So you want to go to grad school (in the academic humanities)?

Glad the author gave a shout-out to the positive experience that is an undergraduate degree in the humanities (I did that myself), but I would add a word of caution along with his others:

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.