Peters,
Robert L., 1951- Getting what you came for : the smart student's guide to earning a Master's or a Ph.D / Robert L. Peters ; illustrations by the author. So you are interested in going to graduate or professional school?
Contents of this page--some suggestions :
1-3. Advice on considering graduate study, working with SCSU faculty mentors, selecting appropriate programs, and preparing the applications
4. Additional resources
5. An essay warning you against earning a Ph.D., from the Chronicle of Higher Education
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1. Moving towards graduate study means that you are serious about seeking out an academic community. If your goals involve exchanging ideas, collaborating with others, and, ultimately, teaching students and publishing your own work, the time to prepare yourself for those goals is the earlier the better.
The following advice may be obvious to most of you, but its importance may be underestimated: Start as an undergraduate by making friends with fellow students who share your interests (usually, fellow majors). Get used to trading drafts of your work, whether academic or creative. Your future work will inevitably involve collaboration. In class, practice contributing to discussion, and practice watching classroom dynamics and personalities. What kinds of language use encourage fellow students to get involved in discussions? What sorts of conduct seem to stop conversation?
Identify and chat with faculty who seem like possible mentors. Make sure by the time you graduate that you have a couple of mentors you can trust both outside of the university and among faculty.
For The Real Deal, see this book in our library:
| SCS Miller Center Main Collection Call #: LB2371.4 .P48 1997 |
|
| Author | Peters,
Robert L., 1951- |
| Title | Getting what you came for : the smart student's guide to earning a Master's or a Ph.D / Robert L. Peters ; illustrations by the author. |
| Edition | Rev. ed. |
| Publisher | New York : Noonday Press, 1997. |
NOTE: Competition for admission to the best graduate and professional programs is extremely tough. Some programs help you by providing their cut-off GRE or LSAT scores--probably above 700 verbal. Do they require you to take the GRE subject test in addition to the general one? Do they have expectations that you have already written a thesis, a paper of more than 30 pages in length? Some programs only admit students who have done so, because they can be expected to complete a thesis or dissertation.
It is even harder to get a full-time job as a professor in the humanities. Please do not accumulate much debt as you progress through your studies. Remember that, especially these days, you can create many of the elements of an academic life in your own life: use the online technology to pursue your own research and writing; create writing groups and reading groups; find opportunities to teach; build your own academic community, which might be free of the sort of competition that often goes along with Ph.D. programs. Call yourself an "independent scholar" and pursue conference and networking opportunities based on your own seriousness of purpose.
In any case, our mentorly advice to you is that you do have some control over the process. There are steps you can take.
2. The Modern Language Association’s online guide to doctoral programs in its related fields: http://www.mla.org/gdp_intro
As soon as possible, look at the webpages for specific graduate programs or professional schools that interest you. Try to consult these at least two years before applying, since Admissions requirements for specific programs will tell you how to prepare. Do they require the GRE, subject tests, or specific standardized tests in the field? (MCAT, LSAT, etc.) Do they require foreign language proficiency? How many languages? Plan the coursework that will allow you to impress these schools. Remember that even one or two semesters of a foreign language may be enough exposure to the structure of the language to allow you to pass a proficiency test with a dictionary.
Read application deadlines carefully. Typically, the deadline date is a postmark date, so “send by January 2” means get it into the mail by that date. “Must be received by” means to put it into the mail with plenty of lead time.
Graduate programs, law schools, and creative writing programs are typically impressed if you make it clear that you have researched them and can demonstrate that your goals and preparation are a good fit for what they have to offer. In the age of the internet, it is virtually unprofessional not to show that you cared to check out their offerings online.
Web site for ranking programs---allows you to select your own priorities, then search for themState-by-state guide to graduate programs:
Advice on how to position yourself:
- Be aware that graduate programs often give TAships and other financial aid to Ph.D. students rather than to MA students, since the Ph.D. students are postponing their career of earnings.
- You can definitely study for the GRE tests, using helpful workbooks and practice tests.
- Seek out chances to present your work professionally, especially at academic or professional conferences and through publications of all kinds. Keep writing. Look for conference Calls for Papers (these usually come out far in advance of the conference itself), and plan your year of work and essay- or chapter-writing to fit those into your schedule.
- Interdisciplinary graduate work is exciting and often opens up specific niches for your expertise. Unfortunately, it can be extremely hard to get hired if your work is interdisciplinary. You will wait in line for TAships behind students in mainline disciplines, and fewer colleges and universities venture to hire faculty difficult to slot into teaching standard courses.
3. Approach faculty mentors or those who will write letters of recommendation for you. It is important to ask faculty members if they are willing to write on your behalf, and to discuss your choice of programs with them. Faculty advisors may help with identifying programs that are a good fit for you. Remember that there are many strong regional programs: University of Wisconsin schools, especially Madison and Milwaukee; Marquette; Univ of Iowa, Iowa State, USD, UND, and now NDSU.
Discuss with mentors which programs would make the best fit.
See the additional website I have that provides information about getting letters of recommendation.
You will need to prepare a Writing Sample, in most cases, and may want to spend some time polishing this. They ask for between 12 and 25 pages. This should be outstanding work. It is even better if the sample demonstrates good fit between your research interests and the program to which you are applying.
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4. Additional resources:
David Burrell's Getting In: An Applicant's Guide to Graduate School AdmissionsMarie desJardins's How to Be A Good Graduate Student.Dan Horn's Graduate Student Resources on the Web*The Creative Writing MFA Handbook: A Guide for Prospective Graduate Students by Tom Kealey (Paperback )
A GUIDE TO APPLYING TO DO GRADUATE WORK IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY last update: fall 2000/minor revisions 2001-2.http://www.people.virginia.edu/~adm9e/grad/grad.htmUS News and World Report's Rankings of PhD Programs (1998)
Although it is certainly not accurate in every respect, Robert E. Clark and John Palattella, eds., The Real Guide to Grad School: What You Better Know Before You Choose Humanities and Social Sciences (New York: Lingua Franca, 1997; $24.95) contains a great deal of useful information. See also Lesli Mitchell, The Ultimate Grad School Survival Guide (Princeton, NJ: Peterson's, 1996, $14.95). Richard and Margot Jerrard, The Grad School Handbook (New York: Perigee, 1998: $14.00) contains a lot of practical advice about whether to go, where to go, financing, and so on. A. Leigh Deneef, Craufurd D. Goodwin, and Ellen Stern McCrate, eds., The Academic's Handbook (Durham: Duke University Press, 1988), gives a good general introduction to the way universities work; most of this will be terra incognita to undergraduates.
Academic research and writing: Wayne Booth: The Craft of Research; Howard S. Becker, Writing For Social Scientists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
Jonathan Simon, Discipline and Punish: Birth of a Middle-Range Research Strategy
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AN ACADEMIC IN AMERICA
Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go
It's hard to tell young people that universities view their idealism and energy as an exploitable resource
Nearly six years ago, I wrote a column called "So You Want to Go to Grad School?" (The Chronicle, June 6, 2003). My purpose was to warn undergraduates away from pursuing Ph.D.'s in the humanities by telling them what I had learned about the academic labor system from personal observation and experience. It was a message many prospective graduate students were not getting from their professors, who were generally too eager to clone themselves. Having heard rumors about unemployed Ph.D.'s, some undergraduates would ask about job prospects in academe, only to be told, "There are always jobs for good people." If the students happened to notice the increasing numbers of well-published, highly credentialed adjuncts teaching part time with no benefits, they would be told, "Don't worry, massive retirements are coming soon, and then there will be plenty of positions available." The encouragement they received from mostly well-meaning but ill-informed professors was bolstered by the message in our culture that education always leads to opportunity. All these years later, I still get letters from undergraduates who stumble onto that column. They tell me about their interests and accomplishments and ask whether they should go to graduate school, somehow expecting me to encourage them. I usually write back, explaining that in this era of grade inflation (and recommendation inflation), there's an almost unlimited supply of students with perfect grades and glowing letters.
Of course, some doctoral program may admit them with full financing, but that doesn't mean they are going to find work as professors when it's all over. The reality is that less than half of all doctorate holders — after nearly a decade of preparation, on average — will ever find tenure-track positions. The follow-up letters I receive from those prospective Ph.D.'s are often quite angry and incoherent; they've been praised their whole lives, and no one has ever told them that they may not become what they want to be, that higher education is a business that does not necessarily have their best interests at heart. Sometimes they accuse me of being threatened by their obvious talent. I assume they go on to find someone who will tell them what they want to hear: "Yes, my child, you are the one we've been waiting for all our lives." It can be painful, but it is better that undergraduates considering graduate school in the humanities should know the truth now, instead of when they are 30 and unemployed, or worse, working as adjuncts at less than the minimum wage under the misguided belief that more teaching experience and more glowing recommendations will somehow open the door to a real position.
Most undergraduates don't realize that there is a shrinking percentage of positions in the humanities that offer job security, benefits, and a livable salary (though it is generally much lower than salaries in other fields requiring as many years of training). They don't know that you probably will have to accept living almost anywhere, and that you must also go through a six-year probationary period at the end of which you may be fired for any number of reasons and find yourself exiled from the profession. They seem to think becoming a humanities professor is a reliable prospect — a more responsible and secure choice than, say, attempting to make it as a freelance writer, or an actor, or a professional athlete — and, as a result, they don't make any fallback plans until it is too late. I have found that most prospective graduate students have given little thought to what will happen to them after they complete their doctorates. They assume that everyone finds a decent position somewhere, even if it's "only" at a community college (expressed with a shudder). Besides, the completion of graduate school seems impossibly far away, so their concerns are mostly focused on the present. Their motives are usually some combination of the following: They are excited by some subject and believe they have a deep, sustainable interest in it. (But ask follow-up questions and you find that it is only deep in relation to their undergraduate peers — not in relation to the kind of serious dedication you need in graduate programs.) They received high grades and a lot of praise from their professors, and they are not finding similar encouragement outside of an academic environment. They want to return to a context in which they feel validated. They are emerging from 16 years of institutional living: a clear, step-by-step process of advancement toward a goal, with measured outcomes, constant reinforcement and support, and clearly defined hierarchies. The world outside school seems so unstructured, ambiguous, difficult to navigate, and frightening. With the prospect of an unappealing, entry-level job on the horizon, life in college becomes increasingly idealized. They think graduate school will continue that romantic experience and enable them to stay in college forever as teacher-scholars. They can't find a position anywhere that uses the skills on which they most prided themselves in college. They are forced to learn about new things that don't interest them nearly as much. No one is impressed by their knowledge of Jane Austen. There are no mentors to guide and protect them, and they turn to former teachers for help. They think that graduate school is a good place to hide from the recession. They'll spend a few years studying literature, preferably on a fellowship, and then, if academe doesn't seem appealing or open to them, they will simply look for a job when the market has improved. And, you know, all those baby boomers have to retire someday, and when that happens, there will be jobs available in academe.
I know I experienced all of those motivations when I was in my early 20s. The year after I graduated from college (1990) was a recession, and the best job I could find was selling memberships in a health club, part time, in a shopping mall in Philadelphia. A graduate fellowship was an escape that landed me in another city — Miami — with at least enough money to get by. I was aware that my motives for going to graduate school came from the anxieties of transitioning out of college and my difficulty finding appealing work, but I could justify it in practical terms for the last reason I mentioned: I thought I could just leave academe if something better presented itself. I mean, someone with a doctorate must be regarded as something special, right? Unfortunately, during the three years that I searched for positions outside of academe, I found that humanities Ph.D.'s, without relevant experience or technical skills, generally compete at a moderate disadvantage against undergraduates, and at a serious disadvantage against people with professional degrees. If you take that path, you will be starting at the bottom in your 30s, a decade behind your age cohort, with no savings (and probably a lot of debt). What almost no prospective graduate students can understand is the extent to which doctoral education in the humanities socializes idealistic, naïve, and psychologically vulnerable people into a profession with a very clear set of values. It teaches them that life outside of academe means failure, which explains the large numbers of graduates who labor for decades as adjuncts, just so they can stay on the periphery of academe. (That's another topic I've written about before; see "Is Graduate School a Cult?" (The Chronicle, July 2, 2004.)
I fell for the line about faculty retirements that went around back in the early 90s, thanks to the infamous Bowen and Sosa Report. I still hear that claim today, from people who ought to know better. Even if the long-awaited wave of retirements finally arrives, many of those tenure lines will not be retained, particularly not now, in the context of yet another recession. Just to be clear: There is work for humanities doctorates (though perhaps not as many as are currently being produced), but there are fewer and fewer real jobs because of conscious policy decisions by colleges and universities. As a result, the handful of real jobs that remain are being pursued by thousands of qualified people — so many that the minority of candidates who get tenure-track positions might as well be considered the winners of a lottery. Universities (even those with enormous endowments) have historically taken advantage of recessions to bring austerity to teaching. There will be hiring freezes and early retirements. Rather than replacements, more adjuncts will be hired, and more graduate students will be recruited, eventually flooding the market with even more fully qualified teacher-scholars who will work for almost nothing.
When the recession ends, the hiring freezes will become permanent, since departments will have demonstrated that they can function with fewer tenured faculty members. Nearly every humanities field was already desperately competitive, with hundreds of applications from qualified candidates for every tenure-track position. Now the situation is becoming even worse. For example, the American Historical Association's job listings are down 15 percent and the Modern Languae's listings are down 21 percent, the steepest annual decline ever recorded. Apparently, many already-launched candidate searches are being called off; some responsible observers expect that hiring may be down 40 percent this year. What is 40 percent worse than desperate? The majority of job seekers who emerge empty-handed this year will return next year, and for several years after that, and so the competition will snowball, with more and more people chasing fewer and fewer full-time positions. Meanwhile, more and more students are flattered to find themselves admitted to graduate programs; many are taking on considerable debt to do so. According to the Humanities Indicators Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, about 23 percent of humanities students end up owing more than $30,000, and more than 14 percent owe more than $50,000.
As things stand, I can only identify a few circumstances under which one might reasonably consider going to graduate school in the humanities: You are independently wealthy, and you have no need to earn a living for yourself or provide for anyone else. You come from that small class of well-connected people in academe who will be able to find a place for you somewhere. You can rely on a partner to provide all of the income and benefits needed by your household. You are earning a credential for a position that you already hold — such as a high-school teacher — and your employer is paying for it. Those are the only people who can safely undertake doctoral education in the humanities. Everyone else who does so is taking an enormous personal risk, the full consequences of which they cannot assess because they do not understand how the academic-labor system works and will not listen to people who try to tell them.
It's hard to tell young people that universities recognize that their idealism and energy — and lack of information — are an exploitable resource. For universities, the impact of graduate programs on the lives of those students is an acceptable externality, like dumping toxins into a river. If you cannot find a tenure-track position, your university will no longer court you; it will pretend you do not exist and will act as if your unemployability is entirely your fault. It will make you feel ashamed, and you will probably just disappear, convinced it's right rather than that the game was rigged from the beginning.
Thomas H. Benton is the pen name of William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, Mich. He writes about academic culture and welcomes reader mail directed to his attention at careers@chronicle.com. For an archive of his previous columns, see http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/archives/columns/an_ academic_in_america.