Grad School Advice from Sempai

Hi, friends! So for whatever reason, I keep finding myself dishing out advice on Twitter. Probably means I’m old, both because I’m giving advice and because I’m still using Twitter. *jk* Not like you young snapchatters or whippersnappers or whatever. Anyway, there’s quite a few of my kohai who are either in school or thinking about going back to school, and so it might be helpful for these among you if I summarize here my advice on Academia.

Maybe you went to undergrad and enjoyed it so much that you want more of the same. Maybe you just like learning and/or reading. Maybe you’re thinking of how to turn something you enjoy into a career.

What it boils down to is this: What kind of person are you, and what is your goal?

My perspective is obviously formed by my own experience, but that experience comes with years of working on a daily basis with professional academics in a wide range of situations.

If your goal is to learn, or to continue your school experience, there are a lot of different options:

• Go into a Master’s program. Or two. Or three. They’re generally 1-2 years if you go full-time, and will allow you to explore a given area of study that piqued your interest in undergrad.
• Audit courses (that is, take them for fun and not for academic credit) at your local college. The added bonus is that you don’t have to do any of the assignments or exams, and can relish the envious looks of your less-fortunate classmates.
• Join a MOOC or other online course. These will vary widely in quality and cost, so do your research beforehand.
• Set up your own program of study. Talk to knowledgeable people you know (professors, librarians, Google) and see what resources they recommend. Then follow through.

Do not go to a doctoral program unless you are a single-minded academic type that can make it in a cutthroat setting.

For at least a decade now, the academy has been bleeding out a growing number of graduates who can’t find traditional academic-path jobs, because the quantity of graduates keeps increasing while the number of available positions keeps shrinking. At least that’s been true in the humanities, and now it’s starting to spill over into the social sciences and sciences (not sure about engineering). From my vantage point as someone who lives with one foot in the academy and one foot outside it, I see more and more graduates looking to explore ‘alternative’ career paths because they know the odds of them finding a traditional professorship are getting lower every month.

There are two basic kind of work that PhD programs prepare you for, and those are teaching and research. Most academic jobs are some hybrid of these, though there do exist pure teaching and pure research positions. Unless you, through natural talent and/or a determined disposition and/or sheer luck, are among the best at these in your field, you won’t find a permanent job here. I know some truly brilliant, talented people who go from post-doc to post-doc, 1-2 years at a time, or spending years adjuncting (teaching part-time), all the while fishing for the full-time position. Sometimes they find it, but more often not.

What happens to those (like me) who don’t end up in traditional academic careers after the PhD is finished? Generally they find so-called ‘alternative’ career paths, like teaching in high schools or finding employment in non-faculty positions at colleges. This doesn’t in any way mean they have failed: I have, for me, the best job in the world! I love what I do, I’m great at it, and I’m probably a lot happier than if I’d gone on to become a professor.

What it does mean is that they are setting off the beaten path into uncharted territory. The traditional post-graduate career path is pretty well-defined, but not so much if you want to (or have to) step outside of it. So while it’s certainly viable to go to grad school and get a non-academic career afterward, I don’t recommend banking on that happening.

And while graduate school might be a lot of fun (depending on what kind of person you are), it will be grueling. The goal of a PhD program is to crush you down into your composite atoms and then rebuild you into whatever kind of being that particular program is designed to produce. And the thing is, it works. I entered college loving creative writing and wanting to write novels; I came out the other side over a decade later with most of my fiction-writing inclinations just gone—but with a solid grounding in literary criticism!

(Literary critics, like any kind of critic, resemble eunuchs. They know how it’s done, they see it done all the time, but they can’t do it themselves. But I digress.)

And once you come out the other side, there’s no time to rest on your mortarboard. Assuming you are fortunate enough to land a tenure-track job, you have years ahead of you of doing all of the teaching, research, and academic grunt work that young professors have to do if they want to earn the approval of their older peers and eventually obtain tenure. Some people are cut out for this, and some aren’t. If you have any doubts, you probably aren’t.

Got any questions I haven’t covered? Leave ’em in the comments! I’ll reply and possibly incorporate them into what I’ve said here.