51–60 of 87 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, there is a PhD requirement wall for many cool jobs out there, including at Microsoft Research and alike.
A humanities PhD requirement?
This is my own essay on grad school in English lit: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-kno... , the short version of which is "Don't go, and friends don't let friends go."
Oops.
Don't most of us think, "Duh?" to an article proclaiming that getting/being a PhD in Literature is hard and mostly pointless? Upper level education costs a lot of money and involves years of time, don't these people think about what they want to do with their lives? Don't they do at least cursory research into what that degree will mean to their careers? Every high school has some sort of career counselor. Colleges h…
Well, there is a PhD requirement wall for many cool jobs out there, including at Microsoft Research and alike.
This is the perfect article to be submitted to HN. Because it brings out the worst in HN. The saturated, self-congratulatory, better-than-thou crowd that is smug about their income, prospects and worth . Many here already believe that everything that isn't programming or engineering is virtually worthless and should be killed. This reinforces them. But credit where credit is due: Academia, especially in the humanitie…
What a bad article. First, a humanities PhD has little relation (from a career and financial perspective) to a STEM PhD. So I don't understand why this link is on Hacker News. Second, while I complain about the relatively-not-high compensation and limited opportunities available to CS PhDs, it isn't that bad if you graduated from a top 10-20 program. Lets stop it with the PhD bashing already. - a CS PhD
The article is specifically about literature PhDs. I don't know why that isn't in the title here.
This is the perfect article to be submitted to HN. Because it brings out the worst in HN. The saturated, self-congratulatory, better-than-thou crowd that is smug about their income, prospects and worth . Many here already believe that everything that isn't programming or engineering is virtually worthless and should be killed. This reinforces them. But credit where credit is due: Academia, especially in the humanitie…
This is the perfect article to be submitted to HN. Because it brings out the worst in HN. The saturated, self-congratulatory, better-than-thou crowd that is smug about their income, prospects and worth . Many here already believe that everything that isn't programming or engineering is virtually worthless and should be killed. This reinforces them. But credit where credit is due: Academia, especially in the humanitie…
Before getting a PhD, you should consider that this might make you less qualified than someone holding a bachelors or masters degree. As the author states, academia breaks you down and remakes you in its image, which will make it harder for potential employers to break you down and remake you in theirs, and they generally know that. Unless I was running a research lab, I would prefer to hire someone with a master lev…
Humanities PhDs are fundamentally different from science PhDs, they set people up differently, teach different skills and have different requirements.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we should clarify that the research-job outlook is not rosy in CS. There are plenty of corporations that want to hire CS PhDs for non-research work. And there is always the entrepreneurial route (the smart VCs aren't going to hold the PhD against you).
Well, that's the point - if you get a computer science or physics or biology PhD, then it's likely to be useful also in a bunch of non-research industry jobs. If you get a literature or anthropology PhD - then outside of teaching it's useful mainly as a hobby.
Don't most of us think, "Duh?" to an article proclaiming that getting/being a PhD in Literature is hard and mostly pointless? Upper level education costs a lot of money and involves years of time, don't these people think about what they want to do with their lives? Don't they do at least cursory research into what that degree will mean to their careers? Every high school has some sort of career counselor. Colleges h…
However, most of my classmates were so intensely interested in researching their specialities that they decided the risk was worth taking. After all, it's not like they're particularly suffering during grad school. Grad school in the humanities gives you blissful amounts of time to really geek out in the speciality of your choice, and at top-flight universities, the first few years are free (except for the opportunity cost.) If you get in, your basic expenses and tuition are covered.
Note how we lionize entrepreneurs who intensely pursue a low-probability dream, whether they succeed or fail, while grad students pursuing their own low-probability dream get nothing but scorn. Odd, no? What needs to be changed isn't necessarily grad school, but academic culture - particularly its attitudes towards and adaption to failure. If their community was as understanding of their own failures as ours is of our own, perhaps there wouldn't be such drama about their low rate of success.