know "there's no money in humanities" the same way we know that "smoking's bad for you" but many of us don't really get what it means until real sickness/poverty explains it to us. This is proven by the relative over-representation of immigrants and first generation Americans in "practical" majors - people who have tasted poverty and struggle are likely to seek education that helps them avoid it.
This isn't limited to humanities. I always remember interviewing a "kid" who just got his PHD in chemistry at Case Western, realized there was nothing in chemistry he could/wanted to do, and was thus applying for entry level programming jobs, for which he would have been equally qualified 10 years earlier out of undergrad. The years he spent getting his MS and PHD shielded him from confronting reality, so now he was competing with kids almost 10 years younger, who were frankly more qualified, energetic and less in debt than he was. His graduate education was purely a waste of time and money.
Lest I seem anti-education, I have 2.5 masters degrees which served me very well. My wife is working on her second masters part time. My grandmother is a professor of Russian Literature, my grandfather was a professor of Mathematics, both my parents have masters' degrees and my cousin just defended his PhD in bioengineering. I see the benefits of education all around me, the only point is that we need to be thoughtful about it.
Placing a "tempting" grad school path in front of young people who aren't able to appreciate the implication of this choice is inherently going to lead to bad outcomes. The fact that it's possible for a person to be almost 30 and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt before they get any taste of their professional and personal life is crazy.
I spent some time in Israel and I think their model works much better. After high school, Israeli kids spend a few years in the army. This is a mainly "not fun, working experience" which exposes them to different career options. After the army, they are starved for fun so they spend 6-12 months backpacking India or South America. By the time they're back in Israel, they are more mature, got their "fun times" out of the way, and can think about what they want to get out of their college education. They don't look at college as a chance to have fun or find themselves since that's already done, but simply to enable them to have whatever career they desire. Sometimes that choice leads them to humanities and professorship, but they are making that choice more wisely.
My 2.5 graduate degrees were earned part time, starting a few years after I begun my career. This allowed me to be very thoughtful about what I want to do, and how to get an education that enabled that. The sum total of my advice is that it almost never makes sense to go into grad school directly out of college - unless you're very certain you want to be a doctor or a lawyer and you can't experience those fields without doctorate level education. For almost everything else, I strongly advise working at 2-3 years, experiencing the field and what the lifestyle of that field is, before you double-down the years and money on graduate work. I bet the decisions made 2-3 years later will be very often different and much better.
To be blunt, graduate humanities education should be treated as a dangerous life choice by default. While people making this choice are old enough and should intellectually "understand" that it is not going to be a lucrative path, I suspect they are mainly not equipped to really get what that means.
It's one thing to say "I am going to make less money than my orthodontist dad by going the humanities route" but it's not the same as viscerally understanding what it means to lack financial security, struggle to afford housing, vacations, etc. for the rest of your life. People who've never known poverty are not able to adequately understand what it means to condemn themselves to it.
I can't blame them. We all know "there's no money in humanities" the same way we know that "smoking's bad for you" but many of us don't really get what it means until real sickness/poverty explains it to us. This is proven by the relative over-representation of immigrants and first generation Americans in "practical" majors - people who have tasted poverty and struggle are likely to seek education that helps them avoid it.
This isn't limited to humanities. I always remember interviewing a "kid" who just got his PHD in chemistry at Case Western, realized there was nothing in chemistry he could/wanted to do, and was thus applying for entry level programming jobs, for which he would have been equally qualified 10 years earlier out of undergrad. The years he spent getting his MS and PHD shielded him from confronting reality, so now he was competing with kids almost 10 years younger, who were frankly more qualified, energetic and less in debt than he was. His graduate education was purely a waste of time and money.
Lest I seem anti-education, I have 2.5 masters degrees which served me very well. My wife is working on her second masters part time. My grandmother is a professor of Russian Literature, my grandfather was a professor of Mathematics, both my parents have masters' degrees and my cousin just defended his PhD in bioengineering. I see the benefits of education all around me, the only point is that we need to be thoughtful about it.
Placing a "tempting" grad school path in front of young people who aren't able to appreciate the implication of this choice is inherently going to lead to bad outcomes. The fact that it's possible for a person to be almost 30 and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt before they get any taste of their professional and personal life is crazy.
I spent some time in Israel and I think their model works much better. After high school, Israeli kids spend a few years in the army. This is a mainly "not fun, working experience" which exposes them to different career options. After the army, they are starved for fun so they spend 6-12 months backpacking India or South America. By the time they're back in Israel, they are more mature, got their "fun times" out of the way, and can think about what they want to get out of their college education. They don't look at college as a chance to have fun or find themselves since that's already done, but simply to enable them to have whatever career they desire. Sometimes that choice leads them to humanities and professorship, but they are making that choice more wisely.
My 2.5 graduate degrees were earned part time, starting a few years after I begun my career. This allowed me to be very thoughtful about what I want to do, and how to get an education that enabled that. The sum total of my advice is that it almost never makes sense to go into grad school directly out of college - unless you're very certain you want to be a doctor or a lawyer and you can't experience those fields without doctorate level education. For almost everything else, I strongly advise working at 2-3 years, experiencing the field and what the lifestyle of that field is, before you double-down the years and money on graduate work. I bet the decisions made 2-3 years later will be very often different and much better.
Academia is a pyramid scheme, which by necessity means that most people have to lose in order for a few to win.
Fortunately for science and engineering Ph.D.'s there are usually decent opportunities in industry.
Fortunately for science and engineering Ph.D.'s there are usually decent opportunities in industry.
I'm a PhD student in CS at Caltech, and a lot of this resonated with me, especially the importance of finding the right advisor - and how random that process is. As the author says, your advisor has a lot of power over you and your career, and you really don't know in advance whether they will be a good fit. I was lucky; while my first advisor wasn't a good fit, I was able to switch to someone really great.
OTOH, some aspects of this post are crazy to me. We get paid $36k/year, way more than the $16k/year he mentioned. Also, our insurance is decent: mental health visits are 100% covered, and visits to other specialists (for example, a dermatologist) are just a $15 copay/visit. I think the insurance costs us just a few hundred dollars per term - annual costs are definitely less than $1k/year. Job prospects are very good - at least 15-20% of our PhD students eventually land a faculty job, often at top 20 institutions. Also, industry jobs pay well; my friends who did ML now make $300k/year straight out of their PhD. Finally, working 80 hours per week is definitely the exception. Most students I know have much more reasonable hours - in fact I think it's possible to do a decent PhD while putting in only 40 hours per week (on average; weeks before conference deadlines are intense!).
People often write about how painful the PhD process is. While it certainly can be awful, I think CS PhD programs at top schools provide much better living conditions and ROI than the humanities programs he describes.
OTOH, some aspects of this post are crazy to me. We get paid $36k/year, way more than the $16k/year he mentioned. Also, our insurance is decent: mental health visits are 100% covered, and visits to other specialists (for example, a dermatologist) are just a $15 copay/visit. I think the insurance costs us just a few hundred dollars per term - annual costs are definitely less than $1k/year. Job prospects are very good - at least 15-20% of our PhD students eventually land a faculty job, often at top 20 institutions. Also, industry jobs pay well; my friends who did ML now make $300k/year straight out of their PhD. Finally, working 80 hours per week is definitely the exception. Most students I know have much more reasonable hours - in fact I think it's possible to do a decent PhD while putting in only 40 hours per week (on average; weeks before conference deadlines are intense!).
People often write about how painful the PhD process is. While it certainly can be awful, I think CS PhD programs at top schools provide much better living conditions and ROI than the humanities programs he describes.
Literature departments are maintaining themselves on "Creative Writing" programs aimed at every Harry Potter and YA fiction fan in the world. As such, a lot of unwitting kids think they can go to a trade school in how to be a literary millionaire/billionaire.
That is not the case, and an undergrad writing program won't do anything other than cause you to miss what might make you a good writer, namely all of those other humanities classes that people who think they're in a writing vocational program don't care about. You know... the Shakespeare courses, the PHIL courses, the culture-specific courses, the weirdo Psych courses about Freud, the criticism courses, etc.