So you want to go to grad school (in the academic humanities)? • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by UncleMeat » Sun, Oct 03, 2021, 6:05 PM UTC

cge wrote: post #62

UncleMeat wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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,…

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.

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

#72

Post by zhdc1 » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 7:49 AM UTC

ramraj07 wrote: post #68

zhdc1 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sti…

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.

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

#73

Post by RNCTX » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 2:19 PM UTC

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #33

RNCTX wrote: post #2

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 litera…

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.

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

#74

Post by RNCTX » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 10:36 AM UTC

zebraflask wrote: post #36

RNCTX wrote: post #2

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 litera…

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…

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.