52. Your adviser’s pedigree counts.

Nowhere does it matter more where you go to school than in academe. Higher education takes itself and its hierarchies very seriously. You will find it hard to compete—in an extremely competitive academic job market—against people with degrees from the Ivy League and the quasi-Ivies if your degree is from Generic State University (see Reason 3). But it is not only your own pedigree that you have to worry about. Graduate students at even the toniest universities have to make strategic decisions to maximize their chances on the job market. To that end, few things are more important than choosing an adviser.

For graduate students interested in an academic career, Professor Lennard J. Davis recently offered some excellent advice in the Chronicle of Higher Education. That advice included the following:

I tell my students to plan their dissertation committees with the job search in mind. They should pick professors who not only are skilled in the field of the dissertation, but who also have national and international reputations. Letters from those professors will count a great deal. And as these things go, letters from full professors will count more than letters from associate professors, and so on down the line.

Note the emphasis on reputation and hierarchy. Professor Davis, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is refreshingly honest and would make a good adviser for that reason alone. Even better, all of his degrees are from Columbia. Unfortunately, the most understanding professors with the time and willingness to shepherd you through a graduate program are rarely those with the biggest reputations and most fashionable credentials. 

51. You are surrounded by undergraduates.

Most everyone who works in education experiences the strange phenomenon of growing older while students stay the same age. Graduate students experience an even stranger phenomenon. While still students themselves, they age in the presence of fellow students who remain 18-22 years old, year after year after year. As a graduate student, you encounter undergraduates every day on campus. It is more than likely that you have to work with them. And because you can’t afford to live anywhere else, you probably go home to a neighborhood (or even an apartment building) that is full of them. They surround you constantly. In fact, in ways that seem more distressing over time, your life is very much like theirs.

It is not much fun to live in a sea of undergraduates unless you are an undergraduate yourself. Their unavoidable presence and carefree ways are a constant reminder of your delayed adulthood (see Reason 12), even as their feeling of relief and accomplishment at the end of each term is a jarring reminder that your own work does not end with finals week (see Reason 47). You may not be much older than they are, but they can make you feel much older than they are. And then one day you discover that you are much older than they are. Perhaps most bothersome of all is their collective sense of possibility; they know (or at least live in the belief) that a world of opportunities awaits them, while you see more clearly every year that your prospects are becoming fewer and fewer (see Reason 29).

50. You are surrounded by graduate students.

A graduate student in his first year of a PhD program was disappointed that his classmates scattered to the four winds as soon as their unbearable seminar meetings were over (see Reason 21). Not yet knowing any of his fellow students, he expressed his disappointment to a tenured faculty member. The professor responded without the slightest hesitation: “There is nothing to be gained from the company of graduate students.”

Graduate students are not bad people, but they are often unhappy people for a variety of reasons (see Reasons 1-49). Graduate school can produce real friendships and even marriages (see Reason 48), but it is rarely experienced as a community of people working together. Instead, grad school throws people together who are fighting their own lonely way toward degrees, often in direct competition with each other (see Reason 2). It is what they share that makes them unhappy—alienation from the real world, unsatisfying work, terrible workspaces, tiny paychecks, ballooning student loans, and constant uncertainty over what awaits them at the end of their long road through graduate school. Being surrounded by unhappy people is hardly a recipe for happiness.

49. There are few tangible rewards.

When you build a house, paint a painting, bake a cake, or clean a room, you can step back and see what you have accomplished. Whether you work alone or in a team, being able to contemplate the finished product of your labors is a satisfying experience, a reward for your work. When that labor is further rewarded by a paycheck, it is all the more satisfying. Many modern occupations come with few tangible rewards but at least provide an income. Graduate school offers little in the way of either.

Instead of being able to see the work of your hands or the product of your ideas, you can reflect upon the thousands of hours that you spent reading in preparation for your exams, and how quickly the impractical things that you learned in the process slipped from your mind the moment that you completed them. You can meditate on the hundreds of thousands of keystrokes that produced the tens of thousands of words that you typed while staring at an ephemeral image on a screen. After a few years in graduate school, you can print out hundreds of pages of text that you have produced, but looking at a neatly-stacked pile of paper is hardly inspiring. (Would your writing inspire anyone who reads it?) After several years, when you are finally handed a piece of paper in recognition of your efforts, you can step back and contemplate your empty bank account.

 

48. The two-body problem.

Graduate school tends to delay marriage (see Reason 15), but if you decide to go to graduate school, you will likely spend many years as a graduate student among other graduate students. Not surprisingly, grad students sometimes fall in love and marry each other. They can be a great support to one another as they together go through the struggles of grad school on a shoe-string budget, but their marriage has created what in academic circles is commonly referred to as “the two-body problem.” It is hard enough for one human being to finish graduate school and secure an academic position; you can imagine how hard it is for two people.

Let us say that you marry a fellow graduate student and both of you manage to complete your PhDs. (The fact that you have each other’s support may make that more likely.) Now it is time for you both to find jobs. First of all, there are very few jobs (see Reason 8), and the available jobs are probably nowhere near where you are now (see Reason 16). Having spent years of your lives devoting yourselves to your respective disciplines, you are both heavily invested in your fields. At the same time, neither of you is better qualified for anything other than being a professor (see Reason 29). You will be very lucky if either of you is offered an assistant professorship; you will be extraordinarily lucky if both of you are. In that unlikely event, if you are offered a job in Texas and your spouse is offered a job in Minnesota, which one of you is going to accept the position? Academic jobs are so precious that there are married couples who work hundreds of miles away from each other, but do you really want to do that? An alternative is to move with your spouse and hope that you will land a job within commuting distance of your new home. Another is for one of you to start from scratch in a new profession.

47. It requires tremendous self-discipline.

Graduate school is not like college. Perhaps so many people go to graduate school because they are mistakenly under the impression that it is. In college, you go through a tidy progression of classes from one term to the next, each having a beginning and an end, neatly punctuated by mid-term exams, final exams, and regular paper assignments. While hundreds of other students march through similar routines all around you, you follow a set class schedule from day to day until, finally, you take your last final exam in your last class and walk away with your diploma. (In the mean time, you probably have some fun, too.) In the United States, graduate programs begin with coursework, but classes designed for graduate students are different from those designed for undergraduates and can be extremely unsatisfying in comparison (see Reason 21). Classes are smaller, so the feeling of shared experience is diminished from the outset. As you enter the isolation of preparing for your comprehensive exams, that shared feeling all but disappears. If you pass those exams, then the real isolation begins.

Imagine a day when someone says to you, “Write a book.” This will not be just any kind of book; a thesis or dissertation is the product of tedious research and the most laborious kind of writing: academic writing (see Reason 28). You must write this book while fulfilling your basic obligations (like paying the rent), carrying out your obligations as a teaching or research assistant (which makes paying the rent possible), and satisfying the expectations of your potential future employers by adding as many lines to your resume as possible (presenting papers at conferences and publishing articles). If you don’t receive funding from your department, then you will either have to hold down a different kind of job or sink into debt (see Reason 1) as you research and write. For all intents and purposes, you are on your own throughout this process. Some people are adept at managing unstructured time and multiple obligations at once, but graduate-school attrition rates (see Reason 46) make it clear that some people are not. Given how long it takes for most of those who do finish to finish (see Reason 4), it is probably safe to say that most people are not.

46. You may not finish.

Presumably, very few people start graduate school with the intention of dropping out, but graduate school attrition rates are depressingly high. In the humanities, they are painfully high. A study by the Council of Graduate Schools found that only 49 percent of those who start PhD programs in the humanities finish within ten years. (The best numbers are in engineering, where 64 percent finish in ten years.) A fraction of graduate students take longer than a decade to finish their degrees, but the vast majority of those who haven’t finished within ten years never will finish. So, even in the fields with the lowest drop-out rates, one third of those who start a PhD program never complete it.

Graduate school is difficult (see Reason 9), and some of this attrition is the result of students being unable to pass their exams or write acceptable theses. Their inability to do so may have as much to do with their work obligations (see Reasons 7 and 41) as with their academic potential. Some graduate students crack under the pressure of demanding professors (see Reason 44), while others cannot muster adequate self-discipline under the supervision of lenient advisers (see Reason 45). In many cases, money becomes an issue, and it is arguably much wiser to drop out of a program than it is to go into debt. Life simply gets in the way sometimes. For all sorts of reasons, spending the better part of a decade in a state of financial insecurity (see Reason 17) and prolonged “youth” (see Reason 12) proves untenable for many people. Unfortunately, there is a cost to be paid for quitting (see Reason 11). Anyone considering graduate school should consider the attrition statistics soberly, and then consider the bleak job prospects for those who finish despite the odds.

45. Nice advisers can be worse.

If you suffer under a tyrranical adviser (see Reason 44) who expects you to meet high standards and strict deadlines, you may rise to the occasion, produce outstanding work, and graduate in a reasonable amount of time. Of course, what today counts as “reasonable” is a very long time (see Reason 4) and you may still find that there are no jobs waiting for you at the end of an arduous journey through graduate school (see Reason 8). Nonetheless, there is something to be said for advisers who push their students through the various stages of a graduate program and then push them out the door with a degree.

The sooner you finish, the better. Graduate school delays adulthood (see Reason 12) and the longer you devote to a degree, the longer you will be without a salary. And there are few things more discouraging than sinking years of your life into working toward a degree that you never finish (see Reason 11). Having an adviser who offers you maximum intellectual freedom while allowing you to work at your own pace is an advantage if you are exceptionally organized, disciplined, and focused. However, if you are not, that kind of generous leeway can be detrimental to your chances of finishing in a timely manner or finishing at all. People tend to be most productive when they have expectations to meet and a schedule to follow. Ironically, it is often the kindest advisers who are the most averse to imposing strict expectations on their students, leaving them to rely on their own far-too-often insufficient self-discipline.