Early in graduate school, you will probably be asked to write book reviews or other relatively short papers that require reference to a limited number of sources, but most of your writing will require a great deal of preparation before it even begins. Because your research contributions are expected to be original, you will have to acquaint yourself with the literature that has already been published on the subject about which you are writing. Then, you will have to find a way to incorporate the conclusions of your predecessors into your work before offering some kind of interpretation of your own—an interpretation that should be justified by evidence. Creativity—and one hopes that there will be some—has to be expressed within the template of what constitutes a sound academic argument. Scholarship is made better by high standards, but you should ask yourself if this is the kind of writing to which you want to devote a good portion of your life.
Too true -- I'm just wrapping up my Honours and I can't wait to live a life free of academic writing!
ReplyDeleteP.S. this blog has totally supported my decision that carrying onto Masters is just silly for me :P you should feature the Avenue Q song "What do you do with a BA in English?" because as I've discovered this year, the answer is... well, not much. ^_^
Get your TESOL, go overseas and make your money back.
DeleteWhat happens when you turn 40?
DeleteAfter reading this post and most of the others, a few things:
ReplyDelete1. In regard to this particular post: Did this person think that their dissertation was going to be in the style of a New York Times best-seller? If you want to "Indulge in enjoyable, free-flowing production of words" why don't you just become the next Dave Eggers? Nothing is stopping you from going into creative writing. There is a reason that in scholarship, statements need to be backed up with evidence. It is true that "evidence" is not required for writing in the "real world." This is why in the "real world," you can become Glenn Beck or write The DaVinci Code. Seriously, go for your dreams. No one will miss you.
2. In response to all the previous posts bitching about the money and the politics: Please name a SINGLE job in America that isn't profoundly affected by capitalism/the market and thus automatically a horde of brown-nosers all clawing at each other to get to the top. Yes, if you are going to be given an opportunity to write your very own work that is not helping some CEO at a company (or at a nonprofit for that matter) earn more money than you, there is not going to be very much demand for your labor and thus you can be lucky that you get your minimum-wage stipend. There are plenty of non-academic artists and writers out there dealing with the same issue. If they are to gain any success in the capitalistic system, they create something marketable to at least some kind of buyer. It is delusional to think that academics is any different.
3. Regarding the "real world"/"ivory tower" dichotomy: Listen, if you are slaving away at a company creating algorithms for JCPenney to best sell its plus-sized clothing for 100 hours a week, you are not in the "real world." You are in that company's world. Stop thinking that there is a "real world" out there that you were "missing out on." If you work for a PR company, you are in the PR world. If you work for a nonprofit, you are most likely in the "sucking up to rich donors who want tax breaks" world. If you work in politics, you are in an insane asylum. If you are a lawyer, you sleep 3 hours a night anyway. And so on. If you really want a "real life," yes you can get some 40-hour a week administrative job, then go home to your house in the suburbs you can't afford, watch The Office, and pop out some children that will someday have to take out loans for their education. You make your own effing world.
3. Oh, but the "academic world" sucks you say? You are isolated from Uncle Joe now? I have an Uncle Joe. He is morbidly obese, can barely spell, and voted for George Bush twice. I never had anything in common with Uncle Joe in the first place. But you are sad because you didn't find your "intellectual soulmates" at your graduate school? Here are some suggestions: Go back in time and stop being so socially awkward in your pre-grad school life, and make one friend that might actually last so you don't go into your PhD program an isolated hermit. Also, try to stop romanticizing the idea of an "intellectual soulmate" in the first place. Smart people are rare, truly intellectual people are almost, if not completely, non-existent. Are you really sooo much more intellectual than those money-obsessed people in your program? Aren't you the one creating the blog bitching about money and politics in the first place?
Seriously, if you don't understand the politics of grad school and construct a very politically-driven statement with the support of strategically selected faculty members; you probably won't get into grad school in the first place. I am not sure how the author of this blog did, they are making it sound like it is a piece of cake to receive an acceptance letter. You have to know your field, know where it's going, and know what is going to be (gasp!) marketable in the future.
You really could not have summed it up better. Thank you!
DeleteIs it okay to hate you for your opinion?
DeleteWhy is one opinion more valid than another? Are we to give your opinions on the matter of graduate life more credit than the original author of this post? Being in a state of wrapping up my graduate degree right now, I can understand some of the points and opinions in the authors post. In your reply, you stated "Please name a SINGLE job in America that isn't profoundly affected by capitalism/the market and thus automatically a horde of brown-nosers all clawing at each other to get to the top." I can tell you right now that it is not capitalism that creates this, it is the culture of not being content with what you have. Should be workers not strive to do better? Of course they should. But there comes a point in your life where you either choose to look at what you have and say "I'm happy", or look at the neighbor to your left and say "I want THAT car and THAT house", and then begin your tirade of clawing at everything and everyone on your way to get it. I can tell you right now, I am at the ripe old age of 30, have multiple degrees under my belt, several professional certifications, make well beyond what many of my peers make, and I have not had to fight for it. I am content where I am, decline bonuses and pay raises from time to time to help put money into the pockets of the employees who work for me, and I try to live as content as possible. Is it easy, hell no. On top of all of that, I absolutely hate school. I can't stand it. It takes time away from my 3 kids and wife. Between work, school, and family, there is no time for social activity with friends. So why do it? To open up options in case my vertical industry takes an economic nosedive into the toilet. I hate writing. I hate researching. I have student loans I'm paying on, while I'm currently paying out of pocket more in tuition for current classes that what I owed for undergrad classes. I'm not saying this to whine or complain, by no means whatsoever. I've made my choices and live with them. My point is that I hate going to school, yet will be enrolling for my PhD shortly, I understand that there is a difference between the "real world" and the "ivory tower" and have spent many hours teaching my instructors how things are really done in the industry and how to alter their lesson plans to incorporate useful tools and techniques. Lastly, the little arrogant comment you made "And so on. If you really want a "real life," yes you can get some 40-hour a week administrative job, then go home to your house in the suburbs you can't afford, watch The Office, and pop out some children that will someday have to take out loans for their education." - So you're going to tell me that I can't serve time in the military, have my education paid for, take an admin job at 40 hours a week, have my kids use my education benefits or attend in state tuition free due to veteran status, and can't afford to watch whatever TV show I want to watch? How blind are you? Do you think that humility doesn't exist? Disregard the scenario I gave, do you really think people don't do exactly what you just said and manage on their own? One more thing, I've been accepted to the Citadel, USC, UNCW, and two other grad schools with a GED and an undergrad in my back-pocket without a single letter of reference from a previous professor, just saying.
Deletei'm not agreeing wth your critique of the author's use of "real world". Yes there is the nonprofit world, the legal world, jc penny, but those are real world endeavors which contrast with the academic world. JC Pneny and the legal world are legit economic enterprises whose efforts and output are in response to real life problems. That of clients paid legal needs, that of selling plus size womens' clothing to that paying demographic. In stark contrast is the nasty little fake economy of the academic world. No one besides the review committee reads most of the crap that students write, and even then they only skim it. years of effort go into a thesis which could be shredded and burned the moment it was submitted, and it would make no difference. So much of the money in college is ripped off from tax payers, or borrowed by stupid 18 year olds or stupid 28 year olds, chasing degrees which do not really exist. MOst of academic world should not exist..it's only here and booming because of an uneconomic, unholy alliance between the construction and publishing industries and the police power of the state to levy taxes and distribute it to voting groups.
Delete(Continued) All entry-level jobs are complete crap. If you don't want your package, I will gladly take it so you can go become an administrative assistant for 5 years and work your way up to middle management. Oh, but you want to do that in a nice location, instead of "Alabama?" Too bad, the rent is too high for whatever city I am sure you had picked out. Everyone who can afford an apartment there was climbing their way to the top of whatever they do. Please, everyone realizes the entire system is fucked. The only problem is that this blog owner doesn't have a grasp of reality.
ReplyDeleteI don't get what you're saying? To be able to buy an apartment in, say, New York City, you have to be a senior corporate manager or equivalent and rentals are to expensive so nobody lives in them? Ergo, only senior corporate managers or equivalent live in New York City. Ergo, everbody else lives in "Alabama" anyways, so no different for professors. That' grasp of reality?
ReplyDeleteI pray you don't teach logic.
DeleteThis reason seems out of place. The other reasons pertain to job market, culture, environment etc. Things that make life difficult for academics. But if you hate reading and writing you're not an academic in the first place. If you're not an academic in the first place all the other reasons are irrelevant and you probably won't even come across this blog.
ReplyDeleteThis reason seems totally appropriate. A lot of people go to grad school thinking the writing they do will be the same as the writing they did as undergrads. This is not the case. For example, as an undergrad English major, the majority of papers you write are close readings of texts. You look at a poem or novel and make an interpretive argument about it using your observations about and analysis of the author's language to support your position. There's no research involved. You might do one or two research papers, or you might do a senior project that involves research into secondary sources, but most of your writing is about primary sources, about novels and poems, and you don't have to situate what you have to say about them within any larger conversations. You don't have to care about or account for what other scholars have said.
ReplyDeleteIf you go on to graduate school in English, close reading is still a part of how you write, but the point 100 Reasons is making, I think, is that there's a lot more to it. You have to actively situate your own readings within other conversations. It's a very different kind of research and approach to argument than just reading and interpreting primary sources and that research results in a different kind of writing.
Personally, I found this more sophisticated approach to reading and writing very satisfying, but a lot of people I went to graduate school with were disappointed when they realized what they really had to do. Many of them ended up dropping out -- or finishing but hating what they were doing through the entire proccess of writing their dissertations.
If you're a prospective graduate student, make sure you know what you're getting into. Talk to someone -- more than one person -- about how the writing expectations differ between undergrad classes and graduate school.
I think this one (as Recent Ph.D. notes) applies more to English than to History. Undergraduate history papers (at least good ones) are already full of footnotes. And not everyone dislikes using them!
ReplyDeleteTo defend the honor of the blogger, I used to love reading and writing. Then I went to grad school.
ReplyDeleteAcademic prose is the very definition of UNcreative writing, and it is totally inaccessible to normal people. People still in the game think that makes it 'better', but I think that's BS. It's not worth wasting hundreds of hours on something no one's ever going to read.
"But you are sad because you didn't find your 'intellectual soulmates' at your graduate school? Here are some suggestions: Go back in time and stop being so socially awkward in your pre-grad school life, and make one friend that might actually last so you don't go into your PhD program an isolated hermit. Also, try to stop romanticizing the idea of an 'intellectual soulmate' in the first place. Smart people are rare, truly intellectual people are almost, if not completely, non-existent. Are you really sooo much more intellectual than those money-obsessed people in your program? Aren't you the one creating the blog bitching about money and politics in the first place?"
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure why you assume everyone here is an isolated hermit. I do have close friends from my pre-grad school life, but, like many people, I moved in order to attend graduate school, so they're not a part of my daily life.
I also made new friends in my current city, both in my program and outside of it, but academia is so specialized that few of us can really have meaningful conversations about our intellectual work--you know, the work that occupies most of our time and was the whole purpose of uprooting our lives and attending graduate school in the first place. Our friendship is meaningful in other ways, but I still sometimes feel a bit of regret that we can't share such a major part of our lives.
Am I saying that I'm better or more intellectual than them? No, of course not. After all, I don't understand much of *their* work either, and at the end of the day we're all usually too tired--myself included--to have very deep conversations anyway.
"Smart people are rare, truly intellectual people are almost, if not completely, non-existent."
ReplyDeleteAre intellectuals some sort of mythological creature? I didn't think so, because I was friends with several in college. We'd argue about philosophical issues well into the night, go on outings to art museums, etc. And I didn't think it was unreasonable to expect similar intellectual friendships in a PhD program.
But I quickly learned that graduate school tends to attract people who are extremely educated on a particular subject, not people who aspire to be broadly educated on a variety of areas. Nothing wrong with that--after all, knowledge advances a lot through people who give their heart and soul to a subject--but the end result is that if your research interest is different, or if you've got intellectual interests outside your field, it can be hard to connect with that kind of person on an intellectual level.
Is it immature to expect an "intellectual soulmate," especially during a period of life when we're all busier and more preoccupied with the details of career and family? Maybe. But let's face it, friendships with smart people who "get" us is a major reason why we come to graduate school instead of entering middle management or teaching high school. It's important to remind people that these friendships can be rare even among the cognoscenti.
I just posted the above post and don't think I explained myself well, so I'll elaborate.
ReplyDeleteAcademia is structured in such a way as to reward specialization. The dissertation, for instance, can't contain 5 publishable articles on disparate subjects, but rather consists of a 300+ page tome on a single topic. Interdisciplinary PhD programs like American Studies often find little institutional support and get shut down. Even "comprehensive" exams usually just test a few subjects.
This degree of specialization works well for a lot of people, but others find it constricting. If you're a person with varied intellectual interests, it can be difficult to connect with others in your program, who probably just care about their own subfields. Some people are also frustrated by academic writing because 90% of it addresses narrow, technical questions. Sure, you can briefly explain how your topic relates to broader issues, but the majority of the article won't really engage with those broader issues and instead will: cite tons of obscure secondary literature to show why your contribution is original; explain your statistical methods (if you're in the social sciences); etc. Those are the details your fellow specialists will care about . . . and I know this because plenty of my professors have told me that they only read the technical part of an article.
That being said, I've enjoyed graduate school and I've enjoyed writing my dissertation. But if you're going to enter graduate school, enter with reasonable expectations so you can avoid disappointment at the outset.
Note -- An awful lot of grad school writing is aimed at codifying and teaching a method of ANALYSIS and professional behaviour for the study of (your chosen field). As such it is both communication and a record of process.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm sorry, but in my opinion, this country needs all the competent thinkers and discriminating analysts it can get. The ability to separate any argument (no matter how well worded) from the underlying data/foundations (no matter shoddy) is something I wish was developed a lot earlier.
hey can anyone give me tips on how to write well? I want to pursue a ph.d in medieval history. I am working very hard to improve my writing, i see a tutor for any work i am going to hand in, i try to read Strunk and White, etc.
ReplyDeleteIf you're having trouble writing at all, a PhD is probably not the track for you.
ReplyDeletethis blog should really be retitled "100 reasons not to go to grad school if you're a mediocre student".
ReplyDelete^Anonymous 11:41
ReplyDeleteDefine mediocrity. So much of the road to success is paved with randomness - did you get a 1-in-50 fellowship? Did you happen to research something that was popular, fruitful, and for which there were vacancies in the year/s you were on the job market? One of the worst problems in academia (and partly covered by the Pride Reason) is the fact that it is not a meritocracy but all the people who succeed think it is.
Amen!!! The arbitrary nature of success should not be lost on any PHD candidate.
DeleteI'd rather be a mediocre student than one of the whimpering man-children in the comments section of each post here. Was everyone's last conference call for papers on taking extremely general criticism as a personal attack? Is everyone here still in second grade?
ReplyDeleteYOU'RE STUPID SEGA GENESIS IS TOTALLY BETTER THAN SUPER NINTENDO!!!! WHAT AN IDIOT!!!
Another reason not to go to grad school in the humanities is that you will be around a lot of people like 'anonymous' in the second post of this page that hates his uncle that voted for Bush. What a tool that guy is!
ReplyDeleteMy definition of undergrad: little to no bs at all. MA: learning to bs for 5-6 pages. PhD (classwork): learning to bs for 20plus pages; dissertation: being able to bs for a couple of hundred pages (my dissertation was 700 pages of bs). I can now write (or help others to write) a lenghty paper on any topic given to me - especially those that I know nothing about.....
ReplyDeleteWriting isn't hard. You go to the university library and check out 30-40 books. You make a "Works Cited" page. You open the books to any page and type a page about the subject matter of the first or second sentence you read. Proceed until you have filled 15-20 pages. You now delete any books not used from the works cited page. Now do the same with 5-10 journals. Shuffle the pages of your paper in any order you chose. Add a few sentences to construct "flow". I can assure you the tone of your writing will determine your "A" grade.
ReplyDeleteHahaha. Awesome post.
DeleteI just wish I could write a paper so easily.
@diane I love you! This is really good advice, thanks.
ReplyDeleteIn what field, which requires you to write, are you not exposed to close scrutiny? If you write something for someone paying you, then generally that means that that person (as well as others) are going to closely read and give feedback on the thing you wrote for them. Unfortunately, in most other fields, those comments come from people who have no idea what they're talking about...
ReplyDeleteMy advice: if you think graduate school is bad in this way, don't ever work in the entertainment industry or the world of marketing...or anywhere else creative. Trust me. There's no "indulg[ing] in an enjoyable, free-flowing production of words" in these fields either.
Academic writing is hell. Citing sources because the corporations's intellectual property, of course, has to be protected above all is disgusting. I truly hated writing 100% BS essays throughout my undergraduate about things that I didn't care about. Also they can literally give you any grade that they want. As the grader you are a beggar.
ReplyDeleteIn my case writing was true hell because my teachers would try to screw me over for any little thing they could find. So I had to make sure everything I said was supported by direct quotes. I had to spend a long time finding enough quotes that would fit. Even though my undergrad was free once I was in I had to finish just to not have the anger. Looking back it was one of the biggest mistakes of my life and I wish I hadnt ever done it.
ReplyDeleteI'm in sympathy with this one. Indeed citing others' works is a pain, considering so many people publish meaningless papers on the topics. Albert Einstein's papers often don't have any citations, but those years may never come back.
ReplyDeleteShredder, you rube.
ReplyDeleteEinstein's papers often don't have any citations because he was the one doing original work.
The comments here sound like they came from a faculty member or their pet. Walk around any grad department and what each faculty member defines as acceptable standards in writing differs by a vast margin. Advisors have a single motto in seeking revenge for the agony their advisors put on them. Most faculty members are people who failed to grow up and get a real job. They live in their tiny delusions of grandeur berating students because its what gets them going.
ReplyDeleteReason seems totally appropriate. As a grad student, oftentimes what I find is that writing is not done for yourself but at the behest or the benefit of other people so that at the end of the day the manuscript that you thought was yours looks nothing like yours. Sometimes 80% of my writing is replaced. One time my adviser removed several points from my intro only for me to be chastised for missing those points by the editor. So in the end I had to re-write something that had already been done before. A lot of writing is done to please reviewers. And a lot of writing is done w/o any fixed guidelines. Oftentimes writing tasks are just expected to occur w/ little or no instruction about what the finished product will look like from the adviser, just write X. And the whole process rewards procrastination in the sense that if you start very early, you are often going through rounds and rounds of pointless drafts for papers that are sometimes just not even important. For instance, in my program the terminal masters thesis is not very strict, so two of my cohort mates turned theirs in late or on the last day possible, without even going through the rounds of reviews with their adviser. Meanwhile I wrote my draft very early then spent months of time revising it and neglecting other research, granted that is my fault, but it made it very confusing what to prioritize. It is very much an arbitrary process meant to be done to please other people: your adviser, your second reader, your reviewers, the journal editors.
ReplyDelete