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<li><p>I would not pay for a PhD, especially not in a humanities or social science field, even if it were only costing me $4,000 a year. It’s not worth it. Doctoral students in the humanities and to a certain extent in the social sciences are generally being trained for one thing - to become professors. Professors don’t get paid enough to pay back the amount you would have to borrow for a PhD program plus living expenses and whatever you borrowed in undergrad. The caveat is I say this as a PhD student on fellowship at a place where the tuition is $34,000 a year while you’re in coursework and $3,000 a year thereafter. Assuming I finished in 5 years, it would cost me over $90,000, and that’s not even including living expenses. Would I have come here if I had no grant or fellowship? Heck no. But I still wouldn’t pay even $4,000 a year for a PhD.</p></li>
<li><p>Doing a PhD, a master’s, or law school just for the experience of being back in school, making friends, and having some kind of social life you imagine is a terrible idea. I can only speak for the PhD and the master’s. For the master’s, you do have kind of a social life - during my first year here, when I was more of a master’s student, I met lots of other master’s students as friends and we hung out, went out on the weekends, explored New York and had fun. I had less time than them because I am a doctoral student, but they all seemed to make lifelong friendships and such. The atmosphere here is really work hard play hard for the master’s students. However, again the caveat is that they are over $60,000 in debt and that’s just tuition; most of them had to borrow living expenses, too, so that’s about $100,000 just for a social life.</p></li>
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<p>For doctoral education, I definitely know that’s not the case. Your social life will depend a lot on your department. One of my departments is kind of stodgy and I stopped seeing the other students in my cohort after the first year, when we had a class together. They are all work, work work. They don’t want to go out and when they do want to get together, it’s at someone’s house to just chat. I’m in an interdisciplinary program and so I have two departments, and my secondary department is more fun - more close-knit and they tend to go out for drinks more (like we had a night on the town when one of my labmates defended!) But it’s not a regular-basis thing - it’s only a couple of times a semester, when we have something to celebrate - someone defends, someone gets a job, someone gets a big publication, or the holiday party. But honestly, the amount of work you have to do to stay afloat almost cancels out any fun and if someone asked me I would not say doctoral work is FUN, in any semblance of it. There are moments but it is not fun. It is hard work and it is miserable far more often than it is fun. My dad asked me if it was worth it earlier today and I had to half-lie because I wasn’t really sure how to answer the question.</p>
<p>I don’t know much about law school, but from what I’ve heard it’s not a barrel of fun either, not to mention that you’ll be borrowing six-figure debt. If you want a social life, join a community activity, volunteer, get a dog and take it to the dog park, start a ■■■■■■■■■■ group. Do something free or cheap through which you can meet people. For God’s sake don’t come to graduate school, because you will just want to shoot yourself.</p>