I was eating dinner last night with a grad student who works on certain philosophical texts, but works in a non-philosophy, Theory-ish humanities department. He was saying how he wanted to "professionalize" in philosophy, by which he seemed to mean put himself in a position to apply for jobs in philosophy.
Someone--not a random dinner companion, but, oh, I don't know, maybe the single philosopher on his committee--needs to tell him he'll never work in philosophy. That's some astonishingly irresponsible supervision.
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Wow. Since I teach kids to read, I could maybe 'professionalize' so that I could teach guitar virtuosity, or maybe 'Masterpiece Painting 101'. Hell, it's all artsy, right?
I hope that person's lone philosophy advisor does step up. Otherwise, what a fracas.
Oh, yeah. It really was as bad it sounds. This guy wanted to "professionalize" in philosophy, and yet didn't seem to even know about the majority of conferences that would be relevant to his work. . . .
Oh, that counts as seriously irresponsible advising? In my department, the profs prefer to shuffle non-funded, never-going-to-amount-to-anything, borderline-crazy grad students from class to class with passing but not-too-discouraging grades. I can only assume that the profs are hoping that these students will run out of money and starve to death so that they won't have to sit down and suggest to them that they might want to consider pursuing a different career.
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