Religious Studies: Are my stats good enough to get me in?

Graduate School
1

So I’m a rising senior Religious Studies major at a small private liberal arts college with a minor in both English and Psychology, and I want to pursue graduate level education in my major field. First a masters, and then I anticipate progressing to a PhD and teaching at some point. Finger’s crossed. I want to know if my stats are objectively good enough or if I need to keep trying at my GRE etc.

I just recently took my GRE.
Verbal: 160
Quantitative: 154
AWA: not out yet, but it’s been almost a week and I need to think seriously about retaking if these aren’t good enough.
Major GPA: 3.8
Overall: 3.4
Member and Vice President of Theta Alpha Kappa (Religious Studies Honors Society)
Involved with the Interfaith and Better Together organization on campus
Trained and certified LGBTQIA Safe Zone Participant
I volunteer a lot, have another non-research oriented student job, and leadership positions in a few different student organizations.

I have research experience working with the chair of my department (it’s a very small school) on biblical texts and themes in translation. I’m working on learning Hebrew and trying to keep up with French and learn a little German before the year is out. I know I’m not going to be advanced enough to apply for any PhD programs like some of my friends are - I don’t have the language skill yet. But I want to get into a really good program so that I can be competitive when my time comes for applying to PhD work. I want an MA not an MDiv if that is helpful information to anyone looking this over.

I’m really interested in Hebrew Bible work and theology. I think the cool bit about religion is that you can take a text and follow it through to see what it’s doing in the real world and how it’s being used by its people. Anyways, I’m looking at:

Yale Div (they don’t take GRE Scores)
U Chicago
NYU
Illif
Columbia
and Vanderbilt.
However, if you have any suggestions, I’m more than open to programs any of you think I might be better suited for! My adviser seems to think I won’t have trouble, but I’m really worried, and it’s not just about getting in for me. If I don’t get some sort of funding - another degree is out of the question. And I’ve seen a lot of programs saying they can’t or don’t offer any aid to Masters students…

Please let me know what you think, I would appreciate any help I can get at this point.

2

You should look into the MTS program at Harvard Divinity School. I know several people who used that degree for admission into post-Master’s doctoral programs. It is a very flexible 2 year degree and financial aid based on need is possible.

3

The financial thing might be a problem - some programs do provide funding to some students, but for the most part MA programs in the humanities are financed primarily by loans. So you might want to add some inexpensive public universities in your home state to that, if they have a religious studies program. I’m not going to say that where you get your MA doesn’t matter at all in PhD admissions - it certainly can - but lots of people go from sort of mid-ranked MA programs where they turn out excellent work to top PhD programs in religious studies.

I mean, we can’t comment on your chances, but you do look like you have a competitive profile for admissions to PhD programs minus the language skills, so you should be fine for MA programs I would think.

Obligatory note: You do realize that the [academic[/url] [url=<a href=“http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/03/23/academic_job_market_still_terrifying.html%5Dmarket%5B/url”>http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/03/23/academic_job_market_still_terrifying.html]market[/url] in the humanities is [url=<a href=“http://leavingacademia.blogspot.com/2012/01/academic-job-market-in-numbers.html%5Dabsolutely%5B/url”>http://leavingacademia.blogspot.com/2012/01/academic-job-market-in-numbers.html]absolutely[/url] [url=<a href=“http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/09/how_do_professors_get_hired_the_academic_job_search_explained.html%5Dterrible%5B/url”>http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/09/how_do_professors_get_hired_the_academic_job_search_explained.html]terrible[/url], right? There are [url=<a href=“http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846/%5Dlots%5B/url”>http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846/]lots[/url] of [url=<a href=“http://chronicle.com/article/Just-Dont-Go-Part-2/44786/%5Darticles%5B/url”>http://chronicle.com/article/Just-Dont-Go-Part-2/44786/]articles[/url] floating [url=<a href=“http://chronicle.com/article/The-Big-Lie-About-the-Life-of/63937/%5Daround%5B/url”>http://chronicle.com/article/The-Big-Lie-About-the-Life-of/63937/]around[/url] out there telling students not to go. (In the interest of fairness, though, here’s a [url=<a href=“http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/in-defense-of-the-humanities-phd-its-no-crazier-than-becoming-a-journalist/279863/%5Dreally”>http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/in-defense-of-the-humanities-phd-its-no-crazier-than-becoming-a-journalist/279863/]really good piece](New MLA analysis sheds light on the much-discussed humanities job market) in the Atlantic explaining why it’s not such a bad deal.)

I’m not saying don’t go. In fact, as The Atlantic article notes, there are worse things to do than spend your 20s getting paid a decent salary to study something that you are really passionate about. And the unemployment rate for PhDs is really low - even if you don’t get a job as a tenure-track professor, you’ll probably get a job doing something else interesting that allows you to live a middle-class lifestyle. I’m only passing this along because I want you to know that odds are you won’t get a job as a tenure-track professor anywhere. Most likely you’ll spend 6-8 years in a grad program and then go do something else, possibly unrelated. If you do get an academic job, most likely it’ll be at a teaching-oriented college, possibly somewhere you don’t want to live, probably making less money than you’d imagined you would, and it will probably not be straight out of grad school - you may spend 2-4 years doing visiting professorships or postdoctoral fellowships.

If you still want to go get a PhD knowing that, go for it! I got my PhD in 2014 having read a lot of this stuff and knowing what I was getting myself into when I started in 2008. I’m mostly aiming for non-academic jobs, and I don’t regret my choice. But be armed with knowledge.

4

Yeah, thank you for the response. I do know about the current situation of the academic market. I’m pretty much freaking out about it on a regular basis, but I really do want to be a professor of Religious Studies and this is basically the only way to go about that.
Partially, I don’t know what else I would be good at or what else I could at least relatively enjoy you know? I think about getting to study this stuff for the rest of my life and part of me lights up, and I can’t really picture myself doing anything else as a job, but I’m always worrying that I’m making the wrong decision. My parents have been trying to talk me out of this for a while, and I know quite a few people that wanted to do the same thing and then left after getting their masters because they were miserable, and that’s terrifying to me because a lot of them got out and weren’t qualified for anything but academics - which they hated. So I do feel a little lost at the moment. Because like I said, I really want to do this, but I also don’t want to get out because I couldn’t cut it or just hated it and then not be able to do anything else…
What else are you qualified to do with a PhD in religion besides teach? How did you know 100% that this was right for you with all the knowledge that there’s basically a 7-9/10 chance that it won’t really work out?

5

D got into Yale, Harvard, Duke, Chicago, and Emory. Best $ from emory followed by Yale and Duke. She wants to cross over some into other disciplines and picked Yale. Harvard and Chicago most expensive of the group. She like Emory if she had been doing MDiv or straight Bible. Liked Yale and Chicago programs best.

6

@HavocHayes, I just wanted you to know. There are many jobs that come with risks, and I’m simply an advocate of people knowing the risks involved. That doesn’t mean that you don’t take the risk, though! If it’s something you really love and it’s a passion of yours, then go for it. Like I said, unemployment rates for PhDs are very low, and you can always find something else to do if being a professor doesn’t work out. In the meantime you get to spend 6-8 years exploring and deeply studying what you really love - and get paid to do so (not much, but something).

The thing you do is avoid being that person who is qualified for only academics. Studying for a PhD gives you transferable skills that you can use elsewhere - you know how to dig up information, to critically analyze large amounts of information, pick out what’s important, write well, communicate your ideas to audiences, teach, etc. Those are important and in-demand skills. The other thing is to do things in graduate school that make you marketable in a variety of fields. Do a non-academic summer internship; work a part-time job; take a workshop or class in other non-academic skills that might appeal to you, like programming or web design. I did these things in graduate school and am seeing them pay off now as I apply for non-academic jobs. (Note: Some advisors will give you some pushback on this. A lot of advisors are still operating under the old model that the only acceptable outcome for a PhD in X is to teach and do research in X at a university or college. This denies the reality of the job market. Sometimes you have to be covert with your skill-building,)

You might want to join and lurk around the website VersatilePhD - it’s a resource for PhDs (mostly humanities, but caters to all) who have decided for whatever reason that academic jobs are not for them and are moving into non-academic careers. The website has profiles of people in humanities fields that may seem completely unrelated to other things who are doing interesting and exciting work. They’ve gone into business, consulting, institutional research, academic advising, grant-writing, NGO/nonprofit work, research administration, university administration, writing/editing, and a variety of other fields. Their [PhD Career Finder](PhD Career Finder | The Versatile PhD) has links to different profiles of people in seemingly obscure areas (philosophy, musicology, cultural studies, art history) who have been hired into non-academic careers.

Ha! I didn’t. You can never know 100%. Or you can feel like you know and then things change later. What I knew when I started my PhD program at 22 was that I loved my field, I loved research, and I wanted to make a career out of doing research in my field. I learned about the difficulties of the academic market and initially decided not to even pursue it - I wanted to do health research at a government agency or think tank. For a short while towards the end of grad school and the beginning of a postdoc I got sucked into the academic world, mainly because I discovered I liked teaching and am good at it. But after a few months in my postdoc I again realized that academia’s not for me, and started looking for non-academic jobs. Am I 100% sure that I don’t want an academic job? Of course not, lol - although I think I am pretty close (I’d put it at 90-95%).

You can’t predict the future. You have to make choices that make sense to you and balance your own personal tolerance for risk with a desired outcome. There’s no way to completely escape risk - you can minimize it. I don’t think that young people should completely eschew the PhD if they really have a passion for their field, and want to teach in it. I just think they should go in with open eyes about the job market, and give themselves the chance to develop other marketable skills in the likely event that it doesn’t work out. It’s kind of like really wanting to be an actress but going to college and majoring in English so you have a degree and some writing skills in case acting doesn’t pan out, or wanting to be a musician but working a day job until you can do that full-time. Take care of yourself, but pursue your dreams.

Also, think about this. You’ll be 21 when you graduate college, presumably. Let’s say you go to a master’s program in religion right from college and decide that you hate it. You’ll be 23 when you finish the master’s. That’s still so young! You’ll have plenty of time to reinvent yourself and change careers after that if you find out that you’re miserable. But the only way to figure that out is to try it.

7

As well, realize that there are teaching positions beyond the holy grail tenure track big U positions, such as prep schools, parochial schools, community colleges, seminaries, and divinity schools that hire religion Ph.Ds.

8

@juillet Thank you so much! This was really helpful information, and I feel a bit better knowing there are ways to build other skills and market the PhD level education when applying to non academic positions.