When students come to ask about graduate school in the humanities, it is hard to be encouraging. For the most part, I tell students not to go. There just aren’t that many jobs. Even when I was in graduate school a dean suggested that we view our employment prospects as similar to those of someone who moves to New York to make it in music (not encouraging). I typically tell students that if they are incredibly passionate about a subject and just have to know more about it and don’t mind if they don’t get a job on the other end—it may be for them, if they get into a good enough program.
It is very hard to explain to students why most of us who have been through a PhD program in the humanities look back with some fond memories and also a sense of having survived something. It seems so great from the outside. You get paid to read and write and learn. People send you on research trips. You are allegedly surrounded by very smart people. All of that is true, but the situation is more complicated. According to studies, graduate students are more depressed on average than the general population. How can that be? They are not exactly working real jobs or doing hard labor.
I recently came across an example that I think almost explains everything. This comes from Silas: The Antarctic Diaries and Memoir of Charles S. Wright. Before he went on the Scott Expedition, Charles S. Wright was a graduate student in Cambridge. He was a Canadian who won the prestigious 1851 Exhibition Scholarship. At Cambridge he was able to work in the Cavendish Laboratory, under J.J. Thompson, who had won the Nobel Prize two years before Wright’s arrival. Before he left for Antarctica in 1910, “Wright wrote up the results of his research and his new techniques for the detection of ionization; he gave them to Thompson for final approval and transmission to the publisher. When he returned from the Antarctic in 1913, he found the paper still in Thompson’s desk drawer. In the meantime, a similar but more complete work had been published by Geiger, which resulted in development of the Geiger Counter, still used today for the measurement of radioactivity.”
This passage is incredibly instructive for would-be graduate students. Wright was at Cambridge on scholarship—amazing. He was working with a Nobel Prize winner—amazing. He was doing research and got to take a trip to the Antarctic—amazing. But his supervisor dropped the ball and because Thompson was not attentive, it’s the Geiger Counter, not the Wright Counter. So many great things happen in graduate school and you have incredible opportunities and exciting educational experiences. But so much of your future is in the hands of your advisor and the other senior academics. They may leave your work in the desk drawer for three years. They may not write that recommendation on time or review your chapter on time or respond to your emails in helpful ways. There seem to be so many gates to get through between being a student and becoming somebody and you don’t hold the keys.
The years you spend in graduate school emphasize the lack of control you have over your own life. You may not know how long you will be there. A history PhD often takes 6-7 years, sometimes less, sometimes much more. But it’s not like an undergraduate degree where the path to completion is very clear. You aren’t just checking off required classes. As mentioned, you are very dependent on your advisor and committees and they can be good or bad but you have little ability to affect their behavior. If it is bad, you just endure it. You are being paid, but unless you have a working spouse, you probably do not have enough money to fully live the adult lifestyle your college friends are enjoying. You’ll have to wait on a house and maybe a wedding and very likely a new car and probably some of the non-research travel. As long as you tell people you are a “graduate student” you are more of a proto-adult to the people you meet than an actual adult. You may be thirty, but you are not working a “real job” (they’re not wrong). Your advisor might retire and leave you stranded, your research topic may turn out to be not very good, and it is not at all uncommon for someone to publish something just like what you are working on before you have a chance to publish. You may have free will, but you do not seem to control your fate.
Graduate school can be very fun and rewarding. It is a unique opportunity to pursue knowledge which is unmatched. You meet very interesting people. You sometimes get to do very interesting things. You meet people who care about whatever obscure topic makes your little heart beat a little faster. You have a flexible schedule. You can still play intramural sports and get student discounts everywhere. You can form connections with professionals in your field who are remarkable. I had a professor in graduate school who became a MacArthur Fellow. You don’t meet people like that all the time everywhere you go.
There are many great things about graduate school. Some people should definitely go. But, know now, there is a chance that you will do something groundbreaking and it will never make it out of a desk drawer and, if that happens, you won’t be able to do much about it. You may or may not get a job. Whatever comes of it, graduate school is an education.
This reflection is about pursuing a doctorate. It is a very different calculation to decide whether it is in one’s interests to go to graduate school to gain a master’s degree.
“They are not exactly working real jobs or doing hard labor.”
I think this might miss as much as it captures. What is “a real job”? As a grad student, you’re typically putting in 80+ hour weeks. You have incredibly stressful deadlines. You have to perform in public. You have people you have to please. If you don’t you can be let go (lose funding). You have difficult colleagues and it’s often quite competitive, even nasty.
And you can’t afford the typical things people do to reward themselves for working hard–vacations, going out to dinner, plays, etc. Your transportation is probably unreliable. My career is well in the past, back when stipends didn’t even aspire to sustain you (my first–a named award!–was the So-and-so Distinguished Scholarship or something); it was $6000 a year. Not only can’t you afford luxuries, eye-care and dental care are close to out of the question. In pre-Obamacare days you couldn’t afford check-ups.
And what is “hard labor”? If it means ditch-digging and such only, then yes, you’re not doing that–hardly anyone else is either, but they have “real jobs.” Is brain-work real labor? You’re assimilating and mastering massive amounts of information (facts, arguments), you have to repeat it all accurately and attractively, and you need to go beyond that, doing genuinely creative work that generates interpretations that are uniquely your own, and you have to defend them before an often quite difficult audience. It might not be ditch-digging, but it is a huge expenditure of energy. Felt like labor to me.