Studying for a PhD: Classic or Dud?

I did a Masters (MSc). This introduced me to how difficult research would be (it really did, it really hits home what kind of hours you have to do and how to manage your time though for you its different. In science PhD you have to be doing experiments but also go to the bloody library as well and then thre's all the posts I have to do for ILM/E heh) but overall it was well worth it.

There's a risk of course that you will not get funding (though you can always try the year after can't you as long as you have a good mark) and, in terms of a degree, my mark might have gone down hence it could've disqualified me from doing a PhD in most places (it went well for me) but if this is what you want then go for it and good luck.

If you finish an MA, I don't think it would screw up your CV at all to not continue on to a doctorate. It's my impression that many programs work similarly to mine: take coursework during your MA, and just work on your dissertation during your Ph.D. time. So there's a natural split there. If you don't go on, you don't go on. Not everyone does - so?

My answer is US-centric, I should note. And state school-centric - I don't know about the UK but in general in US state schools now, funding is generally available since the schools need wage slaves to help teach their classes.

(would having an ma but not a phd really arse up yr cv?)

I have heard academics discussing in all seriousness how a PhD is not really a PhD unless the applicant has gone through at least one "long dark night of the soul". Seems to me that's a form of torture. A couple of friends of mine have spent years on their doctorates and given up with the justification "I'd rather stay sane, really".

Two PhD students in English are talking.

1st student: what are you up to at the moment? 2nd student: I'm writing up my PhD. 1st student: Hm, neither am I.

Firstly, PhD funding in the humanities is extremely hard to come by. The AHRB give out a lot more funding for MAs than PhDs, so don't assume if you get funding for one you'll get funding for the other. The key to getting the PhD funding is I suspect a very well-thought through proposal, so it may be worth taking some time out between the two courses to work on this, since if you're writing a PhD proposal half way through your MA you will naturally enough not probably not know clearly what it is you wish to research.

Secondly, a PhD in the humanities is only really of value if you wish to pursue a career in academia. If this is your reason for applying, please bear in mind that very few people who complete PhDs end up working in Universities. The bookshops around here are staffed almost entirely by folk with doctorates in the humanities. Due to the state of the job market at the moment, you should also expect to spend up to two or three years following your PhD working part-time, being paid by the hour, before you will be considered for even a temporary contract as a lecturer. (Although this varies somewhat from discipline to discipline, as a rule, you shouldn't expect less than two extra years of running up debts before you get a full-time position.)

My recommendation would be that there is no hurry to start a PhD. If I were going through the process again, I would have taken time out between my MA and my PhD to make better contacts within the academy, to save up some money, and to think through my line of research more clearly. Unlike the situation in the States, in general PhD candidates in Britain in the humanities get little involvement in the deparment, little supervision, a low status and very little reassurance that their work is worthwhile pursuing, since the humanities departments often view postgraduates primarily as a source of income and of low-paid labour, rather than of intellectual capital. So you need to have a lot of self-confidence before you start and a very strong sense that this is what you want to do.

Having said all that, I did get funding eventually. I found the final completion of my research project very rewarding, and the opportunity to study for three years is not to be sniffed at. If you get funding for the MA, I see no reason not to do it. Taking time out between the MA and the PhD shouldn't be too much of a problem academically: and the most successful and happy PhD candidates I have known have been those who were able to continue working part-time at jobs they held before they started their research, because it gave them a base in reality...

Good Luck!

That, and most law professors are unbearable prats.

I strongly believe that it's very difficult for anyone to predict how they'll cope with what happens during a long, often mysterious process in which support (academic and pastoral) is unpredictable at best. (In any other sphere of life, the quality of my supervision would be considered lax to negligent. And I though I'd chosen a supervisor very carefully). The bit Tim said about 'dark nights of the soul' is obv.dramatic license, but the toughest test is more psychological than intellectual. I was an organised, hard-working, carrot-oriented undergraduate and masters student. I became a confused, often slothful, directionless PhD student for a long period in the middle (it doesn't help that ALL CARROTS disappear. As did most of the sticks in my case. Apart from occasional feedback, you often get no real 'reward' for the work you put in/pull off at the early stages, which lots of people find acutely demotivating.)

Without wanting to be melodramatic, I feel kind of damaged by the whole thing (on top of the poverty and career stress), and have at least three friends who feel that way also (two sociologists and a chemist). These are bright, sensible people, not sensitive ivory tower flowers (there aren't any ivory towers any more). And that's my final point; although Alex was very honest about the job situation for academics, it's also worth pointing out the degree of entrepreneurial individualism associated with it. Because of the effect that the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) has had on the funding of HE, the pressure to publish and attract funding (and to network and compete for openings) can be enormous (although this varies between intitutions). If you find it difficult to (re)construct yourself in line with these constraints it's very stressful. At the same time, you'll also be working within a basically corporate/bureaucratic system; the contradictions aren't fun.

On the plus side, ideas are endlessly exciting and teaching can be enormously fruitful and fulfilling. If I'd known how it would be (and how badly I'd handle it) I'd've RUN FOR THE HILLS. But I am a particularly bad case.

On a practical note: you could consider a more vocationally-oriented Masters, thereby getting a year to indulge your intellect and the propsect of opening up new job prospects at the end of it.

Ellie's experience is more common that I would have believed, had I not worked in the area.

The thing about stacking shelves / taking menial work is a good one, too: a lot of PhD students take on teaching because the hourly rate seems decent and they're teaching the subject they're good at and it's in the dept and so on. Then they realise that the rate per hour is per hour teaching and the preparation / marking is swallowing far more of their time than it's worth.

I took a reasonably vo9cational masters with enough room for thinking built in. It was a good move, and although I entertained thoughts of doing a PhD, I know I'm not suited to that mode of study (& possibly not up to it).

Of course the best plan is to get your Bachelor's degree at Oxford or Cambridge. Then the way to get a Master's degree is to wait a couple of years and send them a tenner (may have gone up) and they give you an MA!

In particular, thankyou Alex and Ellie. It's incredibly useful to me to have your insights into pursuing a career in academia.

I'm off to weigh up my options, bite off my fingernails, and wait for that letter from the AHRB.

I have rampant criticisms of how the phd works, and I'm still planning on staying in academia, if it proves possible. So I'm clearly not totally alienated. It's not exactly a ringing endorsement, I know, but a guarded 'yes, but think about it hard' is the best I can do. Good luck Dan, queen, if you decide it's worth it.

Given the presence of that sort of personality, studying for a PhD is heaven on earth.

best/worst "advise" i ever had was being told that after you've done a phd you realise that it wasn't so hard, and you can do another one (even in an unrelated area) much more quickly. i think this is mostly true, although i never managed to find it helpful at the time. i suspect that a great deal of doing a phd (at least in maths, maybe not so much in other areas) is self-belief.

'I think, generally, that doing a PhD in English is a valueless
occupation. If you can write you should write a book; a thesis is bad
preparation for that. Three years' concentration on problems that
don't exist but need to be created is worthless training to be a
university teacher. A PhD is a preparation only for academic life, a
taught MA would be much better. I don't think anybody ever consults a
thesis in English once it has been written; what use is that?'

As someone doing a PhD in astrophysics, where we all confidently pat each other on the back safe in the knowledge that we're doing difficult, worthwhile things (!), I find this quite baffling. It's a view I've heard it expressed, but is it really that widely held? Do those of you doing an arts PhD agree?

i Hope it will be classic, but some of you have some terribly bubble-bursting negative things to say in DUD direction :(

hey, at least funding isn't an issue. i've been reassured that a couple years into it i'll have nearly a normal salary's worth of stipend, which sweetens the deal.

also, i'll be working on very real problems with concrete design. it doesnt get more concrete than that!

This 'If you can write you should write a book' is rubbish. I am writing a book, except, I get direction, training, and constructive criticism along the way from my supervisors.

OTM.

The availability of opportunities to get teaching experience is an issue. My current plan after the PhD is to go into teaching at a liberal arts institution at the U.S., rather than continue with research per se, so I need all the teaching experience I can get. With labs, who will employ any idiot first year PhD student who can operate an oscilloscope, I get the impression this is a process that is more easily bootstrapped in the sciences.

Depressing thing that happened yesterday: a friend of mine is doing a PhD in Medieval English. We were both undergraduates at our present institution, and have very similar CVs. We both applied for the same top-up scholarship, which aims to prepare you for teaching, and commits you to three hours tutorial teaching per week. He found out yesterday that he hasn't even got an interview, despite having given half a dozen one/two-on-one tutorials, which is about as intense a preparation for teaching as you can get. They told him he needed to build up his "teaching portfolio". I've done two terms of lab supervision and some A level tutoring, and my interview is next week. I don't envy students in the arts :(

I'm jealous! In astrophysics, there are two types of people: observers and theorists. I'm a theorist (I'm so theoretical I'm in the theoretical physics department, and not the perfectly good astrophysics department next door!). Because observers are working in a large, multinational team where huge amounts of money are at stake, observer PhD students finish in three years or never. This has the downside that their success is, to a certain extent, out of their hands, but they do get to work with real people rather than chalk dust and Linux. Theorists tend to drift over the three years (often by quite a lot!) and their collaborations are rarer and smaller.

i'm doing an arts phd. it's really just a way of making me do covert research for a book. no-one reads theses, so what's the point? a humanities phd is basically a lengthy job application. fuck that noise!

ah, but you were away! try taking even a couple of days completely off while you're in london. also, i always find that i come back to work really fresh and clear-headed, and then 10 minutes later i'm completely disillusioned. the key is getting past that, i guess! i also find that working somewhere with no distractions (internet etc) works well, as when i'm forced to work i do enjoy it in the end.

[sorry if this is obvious/unhelpful, am rather drunk.]

OTM. I guess this is a truism for anything, but I do think we poor PhD students suffer particularly badly with distractions. There are essentially no deadlines other than a rather nebulous one in three years, so you end up feeling like you're trying to swim across an ocean rather than a series of swimming pools. Consctructive small tasks like shopping, administrivia, etc. become attractive, and microbreaks become enormously attractive.

ilx.[wh3rd|p3r].net are both in my /etc/hosts at work, to prevent precisely this.

Sounds like you are in the 'home straight' so like its been said don't force it. There are probably strategies you could use but again, it may not work. I guess you have to remember its perfectly normal to get those annoying mental blocks but that's all they are: an annoyance. Somthing to brush aside. You know what you cared about all this time is 'there'.

All the best.

So for me: classic.

PhD: A Play in One Act

Dramatis Personae and Actors
Man, played by you
Dog, played by you

Act one, scene one
Man Here, doggy doggy! Here, little doggy!
Dog approaches, wagging tail excitedly
Dog Is it dinnertime? Is it? Is it?
Man It is, indeed, my little friend. How would you like a nice bowl of meat?
Dog Oh, boy would I ever! Meeeeat meat meat meat meat. I love meat!
Man Well, here you go, because you're such a good dog
Man puts down bowl. It is full of dog food.
Dog What the? B-b-but this is dog food! This is the most horrid tasting gruel ever invented by humans to punish dogkind!
Man (feigning surprise) Oh, is it? I'm sorry, I hadn't noticed. But look, you've already eaten most of it, you might as well finish it now.
Dog (furious now, though resentfully eating) You said there'd be meat!
Man Well, tomorrow you'll have meat, ok? Eat your dog food.

Scene repeats for FOUR FUCKING YEARS.

:(

Couple of quotes from My Life as a Quant, the biography of a physicist who left academia to work in banking:

"If you didn't mind wasting the best years of your youth, graduate student life at Columbia was paradise." p29.

Quotes this letter to the NYT following the suicide of two grad students: "Perhaps even more now than then, graduate education is an extended adolescence during which highly intelligent young people see their world shrink to fit the dimensions of their advisor's laboratory … With their identities bound to the outcome of their thesis project, graduate students are socialized to view other options (teaching, industry, even changing to another type of world altogether ) with contempt. Wanting a decent wage and meaningful work that occupies, say, 50 hours per week are considered signs of selling out." p29

"Despite the amount of time it took to finish my thesis [seven years], I have no real regrets; in a way, I am proud of the struggle. What I learned in those years — perseverance as much as mathematics — has stood me in good stead on Wall Street as well as in academia. When trying to discover something new in any field, one has to spend many years thinking, making false starts, wandering down blind alleys and stumbling into ditches, only to emerge again and keep going. For this, a PhD is good, if painful, training." p51

I nearly quit a couple of months ago. In the end, I changed supervisor and project, and I'm really happy with the decision and how things are going now. It's really not all bad.

well again just to be clear idea would be to teach in a college ed dept, not an art dept

we all know college professors are not trained in pedagogy

actually from teaching elementary sped to college ed

oh okay

and maybe you have to participate in that credentials inflation to get a job these days but it's enough of a sign that it's a rough market to be jumping into.

and I think art schools in general will have declining enrollment in the future.

I would look into teaching hs

xp

i guess the one thing is that special ed teachers are more in demand than other kinds of teachers, so it follows that college professors that can train teachers in special ed would be more in demand than regular old education professors. maybe?

but iatee is otm, she should talk to recent phd grads and find out how the job search went for them

oh wait, she's training to teach college students to be art teachers, isnt she? i have to say that seems like it would be one of the first areas of the education college job market to collapse :/

bubbles upon bubbles

yeah. i tend to get all macro in my thinking about this stuff, so it might not collapse for a little while, but i wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't take too long. /eeyore

I don't think you have to be retire to cringe at the sight of 'unfunded phd'

haha retire=eeyore

What you guys are saying is exactly what I think. So at least I have met goal #1: confirm that I am not crazy. However I don't know how I will meet goal #2 right now: convince her that maybe she ought to look into this a little more.

99% tumblr

just troll it for the worst cases of debt and unemployment

Answer is probably wait a few more months until she is not pregnant

count in me in as dubious.

aw, when is your baby due?

yes congratulations, Hurting!

how much debt/eating into savings are we talking about if she does this- ballpark-wise? if she really is hating her position now maybe doing it and having a couple of years of it not paying off (ie going right back to what she was doing until something opens up academia) might not be terrible. but it depends on how much she needs to put into it in terms of $$$$$

so mad at Columbia right now. such a shitty thing to accept someone into a ph.d. program unfunded. assholes.

don't underestimate the career frustrations of your spouse (/bitter voice of experience)

I would guess it could be anywhere from $30K to $90K debt, depending on a lot of things. We don't really have the savings to cover it (I only just finished school and started working again myself, although thankfully I have no debt from that), so debt is what it would be. Low end would be assuming she's able to work enough while doing it/my salary goes up enough that we can pay a significant chunk of it as we go, and/or maybe some more grants come along.

http://i68.photobucket.com/albums/i14/AUBURN_MYSTIQUE/Big_surprise.gif

Has she talked to some TC students? I know several who have bitter experiences with TC, esp regarding the funding, but also with the PhD itself, and that despite being the #1 education school, there is quite a lot to be desired...I also know some who are more sanguine about TC, so she could get a diversity of views & see how she feels. (I am anti phd personally, and the fact that I am surrounded daily by PhD students only strengthens that sentiment...)

haha nothing will scare you off a ph.d. program like interacting with ph.d. students

yeah she's in a couple classes p/t now. It actually doesn't even sound good from her description, but the force of "I want out of my job" is very strong.

E.g. they have tons of foreign students in her classes, which would be fine except that many don't have the best command of english, which makes discussion difficult.

(the foreign students are not necessarily phd students themselves)

I think the problem w/ this is that 'arts education' is more of a professional field than an academic field so even in theory you don't have opportunities to teach undergrads for $ as a grad student and I'm guessing the education school isn't set up w/ the resources to fund people for 5 years even if they wanted to.

i honestly think just quitting her job and looking for another would be better than enrolling in a ph.d. fulltime.

like, she could take time to brainstorm work she's qualified for and would enjoy, etc.

but maybe that's terrible advice. i think it's also a pyschologically difficult thing to do.

otm it sounds like she'd already qualify to teach hs, which, truth be told, might be what she ended up doing after this phd

I think someone who feels underappreciated by their current position is prob particularly drawn to the glow of becoming an ivy league scholar, but...ivy league phds don't necessarily end up where she might think they do these days

is teaching at the university level a real big dream of hers? doesn't sound outrageous and impractical to me, but the devil is in the cost details

yeah that is the only reason i would advise someone to get a ph.d. honestly, if it was a life dream and they really wanted it and didn't want to do anything else. and even then i'd tell them to prepare not to get it.

(a life dream to be a college professor, i mean)

I mean yeah she's talked about teaching at the university level for a while, and I don't think it's some kind of scholar fantasy. She seems like she's willing to teach at even the least prestigious of colleges too.

horseshoe, if it makes you feel better, your longtime enmity toward Ph.D. programs has often made me feel better about not having gone down that route myself.

added to the cost of tuition is the money you don't earn while you're studying because you're busy studying.

good! you should! you were smart.

xp to j0hn

and how much it costs to live

xp to estela

(You should talk to my boss, btw -- the two of you dropped out of the same program.)

(hahahahaha i don't even need to talk to your boss, then, i can just imagine in my head exactly what we would both fume.)

again, you need to envision a scenario where you and other family memebers disuade her from the TC plan w/o offering up some other similar path to phd/uni job - how's that gonna sit with her (not that her ~happiness~ should hold you hostage but there may be consequences/resentments down the line)

lol memebers

realistically there is no easy or guaranteed path to a uni job, this seems like it'd be an enormous gamble to join a job market w/ a questionable future. I think the key is hurting providing her w/ the right information, not making the decision for her...

like besides all these macro arguments which may be totally otm there is the marriage/relationship dynamic that other people can't really help you with as it is unknowable to anyone outside of you & your wife (perhaps some professional counseling might be helpful)

that is really otm.

fwiw, looking at columbia, at prob one of the only schools giving 'arts education' phds in the country there are a total of 2 tenured faculty in the arts education dept. (and a whole bunch of adjuncts.)

like besides all these macro arguments which may be totally otm there is the marriage/relationship dynamic that other people can't really help you with as it is unknowable to anyone outside of you & your wife (perhaps some professional counseling might be helpful)

― tuom tuom club (buzza), Monday, November 14, 2011 12:18 AM Bookmark

Yeah this seems like the answer, actually, as much as I hate to admit it. This is a pretty huge, serious decision with ramifications down the line.