Courtesy of Tam: check these excellent rants out.
This response to the second writer's famous anti-grad school Slate rant kind of makes me irritated. The guy's an anthropologist, but probably could have benefited from taking a few social psychology courses along the way. When an environment is as toxic as grad school/academia generally is, and the socialization pressure is as strong as it is, it's really not kosher (nor fair nor other humane qualities) to blame people for being successfully socialized and hence being fucked up by their experiences. I mean, it's great that this writer hasn't had this kind of experience, and maybe that's because his program is different, or he is kind of clueless about social norms, or his gratifying work advancing people's rights in foreign countries gives him partial immunity to it. But his experience (esp. the part about doing something meaningful to help advance the lot of needy people in a direct way) is really not what most grad students/junior faculty experience. It's like, great, you're an anomaly. BFD. Your personal experience does not negate the personal experiences of all these other people.
And of course, I get mad when I read about people in academia who talk about how much work/life balance they have, and how they have kept up with all kinds of outside activities, and if you haven't, then it's your own damn fault. Um, seriously, that is not an option for a lot of people. I would not have been able to live that kind of lifestyle and be allowed to even stay in my program. Perhaps my own program was extreme in this regard, but that pressure and the threat (implied or explicit) is, I think, present in most programs.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
Honestly, among other things, I don't think there is much motivation for faculty to work with grad students who don't intend to pursue serious academic careers. It's not like you get extra pay or course releases for advising doctorate students. Most of the reward seems to come from sort of procreating yourself forward and outward. Thus, etting your advisor find out that you value work-life balance and are fine ending up with a non-academic job at the end is going to have a bad outcome in many cases.
It is also amusing, as one post pointed out, listening to the cheerfully optimistic takes on academia given by people in the middle of getting the degree. Come back in 5 years and tell us again how your anthropology PhD made you more qualified for every job.
...and also how you felt as you started to see your peers buy houses, go on vacations, etc.
Being poor is so much less cool at 30 than at 20.
Right, I meant to comment on the whole "the process of honing my mind in the ways necessary to get a PhD is just so useful in a gazillion ways" aspect of this. It's not like I disagree with this completely. A person with a PhD is "smarter" in some ways than the same person with only their BA before the PhD, and this includes in ways that employers could care about. But I think almost any non-academic/non-think-tank employer would prefer the person with the BA and 5+ years of experience in the kind of job they're hiring for than the person with the PhD and no work experience, and for very good reason. But in any event, it hardly seems that getting a PhD is the right way to spend your time if you are targeting jobs outside academia (and certain govt or think tank jobs) unless you really just LOVE LOVE LOVE the experience of getting your PhD and can fake it (i.e., do all the work that supports the idea) that your ultimate career goal is academia.
And a lot of these anti-academic rants aren't just about the fact that there are no jobs. Grad students who LOVE LOVE LOVE their experience are sort of rare, I think.
After reading all the blogs and comments what stands out is how little sympathy anyone has for the people who had bad experiences in grad school and job searching. There is an attitude of if you hated the experience there must have been something wrong with you.
Don't these people who think grad school is great and they love it realize that people go into careers all the time that they end up not wanting to do because you really can't know that you are going to "love" it until you actually do it?
Thanks for the link! Yeah, that MgGill fellow is the least-nice Canadian I have ever seen. He besmirches the great country that gave us the Kids in the Hall and You Can't Do That On Television. (And all the other amazing stuff Canada did/does. I love Canada). But anyway, yeah, as Tam says--it's all well and good to insist that you're doing a PhD for your own edification, as I insisted I was until I got properly socialized. And that jackwagon from McGill isn't even in the Humanities, so his arguments don't apply to most Humanities grad students. Blurgh. Me no articulate today. Sorry. Anyway what I meant was...thanks!
Mom, yeah, I think there is both a lot of groupthink going on as well as defensiveness about the job market and the lifestyle.
Rebecca - One of the nice things about my own (non-humanities) program was that I did have some great fellow grad students who are Canadian and lived up to the positive reputation :)
Post a Comment