Not mentioned here, but if you want an academic job in the humanities, in the US, don't be white. Universities have adopted explicitly racist hiring policies for the time being.
Rachel Dolezal got it right!
So you want to go to grad school (in the academic humanities)?
21–30 of 74 posts
Re: So you want to go to grad school (in the academic humanities)?
#22Not mentioned here, but if you want an academic job in the humanities, in the US, don't be white. Universities have adopted explicitly racist hiring policies for the time being.
That’s a good point. When I look at US humanities departments, I definitely don’t see any white people. (/s, obviously)
Re: So you want to go to grad school (in the academic humanities)?
#23Not mentioned here, but if you want an academic job in the humanities, in the US, don't be white. Universities have adopted explicitly racist hiring policies for the time being.
That’s a good point. When I look at US humanities departments, I definitely don’t see any white people. (/s, obviously)
You may not be aware of this, but university professors tend to hold their jobs for a very long time, often 30, 40, or even 50 years. So if you look at a department now, that means that the people there were hired possibly decades ago and do not reflect current hiring practices
You should instead look at recent hires. Or have a look at the recent MacArthur Grant awardees in the humanities.
Re: So you want to go to grad school (in the academic humanities)?
#24Some 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 follo…
> 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.
Re: So you want to go to grad school (in the academic humanities)?
#25The 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 ca…
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.
Re: So you want to go to grad school (in the academic humanities)?
#26Some 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 follo…
> 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 caree…
> 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.
Re: So you want to go to grad school (in the academic humanities)?
#27> 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.
Re: So you want to go to grad school (in the academic humanities)?
#28Not mentioned here, but if you want an academic job in the humanities, in the US, don't be white. Universities have adopted explicitly racist hiring policies for the time being.
Just so you know, I read your comment about racism and your choice of a throwaway name ending in 88 as a statement that you are a nazi or nazi-adjacent.
Re: So you want to go to grad school (in the academic humanities)?
#29> 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…
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).
Re: So you want to go to grad school (in the academic humanities)?
#30> 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…
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…
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.