So, I went to law school instead, at a school with an excellent health law program, and concentrated in health law, bioethics, health policy, etc. I practiced law for a few years with a big firm, earned some dollars, and then kissed it goodbye to return to grad school and prepare for the career I’ve always wanted (clinical medical ethicist).

I work part-time as a lawyer, which pays the bills nicely. I have law school debt, but it isn’t overwhelming by any means, and I make more than enough to live comfortably whilst I am in school.

Admittedly, my intended career is not entirely academic in the traditional sense, though I do plan to seek academic appointment. I did what I did partly to make the decision to attend grad school more practical for me.

And of course, having a law degree and several years of practice, as well as clerking for a judge, only serves to make me more employable, I tend to think.

You, on the other hand, had some sort of tragic career-ending alcoholic event in grad school, and it’s been a gift that’s kept on giving.

couldn’t possibly be Jason Gabriel Gonella, nor the infamously dubbed “Troll of Sorrow,” well-known for his cowardly excrement-slinging and destructive harassment all across the Internet. No, it couldn’t possibly be. And to even suggest such a thing would be to expose this owners of this site to frivolous lawsuits, for which Jason Gabriel Gonella—whether or not he is indeed the Troll of Sorrow—would eventually have to pay himself, anti-slapp style. That said, if one were to google “Jason Gabriel Gonella,” say, on Amazon.com, and to compare his interests and his prose with that of “Pedro,” “perezoso” or with any number of other handles, by now well-known as belonging to “The Troll of Sorrow”…well, far be it from me to say with any certainty what one may discover! And groundless lawsuits, ladies and gentlemen! Nay, but it just doesn’t fit the harassment profile, you say. If anything is certain, it is that if Jason Gabriel Gonella is indeed the Trollo Sorrow, he has yet to use his real name either here:
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/adamkotsko/113293064682691274/#366003
or here:
http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2005/11/anatomy_of_a_tr.html

or should I say, Jason Gabriel Gonella, aka “The Troll of Sorrow…” (yes, you’re easy to spot these days, terrorizing all these “loser blogs” like one obsessived):

Your dislike for John Emerson (and the blogs to which he posts) is not exactly a secret, it is true. But do you really think people fail to spot your excrement prose by now?

And now that I’ve called you out, to stay true to form you will of course need to follow-up this comment, eventually, with the threat of a frivolous and groundless lawsuit, from what I hear. But then it must be increasingly hard to keep up, being such an ass.

If this is your definition of an unhappy outcome, then don’t go to grad school.

The advice above about considering moving up (getting an MA from one institution and then transferring) makes sense. Another option is to go to a university with a good terminal MA program, where lots of people will be in your situation: coming from a less well-known place, or whetever, and wanting to spiffy up their applications for good Ph.D. programs. (I’m biased, as I teah in such a program, but I still think it should be kept in mind.)

I would also advise, if your GPA was significantly lowered because of a couple of semesters of Fs due to personal problems, that you be upfront in your cover letter about why you have the transcript that you do, or ask one of your letter writers to address the issue. Otherwise many places (with large numbers of good-looking applicants) will simply see that your GPA is e.g., 3.2, and chuck your application out.

Speaking strictly for myself, Nathan, there’s a crucial distinction between academic jobs and the other kinds you refer to: the relative ease of changing jobs when you find yourself in a situation not to your liking. I was considering an academic career in the smallest of anthropology’s four subfields—even in the best years, no more than a dozen or so tenure-track jobs are likely to open up, and many of these will be restricted in terms of geographical area of study or other specialization. And as I pointed out above, having to relocate is pretty much guaranteed.

Simply put, an associate attorney or physician in a large city, upon finding herself in an intolerable work environment, will have an infinitely easier time finding a position in the same city than will an assistant prof in linguistic anthropology—and this is one of the factors that ultimately scared me off.

Nathan, one of the big issues is debt, and Brian and I agreed on that one, though I think that he overestimated the proportion of fully funded grad school positions.

I agree with you that lower-middle-class income would be OK if everything else was. Adjuncts, though, have (besides low pay) no security, and they aften have hectic workloads (often part time at several schools) making the fun part of teaching/studying hard to spend much time on,

Careerwise, with the exception of library science, no one has mentioned any of the various certificate / MA type programs which lead to pretty good jobs, some of them even without the BA. ESL is another, and there are many jobs in medical and high tech fields. They often do require tech rather than verbal skills, but often not at a terribly demanding level.

If the number of PhD programs dropped from 150 to 50, then some large number of departments would downsize, but they wouldn’t disappear entirely. More relevantly, they wouldn’t pump out so many PhDs to compete for the jobs that remain. So Brian’s advice would result in a sustainable equilibrium at some level. Of course, the jobs that are lost would be many of the best (though not the very very best) jobs, but there would still be plenty of tenure track jobs for the graduates of the smaller number of institutions.

If that crosses a line, so be it.