<p>After reading this forum for several hours, I can't help but notice a decided lack of representation for the humanities. I thought I'd create our own devoted thread to chronicle our sorrows, joys, and somewhere-in-betweens.</p>
<p>I guess that, by default, I'm the one to start. I'm applying to Comparative Literature at Princeton, Literature at UCSD (where I currently work), and English at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Univ. of Chicago, Northwestern, and Berkeley. Some of these choices were dictated by where my husband can get a job; some by mere whimsy.</p>
<p>I took three years off after graduating from Harvard's History and Literature program to see whether my interest in the latter stuck. It did. Since then, I've used my employee discount at UCSD to take Russian language and literature classes, since I'm planning on studying formalism and structuralism in relation to literature and technology and verisimilitude in the novel.</p>
<p>I got a perfect score on the Verbal GRE and the writing portion, a not-so-hot one on the math, and a 98th percentile on the subject. My professors tell me that none of this will matter, but I'm kind of hoping they're wrong.</p>
<p>The things I worry about most are a relatively low GPA (3.56 overall; 3.72 in my concentration), which I attempted to explain away by citing my 40-hour-workweek in addition to schoolwork to pay for the experience; my three year gap for enrollment in a degree-granting program; and, of course, getting a job. I ultimately dismissed the third because I figure even a part-time lectureship at an uninspiring party school is better than the gig I've got now.</p>
<p>So come on in. Introduce yourselves. It's okay. The engineers won't hurt us as long as we all stick together.</p>
<p>Don't worry about the three years out of school. I spoke with one professor at Yale who told me that he believes that students are usually more mature after they have taken some time off. It all depends on what you do with your time. I taught elementary school in a low-income area, learned two languages, and got a master's degree (in a completely unrelated subject that was paid for by the school district I worked for). I have a friend who spent time working for a nonprofit company after he graduated, and now plans to parlay his experience working for women's reproductive rights into a much stronger statement of purpose. I think that students are better prepared if they don't come straight out of undergrad, not less.</p>
<p>Thanks for the reassurance. I've heard this, too, and I hope you're right. I guess I still buy into the cult of the genius to some extent--that precocious 21-year-old who skips a year of college and turns down a Rhodes because his/her desire to study the metaphysical poets is so all-consuming.</p>
<p>I was wondering are humanities departments (history,linquistics) more dominated by males or female grad students? In my old university it was essentially a all female (>90%) departments? Actually, now that I think of it, I've never had a male TA in my humanities classes, but I think there are 2 male historian professors.</p>
<p>I think that overall things are pretty balanced. Here at Penn the Classics grad population is (I think) 11 men and 10 women right now. But things are going to vary at any given place depending on the admit pool, available professors and so forth. </p>
<p>Looking over the places I'm applying they're all pretty even too. there are some oddities though - one school I was considering was HEAVILY tilted to male grad students. It was so weird (and raised so many questions) I decided not to apply, though it was a decent match for my interests.</p>
<p>I think we'll see a general imbalance in the ratios between male and female graduate students soon, if we're not seeing it already. The college population is 60 female 40 male now. That's got to catch up with grad school admissions at some point.</p>
<p>I thought on average 30-35% of doctorate pursuers are female. So you are saying from that 30-35% doctorates of the general population the Language, Literature and Arts is around 60% women? Where are the female representation in the hard sciences and engineering? I wish females took more interest in those fields, might help diversification in a predominantly male-run techonology industry...</p>
<p>That 30-35% number is probably for engineering and the physical sciences. But keep in mind that those fields only represent about 30% of the total graduate population. (Though they get the VAST majority of the publicity.)</p>
<p>As you can see from the link, at Minnesota the overall graduate school enrollment is close to 50-50. </p>
<p>In my experience at Penn and in looking at a few other programs in Classics and Classical Archaeology, it is pretty much dead even everywhere (with that one exception I mentioned).</p>
<p>Explore back from the link and draw your own conclusions.</p>
<p>Not to completely change the subject, but I'm applying to Northwestern's English department and did sort of a double-take when I saw their 400-500 word limit. So I decided to email them to ask if they really meant it, since the word counts for every other school I'm applying to are at least 1000, usually more. The answer was that no, they don't mean it, and regularly receive and read statements with much higher word counts.</p>
<p>I have no idea if that helps anyone, but there you go.</p>
<p>I'm still an undergrad right now (junior) but I'm planning on going to graduate school in anthropology/museum studies. I am also going to take a couple years off, but that is because I will graduate undergrad when I'm 20 and I just don't think I'll be ready for grad school that young. And I want to take some time off after straight school for the past 16 years.</p>
<p>I think taking time off from school is an excellent idea before going to the grad school. It's harder for the international students to afford this option, as it was the case for me. I wonder now and will keep on wondering how the life outside the school looks like.</p>
<p>Don't</a> pursue a humanities PhD?
[quote]
1. A humanities PhD makes you less employable not more employable.
Most people who get degrees in humanities will not get teaching jobs. And people who are looking for jobs in the corporate world, with a humanities PhD under their belt look like someone who tried to teach but couldn?t. Or, worse yet, it looks like you spent five years getting a degree you had not made a plan for using. Both cases serve to make you ?probably not even qualified to run a cash register,? according to Thomas Benton, a columnist in the Chronicle of Higher Learning who is discouraging people from pursuing these degrees.
[/quote]
Addendum:
<p>Lost humanities students with an eye for cash and stability often enter law school because other professional schools require too much math or science. Yet the land of lost lawyers is full, too, which confirms that if you don?t have a passion for what you are going to learn in graduate school, you shouldn?t go.
Berkeley</a> Article
[quote]
While 80 percent of the English PhDs surveyed wanted to become professors at the end of their doctoral education, only 53 percent were tenured by 1995, the study found. Another 6 percent were in tenure-track positions and 16 percent were still in untenured, year-to-year positions as instructors. More than 10 percent were employed in business, government and nonprofit jobs. Less than 1 percent were involuntarily unemployed.
[/quote]
[quote]
"There's a significant gap between the number of PhDs produced and the number of academic jobs available," he said. Otter added that only 55 to 70 percent of Berkeley's English PhDs find academic jobs, often after looking for two or three years. "And Berkeley has one of the highest placement rates in the country," he noted.
[/quote] Swarthmore</a> Blog Post The</a> Village Voice: Wanted: Really Smart Suckers
Grad school provides exciting new road to poverty
[quote]
The also pseudonymous Thomas H. Benton was a frequent contributor to Invisible Adjunct's blog and has penned a series of cautionary columns for the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is even more blunt than IA. "The premise of graduate education in the humanities is a lie: Students are not apprentices preparing for a life of scholarship and teaching," he says. "They are a cheap source of labor and status for institutions and faculty and, after they earn their degrees, most join the reserve army of the academic underemployed." Benton, a professor at a small liberal arts college, warns his students about trying to follow in his footsteps. "My experience as a working-class kid who finally earned an Ivy League Ph.D. is that higher education is not about social mobility or personal enrichment; it is one trap among many for people who are uninitiated into the way power and influence operate in this culture."
[/quote]
[quote]
Dan Friedman completed a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale University this spring after 10 years. He now teaches at a private high school in New Jersey, making twice the $25,000 he was offered as a university part-timer. He says that as a TA back at Yale, he tried to warn his favorite students. "I've had a few bright students, majors, who are often interested in carrying on and I've said to all of them, 'Don't do it.' I really wanted them to stop and think. And without exception, they thought I was joking. Only one of them came back to me?she ended up at NYU?and said, 'Now I know what you were talking about.'" Friedman says, however, that he isn't sure he would have taken his own advice back then. "I didn't know what I was getting into. It would have been different if I had known. You're committed to your subject and you think, I want to study literature. You don't think of yourself as a 40-year-old trying to support a family."
[/quote]
What do you guys think? It's severely depressing. What are your plans if academia just doesn't work?</p>
<p>Another article: Don't</a> pursue a PhD in Humanities!
[quote]
Forced to choose, most less-successful humanists will probably decide to attain middle-class status through some other kind of work, and forget about scholarship. In some cases this will be because scholarship has been so ruined for them by the hierarchical form of industrial organization presently in place that they would never think of doing it on their own time In other cases, those who are still in touch with the bohemian-aristocratic joys of study will still be uncertain about the monkish sacrifices involved in doing unfunded work (i.e., working entirely for the intrinsic rewards, with no extrinsic reward). Furthermore, the audience for scholarly nonfiction is pretty small, since many readers have been turned off by bad experiences at school or by exposure to jargon-laden writing never intended to be read by anyone. And finally, many who are kicked off the gravy train end up believing at some deep level that their work really is not, and never will be, good enough.
[/quote]
[quote]
Furthermore, suppose you do go to graduate school. You will go there thinking that now you'll be able to study the things you really love at a higher level, but forget that. You will find yourself continually pressured to narrow your interests and to conform your thinking to one of the handful of academic methodologies dominant in your school. If your English department happens to be dominated, for example, by the quantum tectonic paradigm, catastrophe poetics, and fractal discourse analysis, you goddamn well better get down with one of the three, or your chances of ever having a fulltime teaching job are nil. (And not only that -- if your department happens to have put its money on three losing horses, you could be SOL even if you do exactly what you're expected to).
<p>More</a> reasons to not pursue a doctorate (esp. in humanities)
[quote]
Doctorates don't count for much outside academia - and in fact they may count against you. If you can't find a directly relevant area for subsequent professional work, then many employers are likely to look at a 25-30 year old person with three-six years of post-graduate work as being a strange and slightly worrying employment prospect - they're going to be too smart for their own good, too ivory-towerish, too specialist, out of touch with the way that the "real world" works.
[/quote]
[quote]
Which brings me (briefly) to my final point. Do not believe there is no worthwhile life outside academia! It's difficult sometimes, when you've been in the education system for getting on for twenty years to remember that there's an enormous panoply of jobs outside academia and not all of them are sullied by the feeble crust of crass commercialism.
[/quote]
[quote]
The stereotype (and the assumption of many potential postgraduate students) that study for the sake of study and the stretching and mental gymnastics of intellectual work are somehow naturally superior and elite practices would hold more water with me if such warming-up regularly translated into actual attempts to build or refigure the world in positive ways.
<p>Here's another reason to get a Ph.D............ chicks dig it. Okay, maybe not as much as they dig money, but a Ph.D is an alternate way to gain social status for the socially inept.</p>
<p>mme-lin - Don't get a PhD to become more employable or to make money. Do it because you can't be happy without it. You're looking at it from the wrong perspective.</p>
<p>Donald Asher, in his graduate admissions book, puts the lie to that old "PhDs are unemployable" canard and uses Bureau of Labor Statistics data to show that only 0.8% of PhDs are unemployed, and those who don't manage to find academic employment still earn far more than people who hold BAs. I'd recommend the book in any case because he's a good writer and demystifies a lot of this process.</p>
<p>In my case, I took a good hard look at where I was now and what my likely trajectory would be if I didn't change anything. I'm a fellowship advisor for the grad studies office at UCSD, and while there are good things about my job, it's still pretty low paid employment with a definite ceiling for advancement. If I go to a top ten PhD program, the worst case scenario is that I'll spend the next six years doing something I love and come out with nothing better than a lectureship off the tenure track, with credentials that would still allow me to become a resident dean or fill some other administrative post that I couldn't possibly apply for now. Doesn't seem like such a bad deal to me.</p>
<p>Thanks for a fine research you have done exploring the negative aspects of getting a humanities PhD.</p>
<p>However, I think there are as many of us who have thought much about what we are getting ourselves into before committing 5-10 years of our lives. If we didn't, shame on us and the very predicament you have nicely sketched will befall us. It happens to be the case that a lot of us who are pursuing PhDs have all considered becoming doctors, lawyers, bankers, etc. As for myself, I chose an academic career in humanities over graduating with a degree in Computer Science (the Comp Sci alums from my alma mater, Berkeley, apparently have one of the highest starting salaries, in terms of money). I consciously chose a life that has very little financial returns and demands much labor on my part, as did many others.</p>
<p>When I compare my situation to some of my friends who pursue the usual elitist paths, my financial difficulty and job prospect have not diverged much from them. A friend in dental school gets ~$100,000 a year in loan to support her education in New York City (sure, there could have been cheaper alternatives), and she says that when she finishes she will not have a job guaranteed. A friend in med school complains of the similar financial burden, and will apparently have to serve years of residency in addition to the four years in school. My brother at a respectable top-50 law school tells me that, in order to secure a position in a top firm, he will need to stay within the top 10% of his class. Of course, they will make tons more money once they start taking patients and clients of their own (most likely much more than me). But I just wanted to stress that one faces competition and hard work no matter which course he or she chooses.</p>
<p>The thing about "tenure" has attracted a lot of attention from critics, from both insiders and outsiders of the academia. In my point of view, they are missing the point when they stress the benefits and job security that accompany it. The system was originally introduced to give academics freedom of speech and expressing their views. Of course I would be happy to be granted tenure and I am not arguing that they should abolish it--it is certainly disconcerting to see the scope of tenured or tenure-track appointments shrink. But think about the other jobs: the notion of tenure is alien in practically all other working fields. I think a graduate student in humanities can rejoice at the existence of tenured positions in the higher education as being a privilege as much as he or she can lament about the decrease in its number.</p>
<p>What about the priests and ministers and missionaries who often work in severe conditions without conspicuous monetary rewards? What about those who work in non-profit organizations? What about the businessmen who make a ton of money only to give it back to the community when their career ends?</p>
<p>A decision to pursuing a PhD in humanities is a personal choice and it may not strike a chord with the predominant materialist worldview today. As long as the graduate student is aware of it, I think it's fine.</p>