Grad Students, Prospective and Otherwise

Well, I’m very curious whether philosophers think that you need the philosophical equivalent level of specificity that Burke says a history applicant needs. When I make decisions I more or less disregard personal statements which range from bland (which I like) through specific (which makes me think that they have had a good professor in the field of specific interest) to the loopy (which I dislike, but don’t discriminate against). I’m interested in the following: Do their grades, letters, and most of all writing sample, indicate an aptitude and disposition for careful analytic thinking, and, if they have a weak background, do they look as if we would be a good place for them to catch up? Of course, I’m not in a top-20 school, and we are ungenerous funders, but I will say that despite that my approach seems to have yeilded pretty good results in the case I know about (ie, the people who actually came — maybe people high up the list who turned us down were duds; that would be embarrassing!)

My advice to intending PhD applicants in Computer Science is here:

http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~peter/phd-notes.html

“Well, I’m very curious whether philosophers think that you need the philosophical equivalent level of specificity that Burke says a history applicant needs.”

In statistics, no.

There were several comment on his blog, to the extent that this is perhaps a history-specific thing.

Hmm. I seriously looked into postgraduate study in linguistics in a very specific area; the guy I was interested in working with (and who did most of the work I’m interested on building on) politely said ‘no, I’m not taking on grad students,’ and didn’t follow up to my response asking for the programmes he’d recommend, given that.

But a good friend who is currently starting a Ph.D. in linguistics, on learning this, and that I had abandoned interest in linguistics for another field of study, suggested applying to do Ph.Ds with other professors who were not so interested in what the first guy does. I didn’t listen to her, and wow, to my surprise, I may well have been right. But, hey, even if I wasn’t, the money will be better in the alternative field, should I manage it.

I agree with harry that specificity per se is not necessary for a graduate applicant. (I’m a professor at a program at the lower end of Leiter’s ‘top 50’, btw.) But I think that Tim Burke indicates that the specificity is a proxy for a harder to gauge trait: how well the student understand just what kind of work is required at the graduate level, and their mental preparedness to engage in that kind of work. There are other cues available for this, too. Often one can get it from the writing sample, when it’s a really solid. But the personal statement _can_ be a good source of such a cue. I guess I do somewhat hold the loopier ones against people, in that they may indicate that the person has a bad misconception as to what professional philosophizing amounts to.

Thinking about getting a Ph.D? Try lying down until the feeling goes away.

Is it really that bad? What about just a masters?

Oh so discouraging! Well, I’m not sure it will. What if I told you it would be joined with a JD degree? (the philosophy part being for fun, the law part for bread)

Thanks, Eszter. I can see what you mean about the higher coursework content in a US degree being helpful. Funding seems to be more available in the US, as well. And at the end of the day, I suppose you don’t actually save all that much time in the UK, especially once you factor in the year or two of postdoc work that’s often tacked on to the 4 years in order for newly-minted researchers to get a start on publishing.

Is a masters not a good way to test the waters for a doctorate? What’s makes a non-qualification MSc etc. such a bad idea?

Is it extremely difficult to get American academic jobs without an American degree?

It’s trickier coming into the US market with a British PhD in the humanities and no significant teaching experience. The entire machinery of academia, from positions to conferences, is understandably built around.

I’d say it’s a smoother transition for a talented British student to go from undergraduate studies to a Kennedy Scholarship or similar, and then enter the US system at the postgraduate level.

The funding options are much more helpful back on the other side of the pond, though. But with that route, it’s probably smarter to look for a postdoctoral research fellowship in the UK to build up a publishing/teaching portfolio before braving the US cattle market and abbatoir.

“What if I told you it would be joined with a JD degree? (the philosophy part being for fun, the law part for bread)”

I’d be careful here, too. For one, it won’t be for free and will be one more year you’ll be earning interest on the big student loans for the JD. And, it will make firms a bit more weary about hiring you- you won’t be ready to start working for them for a year, they might worry that you’ll be too airy or abstract for the real work of lawyers, and maybe that you really want to be an academic. (I speak from some experience from dealing w/ law firms while doing grad work in philosophy, too.) It _might_ be of some use w/ some judges in getting a clerkship (in which case it might well be worthwhile) but there will be several other judges, too, who will see it as a direct negative. Anyway, I’d check and be very clear as to what has happened for former philosophy JD/MAs from the program and see if you’d be interested in that sort of life before spending the money and time. (My impression is that a JD w/ another professional degree can be very useful if you want to practice a special field of law where the professional degree is applicable.)

Regarding terminal MAs in the US, a lot of applicants don’t realize that it is very rare for a school to fund such students whereas programs will fund PhD students.

Also, if a school admits you to its PhD program, but offers no funding, I’d think very long and hard before committing to it. (I would never have, for one thing, I already had enough loans from college.) If they don’t believe in supporting you financially, it’s not clear whether they really believe in supporting you at all.

She could hate it and still have enough integrity and professionalism to do a decent job. Why assume the worst, and then take a jab at someone? You could figure that you don’t know the whole situation and then say nothing.

Well, as someone about to start a (part time) Masters, I’ll bookmark this thread and come back in the three years it’s going to take me. Thanks for the links.

I’m just doing it to learn, shock horror, so lord knows whether it’ll lead to anything else.

If you’re considering the differing merits of PhDs via the US/UK route, one thing to bear in mind is that it is now very hard to get postdoctoral positions in the UK (at least for the humanities). The British Academy has about an 8% success rate for postdoctoral fellowships and that’s at the generous end: Oxbridge Junior Research Fellowships routinely have several hundred applicants for a single post. A lot of UK medievalists with PhDs (good candidates from places with world-class supervisors) are having to survive on part-time teaching for several years (the equivalent of adjunct work) or have just left the field.

“I should have guessed that the real world would discourage learning for learning’s sake.”

It’s not exactly that, Lindsey, but rather that lawyers (like most people in their own fields) tend to be pretty conservative- not necessarily in the political sense, but rather in that they don’t like to take risks. (This might be more true of big-firm lawyers than others but I’d be surprised.) And, they have lots of very good applicants to choose from. So, if they hire the regular Columbia grad and he does poorly they can just say, “well, who could have known. He had great credentials.” But if they hire the person who also has the MA in philosophy and she does poorly then someone might say to them, “That’s what you get for hiring something who’s not down to earth.” It’s nothing in particular about philosophy, I think- just something that marks the person as different. They saying used to be, “No one got fired for buying IBM computers.” It’s not true like that now, of course, but I think the general idea still plays out a lot whenever there are more applicants than jobs.

This isn’t to say you should not do an MA in philosophy, especially if you think you might eventually want to get a PhD. Merely, it’s important to see that there are potential down-sides to it too.

Just tell that to the admissions people! (their decision, after all)… but I’ll keep an eye out for what everyone says they’re looking for in an applicant…

I didn’t mean to be too negative on MA programs as such. It was a big help to me to do an MA (though not in a straight MA program) before eventually returning to grad school (and law school). And, I do think that doing an MA in philosophy while doing a JD can make one a better lawyer (as well as a better candidate for a PhD program.) My only concern is to point out that there are real potential costs in doing an MA and that these should be considered when deciding whether to do one, and that many people will not, for various reasons, make them clear to you.

Thanks matt. I do appreciate your warnings. And no, I hadn’t really thought of that being a problem, though it does seem like it could be. Thankfully, I’m not all that interested in a dog-eat-dog law firm, so if they don’t want me it’s not a big loss. Ideally, I’d like to do public interest stuff, so I’ll be broke anyway. And the school I’m going to does have pretty good hiring rates regardless(though I don’t know for those who get the MA). I do appreciate your concern, and I’ll keep it in mind!

Jesus H. Christ, the least I hope for my children when they go to college is that their professors enjoy teaching them. The idea that they’ll be stuck with some asshole who hates the little fuckers’ guts, but is going to teach them, anyway, because that’s what she’s paid to do, makes my hair stand on end. You think that teaching is a sacrifice you make in order to do research. I don’t give a fuck for your research, I want someone who will teach my children for my $45,000 a year. I’m not interested in delaying my retirement for 3 years so you can be available in your office one hour a week where you take delight in belittling your students because they really don’t want to be like you.

And as for the worth of your research – one in a hundred of you will make a genuine contribution to scholarship. The rest will write “The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485” over and over again. But you will all teach. If you do your jobs well, you will all raise the level of public discourse and awaken minds to new possibilities. If you do it poorly, you’ll damage them and alienate them. That’s your important work, not your precious research.

wow, bloix, logicguru really seems to have struck a nerve! and you seem to assume that someone cannot do her job well unless she enjoys it. while I enjoy teaching and I am happy that I don’t have to face it in the way that logicguru does, that doesn’t mean I am necessarily the better teacher of the two of us.

Ben (and logicguru as well, I suppose),
You’ll have a very difficult time convincing me — and a lot of people, I think — that someone who claims
I hate teaching. The sole reason why I got a Ph.D. was to avoid pink collar shit work and to minimize teaching.

is not a shite instructor. There are legions of professors with this attitude, especially in technical fields, and we’ve probably all suffered through the results in the classroom. But what does it matter — they’re probably just teaching students who will go on to do some “pink collar shit work” anyway.

Logicguru:

I wouldn’t call it a taboo. It’s more, at least for me, that I have a hard time reconciling my own experience of teaching with your claim that you can both hate teaching and do it very well. Your analogy to other jobs is part of what’s leading you astray. If an actor said, “I hate acting, I absolutely loathe it”, we’d wonder how it was possible that that actor still managed to give moving dramatic performances. We wouldn’t wonder if that actor was able to do a perfectly good job pitching detergent in a commercial, on the other hand.

Really good teaching seems to me to be something that requires a strong quality of emotional investment in both the act of teaching and in the desire for students to learn. But it’s somewhat dependent on subject and on the size of the classroom. A beginning science lecture to a classroom of 400 students might be more like the actor in the commercial: something that anyone with the necessary knowledge and basic presentation skills could do credibly. A small discussion-oriented seminar in the humanities? I just don’t see how you can do that well if you’re hating every minute of it every time you do it.

I simply don’t understand logicguru’s claim that “I would never have gotten a Ph.D. if I could have gotten non-menial non-pink-collar work without one. Period.” Didn’t logicguru consider going to law school? Medical school? Becoming a certified accountant (which actually pays pretty well)? Or is she attempting to claim that sexism in all of these fields is still so bad that she would be relegated to “pink collar” work? I find that very difficult to believe.

There are a lot of people who actually like teaching. Enough, in fact, that I don’t think it is a wise use of college funds to employ people in the humanities who do not like to teach. Everyone who went to college as an undergraduate remembers that one professor who obviously considered his (or her) teaching to be a burdensome chore. The classes were boring and lifeless, and they sucked. With dozens of aspiring PhDs for every job opening, I don’t see why we should be hiring those people for tenure-track positions.

I suppose things might be different in the hard sciences. If someone is doing cutting-edge biology or chemistry research, you can credibly argue that this is more important than teaching undergraduates. (I still think there’s a real problem in the fact that we conflate the two essentially unrelated roles of teacher and researcher into the same job description. In practice, it often amounts to a game of bait-and-switch played on the students.)

On the other hand, if you’re a professor in English, I don’t think you can credibly claim that your research is more important than teaching undergraduates, or, indeed, that it has any value at all. Virtually no one will ever read it, and most of it is so densely written that no one could understand it even if they did make the attempt. And, let’s face it, there’s nothing you can say about Shakespeare or Homer that hasn’t been said a thousand times before (and probably in a clearer, more understandable manner). We should stop the ridiculous pretense of “research” in the humanities, and professors in those departments should be chosen for teaching abilities, not on their ability to crank out worthless articles that no one cares about. If necessary, designate one or two departments in the country to do research, and let everyone else concentrate on teaching.

If I could restructure American higher education from the ground up, I would split the current career track of “professor” into two separate lines of advancement.

One career track would be focused on teaching undergraduates. These teachers would have PhDs and would be full-time, tenure-track employees (not adjuncts, as many colleges use today). They would be hired, tenured, and promoted based on their willingness and ability to teach a relatively heavy course load, much of it at the entry level (especially in fields that include a distribution requirement for all majors).

The other career track would be focused on research. These professors would also have PhDs and would be full-time, tenure-track employees. They would be hired, tenured, and promoted based on their ability to bring in grants and to do high-quality research.

These categories would not be exclusive. Instructors would be given some free time to do research if they so chose. Researchers might be tasked with teaching a couple of upper-division seminars. And there would be the opportunity to move from one track to another if vacancies permitted.

Professors in both tracks would have the same pay at the same levels, and similar job titles. For instance, an instructor might be titled “Assistant Professor of Political Science Instruction,” while his research colleague would be “Assistant Professor of Political Science Research.”

The ratio between instructors and researchers would vary between departments. For instance, English might have a bunch of instructors, but only one researcher in the department (or none at all in small colleges). Hard science would be closer to an even split, or maybe even somewhat tilted towards researchers. Social science would be somewhere in-between.

The job of “professor” is currently two largely unrelated jobs stitched together. There’s no reason to believe that the best researchers are also the best people to teach low-level courses to undergraduates. Let’s make this plain and transparent and almost everyone will be happier.