More from Second Suitor. --PGS
I’m sure all graduate students have come across it sometime. The study where some scientist got spiders high on all sorts of drugs and observed how they subsequently spun their webs. Sure the one on Peyote did alright. The weed spider seemed to forget what he was doing sometimes, but let’s let her be. What worried me was the caffeine spider.
A personal note: chilling in the coffee shop, procrastinating my way through a large cup of coffee I realized I needed to be productive. No worries, I got my refill and did work. Strong work. Lots of work. Sounds great right. So long as I’m not caffeine spider.
--Second Suitor
Update from PGOAT:
Nice web, Mr. Crack Spider.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Thursday, February 28, 2008
You are not alone.
In comments, whipitgood brings us this encouraging report:
Great news, everyone who's working as an adjunct instead of as a "real" professor:
Indiana Jones is one of us!
(see 1:35-1:40)
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
A Dollar When I'm Hard Up VIII
I put another round of applications in the mail today, and left the post office $15.54 poorer. I'm not going to bother figuring out my total for the year so far, because even just thinking about it is making me dry heave.
Please, Please, Please
Another dispatch from Second Suitor. --PGS
I’m running into a problem. Ok, it’s a dissertation problem. You know, the kind that you have to solve before you can get back to real, philosophical work. When I was but a fledgling grad student worrying about seminar papers, I always had a fairly good grip on my ‘my documents’ folder. With a folder for every semester and subfolders for each class it was easy to get to the information I wanted. I adopted a numbering system that points me to the most recent version of a paper and identifies when significant changes happened to the document. So far so good.
The problem comes in having a whole year to think deep thoughts. The number of documents on my computer has exploded. Sure some of it has to do with the fact I have 2-3ish different intros (Don’t worry, I’ve skipped that part for now) and some of it has to do with having a new version of at least one document (almost?) every day, but I also seem to be generating a lot of ‘dissertation related but not part of the dissertation’ stuff. I need a way.. a program.. a system.. something to organize my ‘dissertation and beyond’ folder. If anyone has a good way of keeping your dissertation files (or even all of your documents) organized, that’d be really helpful.
I’m running into a problem. Ok, it’s a dissertation problem. You know, the kind that you have to solve before you can get back to real, philosophical work. When I was but a fledgling grad student worrying about seminar papers, I always had a fairly good grip on my ‘my documents’ folder. With a folder for every semester and subfolders for each class it was easy to get to the information I wanted. I adopted a numbering system that points me to the most recent version of a paper and identifies when significant changes happened to the document. So far so good.
The problem comes in having a whole year to think deep thoughts. The number of documents on my computer has exploded. Sure some of it has to do with the fact I have 2-3ish different intros (Don’t worry, I’ve skipped that part for now) and some of it has to do with having a new version of at least one document (almost?) every day, but I also seem to be generating a lot of ‘dissertation related but not part of the dissertation’ stuff. I need a way.. a program.. a system.. something to organize my ‘dissertation and beyond’ folder. If anyone has a good way of keeping your dissertation files (or even all of your documents) organized, that’d be really helpful.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Bouncing Off the Walls, Unraveling the Thread
Last week I mentioned how tired I am. It's a physical tired, but not just that. It's a tired that's in my head, too.
In comments, M.A. Program Faculty Member reminded me of something Old Fart said a while ago. Think of getting a job as a marathon, not a sprint. I get the point of the marathon metaphor. I need to take the long view of my prospects. True enough, because it's not like getting a job is a sprint, either--or at least that's not how it's turning out for me. Also, it's impossible not to appreciate sincerely the kindness and empathy that's meant in this advice. In some sense that's the really important thing.
But still, I can't quite buy the marathon metaphor. It gets the rhythm all wrong. Getting a job's not slow and steady, so that's not how I'm going to win the race. I fucking hammered for months. It's not just the amount of work I was doing, although it was that too. It's the heart palpitations and cortisol-level spikes; it's the insomnia; it's the hope and it's the fear.
But now that's all over and I'm left feeling like I lost three pints of blood. Now every day's about trying to get some momentum back, trying to find my groove. Come September, I'll do it all again, hammering for months and then crashing hard. That's not a marathon. I don't know what it is.
In comments, M.A. Program Faculty Member reminded me of something Old Fart said a while ago. Think of getting a job as a marathon, not a sprint. I get the point of the marathon metaphor. I need to take the long view of my prospects. True enough, because it's not like getting a job is a sprint, either--or at least that's not how it's turning out for me. Also, it's impossible not to appreciate sincerely the kindness and empathy that's meant in this advice. In some sense that's the really important thing.
But still, I can't quite buy the marathon metaphor. It gets the rhythm all wrong. Getting a job's not slow and steady, so that's not how I'm going to win the race. I fucking hammered for months. It's not just the amount of work I was doing, although it was that too. It's the heart palpitations and cortisol-level spikes; it's the insomnia; it's the hope and it's the fear.
But now that's all over and I'm left feeling like I lost three pints of blood. Now every day's about trying to get some momentum back, trying to find my groove. Come September, I'll do it all again, hammering for months and then crashing hard. That's not a marathon. I don't know what it is.
Monday, February 25, 2008
So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star
Shit. I thought I remembered Sisyphus on this beat before. Here it is, and this shit is the truth.
Programs aren't necessarily trying to lie. But whatever. Don't get took.
I'll stop and make a snarky side note here to point out that the two-years-ago group who went out was really really large for us, and the vast majority were on second or third job rounds, although our big "coups" were all ABDs out on the market for their first time. The entire department has conveniently forgotten last year's group completely, because we were a smaller group and none of us got any jobs. So conveniently, in fact, that you'll notice that the job placement page on the web site was just never updated and our year's "stats" mentioned (which would bring down our placement rate). Future grad students, assume that your potential departments are "accidentally" and not-so-accidentally lying on their stats pages to look good for you. You'll really have to dig to get an accurate picture of their placement record. Oh yeah, and the two people who got no job offers at all from the two-years-ago group and who have quit academia are counted under "decided not to pursue academia" not "couldn't get an academic job for five years of trying come hell or high water.""Convenient forgetting." That's exactly right. It's why departments think it makes perfect fucking sense to tell you about all the awesome jobs their grads got fifteen fucking years ago. Because all those rock stars of the nineteen-nineties are just more salient to profs when they're thinking of their own programs' placement records.
Programs aren't necessarily trying to lie. But whatever. Don't get took.
Thanks for the Information, I Know I Should Look Before I Leap
I need to be thinking about more applications right now, but every time I try, it just makes me want to go to bed and pull the covers over my head. So instead, let me say one more thing to prospective grad students.
Wiser people than me have already told you to make sure you get a look at the placement stats for the departments you're thinking of going to. That's really, really important. But at the same time, you've got understand most departments are probably--in at least some small way--juking their stats, as Major Daniels might put it. Not lying exactly, just, well, juking.
So let me try to lay out the information I think you want, even though I suspect you're not really going to get it all from most departments.
1. How long to people take to finish the program, and how many people bail or get kicked out before they finish? Suppose you get a five-year funding package, and whoever you're talking to in a department keeps telling you, "It's a five-year program." Well, maybe. I'm sure there are places out there that get people through in five years. But there sure as hell aren't a lot of them. So when you get told you're looking at a five-year program, you're probably getting a pile of bullshit. If you can, I'd suggest e-mailing a senior grad student in the department and asking them what their sense is of how long people take to finish. And ask them how people pay the rent in their sixth, seventh, and nth years. Those years can be damn lean.
Okay, onto placement stats proper. Here's what you want to now about them.
2. How many grads of the program get tenure-tracked jobs? This seems like it should be easy to get, right? It's not. For a department to give you a meaningful number here, they've also got to give you answers to these questions:
3. Exactly who does the department count as not getting tenure-tracked jobs? Here's where things get shady, because a lot of departments aren't going to count people who choose not to go on the job market. But what does this choice look like, and why do people make it? because they think they've got no chance on the market? That's certainly one obvious reason to choose not to go on the market.
So one guy from my department realized he had no chance on the market, and so he went straight to law school. He doesn't count. Another guy was one-half of a two-body problem, and realized he had no chance of ever getting a job in the same place as a partner. So after a year on the market, he bailed on academia. He doesn't count. If someone strikes out on the market four or five years in a row and then decides to throw in the towel, do they count? (Afer all, they did choose to throw in the towel.) If the placement stats are going to tell you much of anything, you need to know this shit.
Now here's a killer.
4. On average, how long do people spend on the market before landing a tenure-tracked job? Do most people coming out of the program get jobs as ABDs? Do they do a one-year? Or do they bounce around the country doing one-year after one-year after one-year before finally getting a chance to settle down?
Do not, under any circumstances, expect faculty from a program to be giving you honest and fair-minded assessments of their own placement stats. Maybe they are. I'd like to think most are. But maybe they're not, so don't get took.
Wiser people than me have already told you to make sure you get a look at the placement stats for the departments you're thinking of going to. That's really, really important. But at the same time, you've got understand most departments are probably--in at least some small way--juking their stats, as Major Daniels might put it. Not lying exactly, just, well, juking.
So let me try to lay out the information I think you want, even though I suspect you're not really going to get it all from most departments.
1. How long to people take to finish the program, and how many people bail or get kicked out before they finish? Suppose you get a five-year funding package, and whoever you're talking to in a department keeps telling you, "It's a five-year program." Well, maybe. I'm sure there are places out there that get people through in five years. But there sure as hell aren't a lot of them. So when you get told you're looking at a five-year program, you're probably getting a pile of bullshit. If you can, I'd suggest e-mailing a senior grad student in the department and asking them what their sense is of how long people take to finish. And ask them how people pay the rent in their sixth, seventh, and nth years. Those years can be damn lean.
Okay, onto placement stats proper. Here's what you want to now about them.
2. How many grads of the program get tenure-tracked jobs? This seems like it should be easy to get, right? It's not. For a department to give you a meaningful number here, they've also got to give you answers to these questions:
3. Exactly who does the department count as not getting tenure-tracked jobs? Here's where things get shady, because a lot of departments aren't going to count people who choose not to go on the job market. But what does this choice look like, and why do people make it? because they think they've got no chance on the market? That's certainly one obvious reason to choose not to go on the market.
So one guy from my department realized he had no chance on the market, and so he went straight to law school. He doesn't count. Another guy was one-half of a two-body problem, and realized he had no chance of ever getting a job in the same place as a partner. So after a year on the market, he bailed on academia. He doesn't count. If someone strikes out on the market four or five years in a row and then decides to throw in the towel, do they count? (Afer all, they did choose to throw in the towel.) If the placement stats are going to tell you much of anything, you need to know this shit.
Now here's a killer.
4. On average, how long do people spend on the market before landing a tenure-tracked job? Do most people coming out of the program get jobs as ABDs? Do they do a one-year? Or do they bounce around the country doing one-year after one-year after one-year before finally getting a chance to settle down?
Do not, under any circumstances, expect faculty from a program to be giving you honest and fair-minded assessments of their own placement stats. Maybe they are. I'd like to think most are. But maybe they're not, so don't get took.
The Blueprint Vol. 2
A follow-up on an earlier post from my boy, Second Suitor. --PGS
While I’m sure publishing now won’t hurt my job prospects, a lot of schools seemed to focus more on teaching. This poses a problem in preparing for the job market. Unless you have some nice deal, you’re like me and don’t have much control over what you get to teach/TA before the holiday fun ensues. The good news is that even if I don’t have that much control over the syllabus, I still get to run my recitations.
As I see it, the kids on the job market got a lot of questions about two things. First, how do you approach teaching students with diverse cultural and educational backgrounds? And second, how would you include interdisciplinary material into the courses you teach?
Well fuck it. I’m going to make sure that my recitation on Hegelian metaphysics relates to critical race theory. Seriously, it seems like the best way to answer this question is to be able to talk about how you’ve included these perspectives in class before. Do I have any in depth knowledge of feminist critiques or the latest fMRI research? No. But I’m sure as hell going to teach them before Christmas.
--Second Suitor
While I’m sure publishing now won’t hurt my job prospects, a lot of schools seemed to focus more on teaching. This poses a problem in preparing for the job market. Unless you have some nice deal, you’re like me and don’t have much control over what you get to teach/TA before the holiday fun ensues. The good news is that even if I don’t have that much control over the syllabus, I still get to run my recitations.
As I see it, the kids on the job market got a lot of questions about two things. First, how do you approach teaching students with diverse cultural and educational backgrounds? And second, how would you include interdisciplinary material into the courses you teach?
Well fuck it. I’m going to make sure that my recitation on Hegelian metaphysics relates to critical race theory. Seriously, it seems like the best way to answer this question is to be able to talk about how you’ve included these perspectives in class before. Do I have any in depth knowledge of feminist critiques or the latest fMRI research? No. But I’m sure as hell going to teach them before Christmas.
--Second Suitor
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Sunday Comics
Apropos of people's advice for prospectives, here's "Get Paid", from Soon-to-be-Jaded Dissertator. (Click to make it big.)
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Another Day to Wake Up on the Feed Kill Chain
Okay, one more really basic piece of advice for prospective grad students. Maybe even more than with my first two pieces of advice, take this as one guy's opinion. Like I said in my last post, this is just something I wish someone had told me when I was thinking about grad school.
This one's a little more complicated than the first two.
3. If you do not get in to PhD programs in the top-35(ish), and if you want to teach less than a 4-4 or 5-5 load, do not go to grad school.* I've made this a little more nuanced than I used to put it, since people (rightly) criticized previous overly-blunt versions. But the basic idea is pretty simple. If you go to a program below (roughly) the top two-thirds of Leiter's list, you have no reasonable expectation of teaching at a school with a 3-3, 3-2, or 2-2 load.
(I know people are going jump on me for saying this. There's great stories floating around out there about people who went to programs in the 40s or lower and ended up working their way up into Leiterrific departments. And that's great. But it's also irrelevant, because no one's saying it's not possible to do that. I'm saying it's really, really unlikely. You've got no reasonable expectation of having that happen.)
Let me elaborate on this advice in way that might make it more meaningful for prospectives. If you're a prospective grad student, you're probably coming out of a university or a liberal arts college (either "small" or "selective"). That means your profs teach either 3-3, 3-2, or 2-2 loads--that is, six, five, or four courses a year. You see some of what they do the rest of the time. They're traveling for conferences, they're publishing stuff, etc. Here's the point: if you want to have a job anything like the one you see your profs have, you have to go to a top-35ish school.
If you go to a program ranked below (roughly) 35, you're much, much, much more likely to end up teaching eight, 10 or more courses a year at a (non-selective) small liberal arts college or community college. For most people, that ends up being a very different kind of job than the job your philosophy profs have. For most people in those jobs, their jobs tilt much, much more towards teaching and service to the school. They travel to conferences a lot less, and they write a lot less, if they write at all Their tenure requirements are much more about teaching, and much, much less about research.
Am I saying you shouldn't go to grad school if you don't get into a school in the top-35? Absolutely not. Teaching philosophy can be, and very often is, an unbelievably rewarding thing to do. Unlike when you're writing, the rewards are immediate and tangible. You see the light bulb go on on kids' faces, and it makes your morning. If that's what you want your job to be about, then you should absolutely go to grad school.
However. If that's what you want only half your job to be about, and if you want the other half to be publishing papers, then don't go to a program ranked much below 35 on Leiter's list. Coming out of a program below 35, you've got no reasonable expectation of getting the kind of job you want.
Why do I feel like I should duck and run for cover right about now?
*Two important caveats. First, I'm sort of pulling the number 35 out of my ass. I suspect some people are going to set that number higher, others are going to set it lower, and obviously it really is a gray area.
Second, this advice doesn't apply for continental programs or Catholic schools, neither of which I know anything about. Can anyone give decent advice about that stuff (besides "Go to SUNY Stony Brook")?
This one's a little more complicated than the first two.
3. If you do not get in to PhD programs in the top-35(ish), and if you want to teach less than a 4-4 or 5-5 load, do not go to grad school.* I've made this a little more nuanced than I used to put it, since people (rightly) criticized previous overly-blunt versions. But the basic idea is pretty simple. If you go to a program below (roughly) the top two-thirds of Leiter's list, you have no reasonable expectation of teaching at a school with a 3-3, 3-2, or 2-2 load.
(I know people are going jump on me for saying this. There's great stories floating around out there about people who went to programs in the 40s or lower and ended up working their way up into Leiterrific departments. And that's great. But it's also irrelevant, because no one's saying it's not possible to do that. I'm saying it's really, really unlikely. You've got no reasonable expectation of having that happen.)
Let me elaborate on this advice in way that might make it more meaningful for prospectives. If you're a prospective grad student, you're probably coming out of a university or a liberal arts college (either "small" or "selective"). That means your profs teach either 3-3, 3-2, or 2-2 loads--that is, six, five, or four courses a year. You see some of what they do the rest of the time. They're traveling for conferences, they're publishing stuff, etc. Here's the point: if you want to have a job anything like the one you see your profs have, you have to go to a top-35ish school.
If you go to a program ranked below (roughly) 35, you're much, much, much more likely to end up teaching eight, 10 or more courses a year at a (non-selective) small liberal arts college or community college. For most people, that ends up being a very different kind of job than the job your philosophy profs have. For most people in those jobs, their jobs tilt much, much more towards teaching and service to the school. They travel to conferences a lot less, and they write a lot less, if they write at all Their tenure requirements are much more about teaching, and much, much less about research.
Am I saying you shouldn't go to grad school if you don't get into a school in the top-35? Absolutely not. Teaching philosophy can be, and very often is, an unbelievably rewarding thing to do. Unlike when you're writing, the rewards are immediate and tangible. You see the light bulb go on on kids' faces, and it makes your morning. If that's what you want your job to be about, then you should absolutely go to grad school.
However. If that's what you want only half your job to be about, and if you want the other half to be publishing papers, then don't go to a program ranked much below 35 on Leiter's list. Coming out of a program below 35, you've got no reasonable expectation of getting the kind of job you want.
Why do I feel like I should duck and run for cover right about now?
*Two important caveats. First, I'm sort of pulling the number 35 out of my ass. I suspect some people are going to set that number higher, others are going to set it lower, and obviously it really is a gray area.
Second, this advice doesn't apply for continental programs or Catholic schools, neither of which I know anything about. Can anyone give decent advice about that stuff (besides "Go to SUNY Stony Brook")?
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