I am about to get a degree in Budgerigar Tapestry Design, which is a humanities subject doing abysmal in this job market. Here's my thing: I love Budgerigar Tapestry Design. I was previously on a well-paying science track before I switched to Budgerigar Tapestry Design. I am thinking of graduate school in Rare Budgerigar, which is a very, very small, ignored subject even within BTD - because I want to know more, I care about it so much.I want to be a professor, I want that life - or what we, on the other side of the office desk, think that life is. I want to research and know and write and publish. And then there's reality, your reality, maybe my reality - student snowflakes, adminflakes, politics, prejudice, you name it. I am on the cusp of committing full time to a career path and yes, I have choices open in different areas, but BTD is where my heart is. On the other hand, a PhD in BTD is not practical, I admit. Noble intentions don't pay the bills, I know.
Q: Are you happy with what you've chosen? Presumably you all went into fields that you loved - and, after all these years and despite the darker realities of academia, are you happy? Are you doing what you wanted to do, even if sometimes you are forced to do something you didn't want? Would you have done it again? And if not, then would you have given your fields up entirely in favor of something more, say, lucrative?
I might moan about capricious silverbacks, and groan at the latest idiot request from one of my brain-deads (my "pet" name for my introductory hamster weaving students)..but NO if I could go back in time I would not have changed my choice to enter academia, and my choice of field for ANYTHING. Just make sure you publish early and publish well, and get that T-T job so you actually have thae chance to do research, rather than just adjuncting to put food on the table. All the best!
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ReplyDeleteYes, I'd have done it again. My only wish is that the sordid realities of academia weren't so sordid.
ReplyDeleteAs Cab Calloway, who was in an even more notoriously difficult field, music, remarked:
“This thing has been so beautiful, so wonderful, and so lovely, and, if I had to, I’d do it all over again!”
If I hadn’t made it, I may or may not have been making more money. I might have if I’d gone into college roommate’s profession, computing, but maybe not if I’d gone into my Dad’s profession, high-school teaching.
I didn't so much get into my field, astronomy, as it got into me. I was five years old at the time. So was Carl Sagan, when he got interested in astronomy. It's not unusual for astronomers to be born, not made. If it hadn't worked out, I suppose I’d have become a frustrated person: I’d rather not think about it.
This has made me an easy mark for unscrupulous employers. I've been taken advantage of by three: 2.5 years at a planetarium at which I gave shows for 35 hours/week, part time without benefits; 2.5 years at a postdoc job at an R1 where my boss helped himself to a computer with my grant; and two years as an Accursed Visiting Assistant Professor at an R2 with a feudal attitude.
Fourteen years of chronic anxiety, from my next-to-last year in grad school, though all those years as a postdoc and untenured faculty, until I finally got tenure, were also not fun. Still, I did have many adventures that were fun during those years.
Americans love to spend the rest of their lives complaining about the miserable time they had in high school. American academics love to spend the rest of their careers complaining about the miserable time they had in grad school. I had a blast in both, although both times had plenty of problems, too. I recently went to my 35th high-school reunion, and had great fun telling people I am now a genuine nutty professor.
It’s fun to go to the computer center, the staff starts playing “Mars, the Bringer of War” from “The Planets” by Holst, because they know what I do and think it’s cool. It’s fun to have two observatories all to myself, with the prospect of getting time on more powerful facilities, if I can write a good proposal. Although I work for a physics department, I never tell people I’m a physicist: they will literally jump up and run away if you do that. I tell them I’m an astronomer, and they say, “Cool!” They also often then ask me for a free horoscope: oh well.
I also have a strong sense that my best scientific work may still be ahead of me. I want to spend the rest of my life figuring out the physics of accretion disks and the late stages of stellar evolution, because they’re fascinating things to do. I’ve given up trying to invent a faster-than-light starship drive: I think the prospects for success are dim. Helping to develop practical fusion energy is in between: if anyone says, “Fusion is the energy source of the future and always will be,” I say, “I’ve also heard that heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” I never did get the Nobel prize, but neither did Edwin Hubble.
It’s not fun to have students who squander the opportunities I knock myself out to provide for them. It’s not fun to have general-ed students who are amazingly innumerate. It’s less fun to have engineering students in my physics classes who are that way. It’s not fun to have students with a strong sense of entitlement, particularly ones interested in astronomy. I hope they know that astronomy will do very well without them, if it must. I do help my physics department with recruiting, because physics is a better degree for a lucrative and interesting engineering job than most engineering degrees. Still, I make sure that any student who wants to do astronomical research with me knows what kind of profession they’re getting into. Although astronomy Ph.D.s have a 98% employment rate, fewer than 1/3 ever get jobs with any measure of security doing astronomy.
Is it within reach as a serious hobby? Here's my plan. Borrow from it to the degree it works for you or reject it entirely.
ReplyDeleteOf the various irons I have in the fires, I'm involved in a sub-field of my field where I can actually do research that is conference-able and publishable "on the side," without being fully invested and without significant lab or travel expenses. I have kept it warmed on the back burner for several years and actually done stuff with it on occasion (several conferences and papers). So over the next year I will be leaving the academy in a concrete way by giving up my most time consuming adjuncting stuff, no longer looking at the job ads or stressing my family with talk about a possible move if this or that happens, and getting a job that is not in the academy, but related to it. I am preparing that move now and things look very good. I will keep one of my adjunct jobs at 2-3 classes per year and keep my membership in one or two professional organizations in my field. I will pursue the niche research interest mentioned above when I can, if I can, but not shit bricks if I can't for a year or more at a time. I also have an idea or two for books that might actually sell. Who knows if I'll get around to writing them, but I will have the capacity if I so choose and if can buckle down. I live in a place with excellent resources for library study and travel. If it turns out I can't pursue these interests or write those books, no tenure committee will care. Meanwhile, as my stress and dissatisfaction dissipate (I can feel it already), I will enter the middle class and - hold on to your seats - actually start saving for retirement.
This was going to be my advice, for my one regret about grad school isn't economic hardship or the realities of a career but the fact that prelims and publishing has made me truly HATE my discipline.
DeleteGo back 15 years and show me how much I hate this discipline and I would have called you a liar, but there it is. In order to own this discipline and know it backwards and forwards, you first have to learn how to kill it and hate it and eat its children.
Are you ready to hate your discipline with all your fiber? If not, make it a hobby that gives you drive in life as you hate your other job.
Putting all your eggs in one basket: you're doing it. Personally I think this question is silly...when I used to troll CollegeConfidential similar questions come up constantly. You're going to look for opinions that reinforce what you want to do and come up with reasons to discard opinions that don't. I agree with AdjunctSlave...go with the serious hobby rather than serious career option. Otherwise you're painting yourself into a corner with zero job flexibility. You'll be happy with what you're doing but miserable with the situation you have to do it in.
ReplyDeleteI went to graduate school in a very crowded humanities discipline that I loved. I went with the intention of learning for several years and with no expectations of what would happen in the end (I figured I'd go back to my old job). Even though I lived on a very low salary, I was funded, and so have no loans. It was fantastic to have the time to read what I wanted and talk about my subject with others equally passionate. So, yes, even if it hadn't worked out for me, I'd do it again. But I'd advise others to do so only if you have funding and are comfortable with doing something else when you're through.
ReplyDeleteYes, I am happy with my job for the following reasons: my work interests me, I enjoy the people I work with and I can influence the policies of my workplace. Note that none of those qualities are unique to universities.
ReplyDeleteI do not love my field. Some days, I am good at it, but some days I'm just better than other people at my job.
The bad parts of my job are micromanaging bosses, poorly planned initiatives by administrators which adversely affect everybody, working with limited financial resources to accomplish goals and dealing with other people - mostly students. Change that last word to "general public" or "customers" and you have the complains of lots of people.
My point is that while faculty positions have some unique qualities, the day to day things that make the job enjoyable or a pain in the ass are typical of most professional jobs. Much of what we complain about here at CM boils down to receiving a lack of respect of one form or another. That can be a problem for you in any profession.
You may get a lot of responses from CM from people like Frod and me who found a job that we enjoy. Others will tell you that adjuncting is terrible and warn you not to do it. Keep in mind that there are others who don't post here because they didn't even make it through grad school or found the working conditions so poor that they gave up on academia entirely.
I had a long, hard slog till I got a TT job, and now I love what I do. Looking back over 9 years (6 in grad school and 3 in my exploitative first job) of lost income, delayed childbearing, inability to settle down with a partner because I never knew whether I'd be up and moving, and daily fear of falling through the cracks entirely -- I don't know if I'd do it again. I love where I am now but some of that damage is permanent.
ReplyDeleteSnowflakes, adminflakes, politics, on the other hand -- who cares. You'll find your share of flakes wherever you work. The real issue is whether or not your life can take a possibly decade-long hit to income and stability (I happen to be of the school that says if you don't get a TT, decently-paying job in a place you can stand to live after 3-4 years, cut your losses and leave academe). If you have a partner who can support you financially and emotionally through all this, if you have additional savings and either kids already or a firm decision not to have them, then I think you could go for it without too much drama.
That's really it in the end, isn't it? All jobs have terrible elements to them, even the "dream jobs" we work for in grad school. So really what you end up sacrificing is 5-10 years of your life -- the very years you should be using to explore yourself and start a family or partnership -- going through an antiquated apprenticeship.
DeleteDo what you love and love what you do. I always ask the undergraduates that come to me if they will pursue their chosen field with passion and integrity and will remain dedicated to this field in spite of occasional setbacks and real heartbreak. It's hard for them to know (I mean, really, at 20, making these decisions is almost impossible!) but it's obviously part of the equation. As long as you will be REALLY good at what you choose to do, you can get by.
ReplyDeleteThe only other things I could point out might kick off the usual shitstorm of
controversy that comes from the STEM majors versus Liberal Arts thing (better cash for that PhD in Chemical Engineering versus a PhD in History). On this I could point out that my wife has found a way to have her passion of having a farm and breeding program for quarterhorses paid for by a more practical degree and training in healthcare. This way she gets her "serious hobby" supported by her education so she gets the best of both worlds (and I get to spend this weekend and a good chunk of my Spring Break cleaning stalls AND building fences!)
Do I enjoy my academic position? Hell yes! Does it sometimes suck? Of course! All jobs have that layer of crap spread across the academic sandwich that is our career and academic jobs tend to take a larger part of your life than other ways of making a living; we spend our evenings grading papers, reading, answering LOTS of email of bitchy whiny students and the like. There are weeks that easily take 70 hours, but ALL serious professional jobs do! I know lawyers that burn the midnight oil plenty and that is 30 years into a career!
Every now and then as I'm getting ready to teach or walking across campus, I STILL get that feeling of "Wow! How did I get here?" and that feeing of wonder and knowing this is a GREAT profession, warts and all! I feel lucky that I get this opportunity and for lots of academics (not all!) if you can scrape off the cynicism, you might get a similar answer.
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ReplyDeleteI came back to the fold after a career outside academia. Some days, especially pay days, I regret it, but in general I'm happy to be back. When a class goes well, or I have been able to help an enthusiastic student with a project, it's a real high.
ReplyDeleteBesides, for all the complaints about faculty meetings and the political BS, it's no different outside academia. It's not like if I had stayed in IT I'd be avoiding long meetings and budget battles...
(sorry for the deleted reply. dratted typos)
All of the folks here have a job in Academia. They are the lucky ones. I don't know if there are job placement numbers for the current market, but they are horrible. They are so horrible that the shitty-post-doc-cum-adjunct job at a no-name cardinal-direction state U my wife is at right now had a number of Ivy League applicants in mid summer last year. If there're Ivy grads failing to get jobs this far down the food chain, imagine where you will be.
ReplyDeleteMy advice, then, has nothing to do with whether or not you like the work or can deal with the misery. Can you get a job? Seriously. Remember those sci-fi TV shows' attempts to delve into multiple possible realities? In how many of the alternate timelines are you gainfully employed in this field?
Next question. Realistically, what other career choices do you have with the degree you will pursue? How can you alter some of the choices you make along the path to better prepare you for different possibilities? What little specialties, or side-jobs, or internships can you take advantage of to broaden your potential career track, especially outside of academia? This is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing you can do if you want a PhD in some horribly unique little niche in an academic-only field. Figure out what other ways you could apply yourself if it fails and prepare for that possibility.
Your chances of landing a job are very similar to your chances of winning the lottery. In the current market, even if you have an elite pedigree and a bunch of awards, it's still a crapshoot, though an Ivy tag may give you a few more bits of buckshot to shoot your crap with. Do not fool yourself into thinking otherwise.
But, if you love it, with your heart and soul and every fiber in your being, give it a shot. Make sure you love it enough that when you do not get a job teaching, and are instead writing grants for the local SPCA part time, tutoring at Sylvan part time, and teaching GRE Prep courses on the weekend, you still enjoy researching your subject and putting articles together to submit, even though you know it will never land you a job in the field.
And if that still feels worth it, then go for it!
But have a backup plan. Think realistically about alternatives, plan for it, take steps to make yourself better prepared for it.
Or, get ready for Sylvan.
Doubleplusgood, Alan. There are other factors at work here. It's easy to picture yourself being happy doing what you're doing in a full-fledged, well-supported department. But consider yourself an adjunct teaching a half-dozen courses peeled off the sticky bottom of the gen-ed barrel for almost no money. Are you still happy doing this? Is your passion for Nook and Cranny Analysis, along with all the Top Ramen you can eat, sufficient to sustain you? Or do you also want vibrant colleagues, a good location, and oh, I don't know, a spouse, a house, maybe a car that wasn't designed with leaded gas in mind?
DeleteIt's not just a question of whether we all think that those years studying whatever were years well-spent; it's also a question of whether you can deal with the uncertainty, insecurity, and inevitable crushing poverty that goes along with getting one of these degrees. Balance your desire to become an expert in the field against the eventuality of starting at the bottom of the totem pole and then starting to dig.
If I had it to do again (though the job search has, improbably and confounding, worked out unbelievably positively for me this year), I wouldn't consider it a career. I would think of it simply wanting to learn more about what you're really interested in. Once you get into a grad program, the impetus is, for various reasons, to continue in academia. Resist that impulse. Find as many baskets as you can and distribute your eggs equally among them. Be ready, when you finally grab the slip of paper at the end, to do anything.
All that said, would I do this again? Yes. Aw hail yes.
First, focus your research on something more central; after you have a job you can shift to your strongest interest.
ReplyDeleteWould I do it again? No. There were the very long hours in grad. school and many years without much income and so without a chance to start building a retirement fund. I loved studying my subject, but there were also lots of stupid hurdles to jump through and which added huge stress to my life. There was the frustrating, saddening, and humiliating years of applying for jobs without getting any serious bites. Then there were the frustrating times when I knew I was shortlisted simply because the institution needed another name: try being interviewed by people who know they're not going to hire you. I tried conferences, but they were duds. Most of my peers wanted to play mind games and talk about how hard the market was, trying to get their rivals for the few jobs to drop out of the search. Too many others were only interested in trying to prove how much smarter they were than I was. More senior colleagues rarely wanted to talk to junior ones, and there was never the free and open discussion ideas I dreamed of. My years adjuncting weren't too bad, but I wasn't happy doing the same work as colleagues for a third of the pay. While I loved my subject, I soon realized that research involves not writing how one wants to write, but writing for referees and editors, whose judgments are too often arbitrary and thoughtless. In my discipline there is too little kindness or even politeness--disagreement with what someone writes means that person is clearly an idiot and should be written about as such. Teaching has degenerated over the twenty years since I first taught a full course: students have, indeed, become far more self-important, privileged, lazy, demanding, and less competent. Every year it seems one has to do more to try to encourage students to come to class, to read, to study, to do homework (I often teach languages), even to care about the subject they have chosen to take a class in, or major in. So, approaching middle age, I wish I had done things differently. I wish I had known what the academic world would be like when I decided to do a Ph.D. I would have chosen something else. Now, of course, I can't really do anything else without a year or two of retraining, and then I'd be a middle aged man on the job market, and we all know how hard that is. So I hope to manage to just outrun the free, online courseware boulder rolling along behind me and keep my job for enough years more to allow me to retire in more than poverty, or to have enough money that I won't have to work in retail or the hospitality industry.
There is some excellent advice here and I'll only add a few things. I think it's wise to work in the 'real world' for at least a year away from your field. You'll come back to it if you are that devoted. Rent an apartment, make some money, and get away from the academic bubble for a while. If you do decide to go back, for fuck's sake don't go into debt to pursue your degree and check out some of the job wikis to see the current state of the market. Think about what else you could do with your degree apart from working in academics. If the answer is, "Not much", then continue to my thoughts below.
ReplyDeleteUnderstand that, even if you do get a degree in whatever and actually land a T-T job, it's unlikely to be at the greatest SLAC with the brightest students in the most vibrant and best big-city in all the USA. A more common fate is Backwards State College where you teach hungover bros and jersey shore wanna-bes, located in a town that is such a shithole that most faculty live at least an hour away and get the fuck off campus as soon as classes are done. Are you willing to chase jobs like this all over the country? Are you willing to live in Shit-town USA? Don't care about having friends or family close by? Would you like to earn pennies on the dollar teaching the lowest denominator of students? If the answer is yes to all of those questions, then welcome to the horrible world of academics.
Those are some good points, Bison. To add, however, some minor pluses: my campus is moderately pretty, the library is a nice place to spend time in (and I get access to a good library), and we have a school of music so there are some decent concerts. But I did apply to some horrible places where I would have lived if offered a job.
DeleteOne of my advisers also gave me the "do something else for a year" advice before I applied to grad school (he cloaked it in the notion that grad schools like to see that you have a range of skills, but perhaps the thrust behind it was 'get yourself some experience doing something practical').
DeleteSo I did. And it was awful. For all its irritations, grad school was still a MILLION BILLION times better than what I was doing before. This certainly cut down on the complaints that I had about my experience there.
So yeah. Listen to the smart quadruped.
I'm a mid-career graduate student in Exegetical Budgerigar Mural Decoration. I don't know what my professional future holds, or whether my advice could help you, but a few factors have rendered my program a relative cakewalk. First, I took a couple years off, and learned that I craved Exegetical Budgerigar Mural Decoration but could also find pleasure and satisfaction in a normal job. Luckily, mine was germane to EBMD, and the institution will take me back if I can't find a professorial position. Second, I keep myself integrated in a wide and deep social network. Third, I'm by nature happy and quite unflappable.
ReplyDeleteThe only thing I would personally advocate is working for one or two years. No matter how eager you are to get cracking, you'll be surprised at the personal and intellectual payoff you'll garner. Good luck!
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ReplyDeleteI love my field, and I've been fortunate enough to be able to make some interdisciplinary connections with it both in my doctoral studies and post-doctoral work. Some days I love my job. I see that a student "gets it" and starts making connections to what I've presented with information from other classes, employment, or life in general. Sometimes I get to read really good writing or watch OK writing become good over the course of a term. I occasionally get to do committee work which actually results in a positive change being made for my colleagues or students. In general, I know I'm good at my job. Most of my colleagues and administration respect me, and I have opportunities for continued professional growth even though in terms of rank, I'm maxed out.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I confess I have mixed feelings about my work. Conditions are very different now. The world I admired as an undergrad and wanted to spend my life emulating is mostly gone. I do a lot of things now that I never dreamed I'd be doing as a proffie, and I've refused to do others that I never thought anyone would ask me to do:
--More and more, I see the language of business replacing the language of education in higher ed. I now know phrases I never wanted to learn. I cringe as administrators make up terrible words to describe the misery they inflict on us. (I'm truly sorry I can't give examples here, but if I did, anyone from my school or system reading would instantly recognize them. They are that uniquely horrible.)
--I've been asked to call students to remind them to pay their bills and threatened with the loss of a decent schedule if mine don't make due to my refusal to do so.
--I am now required to follow up with students who don't come to class the first day and attempt to get them to come so that if I drop them, they can't say every effort short of driving to their homes and making them come wasn't made.
--Plagiarism, which would have resulted in an F at minimum and more likely expulsion when I was a student, is now treated as "misunderstanding" and often given nothing more than a slap on the wrist. The process for documenting it is now so onerous that I have to be pretty pissed off to even start it.
--Any egregious behavior short of actual physical violence results in nothing more than a note on the records for the customer, er, student.
--More and more administrators come from special administrative degree tracks rather than from within our own ranks. As a result, they have no idea what we really do, devalue our opinions and experiences, and think about education as a profit-making enterprise rather than a public service.
--Adjuncts used to be thought of as a way to supplement the faculty. They were mostly experts working in the field by day and teaching by night, retired or moonlighting high school teachers looking to supplement their income, or promising young teachers/scholars who just needed to get some experience for their CVs while working on a dissertation or fresh out of doctoral programs. It was understood that most of the latter would find TT jobs if they were any good at all. Now adjuncts are a cost savings strategy. As tenured faculty retire, their lines are being replaced by adjuncts. Those at the top see no difference between adjuncts and full-time faculty in terms of what we do for the "enterprise." If anything, the latter are pesky because they can't be controlled as easily and insist on antiquated ideas such as shared governance and standards that don't come from pass rates or corporate testing.
I still think I would do it again if I could go back in time, but I might have made some different choices in the process. But now, if I had to start over today, I don't think I would. I will continue to make the best of what I have because I think I can still make a difference this way. If I reach a point where the misery outweighs the positives, then I will know it's time for me to leave.
Like several others above, I'd say go for it, but within limits, the first of which is the one untenured ursula mentions: you absolutely, positively, should not go into debt to get this graduate degree (or any graduate degree the primary purpose of which is to qualify you to teach at the college level). Until and unless you have an offer that includes full tuition and some combination of stipend and guaranteed work to cover expenses, don't even consider it.
ReplyDeleteIf you can make it to that point (and perhaps after a year or so off), then plunge in, but, again, with limits: plan from the beginning to write seminar papers that will contribute to your dissertation, and to finish well before there's any threat of your funding running out (but not so quickly that you don't graduate with a few publications, which will give you the best chance in the job market -- and if you think there's some tension between those two bits of advice, you're right; welcome to the sort of thinking you'll need to do to survive grad school). And be ever-aware of possible "plan Bs," and how you might tailor your experiences in grad school (and any money-earning activities you need to engage in) to make you more eligible for them. No matter how arcane your area of specialization, you'll be building knowledge and skills that will have some sort of other application, if only in an academic library or publishing house (not that either of those professions are exactly thriving). If nothing else, it wouldn't hurt to build some digital/digitizing skills, since that seems to be a growth area (or what passes for one these days) in the humanities. Exploring other professions might lead to ways to implement AdjunctSlave's "serious hobby" plan, which is pretty much what I'm doing at present: I have a full-time but non-tenure track job with a very heavy teaching load and no expectation of or support for research (except for good library resources and some travel funding, both of which I very much appreciate, since I know that plenty of TT professors don't get them). I do research on the side, partly in hopes of getting a job that officially includes research, but, if I'm honest, also because I enjoy it. But it's only possible because I have a full-time contingent job (not a bunch of part-time gigs), with benefits (health and retirement),and something that resembles a living wage (barely, given our local cost of living). And I still have to worry about what happens if somebody decides I'm ready to retire long before I can afford to do so. Better to implement a "plan B" career earlier, I think, than to spend time worrying about how you would do so at 50 or 60.
A final thought: with your enthusiasm for learning, you might be a good candidate for a job at an independent (private) high school. You probably won't get to teach your field (except to the degree you can weave it into much more general courses, or do the occasional January or summer term mini-course), but you'll work with smart, engaged, students, and employers who appreciate the value of the Ph.D. And you'd still have a month or two in the summer to do some research. It's not a bad plan B, and if you want to consider it, a good many independent schools offer internships that can be good jobs for that year you take off between college and grad school.
I've been very lucky. Not so much in workload as in having the time and space to let my brain mature into something I'm much happier with. Though I do have a tendency to spend way too much time on the internet....
ReplyDeleteSeriously, though we wade through sewers of intellectual crap, there's nothing I'd rather do. I was trained in a narrow R1 program, and through teaching have discovered vast fields I never expected to enjoy. My students are as snowflaky as any, but there are the workers, the curious, the geeks and freaks who give as good as they get; and there's the deep gnawing knowledge that even the zoners and time-keepers are getting exposed to something that might someday move their attention a little beyond themselves, might make them slightly less uninformed citizens and slightly less banal humans.
Nope.
ReplyDeleteI love to teach. I love to write. I'm beginning to think the two should never have been combined.