<p>I was having a conversation with my Professor and she was talking about her path to where she is today:</p>
<p>Phi Beta Kappa at Ivy UG
MFA from "Public Ivy" in Writing
MA from top U in (her current) Field
Ph.D from same top U in Field.
Professor at University of Washington.</p>
<p>She said that when she was at Ivy UG she knew she wanted to be a professor. So she went and got the MFA to prepare her for her later study. I will say that her Doctoral dissertation was published by a University Press as a textbook for the subject of her study. Basically this woman is amazing. But I mentioned to her what I was interested in doing with my life and my academic future and she recommended a MFA in Writing for all paths.</p>
<p>I said I was considering whether to go to graduate school for an academic position in Econ or Business or whether I wanted to go to Law school. She made the sell that no matter which of those I chose, I would be stronger with a MFA, to have the best writing skills I could muster.</p>
<p>That makes absolutely no sense, and your professor is doing you a disservice.</p>
<p>If you want an academic position in economics or business, you need to get a PhD in economics or a PhD in business. An MFA will do absolutely zero for you in other of those fields. MFAs in writing are for people who want to write professionally and/or teach writing on the postsecondary level; they are not a general all-purpose degree for people who write. You will learn how to write in your doctoral program, and hopefully at your undergrad.</p>
<p>If you want to be a lawyer, you go to law school and get a JD.</p>
<p>Notice how there are very few professors outside of the fine arts with MFAs and very few lawyers with MFAs. If SHE chose to get an MFA to strengthen her writing skills…that’s her choice to make. But it’s not a common path, nor do I think it’s a necessary one. It’s 3 more years in between you and school, and MFA programs are extremely competitive, especially in writing. They’re designed for people who want writing careers, so if you write that you are just getting it as a stepping stone for a PhD you likely won’t be admitted. The cheap low-residency ones will be a waste of time. The actually respected ones are expensive, although some are funded. But without wanting a career in writing, you are unlikely to get funded.</p>
<p>If you really need to improve your writing skills, at most you can get a graduate certificate in writing or something. You could just take a few classes on writing and composition, or even better, you could simply work on your writing. Join a journal club or a writer’s workshop, or go to the writing center on campus. You don’t have to get an expensive and time-consuming degree that won’t help get you where you want in order to be a professor; in general, the only professors with MFAs are writing professors and this woman.</p>
<p>Along with that, if you look through economics or business journals (I’m in a business PhD program), you’ll quickly notice that being a good writer is not a requisite to get published in the top journals.</p>
<p>An MFA would be a waste, especially when you won’t be expected to incorporate stylistic writing into academic writing.</p>
<p>I second that. On a similar note, I remember doing research for my undergraduate thesis and coming across an article that sounded very familiar. I looked through some of my articles and found a second one by the same authors - they just cut and pasted the same introductions into several of their papers (since they were the same research topics), and just wrote the methods and results. I think some of the discussion was repetitive too, since the studies were very similar. I thought that was a bit cheap, but when time is of the essence it is more important to publish results than creative writing. </p>
<p>Sounds to me like your prof may not have been sure what field she wanted to teach in, or maybe she wasn’t having much luck in admissions and just took longer to accomplish her goals. It’s certainly good to know proper grammar and form, but you should be learning enough of that in high school and/or undergrad to get you by.</p>