No worries! You know we value you around these parts!
Well, on some level @AnthonyC right - these are supposed to be smart people (a friend of mine calls us âprofessional smart peopleâ, but I prefer to think of us as trained in a particular field). What heâs missing is that there isnât a lot of information that lets us know before going into these programs how bad the job market is. I honestly wasnât aware until I was already committed - some of that is on me, honestly. I could have done the leg work to figure that out (but the market got worse, too). That being said, departments want to increase the amount of funding they get and for the STEM fields there is this (mistaken, I think) notion that the world is desperate for STEM phds. Departments actively recruit. itâs not as strong for humamities, but there is this notion that those of us on the frontlines teaching, are supposed to try and convince students to come major, then move into graduate work in our fields. So, itâs not just people making decisions about their careers in a vacuum.
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Iâm totally not opposed to that. We need both. I get people who feel it needs to be either-or. We have a complex economy, which needs a variety of skills, both writing history and learning trades.
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Exactly. I would say that in many fields, we are nowhere near the point where incoming grad students have an honest representation of their prospects. I graduated from a top five program in my field with well-connected PhD advisers who were very honest about what their graduates are up to, and what my responsibilities were if I wanted similar outcomes. I was mentored - a lot, and that shows. For people just across the street in a different department, still a good department, the prospects look different. In that field, itâs not common, but not uncommon, for faculty to ax projects that arenât working - including the grad student who is working on the project. âYou might find yourself unemployed if your project doesnât workâ doesnât show up in the brochures. In that field, itâs common for people to be a cog in a larger lab machine, not independent researchers operating in the lab. That makes the graduates more suitable for tech positions, or to be part of a consortium, not an independent lab head. âAll of my graduates are employed in academiaâ, is therefore, both a true and a misleading statement.
I think with the science media focus on grad school, and the rise of academic twitter, this information is easier to find. But I didnât know, and I donât expect most students to understand how easy it is to cook a lot of these stats.
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This is true. I guess I just a) expect institutions to lie to me/be totally wrong about how awesome they are and b) got lucky with having candid professors and grad students I worked with back when I was an undergrad.
@infundibulum: Itâs true, department and lab culture are critical and really, really hard to evaluate before enrolling. Poor cultural fit is a big part of why I left my PhD program, because I didnât do that legwork well enough. Luckily Iâd made sure to choose a department where I could get an MS in passing and a field where people with an MS are employable.
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It is really, really crucial, but something that Iâve seen time and time again is that the lab heads who are the most toxic are often the best at covering that up. Whenever undergraduates ask me how to evaluate a program, I always tell them to get some time with the students, away from the faculty mentor. If possible, outside of the work building. And I try to be proactive about setting this time up when prospectives are in town.
I didnât know when I went to grad school, but if someone isnât letting the grad students be alone with a prospective student/postdoc/other, they probably know the students wonât speak highly of them.
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That analysis completely ignores the possibility of employment at colleges/universities that donât have PhD programs. The ratio of such schools to those with PhD programs matters a lot. (Also the death/retirement rate.)
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This tickled me because my undergraduate major was, in fact, in music. And from a school with a shitty little music department youâd probably never go to if you were serious about music as a career!
Now Iâm Professor Semiotix, Ph.D., of the Department of Definitely Not Music. Kids, anyone who tells you âyou need to major in ______ if you want to be a _______â is full of beans. I SAY, I SAY THEYâRE FULL OF BEANS, SON.
I realize (since youâre calling it a canard) you understand this; I just wanted to reinforce that point. It can never be said enough, especially since there will always be those who take the view that by age 18 you should know exactly what youâre going to do with the rest of your life and that if you fail to pursue precisely what they regard as the straightest path to that goalâor the most easily attainable version of that goalâthen youâre entirely to blame for every misfortune and setback that life hands you.
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I didnât think of that
This is one of those areas where âit dependsââŚI was in the music industry for a decade and a half. My friends that stuck it out past the years where being young and pretty with great skin and a head full of hair (sadly, I have none of this any more)âŚthe ones that stuck through past their 30s were folks with actual degrees in the field. Rawk And Rool? Degrees? Pop Music? Yeah seriously. The people that stick through it and have a chance of figuring out how to diversify themselves enough to get through lean years? Have degrees.
My most recent ex (or at least the one I admit to as its been over a year!) has her performance PhD and teaches all over the world. She gets about one or two gigs a month in the summer across the world which she schedules towards her teaching career (i.e., masters classes and all that) and rounds it out with an appointment with a symphony that she does only the winter season. She hustles for every job and is FAR more diversified that she was when she was younger.
The fact of the matter is, the degree can be useful if you arenât a complete flake.
That said, my current position as a researcher at a university, mostly focused on researching and fixing educationâŚand being in charge of program review (i.e., analyzing individual degrees and schools and departments)âŚthere are a lot of degrees that I see that one wouldnât think are useful and yet have HUGE placement rates. People almost always get jobsâŚwell paying ones. And then there are the departments that everyone thinks are jobs, and this is backed up by cold hard stats of graduation and retention rates, student loan defaults, and things like that. Ironically music tech / arts are not one of them! At least at my institution (and at least within the core group of my friends that I still talk to today in the field).
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I donât know what those ratios are in general, but in my own field, we keep track of this sort of thing. The numbers tend to look like:
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