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In my recent post addressing a reader's query on how to choose between PhD programs, I suggested the reader should focus less on the reputation of a program or particular advisor and instead focus more on programs' attrition rate (i.e. how many people don't finish the program) and job-placement rate. The other day, however, an anonymous comment inadvertently drew my attention to another salient issue that in my experience is rarely discussed: what I will (for lack of better words) call post-PhD attrition rates. Allow me to explain what I mean, and why I think it may be good as a new disciplinary norm to expect programs to track and make them clear on their placement webpages.In an anonymous comment last week, a person who described themselves as suffering from bitterness signed off on a comment to me as "an old friend." I don't know who the person is. However, their description of themselves as an old friend got me ruminating about the many old friends I've had in the profession that I haven't seen or heard from in many years--friends from the two PhD programs I was in, as well as old friends I had met at conferences or online. "Whatever happened to them?", I thought, "are they still in philosophy? If so, where and in what capacity?" The more I reminisced about them, the more curious I became--so I did a little searching around on philpeople and elsewhere to find out the answers.
What I found was, to be frank, a bit disconcerting. While a fair number of old friends are still in the discipline--some currently tenure-track, others tenured--a surprising number of them, including friends who initially got postdocs or even tenure-track positions, appear to no longer be in the profession. I cannot tell, of course, why they may have left the profession. Perhaps some of them got tenure-track jobs but did not enjoy them. Perhaps others never got tenure track jobs. Perhaps others got tenure track jobs but not tenure. I simply don't know. What occurred to me, however, is that this is probably relevant information for people choosing PhD programs. Why?
I assume that many/most students entering PhD programs not only want to make it through the program and get an initial academic appointment. I take it many/most of them imagine themselves with a long-term career in the discipline. But in that case it seems like someone considering a PhD program should probably care about more than the kind of information listed on department webpages. Department webpages sometimes (though rarely, in my experience) mention attrition rates. More often, they list initial job-placements (i.e. the first academic job a person obtained). However, in light of what I described above, both of these sources of information are importantly incomplete. They at most give a prospective student an idea of how many people make it through a given program, and of those who do, how many of them initially get particular kinds of jobs (postdocs, VAPs, TT jobs, etc). By themselves, these sources of information provide no information on the proportion of students who make it through a program who go onto have stable, long-term academic careers--the thing, again, that at the end of the day I expect many/most prospective students to ultimately desire. Finally, it would not surprise me if different programs had substantially different numbers in this regard--namely, that some programs with similar initial-placement numbers to have substantially different post-PhD attrition numbers (since, plausibly at least, some programs prepare their students better for the world post-PhD, different types of jobs--teaching and research--have different tenure-rates, and so on).
As I am sure long-time readers of this blog know, more than a few commenters have suggested that they felt like they were "sold a lie" in their pursuit of an academic career in philosophy--that they didn't really know what they were getting into, didn't really know their chances of attrition and success in obtaining an academic job, and so on. Given how common these kinds of concerns are--and given the stakes that students have in pursuing this line of work (viz. spending a better part of a decade of their lives or more in pursuit of their career goals, with substantial costs such as student loans, foregoing other forms of gainful employment with more stability, etc.)--it seems to me that as a discipline we should expect programs to provide clear, transparent, and complete information for prospective students. If this is the case, it seems to me we should expect them to report not only their program attrition rates and initial job-placements, but also up-to-date reporting on where previous graduates are now. This may take some time and energy, obviously--to find, reach out to, and hear back from former graduates--but, I think, given the moral stakes involved, it would very much be worth it.
Or so I'm inclined to say. What say you?
In the comments section of our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, Amanda asks: "if you were starting your PhD (in philosophy) over again, would you study the same AOS, why or why not?"
Great question! A while back at an Eastern APA meeting, I had a good discussion with another early-career philosopher who said he thought many grad students don't give their choice of AOS nearly enough thought. As he put it, many of the grad students he knew just picked whatever AOS interested them the most. While there may be something admirably authentic about this, his sense was that many of them found themselves in a bad position later on because they picked an AOS where there were too few jobs. And indeed, readers may recall I've done some informal reporting in recent years of jobs by AOS...and the data are pretty striking. Some AOS (particularly ethics) have consistently comprised a large proportion of advertised jobs, whereas other AOS (aesthetics and "core" areas) appear to have far fewer jobs available. For this reason and others, I agree with Amanda: it would be great to hear how people feel about their choice of AOS in retrospect. Here, in brief, is my answer...
I would absolutely choose my AOS (ethics and political philosophy) all over again. There are not only consistently a good number of jobs in these areas, which is something my previous job-marketeering self cared greatly about and has continuing effects on my life to this day (namely, my having obtained a job). More broadly, my AOS's have made a profound difference in how I see the world and live my life.
First, my views in ethics have not only affected the way I see politics and moral debate, but have also affected more personal areas of my life such as my marriage and friendships. For example, I first came up with one of my central views on ethics--that morality is best understood as requiring negotiation and renegotiation rather than discovering moral truths through argumentation--as a result of disagreements and impasses my spouse and I found ourselves in. At one point, my spouse and I were having arguments about all kinds of things: about what time to go to bed, how to divide household duties, and so on. We kept giving moral arguments to each other (the sort of thing philosophers do)...and we consistently got nowhere. Worse, our disagreements festered and in some cases drew a wedge between us. Then, as I was sitting in bed one night, trying to think through how to better approach the issues between us--in a manner of speaking, thinking through how various ethical theories might help (viz. virtue, respecting autonomy, maximizing utility, arguing about reasons)--it occurred to me that none of the going theories was very helpful. There I was sitting in bed--trying to figure out how my spouse could respect my autonomy and I hers, or what the virtuous thing to do was--and it occurred to me: in trying to figure out the right thing to do in my head (by running through the arguments and theories), I was approaching things in precisely the wrong way. What I really needed to do is get out of bed and talk to my spouse and work with her to negotiate (and renegotiate) productive compromises. Which is when it occurred to me: maybe that is how we should think about morality—not as a matter of making arguments or "giving reasons" but working together to negotiate and renegotiate compromises (within some limits).
To my astonishment (and I'm not kidding here), that simple change of perspective--seeing "the right thing to" as not something for me or her to discover through arguing at each other, but rather as something to negotiate with each other--rather quickly transformed our marriage. The more we both took the view on, the less we found ourselves arguing at each other and instead working together to negotiate compromise solutions to issues that divided us we could both accept as "good enough" given our differing perspectives and interests (and then renegotiate later if we felt a given compromise wasn't good enough!). Because we both found this worked--helping us work together as a couple rather than against each other--I began to think about the deeper philosophical foundations of morality, and came (surprise, surprise) to believe that it's what diachronic rationality (or rationality across time) requires (at least when dealing with people who don't have inherently oppressive ideals). My work in my other AOS, political philosophy, has also deeply influenced my life--specifically, on what justice requires in terms of responding to injustice.
Now, of course, my philosophical views may be wrong, and this is something I also always try to bear in mind given my limitations as philosopher! Still, for all that, it has been a wonderful thing to have an AOS and research interests that directly engage with my day-to-day life struggles as a human being trying to figure out how to live, who to vote for, which social movements to support, and so on. I love abstract philosophical puzzles--everything from consciousness to vagueness to counterfactuals--but, for me, philosophy really comes alive the more relevant it seems to living. And that, at the end of the day, is the biggest reason why I would absolutely choose my AOS again!
But this is just my story. What's yours? Would you choose your same AOS again? Why or why not?
At a conference dinner recently, a non-academic spouse to one of the keynote speakers asked us the following question: if you had to do it all over again, would you go to graduate school? I subsequently posted the question on FaceBook where it generated an interesting range of responses among fellow academic philosophers (and see also this excellent blogpost with musings on the topic by Marcus Arvan). Recently, I did an interview for Clifford Sosis' What's it like to be a philosopher? (currently only for Patreon supporters, but the link will become freely available next week) - I had a choice, as I got an offer to teach at a secondary school (art) at the same time when my graduate funding came through.
Now obviously a question like "Would you do it all over again?" is prone to commitment bias, and is more likely to be answered in the affirmative on a semi-public forum like Facebook. Nevertheless, the range of responses was intriguing.
Many of my respondents expressed a sense of meaningfulness, and joy in their work, while acknowledging conditions aren't as good as they used to be and likely to deteriorate. This was indeed the dominant theme--a love for research in particular, also for teaching, not so much for grading and administration.
Lots I can gripe about with the deteriorating labor conditions and assessment horror but I'm still getting paid to read lots of new books and discuss them with great people. It's a shock to realize how few people will read anything you publish and when non-drinking reveals that your introverted self has never really enjoyed conferences after all. But I'm still able to try to realize truth, goodness, and beauty with other people on their path I think better than I would (given my set of gifts and difficulties) in any other career. So I still feel very lucky.
Others acknowledged that the market has become much more competitive since they got jobs, e.g.,
Watching graduate students struggle to find work over the last few years, I've been repeatedly struck by how much harder they have it. I don't know if there are fewer jobs than when I first went on in 2010 (I don't think so), or if there are more candidates (maybe?). There does seem to be a race to publish as a graduate student that was only beginning when I went on the market. I suspect that if I had to go on today, having the experience and the (lack of) publications I had back then, I wouldn't get a job and maybe not even an interview. This is salient to me when I think about the whether I would do it again question. But ... there's one way in which, despite this, some of us might be slightly better positioned this time around--because philosophy's become more inclusive both with respect to who and what questions get taken seriously in philosophy. This isn't answering your question, but it's something to think about in answering it (Katia Vavova, Mount Holyoke College).
The topic of inequality in academia came up frequently, for example
I would have done the same, but I would have made sure to be born in a rich family so that I could go to a top university and find a permanent job soon after my PhD. The job per se is great, but I didn't realise how classist the whole system is. Had I known from the beginning, I would have tried to reach the same goal through a different way. I'm not happy about where I am now, at the end of my 2nd post-doc, and hoping for a 3rd one. So much uncertainty for so many years is unbearable. I stay because I love the job so much, and there is nothing I love more.
Regret and sadness in the choice was especially expressed by people who were struggling on the job market, for instance
Six years in and no TT job. I literally have no idea what else I'd do, and we wouldn't have our son without that path, so a sad yes.
Remarkably, many people could not envisage any other life path than choosing graduate school and an academic career, or if they did, it was often a creative path (e.g., musician, novelist) which is just as risky. For example
100%. Zero regrets. I can't imagine anything else that could have made me happier, except possibly being a novelist, which would have been too risky a career path even for me. And I am not even sure I'd have preferred that (Rebecca Kukla, Georgetown University).
There were a few people on the thread who thought their choice wasn't right for them. One example is the following:
Absolutely not...There's no one, single thing to point to. But basically, there are other careers I could have chosen that would have been at least as good in almost every respect, and significantly better in many. The nature of the work would have been at least as appealing, the amount of work comparable (or better), the pay far better, the culture better, the frustrations less frequent or less frustrating. Really the only thing academia has that pretty much no other career can offer is the flexibility of the schedule. That's not nothing. But it's also not all it's cracked up to be. And I'm increasingly worried that that benefit of the job will continue to degrade as universities change over the next 30 years I'll be working.
In light of the discussion in the comments section of our recent query by an undergraduate considering grad programs in philosophy, I thought it might be interesting to run an informal poll. Specifically, I'm curious how many of our readers who entered PhD programs in philosophy would make the same choice if they could go back in time and make the decision again.
Obviously, this is an unscientific poll and there might be significant self-selection effects, so I encourage readers (particularly those considering grad school in philosophy) to take poll results with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, I thought it might be interesting to gauge our readers' thoughts. I respectfully ask readers to answer the poll honestly, and to fill it out only once. The poll is open to those and only those who entered a PhD program in philosophy, regardless of whether they finished their program. Finally, if you would like to briefly share why you answered the poll the way you did in the comments section (in a manner consistent with the blog's Mission), please do!
In the comments of our newest "how can we help you?" thread, Jonathan Lauret writes:
...I'm an undergraduate student majoring in philosophy, and I'm entering into the process of looking for what graduate schools to apply to.
I just today have been scanning through the internet for information on graduate school situations involving philosophy, and the tone is almost always very disheartening and depressing due to a number of given reasons. Most posts or blogs wrote about really rough conditions involving the application/hiring process, the amount of experience required for a very punishing and unrewarding job (typically), and the sheer rarity of any resulting enjoyable professorial position.
I don't know what exactly I'm looking for in regards to the particular positions out there for graduates in philosophy. I do know that I love the discipline, that I hold it in value not due to some sort of desire to be famous or great or sage-like, but to get a better grasp or understanding of the world I live in. I feel as though teaching and talking to students/other people who have their own ideas and feelings on these things will bring me what I'm looking for in a profession.
I guess the question that comes from all this may be, where do these sorts of feelings fit into the grand scheme of going into graduate school and later entering the academic job market?
I think this is a great query, in part because we might be able to help Jonathan, but also because this is a kind of inquiry I expect a lot of get fairly often from undergraduates (I know I do). Indeed, I'm hoping a lot of you chime in, as perhaps this thread can function as an online compendium of different people's responses to these kinds of questions--one we might direct our undergraduates to in the future to hear different perspectives on the issue!
Anyway, here are a few of my quick thoughts. Following Brad's reply to Jonathan here, I will say that I love doing philosophy just as much now as I did when I first happened on it 23 years ago (!) as a seventeen year-old. I love it. I love reading it, I love thinking about it, I love writing it, and I love discussing it--online, at conferences, and in class with my students. That being said, I am honestly not sure that if I had to do it all over again, I would. Why? Not just because I had somewhat of a hard go of things (e.g. a variety of difficulties in grad school and then seven very painful years on the academic job-market), but because as much as I suffered to get a permanent job in the field (and, my spouse will tell you, we both suffered tremendously), it is clear to me that I got profoundly lucky. I won't go into all of the details, but in brief, I finished grad school and ended up in a tenure-track job by the skin of my teeth. There were many, many difficult times that I regretted ever going into philosophy--and had a variety of things had gone only slightly differently, I suspect my career might have gone very differently...in a way that I think may have very well led me to regret going into philosophy simpliciter. This is just my story, of course, so please do take it with a grain of salt (I'll be curious to hear other readers' stories!). But let me conclude by just adding this: I would be far, far more willing to recommend hazarding the risks of academic philosophy if our discipline devoted more resources (as some other fields do) to ensuring that graduate students have better opportunities outside of academia if the pursuit of an academic career doesn't work out (though I think our field is beginning to make some inroads here). A lot of the terror that I (and my closest family members) faced was directly the result of the sense that, if I didn't finish my PhD or get a TT job in philosophy, I had few good career options outside of the academy (along with a mountain of debt). Things would have been much different, I think--and a degree in philosophy much less of a terrifying risk--if I had felt prepared and well-positioned to do something else if academia didn't work out.
Anyway, these are just my thoughts, which may not be very representative. With that in mind, what do other readers think? How would you respond to Jonathan's query given your experience in the philosophy profession?
Earlier this evening, I accompanied my spouse, a PhD candidate in Industrial-Organizational Psychology, to the reception at her discipline's major regional conference (akin to our Eastern APA). As I was chatting with her advisor, he mentioned the previous day at the conference. I was a bit surprised, as my spouse told me the conference began today. So, I asked him, "Wait, how many days is this conference?" He told me the conference was three days long, beginning today--but that there were also two pre-conference days. I'd assumed that the pre-conference days were probably special workshops (i.e. invited mini-conferences on hot topics), of the sort common in philosophy these days. Still, I was curious, so I asked him what was the deal with the two pre-conference days. He said, "Oh, those are the pre-doc and post-doc consortium days?" Because I had no idea what that meant, I told him, "I have no idea what that means." That's when he told me.
Apparently, the first day of the annual pre-conference (the pre-doc consortium) is an entire day of workshops for undergraduates and Masters students considering applying to PhD programs. The discipline's organization (i.e. their "APA") arranges for professors from all different kinds of programs around the country to hold seminars on applying to programs, what to expect if you get in a PhD program, how to succeed in PhD programs, what the facts are about academic and non-academic job markets (so that people know their job-prospects before applying to PhD programs), and so on.
That's the first day. The second pre-conference day (the post-doc consortium) is an entire day of workshops for current PhD students and job-candidates, where professors from programs from around the country hold sessions on finding academic jobs, finding non-academic jobs (including networking), succeeding in research, developing teaching skills, and many other things too apparently.
In other words, their discipline devotes two entire days of its major regional conference to educating and mentoring junior members of the profession--job-candidates, PhD students, MA students, even undergraduates--about the profession and how to succeed inside and outside of academia.
I have to confess, I was totally blown away by this, and said as much. My spouse, who overheard what we were talking about, interjected, "Yeah, the consortium?", she said, "that was so helpful. I thought I told you about that!" I'm pretty sure I would have remembered. Apparently they've been doing this for the past twenty years or so, and their discipline's overall growth and job-placement rates are absurdly good. I have a feeling this is not a coincidence...
Suffice it to say, I can't help but think that our discipline might benefit from doing similar things. Educating undergraduate and Master's students before they apply to or join PhD programs would not only benefit them (giving them a clearer picture of what the realities are in PhD programs and beyond). It would also probably benefit the profession by better preparing them. Similarly, workshops for PhD students and job-candidates would not only help better prepare them to get academic and non-academic jobs, and succeed as researchers and teachers; it would also help even the playing field. Over the past few years, I have met more than a few students from PhD programs that give their graduates little or no mentoring for the job-market (hence our mentoring program). Students from programs like these are at a clear disadvantage relative to programs that mentor their students well--so conference workshops like these might significantly reduce that kind of gap.
Just some food for thought!
The final suggestion I offered in the previous post in this series was that graduate students should not expect to be overjoyed when their dissertation is finished, but I said nothing about what graduate students can expect after they've finished their dissertation. So what is post-dissertation life like?
In the short term, you'll probably feel some sense of relief. From recent PhDs I have spoken to, this feeling is pretty common. It's not just that you're freed from the burden of dissertation work – though that's obviously part of the story – but rather that you're freed from the burden of graduate school. Think for a moment about how many hoops you have to jump through to get a PhD: course requirements, teaching assignments, comprehensive examinations, a language requirement, the dissertation, and perhaps more. You have some flexibility with regard to how you meet some of these requirements, but it's often fairly limited. As a teaching assistant, for instance, you are unlikely to have much input in assigned readings or methods of assessment that are used in the class; the professor will usually make those judgments without your input. As another example, you don't have much (if any) say in what graduate courses are offered each term, and in smaller programs, course offerings could be fairly limited.
It's a safe bet that some of these requirements won't seem so burdensome, since you're likely to enjoy fulfilling some of them, but after toiling away at them for the better part of a decade, you will be ready to be done with them. The first day you wake up and realize you have no graduate school requirements on the agenda can bring a sense of relaxation that hasn't been felt in a long time.
That being said, do not expect the semester after your defense to be easy, assuming that you're pursuing long-term academic employment. Most people end up in a temporary position for their first job, so there's not a ton of time to relax before you're back to polishing job applications and trying to add to your CV. Some experience a post-dissertation slump, often as a result of no longer having a grand project that demands their attention and provides structure to their priorities. Even if that doesn't happen to you, it's safe to say that your workload won't significantly lighten after the dissertation concludes. In some respects (e.g., increased teaching responsibilities), your first position will likely require more work than what you were required to do as a graduate student.
Nevertheless, even without feeling overjoyed at the completion of your dissertation or being freed from the labors of academic life, completing the dissertation still provides a persistent source of gratification over time. Most of the good feelings associated with academic achievements do not come from immediate euphoria or the ongoing process of their completion. (This is true even in cases where portions of that process are enjoyable: I generally like writing, but this enjoyment is easily overwhelmed by tedium when addressing a revise-and-resubmit verdict or preparing a manuscript for submission to its third or fourth venue.) Instead, the satisfaction that comes from most academic achievements is a stable, gradually accumulating sense of accomplishment. The dissertation, so far as I can tell, is not an exception to this rule.
You're not likely to feel much different after you graduate, but the change sinks in over time. It's the little things – a new line in the email signature, a different kind of respect from other members in the profession, or that odd feeling when a student calls you "Dr." and you realize it's no longer inaccurate. The PhD is also the kind of achievement that can never be taken away. Even if your life drifts away from philosophy – into another profession, for instance – you'll still be a doctor and still have seen that project to completion.
Missing out on that feeling – that sense of being done – is the main reason I regard ABD attrition as such a tragedy. Perhaps I'm just too much of a completionist, but leaving projects unfinished bothers me tremendously, even when they're projects that I don't enjoy a whole lot. My hope is that this series provides a little guidance for those who may struggle to get their dissertations done, so that they don't later have to wonder how they might have finished it or how doing so might have altered their life plans. Perhaps it also helps to know that there are some meaningful rewards (independent of employment prospects) awaiting at the end.
In any case, if you've read through the entire series to this point, then you've probably done enough reflecting on how to finish your dissertation. You know what you need to do. Now go get it done.
In the comments section of last month's "how can we help you?" post, one reader suggested it might be helpful to have a thread on transferring between grad programs. A reader in this thread then asked if I could say a little bit about how I transferred to Arizona. Because transferring programs involves unique challenges, I agree that it might indeed be a good idea to have a thread on this. So, why don't those of us who transferred programs share our stories?
As I explained here, I transferred from Syracuse's PhD program to Arizona after two years. My two years at Syracuse were wonderful. I did well in my courses, made great friends, and had good relationships with my professors. Alas, three of our professors were hired away by Rutgers. Because I was afraid of what this meant for my professional and philosophical prospects (all three of the professors hired away were people I had worked with and hoped to do a dissertation with - on vagueness of all things!), I looked for programs to transfer to. Alas, most of the application deadlines had passed, and there were only two programs still accepting applications: Arizona and MIT. The application process was easy enough. I got together a couple of writing samples quickly (a paper on epistemic contextualism that I'd written for a class with William Alston, as well as a paper on vagueness I'd written for another class), and my professors at Syracuse were happy to write recommendation letters. Ultimately, I got into Arizona but not MIT, so I went to Arizona.
Technically speaking, the actual process of transferring--namely, getting together application materials and such--was easy. The hard part was leaving my life in Syracuse. I truly loved it there. I loved my friends. A lot of us lived in the same building by campus, and we often stayed up all night after seminars chatting about philosophy and music. I also loved my courses: I took some killer classes on modality, epistemology, consciousness, logic, and philosophy and language (I was a big 'M&E' guy at the time, believe it or not). I was also playing in a band in Boston at the time (on weekends), and had a 'significant other' at UPenn (who I also visited on weekends) who I had been dating since my undergraduate days. In short, leaving Syracuse involved leaving a lot behind. It was really tough to leave. When I got to Arizona, I missed my Syracuse friends and professors, I missed my bandmates in Boston...and my long-term relationship ended because of the move as well.
In other words, while the academic process of transferring programs was easy enough, the personal process was far more difficult than I expected. Transferring programs uprooted my life...and as I explained before, I didn't adapt to the changes as well as I'd hoped. So, I guess, if there's one lesson to take away from my case, it's that transferring programs can be really difficult, in ways one might not (fully) expect heading in. Fortunately, although it took me some time to find my feet at Arizona, things ultimately turned out well in the end. I discovered an unexpected passion for moral and political philosophy there, was lucky to have been mentored by some great philosophers who helped me find my way, made some life-long friends, and met my future spouse. In other words, while transferring came with unexpected difficulties, I wouldn't take it back for the world!
Anyway, that's my transfer story. What's yours? Do you have any tips on the transfer process itself, or experiences about the transition from one program to another you think might be helpful sharing?
I've spent prior posts in this series recapping various aspects of writing the dissertation that can make the process difficult. Since these have been scattered across posts over the past few months, it's worth recapping them:
After all that, I briefly described how I actually got the dissertation done in the end. So what are the lessons that can be taken away from all this to help graduate students prepare for the dissertation stage and ultimately complete it? Here are a few suggestions.
Lesson 1: Pick your dissertation advisor carefully.
Given the challenges associated with completing the dissertation, you want to be sure that your dissertation advisor is someone who will support you and your project throughout the process. The profession is littered with anecdotal stories of distant, unconcerned advisors who don't provide timely feedback on draft material, don't meet regularly with their advisees, and are generally lukewarm (or worse) in their overall support. You don't want to have someone like that as your advisor unless there's no viable alternative.
Get to know the faculty in your department early in your graduate career and gather information about which ones are generally the best dissertation advisors. Talk to their current advisees if this is possible. When you start leaning toward a topic, strike up conversations with your potential advisors and see how enthusiastic they are about your potential project. Ideally, you want an advisor who is distinguished, since a letter from such a person will carry greater weight in job applications, but don't just automatically choose the most distinguished professor if you have good reason to think they won't be all that supportive.
Lesson 2: Prep Your Topic Before You Officially Become ABD
A few years ago, Marcus wrote a lengthy post about trying to find a dissertation topic. Our experiences in this aspect of the dissertation couldn't be more different: My dissertation topic was solidified about 6 weeks after I passed comprehensive examinations, whereas this seemed to be the stage of the project that Marcus found most challenging. Here's what might account for some of the difference.
I had been in conversations with my dissertation advisor about possible topics for two years before I officially completed our comprehensive examinations. (These conversations started when I was about 60% through coursework.) I pitched a few ideas in his direction, and we talked about each of them. Eventually, only one idea emerged as viable, so once I passed the comprehensive examinations, it was more-or-less a foregone conclusion what the topic would be. Then it was just a matter of putting together a solid prospectus, which took about 5 months.
The writing part is hard enough, so anything you can do to streamline the other aspects of the process is worth doing. Keeping your eyes peeled for possible dissertation topics and then discussing them with the right people before you're actually at the dissertation stage can potentially save you a lot of time in the long run.
Lesson 3: Don't allow large gaps to form in your dissertation work.
It's very difficult to jump back into dissertation work after taking a lengthy break. That doesn't mean you have to work on it every day – an ideal that may well be unattainable for most people. (I've never been able to maintain such a writing regiment due to variation in my day-to-day schedule and the psychological grind of writing in that rigidly scheduled format.) But if a week goes by without any progress, you're in trouble. A reasonable strategy short of daily writing might be to designate 2-3 time periods each week solely to dissertation writing and then be more flexible with how you allocate time elsewhere during your week.
One of the obstacles that I encountered with the dissertation was that structured procrastination – my favored writing strategy – just does not work well with large standalone projects. For it to work well, you have to have lots of different projects that you can work on while you're putting off your other work. When there's just one big item on your list and nothing else, structured procrastination is a non-starter and likely to regress to ordinary (unproductive) procrastination.
Looking back, I should have maintained a stronger commitment to writing at particular times twice a week. This might have helped prevent some of the gaps in my progress.
Lesson 4: Expect Sporadic Progress
On the note of gaps in one's progress, don't expect a linear progression toward the end of the dissertation. There's a reason that so many graduate students do not finished them. It's tough work. Don't be surprised if your progress varies from month-to-month, and don't get discouraged by lulls in productivity. There are likely to be peaks and valleys. The key is not to get overwhelmed or disheartened when things are not going well.
Lesson 5: Stay Rested and Stay Healthy
In my first 6 years of graduate study, I only fell ill once. On the many other occasions where I sensed I might be coming down with something, I lightened my schedule for a day or two, drank a lot of water, and slept more than usual. A day or two later, I was back to 100%.
During the last two semester of graduate school, I fell ill three times. Each bout lasted about a week. The first happened midway through the fall semester around the time I started sending out job applications. The second happened just as Winter Break started and immediately after finishing up final grades and doing 3 job interviews. The third happened in March during the frantic rush to complete the dissertation. There are two common aspects to these incidents: increased stress and reduced sleep. Both these things suppress your immune system, and when you're ill, it's much harder to produce quality philosophical work.
In the long run, you'll be more productive if you're getting a good night's sleep and avoiding illness. That's some reason to avoid working in concentrated bursts that carry deep into the night and to avoid overburdening yourself to the point where your daily rest is being compromised.
Lesson 6: Give Yourself a Buffer Regarding Your Defense Date
At the start of Fall 2016, my intended defense date was January of the following semester. The defense did not actually happen until the end of March – more than 2 months past the target date. However, even though the process took longer than I had originally intended, I was still not in bad shape near the end. While it would have been unpleasant, I could have stretched work into the summer and defended as late as June. (I would have needed to register for a few more credit hours, but other than a few hundred dollars in fees, there would have been no penalty to doing so.) Lacking a buffer with respect to your dissertation defense makes the situation more pressurized and gives you less margin for error regarding your progress.
Having a buffer also gives your letter writers some flexibility in what they say. They can note your targeted completion date but add that even if something comes up, you'll still be in good shape to defend later that semester. This can be valuable, since hiring departments often have concerns about whether ABD graduate students will actually finish their dissertations before beginning their new job.
Lesson 7: Don't Expect a Big Finish
It's natural to believe that when the defense is over, you will be overjoyed. Yet from the many defenses I have attended and the discussions I have had with peers in the profession, that reaction seems pretty rare. In fact, not so long ago, one Cocoon reader mentioned being disappointed when the dissertation defense was over (in part because of a poor performance during the defense itself).
There are several reasons why the dissertation defense is often a letdown. First, you'll probably be exhausted when you get to that point and anxious to defend just to earn a reprieve. Second, the defense is often (at least at institutions in the United States) a formality. Usually, advisors will not greenlight a defense unless they are confident you will pass. That means that the real moment of triumph is usually when your dissertation is officially deemed defense-ready. Passing the defense itself, as a result, may not feel like much of an accomplishment. Third, the dissertation often comes to be viewed as merely a means to an end. For most, its main value stems from the role it plays in being able to get academic jobs. Fourth, few people will read your dissertation, so unless you extract chapters as standalone papers or pursue a book contract, it's unlikely your dissertation in itself will have much of an impact on the profession. This can make all the scholarly work that you did while writing the dissertation seem less valuable than it otherwise would.
Here's what all this means: if you anticipate the completion of your dissertation to be some crowning achievement, you're probably setting yourself up for disappointment. It's probably not going to feel that way. You might be relieved, disappointed, ambivalent, or outright numb. But it's unlikely you'll be joyful.
Of course, that doesn't mean that there's nothing to celebrate when the dissertation's done or that there aren't some good feelings that come with it, but they're more complex than those that follow most accomplishments. I'll give them a more thorough examination when I discuss post-dissertation life in the final segment of this series.
Recently, one of our readers shared a post-hoc admissions dilemma about transfer credit. In brief, they accepted an offer of admission to a PhD program believing there to be a reasonable chance of transferring credits from their previous institution. However, once being admitted, they were initially informed that their credits would not transfer - so they wrote into us at the Cocoon asking us for advice. A few days later, the same reader wrote in with an update: their program reconsidered, and accepted one (but only one) of their previous courses. That's good news for them of course (as Amanda wrote, it's better than nothing!). However, the reader's general situation--both before and after the update--raises an issue I think might be worth discussing: how liberal should PhD programs be in granting transfer credit or adjusting course requirements for transfer students?
What do you all think? As I've never run a program myself, I may not be in the best position to say. However, I have been on the student side of things, and thought it may be helpful to share my own experience.
I began my graduate career at Syracuse University in the late '90s. I was in the program for two years, and received A's in all of my courses during my time there--including courses on metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language with John Hawthorne (now at USC), Ted Sider (now at Rutgers), Dean Zimmerman (also at Rutgers), William Alston, and some other really good people. I think part of the reason I did well at Syracuse was that it was such an exciting experience: I was reading really high-level stuff (Lewis' On the Plurality of Worlds, Williamson's Vagueness, etc.) for the very first time, and because I found it so new and exciting, I found myself inspired like I never had before. I was intensely motivated to understand the stuff I was reading, debate it with my classmates and professors, come up with new arguments, and so on.
Alas, during my second year, Hawthorne, Sider, Zimmerman, and Brian Weatherson (now at Michigan) were all hired away by other schools. Because I was worried about how their leaving would affect my professional prospects (they were the professors I had worked most closely with while I was there), I decided to transfer to Arizona. And, all things considered, I'm glad I did! I'm not sure I would have ever gotten into moral and political philosophy had I not transfered there - not to mention the fact that I ended up taking all kinds of cool courses I might never had otherwise taken, including courses in AI programming, computational linguistics, and philosophy of biology and physics. All things considered, Arizona ended up being great!
However...there was one thing that gave me a lot of trouble: you guessed it, their transfer credit policy! I don't know what their policy is like now, but when I entered I recall them accepting only two courses from Syracuse. While that's better than nothing, it wasn't the lack of transfer credits that bothered me so much as the courses I needed to take because I couldn't transfer more credits. Because here's the problem I faced: I ended up having to retake several courses nearly identical to ones I had already taken at Syracuse. Why was that a problem? Well, maybe I should have responded better, but the honest truth is that when I first got there, having to retake similar courses led me to become a bit bored and listless. It just wasn't exciting to have to read Frege, Russell, and others on proper names all over again; or to have to once again learn about internalism and externalism in epistemology again, and so on. I had just spent the last two years reading, thinking, and debating those things! Because I felt like I'd "been there, done that", for the first time doing philosophy I felt uninspired. It just wasn't fun to have to read the same things again, debate the same things again, write papers on the same things again, and so on.
I know, I know: I should have been better than that. Maybe I should have found a way to be inspired by the chance to go through important philosophical works again. Fair enough (it probably didn't help that I went through my first big romantic breakup at the same time - but that's another story!). In any case, I didn't handle it that well. Because I wasn't excited about having to retake classes, I got off on the wrong step: my concentration wasn't there, my work was a bit uninspired...and I ended up losing my confidence and struggling to find it again (which, fortunately, I did). Anyway, I'm not going to blame my difficulties on the fact that I couldn't transfer more courses. Again, I think I should have handled it better. Nevertheless, I can't help but wonder whether grad programs might consider these kinds of possible side-effects in their transfer policies. For, even if one can handle it well, I can't help but wonder whether other transfer students find similar situations dispiriting - and whether it might be good for programs to have transfer-credit policies that don't put new students in dispiriting situations.
What might such policies look like? Allowing more transfer credits is one obvious possibility. But it's not the only one! Notice that, for my part, it wasn't the lack of transfer credits that bothered me. I loved philosophy, and would have been happy to take more courses, not fewer. The only thing I had trouble with, again, was having to retake courses I had basically already taken. So, maybe--even if an institution has limits on transfer credits--a better policy would be to permit students to substitute different classes for classes taken at their previous institution. Of course there should probably be some limits on that - but, if I were a transfer student now, something like that would sound really great to me.
Anyway, what do you all think? How do PhD programs handle transfer credits these days? If you were a transfer student, were you satisfied with your institution's transfer credit policies - or, did you have trouble with them? I'm curious to find out!
I ended the last part of the series on a cliffhanger. Here's an abbreviated recap: after a series of starts and stops on the dissertation, January arrived, and it still wasn't done. In fact, there was still quite a bit of unwritten material. After returning from the APA Eastern meeting, I faced the fact that time was running out, and I really didn't want to drag the project into the summer. So how did I finally get it done?
First, a little background is in order. During my very first semester of graduate school (all the way back in Fall 2010), after completing all my preliminary research and determining what I wanted to argue, I wrote and revised all 3 of my term papers in an intense 4-day writing binge. In total, I wrote around 15,000 words in this stretch. The routine during those 4 days went roughly as follows: get up, get a bowl of cereal, turn on the computer, bring up MS Word, write for 4-5 hours, 30-minute break for lunch, write for 5-6 hours, 1-hour break to make and eat dinner, write until tired, go to sleep, and repeat.
Now, let's be clear: this is not a sustainable or desirable model for academic writing. It doesn't come anywhere near the well-balanced academic life one might want, and it's incompatible with significant teaching and service commitments. But for a short spell at the very end of the term (when I no longer had teaching commitments), it was effective.
Fast forward to January 2017. When the semester got rolling, I tried to emulate this schedule as much as possible. After allocating the necessary hours each week toward teaching and job applications, I put as many hours as possible toward dissertation writing. As many as I could without losing my mind.
For two months, I became a social hermit, worked out less, and refused to take on any additional projects beyond what I was already committed to. I was teaching a course that I had already taught several times, so my required teaching prep was relatively minimal. Grading did take longer than it normally would have, though, since it was not as high on my priority list. The grind wasn't fun, but it was successful. I sent out the polished first half of my dissertation to committee members in early March and followed up with the revised second half two weeks later. The defense at the end of the month was uneventful.
The costs of the grind were severe. Once post-defense revisions were submitted in April, I set my research aside for almost two months, a longer break from my research than I had ever taken during graduate school. While I had succeeded in my two major goals for that semester – finding a job for the following fall and finishing the dissertation – these triumphs brought little joy. The mental and emotional toil wrapped up in the prior academic year had left me exhausted, and the only good feeling that could be savored was relief. It was time for a break.
And so the narrative portion of the series concludes. But there are still two parts to go. In the next segment, I'll summarize the major lessons that can be drawn from prior posts and consider how those insights might help graduate students prepare for the dissertation stage and eventually finish their degree.
In the comments section of our most recent "how can we help you?" post, a reader writes:
I'm currently a first-year PhD student in institution A who also holds an MA degree in Philosophy. During my application season this year, my final decision was between institution A and institution B. I was slightly inclined to choose A over B. However, B has a very flexible policy of credit transfer which was very attractive to me. I then asked the DGA at A whether I could request some credit transfer from my previous institution. The DGS told me that my request needs the approval of the whole department but he/she thought that it was highly likely that it would be fully approved. In addition, the credit transfer is not something unprecedented. Based on what he/she told me, I ended up choosing A.
I didn't hear back from them on the issue for almost five months. Several days ago, the DGS told me that they cannot grant my request. If that information had been available to me earlier, I should have ended up choosing B over A. Given that I have already enrolled in A, what could I do? Any advice would be appreciated.
I'll be curious to hear what other people think. Unfortunately, I am inclined to think that--aside from withdrawing from institution A or raising a big stink about the issue--this reader can probably only take this as a difficult lesson learned at this point.
A number of years ago, I was given some very good advice that, in my view, any grad student or person on the job-market should pay heed to: "get it in writing." I was given this advice based on the individual's experience that, all too often in academia, what people say and what they do may be very different things. Sometimes there is no malice involved: a person might really think X is likely, even though it turns out (as in this case) that X doesn't occur. Whatever the case, the prudent thing to do is to take precautions to protect oneself in advance against this sort of thing.
I suspect there may be another lesson to learn from this case. As the reader notes, the institution they decided not to attend ('B') was clear that its credit transfer policy was flexible. In general, I think it is wise to make decisions on the basis of official policies--in which case, since transfer credits matter a great deal to this individual, I think it may have been more wise to simply choose institution B rather than run the risk with A (where, I think it is important to add, the reader was only told it was "likely" they would be able to transfer credits).
But maybe I am wrong about this. Do you think this reader has any better options, aside from simply learning a few hard lessons from the experience? I guess, as one closing thought, it might be worth reflecting on how bad it is, at the end of the day, to have to take more course work. Looking back at my own career, I sort of wish I had been able to take more courses, not fewer. Academia is a very difficult career path--and, in my experience, the years I took courses were some of the happiest in my professional career. Obviously, I'm not in this reader's situation. I'm just suggesting that there may be a more optimistic way to look at the situation. But these are just my thoughts. What are yours?
As I said in the previous entry in this series, I believe there were two moments where I came close to not completing the dissertation. The first occurred in Summer 2016 when the tedium of dissertation work stifled my enjoyment of writing. As I noted in Part 5, I eventually snapped out of that spell and got back to making steady progress. In October, I had to disrupt my momentum to polish dossier materials and send out job applications, but that brief gap in progress did not affect me too much. I kept sending material to my advisor, and everything continued as planned. A defense at the end of January looked likely.
Unfortunately, things did not stay that way for long. Outside of my philosophical life, two things happened that fall that had a significant impact on me. The first was the 2016 U.S. presidential election. I had, for the most part, tried to ignore the political developments in the U.S. over the summer and focus on my work, but the all-encompassing election coverage on social media and the vitriolic nature of the campaigns made the events difficult to ignore. When the results were finally obtained on November 8th, the outcome was not what I had hoped for, and many of my peers spent the remainder of the night (and a chunk of the morning) in the close proximity to hard liquor.While I kept an even keel initially, a powerful combination of grief and fear started to grip me the following day. Some of this came from an understanding of the long-term political consequences of the election. Much of my academic research concerns environmental issues, and it was clear that mitigating climate change and pursuing sustainable energy would not be prioritized under Trump's regime. It was also clear that many extremist groups with racist and xenophobic agendas viewed this result as a political victory and that the quest for racial and gender equality might take a big step backward. That was all harrowing enough, but the election also forced me to reflect on some of my own beliefs and values.
Earlier in the fall, I had attended a 3-hour Safe Zone training session. My main reason for attending was to gain some insight into how to make my classroom a more inclusive environment and one in which students could feel free to express themselves, but it ended up serving a more personal purpose. One of the conversations at that session marked the first time I publicly identified myself as bisexual. Although I had been wrestling with this aspect of my identity for a couple years, it was only toward the end of the 2016 summer that I had managed to understand and accept it.
I had tried to keep these matters in the background during the fall. Being transparent about this aspect of my identity was part of my long-term plan, but I had wanted to let it unfold on a relatively slow timetable and seep into public knowledge when graduate school was in the rearview mirror. The election aftermath made that timetable seem untenable. So many people I knew felt alone and vulnerable and feared that their progress toward equality would begin to reverse. Acting as if I had no personal stake in the these events felt like a violation of my integrity – a failure to stand by many of the values and commitments I held dear.
For a few days, I tried to carry on with business as usual, but doing so seemed impossible. It wasn't business as usual, and it wouldn't return to anything like that until I reached some kind of resolution. There seemed like only one way to do that, so I had the awkward but necessary conversations with my dissertation advisor, my parents, my friends – until I eventually said something about it on social media near end of November. While that announcement was met with some surprise from certain folks, it came with relatively little drama. Things weren't back to business as usual at the end of the fall term, but I certainly felt better.
This bit of autobiography is not intended to be an anecdote about politics or being LGBT+. It exemplifies a broader truth about the graduate school experience. Because graduate school lasts so long for doctoral students, it is almost guaranteed that they will go through at least one significant personal crisis on the way to their degree. I have watched friends battle through much greater hardships than anything I endured: cancer diagnoses, alcoholism, depression, financial peril, divorce, unexpected family deaths, and a host of other life-shattering circumstances. Sad as it is to see, not everyone manages to overcome their ordeals and still get the PhD in the end.
From what I have witnessed and experienced myself, I can offer two recommendations. First, when in the midst of a personal crisis, the best strategy is usually to resolve the crisis as soon as possible (assuming it can be done), even when doing so comes at a short-term cost to one's philosophical work. In other words, don't just put your head down and try to ignore the problem.
It's good to care about one's work and important to prioritize it, but there are times when the gravity of other things must be properly acknowledged. In the long run, I think trying to carry on with philosophy without addressing high-stakes personal matters will usually be counterproductive. Doing philosophy well requires investing large amounts of time and mental energy. It's much harder to make these investments when something outside philosophy is constantly occupying your attention, and trying to do so can lead to lowered productivity, lower quality work, and a reduced enjoyment of your work.
Second, when choosing a dissertation advisor, consider how much the person will support you when things aren't going well. If you need to, consult other graduate students who have studied under this person, and get some insight from their experiences. I will always be grateful that my advisor did not pressure me to produce any work during November and December, given what else was going on in my life. He also never lost the belief that I would finish the dissertation and continued to provide fast turnarounds on drafts when I was able to resume my work. That kind of support makes a world of difference.
Of course, at this point, you might be wondering how it all came to an end. After the usual deluge of end-of-semester grading, a few Skype interviews, winter break, and a trip to the APA Eastern, it was the second week of January, and I had made about 8 pages of progress since the election. There were still massive holes in the manuscript and several chapters in need of revision. I defended the dissertation on March 30th, so what happened in the 12 weeks beforehand? How did it finally get done? Those details await in Part 7.
I thought it might be helpful to follow up this series' first post (on dissertations) with a compendium of posts at the Cocoon on publishing and research strategies not directly related to dissertations (I'll reserve book publishing for a later date).
Here, then, are previous posts on these subjects, which I will then update moving forward:
Research strategies
Book reviews
In the last few parts of this series, I have discussed several major factors that make the dissertation difficult to complete. Since it's taken several weeks to get to this point, let's recap what I've highlighted thus far:
That seems like an impressive list. It's not hard to see why the dissertation would be tough to finish given this information. Here's the catch: none of these factors explains why the dissertation was the hardest part of my graduate career. I actually think I was rather well-prepared for these things, insofar as that's possible. The biggest reason that finishing the dissertation difficult was something I had not anticipated and something I was not ready for.
For a time, working on the dissertation actually made me hate writing.You might need some context to understand what I mean. I have been a writer in some form of another since high school. Back then, it was fiction and poetry. In college, I expanded my repertoire to include creative non-fiction and philosophy. Before graduate school, I studied technical writing for a year. Prior to working on the dissertation, writing had been a huge part of my life for 15 years. Some days went better than others, and some projects were boring because of their subject matter. Yet the process of writing – creating something from a blank page, giving life to new ideas, crafting images and emotions from letters and symbols – was always something I enjoyed.
Until the dissertation.
In a summer post about avoiding procrastination, Marcus mentioned the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Short summary: intrinsic motivation is better. When you want to do something for its own sake, you will tend to do it better than when your motivation is based on external rewards. What happened while working on the dissertation is that my intrinsic motivation to write eroded. Eventually, it became a chore just to produce a single page. This was something that I had not anticipated. I was not used to dreading the moment of the day when I sat down to write.
Things got particularly bad during Summer 2016. There was a stretch after the semester ended where my production ground to a halt. After progress had stalled for a week, jumping back into the dissertation became so much more difficult. I think the hardest stage of writing is the very beginning – where you must fill the dreaded white void on screen with words. Once you get started and get some momentum, it gets easier, and ideally, your momentum carries you along until the dissertation is fully drafted. But when you hit a snag that creates a gap in your writing, getting the wheels spinning again can prove just as difficult as when you were on page 1.
Sadly, time waits for no one. A week went by. Then another. Since I was going on the market for the first time in the fall and was on my last year of funding, I had to get the dissertation to a point where completion in the spring was realistic. I had to do something drastic.
So I took a break. For two weeks, I didn't even try to write the dissertation. Instead, I wrote other things: blog posts, website updates, replies to emails that had been collecting dust in the inbox, and some fiction. I wanted to remember how things had been in a simpler time when writing was easier and more fun. I needed a reminder that it wouldn't always be so painful, that things could return to normal after the dissertation was over.
After two weeks of non-dissertation writing, I gathered the resolve to return to it. Now, mercifully, it seemed doable. Not fun, not easy, but doable. So the journey continued.
Looking back, there were two moments where I could have stumbled and been unable to complete the dissertation. That summer – and June in particular – was the first of these moments. Since I was less than halfway through the dissertation at that time, a longer lag might have made completion in Spring 2017 either unrealistic or impossible. Once I got the momentum going, however, I finally crossed the hundred page count and kept plugging away well into the fall. Eventually, I had to take a short break to prep for the job market, and it was shortly after that when things once again got difficult. But that stretch of the journey will have to wait until Part 6.
In the comments section of, "Reader query on presenting to a department on mental illness", the reader who submitted the query suggested it might be helpful to gather a list of potential departmental guidelines or policies regarding mental health. I think it's a great idea, and thought we might attempt to brainstorm a rough list of policies here!
Before I open things up for discussion, allow me to briefly float a few policies for consideration. The policies I'm inclined to favor map on broadly to the list of topics I discussed in the earlier post:
Guidelines against stigmatizing mental illness: I'm inclined to think there should be departmental guidelines educating faculty and students about the stigmatization of mental-illness--guidelines emphasizing that mental illness is an illness no less than a physical illness such as cancer; that we should therefore treat it the same way we treat physical illnesses (with compassion, understanding, etc.); that gossip regarding a person's known or suspected illness is inappropriate; that "bad choices" people make while suffering from mental illness may be a temporary manifestation of illness rather than reflective of the individual's true personal or moral character; and that many forms of mental illness are highly treatable, such that a person's personal or professional struggles (and "bad decisions") may resolve themselves once receiving effective treatment.Firm policies on privacy: I'm also inclined to think there should be clear and binding policies regarding disclosure of illness and personal privacy. As I am most readers are no doubt aware, universities typically have clear policies regarding the disclosure of things like learning disabilities and sexual assault--as well as very clear and binding policies regarding confidentiality. Given that an individual's mental illness can affect their performance in a graduate program, I'm inclined to think that students should be able to disclose their illness to individual faculty members (such as one's faculty advisor) or multiple faculty (one's dissertation committee or even the grad faculty as a whole) without fear of word getting out to others. There is no reason why a student should have to hide their illness out of fear of loss of privacy, any more than an individual with a physical disability or victim of sexual assault should fear disclosing their situation due to privacy concerns. Because making faculty aware of one's illness may be necessary for faculty to understand a student's academic performance or behavior--among other things, again, that a student's struggles may be due to temporary illness rather than defects of character, etc.--I think clear and binding privacy policies are vital: policies the violation of which should be attached to substantial sanctions (which, hopefully, will rarely be necessary to impose).
Guidelines on understanding: In addition to guidelines against stigmatizing students with mental illness, I'm inclined to think there should be positive guidelines related to demonstrating certain forms of understanding--among other things, guidelines favoring patience with students with mental illness. For instance, in some earlier otherwise unrelated discussions at the Cocoon, I've heard some people say that departments should push out of their programs students who are not performing well ("the earlier the better", some have said). I generally disagree with those suggestions (I struggled a great deal in grad school for a few years, but turned out okay) -- but I especially disagree with them due to their potential implications for students with mental illness. For suppose a student is performing poorly, but it is primarily a result of clinical depression or a severe anxiety disorder. Such a student's poor performance may well be temporary and not indicative of their actual philosophical promise. In my view, grad programs should be patient with students with mental illness, just as they would (and should) be patient with students with other physical illnesses, demonstrating understanding when feasible. For instance, if a department gives grad students annual reviews and a struggling student comes forward with and documents some struggle with mental illness, the annual review might say that although the student is not currently meeting expectations, the faculty recognize the student's situation and are willing to work with the student as they seek effective treatment (this is yet another reason why I think firm policies protecting privacy should encourage students to come forward rather than hide their illnesses).
Anyway, these are just a few of my initial thoughts about potential departmental policies. I am not entirely sure about all of them, and am sure important policies are slipping my mind. Which is where you come in! What policies and guidelines do you think departments should have regarding mental illness?
This is the first post in the Cocoon's new Grad-School Toolkit series. As I explained in the series preview, the series was inspired by a reader suggestion that it might be helpful to grad students and grad programs to compile and organize all of the Cocoon's grad-school-related posts in one place. The thought/hope is that students and programs may find the series useful as a useful resource to improve grad student life and better enable students to progress successfully through their program.
This series, which I see as constantly evolving, will be comprised by a series of posts, each of which is dedicated to a different topic--such as dissertations, publishing, teaching, work-life balance, mental health, well-being, and so on. The posts will will initially be a compilation of past posts on those subjects here at the Cocoon. However, as the Cocoon continues on, my plan is to continually update each post in the series so that the series can be a constantly evolving and developing "toolkit." I also plan to invite readers to submit (either anonymously or in their own name) special guest posts offering students and programs information or advice on topics of their interest.
Today's post will focus on dissertations. Because, in my experience dissertations are by far one of the parts of grad school that students struggle with the most, I thought they might be a good subject to begin with. What follows, then, are some previous posts on the Cocoon on writing dissertations, departmental policies on dissertations (e.g. traditional book-type dissertations vs. "star paper" alternatives), and so on--as well as links to each entry in Trevor's in-progress dissertation series. I will then update both lists continuously as the Cocoon moves forward!
General dissertation-related posts:
Trevor's Dissertation Reflection Series:
The anonymous reader who wrote in soliciting advice on how to talk about depression to their grad department wrote in with a nice suggestion: that it might be helpful to compile a list of posts at the Cocoon that grad students and grad programs might use as a resource to help improve grad student life and assist grad students navigate their programs successfully. I think it's a great idea, and plan to begin a new series next week: a 'Grad School Toolkit.'
Basically, what I hope to do is devote each initial post in the series to compiling Cocoon posts on different grad-school related topics, including:
If any of you can think of specific Cocoon posts that you'd like to see in any of these lists, please do let me know. Finally, I'm hoping to follow the first part of the series (where these lists are compiled) with new posts, ideally submissions by readers on things they think grad students or grad programs could do to improve grad student life and success.
So, please consider giving it some thought yourself: is there anything you think grad students or programs should know? All you have to do is write up a short post (and you can always do it anonymously!), and I will post it in the series for discussion!
Part 3 of this series focused on the problem of stacking commitments – the tendency for non-dissertation commitments to overwhelm one's schedule in the final stages of graduate school as one tries to become a viable candidate on the job market. Now's the time to consider the job market itself and how the initial run can impact your dissertation work.
First, let's start with the ideal scenario. You manage to get a couple publications during graduate school, and the rest of your CV is pretty solid. You spend most of your summer finishing a full draft of your dissertation. Only revisions and the formal defense remain. You then devote the remainder of your summer and the first half of the fall toward job market preparation. You make sure all your statements are polished and that your writing samples have been thoroughly revised and edited according to feedback from your colleagues. You keep pace with the job market deadlines while making revisions to your dissertation manuscript and schedule a January defense, ensuring that your dissertation will be done long before you start your first job (if you're able to snag one).
That all sounds fine and dandy, but it's pretty far removed from how things actually play out for most graduate students. In all likelihood, you won't be so close to finishing your dissertation when your first job market run commences, and the stress and tedium of filling out applications will take a substantial psychological toll. Additionally, for reasons discussed in Part 3, it's likely that some of your time will be tied up in outside projects during the last couple years of graduate school, which may impede your dissertation progress. Depending on how kind the peer review process has been to you earlier in grad school, you might also be trying to tack on another publication at the start of the fall semester.
In reality, the circumstances for your first job market run are not likely to be ideal, and you will probably still have dissertation progress to make while it's going on. So how do you balance your teaching, dissertation work, side projects, and the 70, 80, or even 100+ job applications you will be submitting?
Frankly, there's no miracle to be found here. Or at least not one that I'm aware of. One year ago, I had to postpone work on my dissertation while I prepped and finalized dossier materials (which took about 10 days of very intense work, in addition the initial prep I had done in the summer) and sent out the first major haul of applications. Even after that, the job market continued to suck up time. There is no rigid schedule for job postings anymore, which means that new ones appear throughout the winter and spring. You have to keep checking for new posts and submitting applications throughout the academic year (or until you get a job offer).
To make matters worse, many applications have unusual or idiosyncratic requirements that force you to construct one-time-use documents from scratch. For instance, as part of the application process for the job I currently have – a postdoc at the University of South Florida – I was required to include a statement explaining how my research fit into the university's strategic plan for the next 5 years. That required me to read this strategic plan and write up something about it, and I didn't use this material for any other of the 90 applications I sent out. This experience is rather common, especially for postdoc applications, and it means that even after the vanilla dossier documents are assembled and polished, you won't be done creating content.
If you're fortunate enough to get first-round interviews, these will also consume a lot of time. You'll want to research the department and institution that you might work for, and you'll want to schedule mock interviews to prepare. These interviews will, even if they go well, be very stressful, and most people who get these interviews do not get invited to campus visits afterward. The experience of getting an interview but then being eliminated from the search can be emotionally devastating: you get a flicker of hope, have a short time to nurture it, and then have it abruptly extinguished. It's not a good time.
All this means that the job market will sap a lot of your time and energy. Theoretically, working on your dissertation during this stretch could function as a type of escape from the tedium of completing applications and the dismay of rejection letters, but it's very hard to remain honed in on writing such a large project when your mental and emotional resources are so heavily invested in something else.
This probably doesn't sound like a pretty picture, but that's because it isn't. Grinding through the job market is brutal, no matter your career stage, and working on the dissertation at the same time makes it even harder. The good news is that this combination of dissertation work and the job market should only happen once. The best advice I can give is to just push through the 4-6 months that this lasts and then plan to take a significant vacation afterward to recharge (though not until after you've passed your defense and made sure all your graduation paperwork is in order). I've touched on the importance of vacations before, and there may never be a better time for one than after you have completed your dissertation and survived your first year on the job market.
A reader writes in:
I finished my Phd in 2015 and decided not to go into academia. While I don't at all currently regret that decision, now that I have recently been able to finally be completely free of depression for the first time since maybe I was a little kid, I am able to recognize that my decision not to go into academia was at least partly influenced by depression. In short: I had been taking zoloft since my 2nd year in grad school; my marriage fell apart during my 8th year, and I coped by smoking way too much weed; my doctor decided to take me off zoloft because she was worried about its interactions with weed; during my 9th year I completely lost interest in philosophy (similar to my experience prior to taking zoloft during my 2nd year) and was able to eke out the rest of the dissertation but called it quits with philosophy.
Anyways: I was recently chatting with a few of my old advisors back at [redacted]... We talked about how we think it's really a shame that depression just isn't discussed openly within the department, even though so many people have it. I thought that it might be a good idea for me to come back and give talk, sharing my own experiences with depression in grad school, talking about resources at [redacted], etc. He agreed, so I'll be giving the talk in November :) In the meantime, as I'm thinking about the content and structure of my talk, I was wondering if you have any thoughts for such a talk: What sorts of things might be good to include in a talk to a philosophy department whose students suffer from depression and at least some of the faculty are interested in helping and improving the environment of the department?
I think this is a great query, and would like to commend the reader, advisor, and department that took the initiative to organize this individual's upcoming presentation. I'm curious to hear what readers think. I myself feel fairly comfortable offering suggestions, as I have a good deal of experience with mental illness: I worked as an intern in an outpatient ward for a year, was co-director of a group home for the mentally ill for another year, and mental illness runs in my family, being more or less a constant in my life-experience since early childhood. Allow me to share some of my thoughts, then, before I open things up for comments...
My first comment--which I know doesn't really address the reader's query, but which I still want to mention--is that I think other departments should do what this one is doing: make it a priority to openly discuss ways in which they could be appropriately sensitive and responsive to mental health issues. While a number of studies suggest that mental health issues in graduate school--and academia more generally--are a real epidemic, it still seems to be something that grad students, faculty, departments, and institutions rarely talk about or address openly or directly (presumably, I think, because of the perpetual stigma associated with mental illness). So, I think, this kind of thing is a good first step that others departments should take.
But on to the reader's query. Here are a few topics that immediately jumped to mind that I think the reader might consider discussing:
Stigma: Recent studies show that that there is still a pervasive stigma surrounding mental illness, and that it is a barrier to people receiving effective treatment. I have experienced this first-hand, knowing a number of grad students who struggled with mental illness that kept it a secret from everyone in their program. As I'll explain below, I think this is bad for many reasons, not the least of which is that it can lead gossipy speculation about a person's mental stability, but also to a failure of faculty to understand that a student's temporary academic or social struggles in the department may not be reflective of the student's actual abilities (more on this shortly). Because stigma is such a pervasive and longstanding issue, this is the first thing I would recommend discussing. Few students would be afraid, I think, of telling people in their program that they had cancer, let's say. I wouldn't be afraid of it, at any rate--as I expect people would very much rally around a person with such a terrible disease. I would, however, be very much afraid of telling people that I was suffering from mental illness--from depression, or social anxiety disorder, etc.--as I would be very much afraid of what people would think. Mental illness is a health issue, no less than cancer, or a heart-attack, and so on. And people need to know that it should be treated as such. It is also a health issue that is treatable in many cases, which is why understanding rather than stigmatization is so important.
Institutional resources & departmental policy: Because mental health issues appear to be rampant in graduate school--exacerbated, no doubt, as a result of the inherent stress of graduate studies--I would suggest that our reader discuss the issue of institutional, above all proactive departmental policies, to respond helpfully to students with mental illness. For reasons I'll explain below, I don't think it is sufficient for a department to simply inform their students that there are mental health services on campus. It is important for grad students to have resources within their department, so that students have some opportunity to make their situation known to individuals in their program (such as faculty advisors) should they wish to do so, and in a way governed by clear, binding policies conducive to student privacy and faculty understanding. This is important, I believe, because as I will explain below, it can be very detrimental to students to feel that they cannot tell anyone in their department about their health issues without running the risks that (A) the information will get out, and (B) faculty may not be appropriately understanding of their health predicament. I am not exactly sure what such policies should include, but would suggest that they include some of the provisions below.
Privacy: In my experience, worries about privacy can be an immense deterrent to students letting anyone know of their health condition. Contrast, for instance, what might happen if word that one has cancer got out, versus what might happen if word that one has major depression. In my experience, people generally respond positively to physical health issues, offering support, comfort, understanding, and so on. Unfortunately, at least in my experience, things can be very different with mental health issues. Instead of support, there may be gossip; instead of understanding, people may wonder whether one has the mental fitness to "finish the program"; and so on. Because of the stigma attached to mental illness, there should be a binding expectation of privacy--one subject to serious institutional sanctions if violated, just as is the case with disclosing a student's entitlement to special accommodations due to disability or a report of sexual violence. Mental health issues are, once again, a health issue, and as such should be something students are entitled to discuss with faculty without fear.
Understanding: Finally, I would recommend discussing the importance of understanding. Once again, I suspect if a student told faculty or their department they were receiving treatment cancer, there would most likely be an outpouring of understanding. Among other things, faculty (and fellow students) might understand that the person's health issue may impact their ability to get their work done, perform to the highest level of their ability, and so on. Mental health issues should, in my view, inspire similar levels of understanding. I have known students who faculty thought were "performing badly"--not writing good papers, not participating in departmental events, making social faux pas (appearing angry, morose, etc.), making personally and professionally harmful choices (e.g. abusing drugs or alcohol)--because of their mental health issues. In these kinds of cases, it may be tempting for faculty and other students to think the person is a bad philosopher or a person who is "not cut out" for academic philosophy. Yet, I have also seen people like this entirely turn things around--writing good papers, making better personal and professional choices--once receiving effective treatment.
This is, in my view, one of the main reasons why students should have clear, effective departmental resources and policies. Faculty may misjudge the promise of a student suffering from mental illness, lowering their estimation of the student's promise on the basis of what appears to them to be "substandard performance", but what is in actuality the manifestation of mental health issues. Faculty need to be aware that such "substandard performance"--including "bad life choices" affecting their work--may not be indicative of a student's true character or abilities, but a temporary set of symptoms of disease that may be effectively treatable. In my view, this is crucial. One of the most important--yet very difficult--things for people to understand about mental illness is that a person's "bad professional or life choices" (the way they treat others, the way they comport themselves, etc.) may not be at all reflective of who the person really is, but instead a temporary reflection of their mental health disease. I've seen it many times with my own two eyes: a person having no control over their "bad choices", only to see those choices turn into "good choices" literally overnight after receiving effective treatment. It is vital, in my view, for faculty aware of students' mental health challenges to develop this kind of understanding.
Anyway, these are just a few suggestions that popped into my mind. Do you have any of your own? Do you agree/disagree with the suggestions I've made? Let's try to help our reader with their excellent query!
In my last post, I emphasized the ways in which the dissertation stage differs from other aspects of graduate school. One of the major differences is that the dissertation is a much longer project than anything else you will be required to complete. Given its length, it's no surprise that you have to devote a lot of time to it over the last year or two of your graduate studies. In the abstract, that might not sound too terrible, since you aren't saddled with coursework or preparing for comprehensive exams. If only it were so simple.
In this and the next part of the series, I consider two related features of the dissertation stage that both threaten to rob you of your writing time: commitments tied to side-projects and professional development and the job market push that will most likely occur during your final year of graduate school. We'll start with the former – what I call the problem of stacking commitments.
Because of the nature of academic conferences and the academic publishing process, you will often agree to do certain things many months (sometimes even years) before the deadline actually occurs. If you submit to a conference, it will be several months before you know whether your submission was accepted and then another few months before you present your material. If you're invited to contribute to an edited volume or review a book, you'll have a long time to prepare your submission. If you agree to peer review a paper, you will usually have several weeks or even a couple months to submit your verdict and comments.
When you say "yes" to these kinds of commitments, you almost always do so with incomplete information about your long-term schedule. Sometimes, deadlines will fall in stretches where several other things must be completed. When your commitments "stack" in this manner, they can overwhelm you. Tough to make dissertation progress when that happens.
Now I know what you might be thinking: why not just avoid taking on board those extra commitments? Why not say "no" sometimes? After all, saying "yes" to everything was identified as a graduate student trap in an old Daily Nous post by Daniel Silvermint. (It's #22 on the list.) For some, the solution might really be that simple: just decline some of those offers. But for most who want long-term academic employment, this might not be a viable option.
To be competitive on the current job market, you're probably going to need some publications and conference presentations – evidence that you're an active participant in the philosophical community and a capable scholar. You're unlikely to be skilled enough to produce high-quality work early in your graduate career, so most of this will probably happen in your third year or later. Furthermore, it needs to be done before you make your first run on the job market. That creates a substantial incentive to say "yes" to as many of these things as possible (unless perhaps you are from one of the most distinguished programs and don't think you need a CV packed with these items to land a job). After all, there's no way to know when similar opportunities will present themselves again.
What does this all mean? Often, it means that you will be pressured to complete various side projects when you should be writing your dissertation. You will often have committed to these projects before you even defended your prospectus, and completing them will often be crucial to helping you be competitive on the job market. These various non-dissertation commitments can stack in a way that makes it extremely difficult to prioritize your dissertation writing, as new project deadlines crop up every month or so in your schedule. Every week spent writing a chapter for an anthology, finishing a book review, or preparing a conference presentation is a week of dissertation progress that is lost. If you lose too many of these weeks, your momentum on the dissertation stalls, and it becomes that much harder to get the gears turning again. (I'll say more about that phenomenon in Part 5 of this series.)
Unfortunately, there's no easy solution to this problem: you just have to find a way to do both – build up your CV in the second half of your graduate career and make enough progress on the dissertation to be within striking distance of its end before you go on the job market. And hopefully, doing so doesn't drag out your graduate career so long that your funding expires!
I wish I had better advice to share here, but frankly, I never really solved this problem: I just buckled down and committed to finishing all my in-progress items until they were done. Then, in my final year of grad school, I did my best to avoid any non-essential work that would interfere with the dissertation. That was easier said than done, though, since I still had to split time between finishing the dissertation and running the job market gauntlet – a unique challenge in its own right. But let's save that for the next post in the series.
In the comments section of Trevor's recent post, "Dissertation Reflection Series, Part 2: A Different Kind of Project", a reader ("cw") wrote:
For me, #1 was the biggest problem. I'm not good with unstructured time. I found myself rushing at the end of each semester to have something to show my director.
I should have set more meeting points for us, and clearer expectations for each meeting. I'm sure my director would have gone for it, but I didn't ask.
In my experience, this is a problem a lot of graduate students have, and for roughly the reasons Trevor gives. Throughout the first part of grad school (e.g. course work, comp exams, etc.), one has fairly clear deadlines. Yet, when it comes to the dissertation stage and publishing, one no longer has such clear deadlines--and one can end up wasting a lot of time getting little done. I know from experience! After my comp exams, I basically got nothing of import done for about a year-and-a-half. And it wasn't for lack of trying. I was reading. I was trying to write. I just wasn't being effective. And I know I'm not alone in this. I am currently mentoring a PhD student who excelled in graduate school...until passing comp exams (just like me!). Fortunately, I have learned a lot about how to deal effectively with "unstructured time", and as I will explain below, the strategies I have developed have sound empirical support.
I didn't know this until my spouse (who works in IO-Psychology), but one of the more well-confirmed theories in her field is known as Goal-Setting Theory. In rough outline, Goal-Setting Theory posits that specific and ambitious daily and weekly goals lead to higher performance than easier or more general goals. The basics of Goal-Setting Theory have been inductively confirmed by over 400 studies spanning over 25 years. More exactly, the theory recommends (here I quote):
Interestingly, several years ago I began implementing this very strategy...before ever learning of Goal-Setting Theory--and the strategy's effects on my work efficiency have been remarkable. Allow me to briefly illustrate how I deploy Goal-Setting strategies, along with the differences they have made in my efficiency.
When I was in grad school, I used to spend months on end drafting a single paper. Then, if I got a revise-and-resubmit, I would spend anywhere from 4-9 months (determined primarily by whatever the resubmission deadline was). It was a grueling and inefficient way to work, but it was all I knew how to do. My first step toward becoming more efficient was learning some new writing strategies I recounted recently here. Just as importantly, however, I slowly began setting determinate and challenging daily and weekly goals for myself, just as Goal-Setting Theory recommends. Here is roughly how I go about my work nowadays. I've never owned a daily planner. Instead, I formulate daily, weekly, and monthly goals in my head. For example, this summer I had two revise-and-resubmits to complete, one book-review to write one paper to draft for an edited volume, five new papers to draft, and a tenure-file to put together. So, I first put together a monthly plan in my head:
Monthly plan
These might seem like overly ambitious goals (I don't know, do they?). In any case, once upon a time they would have been far too ambitious for me. Nowadays, however, these sorts of goals have become fairly routine. Thus far this summer, I've met all of the above goals. I had a similarly ambitious set of goals a couple of summers ago, when I completely re-wrote Rightness as Fairness' eight chapters from scratch (with mostly new arguments) over an eight-week period prior to submission of the final manuscript. Although again these goals might seem too ambitious, one of the central (and verified) parts of Goal-Setting Theory is that ambitious goals that are hard to meet actually turn out to motivate better goal-satisfaction than easier to meet goals! The critical thing, apparently, is for one's goals to be really ambitious, but not so ambitious that one consistently fails to meet them.
Anyway, in line with Goal-Setting Theory, I've found that the way to accomplish monthly goals like these is to in turn set clear, challenging weekly goals, and then similarly clear and challenging daily goals. For example, here are what my weekly goals routinely look like:
Weekly goals
In order to ensure that I meet these goals, however, I also have to set clear daily goals and rigorously hold myself to them. So, for example, here are what a typical set of daily goals looks like:
Daily goals
As you can see, if I hold myself to these daily goals, I will have completed my "Week 1" goal above and thus be on my way to completing my monthly goals. Importantly, as Goal-Setting Theory recommends, I hold myself to my goals. Sometimes I fall behind by a day. If at all possible, I make myself catch up the next day. Also importantly, I intentionally build room to catch up to my weekly goals if I fall behind. For example, when I was rewriting Rightness as Fairness in Summer 2015, I gave myself one week to draft each chapter, knowing however that Chapter 5 was really short and would be easy to draft. I decided to devote an entire week to this chapter in my summer plans not because I thought the draft would take a full week, but because I expected I might fall behind a bit and might need some "wiggle room." As fact would have it, I did fall behind, just as I expected. I had a lot of trouble on Chapter 3 (the book's most difficult chapter), and ended up having to spend a week-and-a-half on it instead of one week. Fortunately, I was then able to partition the week I had planned for Chapter 5, revising my schedule so that I could spend half of that week finishing up Chapter 4, thus catching back up to my original plan.
Another important part of the strategy--or so I have found--has to do with partitioning daily work. I know people who work on one project alone at a time, and this is something I used to do too. The problem with working on one thing at a time, though--or again, so I've found--is that it's all too natural to fall behind on the one project you're working on, only to continually push back other projects to some indeterminate point in the future. Having daily goals for more than one project prevents one from getting "stuck" on one project before moving onto other important things.
Now, of course, I don't want to give the impression that I always meet my goals. Sometimes I don't. There was one paper I wanted to draft this summer that I just couldn't get the argument for correct (yet). So, although I spent my scheduled week on that paper, I didn't finish it but instead set it aside to come back to later (my plan is to return to it either next month or in the Fall). Here again, the critical thing--or so I've found--is not to get stuck. If I fail to meet a given goal (viz. drafting this paper), then if I can afford to do it another time, I stop banging my head against the wall on it (I don't let myself get "stuck" on the project) but instead immediately move onto my next scheduled project. Once again, I find this incredibly helpful--as one pitfall I used to fall into (and which I know other people fall into) is getting "hung up" on a given project, spending too much time spinning one's wheels rather than getting to other things. Keeping to daily, weekly, and monthly goals helps one avoid getting stuck.
Finally, I don't pretend that this strategy will work for everybody. People are different. It is worth noting, however, that Goal-Setting Theory has been systematically confirmed by hundreds of studies, and thus, is known to be a good general strategy for most people. Further, I have seen it work its magic with other people I know. As I mentioned above, I am currently mentoring a PhD student who has struggled with unstructured time. After she approached me for help, I asked her for a list of projects she needs to complete and by which date, along with how many parts each project contains. I then drew up daily goals for her each week, and have worked with her to hold herself to her daily and weekly goals...and it is working wonders so far.
In short, if you're struggling with unstructured time--or with your overall work efficiency--I cannot recommend Goal-Setting strategies enough!
In the first post of this series, I highlighted four factors that made the dissertation stage of graduate school challenging for me. In this post, I focus on how the dissertation differs from other graduate work and why these differences tend to make writing the dissertation more difficult than the other stages of graduate school.
Difference #1: Lack of Rigid Structure and Concrete Deadlines
The first few years of graduate school are highly structured. You take courses with clear reading lists and concrete deadlines. You have conversations about the course material every week, and the professor will often give you insight into the kinds of topics that would make for good papers. Often, you'll get some feedback on in-progress work (through peer review, presentations, etc.) during the course.
The dissertation stage is not like this. There is no rigid structure to how you should spend your time, and while your advisor will often feedback on in-progress work, it is very different from the guidance that you'll receive during the coursework stage. This lack of structure can be a benefit: it gives you more freedom to spend your time as you see fit – to read what you deem important and to submit work for review according to your timetable (unless you have an advisor who imposes very rigid deadlines on you). More commonly, however, this lack of structure makes it harder to get things done since you have to impose your own deadlines and be disciplined about making consistent progress.
Difference #2: A (Much) Larger Project
The dissertation is a longer and grander project than anything else you will do in graduate school. Most of your projects prior to the dissertation stage are papers ranging in length from 3000 to 10,000 words. An adequate dissertation usually needs to be at least 50,000 words – perhaps significantly more, depending on your advisor's standards. (My dissertation advisor specifically said that anything under 200 double spaced pages would be "too thin" to earn his approval; that translated to a minimal requirement of about 60,000 words.) Moreover, the dissertation needs to be cohesive: it cannot just be a series of standalone papers stitched together.
The length of the project also increases the likelihood that you will get "stuck" at some point. You might be able to reliably crank out an 8000-word draft without getting stuck along the way, but the dissertation is so long and has so many components that it's unlikely to go so smoothly. You will probably discover weaknesses in certain chapters months after drafting them or inconsistencies in your position that only become apparent once a large chunk of the dissertation is drafted. Since revisions made in one chapter can affect how the entire work hangs together, they are likely to require revisions in other chapters. Keeping the entire project coherent in your mind is much more challenging when it's this robust.
Difference #3: Higher Stakes
What happens if you fail to complete a term paper at the semester's end? You take an incomplete and finish it after the semester concludes. Usually, so long as you don't take years to clear an incomplete, no one will care. And even if the paper is subpar, no one is going to care if you have a B+ on your graduate transcripts. (Few hiring committees even look at graduate transcripts when evaluating candidates.)
What happens if you miss the deadline for submitting to that conference? Nothing. After you finish prepping your paper, you find another conference and send it there.
What happens if you don't finish your dissertation before your funding runs out? Well, you probably get forced down the path of adjunct work to support yourself, and your efforts to finish it and find permanent academic employment become very slim. (The horror stories of folks spending 10-12 years in graduate school usually involve this situation: often, more than half that time is spent in this tragic ABD purgatory.) In the worst-case scenario, you will be dismissed from your program.
Compared to most of your graduate studies, the dissertation is a high-stakes project. Beyond the risks associated with taking too long to finish it, its quality will also affect your long-term employability, since a significant portion of your early-career work will probably be derived from it. The importance of the dissertation creates additional pressure that can make working on it more emotionally and mentally exhausting than other projects.
Difference #4: Dissertation Work Cannot (Easily) Be Postponed
Many things in graduate school can be delayed with no serious penalties – so long as you do eventually get them done and they are of acceptable quality. Typically, it is not a big deal to put off a term paper or take an extra weekend to grade a stack of exams. But if you get in the habit of putting off progress on your dissertation, things are likely to go badly for you. Once you have gone a week or two without making much progress on your dissertation, it becomes very difficult to jump back into the project and to re-establish the disciplined regiment required for consistent progress. (I'll have more to say about this phenomenon in part 5 of this series.) This problem is heightened by the fact that the dissertation occurs at the very end of graduate school, a time when delays often cannot be afforded.
Does Writing a Master's Thesis Help?
Writing a thesis was not required in my graduate program: you don't need to a get an MA to acquire the PhD, and even if you want one, there is a non-thesis option. Nonetheless, I elected to write one in the belief that it would help prepare me for writing the dissertation down the road (as well as give me some material I could craft into conference papers and publications). Did it help prepare me for the dissertation? Somewhat.
A thesis, like a dissertation, does not have the formal structure or rigid deadlines associated with coursework and is also much longer than a typical philosophy paper. (My thesis was just over 30,000 words.) But in my case, differences #3 and #4 did not apply: there would have been no long-term costs associated with a failure to complete my thesis, and pushing back the defense date from the spring to the fall did not end up being a big deal.
I should also note that the thesis was still short enough that my progress only stalled once – when it became clear I would have to retool my position in response to some strong objections. Recovering from a single lull in the writing process is not all that daunting. With the dissertation, in contrast, I hit significant lulls on three separate occasions, two of which were very difficult to recover from. Just because you've written a thesis successfully does not mean that the dissertation will be smooth sailing.
In his post last week, "Should You Go to Graduate School in Philosophy (Revisited)", Trevor wrote:
Now let's suppose you answer this first question in the affirmative – you think the grad school experience will be worth it even if things go unfavorably for you sometime during the program or during your time on the job market. The next question to ask – one that I did not consider when I was contemplating whether to go to graduate school – is this: "Do I deeply enjoy writing philosophy?" Like the previous question, if you cannot answer this one with a sincere yes, then I think going to graduate school is unwise.
If you enjoy reading philosophy or talking philosophy, that's great. But what really matters to your long-term success in graduate school is whether you will write philosophy...
In response to Trevor's post, an anonymous commenter ('O') wrote: "I think the author is exagerating [sic]. How many people do you know who enjoy writing philosophy? I know very few, even among professors." However, my experience--and Trevor's evidently--is very different. Like Trevor, many of the people I know who have done well in the profession appear to be people who sincerely love writing, and do a ton of it. Not only that. Whereas the times that I struggled the most in my career--both during graduate school and during my early career after receiving my PhD--were the times that I didn't get much written because I didn't enjoy it. I only began to publish successfully and do better on the job market once I learned to really enjoy writing philosophy, just like Trevor says. And, make no mistake, I really love it. As I noted in a comment: "I absolutely love writing philosophy. I wake up just about every weekday looking forward to doing it." This is, if anything, an understatement. I'm half-ashamed to admit it, but often enough if I'm having a boring weekend I actually can't wait for Monday around so I can start drafting a new paper! I'm a nerd, I know, but it's true. :)
Anyway, after writing my comment, a few people asked me how I came to love writing. First, Amanda asked:
Marcus, did you always love writing, or did it change once you decided to write about big ideas instead of the stuff others told you to write about? I think I am going to change my writing style (i.e. write about what I enjoy writing about, and in the style I enjoy) after I finish one last round of revisions for the "try to please the authorities" paper. I hope I have more fun.
Then, after responding to Amanda, I received a similar query via email about how to write more efficiently. Because learning to love writing was such an important part of my professional development--and because at least a couple of people were interested in the answers--I thought I might write a short post on these issues. So, here goes!
Step 1: The 3-5 page "free drafting" method
As I recounted several times before (albeit several years ago), the very first step I took toward loving writing came from a most unexpected place. I had gotten nowhere on my dissertation for a few years...when I randomly received a "how to write a dissertation" book in my department mailbox. Because I was pretty desperate, I actually read it and found that it offered a really interesting piece of advice: getting up first thing in the morning (always first thing!) and forcing yourself to free-write 3-5 pages of material with absolutely no pausing or editing, then making yourself stop and move onto other things (revising other papers, etc.). The trick is to force new ideas out of your head as quickly as possible every single day. Why? As I recounted here, the rationale behind the method is really clever: the primary point is not just to "conquer writer's block" or give one daily practice of writing (though my experience is that it is brilliant for both of these things!). The primary point is that by getting 3-5 pages of new material written every day, each day you end the day knowing you "got somewhere." The point is to build a positive daily attitude--where, each day, at the end of the day, you think to yourself, "You know, I got stuff written today. Can't wait for tomorrow!"
In my experience this was exactly right. The very first week I tried the method, I wrote 20 pages of my dissertation. Then, on Saturday, I cleaned it up and found I had five good pages: the first five good pages of my dissertation. My dissertation was done a mere 8 months later! All because of this one trick--that and the "throw up, then clean up" method I described here (which I also learned from the book). And the strategy didn't just work for me, either. I gave the book to another grad student who was struggling to get anywhere...and eight or nine months later she was done too! Finally, I've only expanded the method since then. Nowadays, I average about 2,500-3,000 "free draft" words per day (e.g. 7-10 pages)--basically, about 10-12K words per week during the summer. It's a ton a fun, and leads me to the next lesson I learned...
Step 2: Over-producing
As I explained here, the second great piece of advice I received came from two early-career people I knew who published up a storm. When I asked them what their secret was (independently!), they both gave roughly the same answer: because journal rejection rates are 90+%, they "overproduced", always having something like ten articles under review at journals. As someone who (at the time) only had one paper under review and (at the time) spent forever revising things, that sounded impossible to me! But, I gave it a shot: using the "free drafting" method described above, I started writing quick drafts of every seemingly "half-decent" philosophical idea that popped into my head. I wrote a ton of papers...and just like they said, I started publishing. Not only that, I found that it was a ton of fun! Just think about it for a moment. Here's one way of approaching philosophical writing: slave over one paper for months on end. Here's another: draft a new paper on a new idea every week or two! Which sounds more fun? My experience is that that it's the latter by far. Every week or so I find myself exploring--and writing about--new ideas and arguments. It's simply a ton of fun. And no, a lot of the ideas don't pan out (I have more "dead" drafts around that you can probably fathom). But, part of what makes it so fun is that when you only spend a week or two drafting up a new idea, you don't have that much invested in it. If it doesn't work out, oh well - onto the next idea! Once again, it's fun. Ever since I learned this trick, I draft things up quickly, then see which of the drafts seem to "fly", send them out to conferences, see if others think they're any good--and then, send out the papers that seem most promising to journals! Another cool thing about this approach is that, all too often, you can end up revisiting "dead" drafts years later. On a few separate occasions, I've returned to and ended up publishing articles I had left for dead (here's one)...because years later, the answer to what was wrong with them popped into my head out of nowhere.
Step 3: Writing on "big ideas"
Finally, the third thing that really got me to love writing philosophy was a conscious decision many years ago to start writing on really big, ambitious ideas that represented the kind of philosopher I wanted to be rather than the kind of philosopher I thought I was "supposed" to be. Throughout much of grad school, and then my first year or two after the PhD, I tried to write the kind of articles I thought might get me published--the kind of really narrow "A Counterexample to X's Argument on Y" that people often mention when criticizing philosophy's overprofessionalization. I tried writing these kinds of papers because they are the kinds of papers I saw others publishing. But honestly, I just found it a total drag. It wasn't the kind of philosophy that inspired me, and I wasn't getting much good work done--and so I just remember saying to myself at some point, "You know, if I'm going to fail at this philosophy thing, I might as well fail doing the kind of ambitious work that made me love philosophy in the first place." And so I gave it a shot, writing on and ultimately publishing some big ideas, while having a blast doing it. All of which, once again, made writing philosophy fun!
Anyway, these were the three lessons I learned that made me love writing philosophy: (1) free-writing 3-5 pages every day, (2) drafting up as many new ideas as I can as often as I can, and (3) doing the kind of philosophy that made me want to become a philosopher so many years ago. Who knows - maybe similar steps will work for you too!
By Trevor Hedberg
In a post I wrote four years ago, I noted that certain discussions in our profession seem to resurface every year. One of these discussions is what we should tell undergraduate students who are interested in studying philosophy at the graduate level. Some views on this subject can be found elsewhere on the Cocoon, on the Philosophy Smoker, on Michael Huemer's personal website, on Bleeding Heart Libertarians, on Goodbye, Academia!, and on plenty of other sites if you're willing to dig through the search results. Since the job market is so tough and the attrition rate in graduate programs so high, there's a fairly strong case for discouraging students from pursuing graduate study in our discipline.
Now that I have completed my graduate studies and my first full stint on the job market, I want to share how my views on this subject have changed. The last time I wrote about this issue, I largely echoed the criteria that Eric Schwitzgebel put forward in the opening post of his series on applying to graduate school in philosophy. He writes, "I advise students not to consider graduate school in philosophy unless (1.) they'd be happy teaching philosophy at a low prestige college and are willing to move almost anywhere in the country, and (2.) even if they never finished the degree they would have found the process of studying philosophy at the graduate level intrinsically worthwhile." I read this advice for the first time in 2009 – when I was considering whether to apply to graduate school myself. I still believe that his second condition is the most important question for prospective graduate students to ask themselves.
No one – no matter what program they are admitted to and no matter how brilliant they may be – is so special that they are guaranteed to finish their degree and get a tenure-track job. Not under current circumstances, at least. In fact, the majority of graduate students fail to land tenure-track positions. (Only about half actually finish their doctoral program.) Because of this dreary reality, would-be graduate students need to ask themselves the following question: "Would the experience of studying philosophy for many years be worth it even if I did not finish the program or find permanent academic employment?" If the answer is anything other than yes, then I think going to graduate school is unwise. Admittedly, it may be difficult for some people considering grad school in philosophy – especially those who are still undergraduates – to be confident in their answer to this question, but you have to make a serious effort to answer it nonetheless. It's too important to neglect: if you go through graduate school with an urgent need for a stable career at the end of the journey, you are likely to end up disheartened and frustrated.
Now let's suppose you answer this first question in the affirmative – you think the grad school experience will be worth it even if things go unfavorably for you sometime during the program or during your time on the job market. The next question to ask – one that I did not consider when I was contemplating whether to go to graduate school – is this: "Do I deeply enjoy writing philosophy?" Like the previous question, if you cannot answer this one with a sincere yes, then I think going to graduate school is unwise.
If you enjoy reading philosophy or talking philosophy, that's great. But what really matters to your long-term success in graduate school is whether you will write philosophy. You will be writing multiple term papers every semester that you are taking courses. If your aim is to be competitive on the job market, then you will be revising some of these papers for a long time after initially completing them. You will present shorter versions of these papers at conferences and prepare some of them for publication (often after many revisions are made based on the feedback you receive). Even after all that, you may have to keep submitting a paper to journals for years to secure a publication. You may have to write a Master's Thesis, and unless you get admitted to one of the very rare programs that allows "star papers" to substitute for a dissertation, you will have to write one of those as well. When you finish graduate school, your ability to achieve tenure (should you land a tenure-track job) will often hinge in part on your ability to produce publishable research.
Now you might think that you enjoy writing philosophy enough that this doesn't sound all that bad. But let's test that hypothesis a little. Imagine the following scenario:
It's Friday night. Earlier in the day, you taught two discussion sections and attended a talk in your department given by a distinguished guest speaker. In between these events, you read an article for one of next week's seminar meetings and graded a few papers. You've had your eye on a call for papers for a regional conference with a keynote in one of your major research areas. The deadline is 5:00 pm tomorrow.
Just then you receive a text message to join a few other graduate students for drinks. You decline the invitation and spend the evening revising a recent term paper so that you have something suitable to submit to this conference. Although it takes you all night and most of Saturday, you send off an email to the conference organizers at 4:30 pm with your paper and abstract attached.
How do you react to reading this anecdote? Does this sort of weekend sound dreadful? Tolerable? Pleasant? If you don't think that you would like doing this sort of thing on the weekend, then grad school in philosophy is probably not the best thing for you. (I'm not saying you would have to do this every weekend, but situations like this will happen with some regularity.) Your commitment to philosophical writing has to be stable and powerful. If it isn't, then you will likely abandon this commitment at some point in your graduate career. There will be moments where you are sorely tempted to neglect your writing, and if you don't enjoy this part of doing philosophy, you are more likely to succumb to this temptation. Should that happen, you may not have the publication record needed to be a competitive job candidate or your dissertation may remain forever incomplete.
If you're the sort of person who writes philosophy just for fun or for your own intellectual enrichment, then you might well have a deep enough interest in writing philosophy to enjoy your time as a graduate student and be reasonably successful at the end of it. In contrast, if you need to be "forced" to write philosophy (e.g., by term paper deadlines, by pressure from your professors), then the odds are good that graduate school will ultimately turn into little more than stress and toil for you.
Thus far, I've identified what I consider the two most crucial questions to ask when considering graduate school in philosophy. What else should be considered when making this decision? Schwitzgebel identifies two other important factors (which he lumps together into a single condition): whether you would enjoy a teaching-oriented position at a low-prestige college and whether you are geographically flexible with your life plans. These should both be taken into account, and I think at least four others warrant consideration as well: the placement record of the institution you plan to attend, your funding situation at the institution you plan to attend, your family plans, and your intended area of specialization.
How should each of these factors affect your decision about whether to go to graduate school? Well, let's break them down in a bit more detail.
Would you be happy with a teaching position at a low-prestige college?
Not all jobs in philosophy are teaching-oriented positions, but most of them are. If the answer to this question is no, then it's going to be a lot more difficult to find an academic job that would enable you to have a fulfilling career.
Would you be willing to relocate far away from where you currently live to find a suitable job in academic philosophy?
If you meet the very first condition that I discussed, then your decision to attend grad school in philosophy does not hinge entirely on whether you can get a permanent academic position in the field. But most likely, you would prefer to get such a position. Greater geographic flexibility means a larger pool of jobs that you will be able to apply for. Of course, very few of us are willing to relocate anywhere in the world, but the pickier you are regarding the region of the world that you would like to live in, the more limited you will be in what jobs you can apply for every year.
Does the institution you plan to attend have a strong placement record?
Like the previous consideration, this is only relevant if you would prefer long-term academic employment. If so, then your institution's placement record should factor into your decision. How often to people with PhDs from this institution get tenure-track jobs, and are the kinds of jobs they tend to get ones that would be acceptable to you?
Note here that I am emphasizing placement record rather than prestige. This runs counter to a claim that I have heard many times over the years: "You should only go to graduate school if you get into a program that is in the top 25 of the Philosophical Gourmet Rankings." (Sometimes, the ranking number varies; the first time I heard this – about 8 years ago – I was told not to go to any programs outside the top 50.) I am not convinced that this advice is sound.
The assumption is that going to a low-prestige program puts you at such a disadvantage on the job market that it cannot be justified. Of course, there is some evidence that where you get your PhD affects your job market prospects, and placement record often correlates with the prestige of a program. But there also plenty of exceptions. Some schools that are unranked according to the Philosophical Gourmet report have surprisingly good placement records, and some ranked programs do not have great placement records. Thus, I don't think it is sound advice to look exclusively at a program's ranking to determine your likelihood of being able to get a job with a PhD from that institution.
Have you secured a funding package from the institution to which you have been admitted? And will the stipend be sufficient to cover your living expenses?
Getting a PhD in philosophy takes a lot of time (usually 6-8 years and perhaps longer if your time in graduate school spans multiple institutions), and the stipends associated with work as a teaching assistant are usually pretty meager. Given the opportunity costs involved in getting the degree and the uncertain career prospects, you really don't want to be racking up debt during graduate school. If you do not secure any funding, I would advise reapplying in the following fall semester and hoping for better results: the tuition costs, especially for out-of-state students, are usually too high to justify.
If you secure funding but will not be able to make ends meet with the stipend alone, then this is a strike against accepting the offer. Everyone has to meet their basic needs, and so you'll be incentivized to either adjunct at nearby institutions (which will reduce the amount of time that you can devote to your graduate studies) or take out loans. Neither is an ideal option.
Are you single or in a relationship? If you are single, do you hope to start a long-term relationship during graduate school? Do you have any children? Do you plan to have any children during graduate school?
One thing you need to consider before going to graduate school is how doing so would fit with your broader life plans. Attending a graduate program usually requires relocating at least once to start your program and probably 2-3 more times (possibly even more) if you seek long-term academic employment. If you have a family, is it feasible to uproot them this many times to pursue an academic career? Will doing so impede your partner's ability to find and maintain a satisfactory job? If you have or plan to have children, do you think you'll be able to be both the kind of parent and kind of graduate student you want to be?
Starting a family or staying involved with the one you have already established is not incompatible with being a productive graduate student, but it does pose some additional challenges. It's tough to balance parenthood and an academic life. And unfortunately, this balancing act is likely to be more difficult for mothers than fathers. It can be done, of course, as many people in academia regularly demonstrate, but you will need to consider whether the sacrifices that academic life may require are compatible with how you prioritize spending time with your family.
What is your intended area of specialization?
Your area of specialization matters a lot to your employment prospects. Why? Because some areas of specialization have more job openings than others. The current trend in the profession is that jobs in value theory are more common than most other AOSs, and jobs in the "core" areas of philosophy – epistemology, metaphysics, language, etc. – are less common. Jobs in ethics, applied ethics, and political philosophy are likely to remain in higher demand than other areas of philosophy because undergraduate course offerings in these areas are much more common than offerings in most other areas. In some cases, you area of specialization may be far more important to your chances of employment than your institution of origin. (A person from an unranked program with a value theory AOS, for example, may well have a much better shot at a tenure-track job than a person from a distinguished program whose AOS is aesthetics.) So one thing that you must consider is what the employment prospects are like in your intended AOS. That doesn't mean that the desire to pursue an AOS outside value theory implies that you shouldn't go to grad school in philosophy, but the (even greater) scarcity of jobs outside value theory should be given some weight in your deliberations.
Of course, one caveat here is that people's interests often change during graduate school in philosophy. There's no guarantee that your intended AOS will remain the same during your many years of graduate school, and given the difficulties presented by writing the dissertation, you do not want to try to write one in a subject area you aren't passionate about just to increase your probability of employment when you finish. That's a recipe for dropping out at the ABD stage, and even if you pulled it off, you'd then be applying for jobs where you would teach and/or research in an area you weren't deeply interested in. All that said, you've got to decide whether to go to graduate school based on whatever information is at your disposal – if you want to study epistemology, you shouldn't just expect that your interests will shift as your studies progress. You've got to assume some level of consistency in your philosophical interests, even if that assumption ends up being mistaken.
Now that I've presented all this information, it can be condensed down to a relatively simple decision procedure.
1. Would the experience of studying philosophy for many years be worth it even if you did not finish the program or find permanent academic employment?
If yes, proceed to question 2; otherwise, you should not apply to graduate school in philosophy. (Answers like "maybe" or "I don't know" do not count as "yes" answers.
2. Do you deeply enjoy writing philosophy?
If yes, proceed to items 3-8; otherwise, you should not apply to graduate school in philosophy. (Answers like "sort of" or "I don't know" do not count as "yes" answers.)
3. Would you be happy with a teaching position at a low-prestige college?
4. Would you be willing to relocate far away from where you currently live to find a suitable job in academic philosophy?
5. Does the institution you plan to attend have a strong placement record?
6. Have you secured a funding package from the institution to which you have been admitted? And will the stipend be sufficient to cover your living expenses?
7. Are you single or in a relationship? If you are single, do you hope to start a long-term relationship during graduate school? Do you have any children? Do you plan to have any children during graduate school?
8. What is your intended area of specialization?
In my view, no particular answer in 3-8 offer a decisive reason against going to graduate school in philosophy (though I think failure to gain funding to a program where one is admitted comes very close). But these questions can generate "red flags" that should carry weight in your deliberations. If you aren't willing to take a teaching job, then that's a red flag; if you aren't willing to move too far from home, that's a red flag; if your intended AOS is metaphysics, that's a red flag.
I don't think there's a magic number of red flags that make it unwise for a person to go to graduate school (provided that questions 1 and 2 have been answered affirmatively), and they can be mitigated by other factors. For example, an intended AOS in metaphysics shouldn't carry as much weight in your decision regarding whether to pursue graduate studies if you can gain admission to NYU or if you don't care at all about academic employment. But fewer red flags will usually correlate with a higher probability of personal enjoyment during graduate school and professional success afterward.
I know it might seem silly to try to reduce a significant life choice such as whether to attend graduate school in philosophy to a point-by-point series of questions like this. These kinds of decisions tend to be too context-sensitive and complicated for this to work. But if I were to advise an undergraduate student about whether they should pursue philosophy at the graduate level, this is more-or-less exactly what I would ask them and how I'd advise them based on their answers.
Now I'm curious what you all think. Does this seem broadly right? Have I omitted anything really important? Have I given something too much or too little weight? How would your advice to undergraduates match up with what I've presented above?
In the comments section of our most recent "how can we help you?" post, 'Prospective Student' writes:
I'm a prospective PhD student, but I'm also a prospective J.D. student. I would like to enter a joint J.D./PhD program. I don't really care where. I love philosophy, and I want to write a dissertation and attend conferences. Surely, I want to teach; but I'm sticking to weak generalizations about my interests because I'm still a student.
My dilemma is this. I'm not really interested in the philosophy of law or value theory. I want to do a joint PhD/J.D. strictly out of interest and financial gain. I'm hoping to write a dissertation in metaphysics or in a related area. But I'm also hoping to graduate with a J.D. so I can leave academia if I can't find a job. I'm okay with not finding a job in philosophy. I'm not ok with not writing a dissertation, publishing, or attending conferences. I hope to do this my entire life, even if I'm not a professional philosopher.
That being said, will departments think that this is not feasible if I lack an interest in philosophy of law? For example, I am thinking about applying to UCSD for metaphysics and then UCSD law school; would it be audacious of me not to include that information in my statement of interest for UCSD and then, if I were accepted, to inform the department that I would like to go ahead with the joint program (or otherwise do a joint program elsewhere). Thanks all.
In response, Craig wrote the following (which I have abridged due to its length):
My advice here is not to do the JD/PHD if you aren't interested in philosophy of law or value theory. You are right to suspect that programs will look askance at this. This is in part because a phd is hard and requires tremendous concentration, and disrupting it for three years to study a topic mostly unrelated to your research is going to make it far, far less likely that you'll succeed...
[B]y seeking the JD/PHD, you are going to limit the schools you might attend, on both hooks. There are good law schools where you won't find good phd programs (not naming names, b/c I don't want to be a jerk), and there are good phd programs without competitive or any law schools (e.g., UCSD does not have a law school). If you want a shot at academia, give yourself the best possible shot by going to the best possible school--it matters significantly.
Finally, your goals as I understand them would be far better served considering these projects in serial. A JD/PHD program is not a good way to save time or money or to increase one's employment chances--it is a good way to do interdisciplinary research...
Although I'm probably not in the best position to judge (more on this below), I'm inclined on the basis of my own experience to agree and disagree with Craig. As someone who barely made it through my PhD program (and have seen more than a few people not make it), I know in a very personal way just how psychologically difficult it can be to go through a PhD program without a backup plan waiting in the wings (which a joint JD/PhD program might have given me). When I had been in grad school for seven years, and it looked like I would never finish the degree, I was positively terrified. I had nothing to fall back on for an alternate career--and I wished for all the world that I had pursued a joint JD/PhD (which my grad institution, Arizona, offered!). When I entered grad school, I had no interest in moral or political philosophy: my primary area of focus had been metaphysics. Which is one of the reasons why I didn't pursue the JD. Oh, how things change! Several years later I was doing my comp exams in ethics and political, and a JD would have very much been up my alley. So, I'm not sure it's a good idea to choose or not choose a joint program on the basis of one's interests (which can, and often do, change in grad school).
The more salient issue, I think, are the job-prospects involved. However, here too I sort of disagree with Craig. As Carolyn Dicey Jennings' recent job-market analysis shows, only 37.4% of all philosophy PhDs get tenure-track jobs three years out of grad school, and in fact, when the figures include those with unknown AOSs the figure drops to just 26.5%). Given that, as far as I can tell, a fairly sizable number of candidates even coming out of top-ranked Leiter programs don't get tenure-track jobs, this makes a philosophy PhD an enormous risk no matter what one does--no matter how good the program one joins might be (and it is worth bearing in mind significant grad program attrition rates as well!). Although pursuing a joint JD/PhD may or may not harm one's chances for an academic job, one's chances for those jobs were bad already. So, why not at least have a good backup? Finally, on that note, I'm less convinced that a joint JD/PhD would significantly harm one's chances for a good career in law. Although of course the highest-rated law schools (Harvard Law, etc.) tend to have the best placement records by far, I've known more than people who made fine careers in law for themselves (including becoming a partner at top law-firms) not coming out of a top-program.
For these reasons, I'm more sanguine about joint JD/PhD programs. Although, admittedly, I never went through such a program myself--and so I'm surely far from well situated to judge--I can say, retrospectively, that I wish I had availed myself of the opportunity at Arizona. In any case, I'd be very curious to hear from who are better placed to judge--people who either did pursue a joint JD/PhD, or else grad-program placement directors who have seen how well individuals do with joint degrees.
Do any of you have any helpful insight? I think this is an important (and not oft-discussed) issue!
By Trevor Hedberg
In Spring 2017, I finally completed my doctoral dissertation. While the experience is still fresh in my mind, I thought it might help graduate students to offer a little perspective on what it's like to write a dissertation and what makes it such a difficult part of graduate school. In the opening segment of this series, I want to consider a question that crossed my mind several times during my first four years of graduate school: is writing a dissertation really that difficult?
Leading up to dissertation work, I had written a 30,000-word master's thesis, learned the ropes of the peer review process, and passed my portfolio papers (my program's equivalent of comprehensive examinations) with relative ease. Graduate school had, on the whole, gone well prior to the dissertation, and I was confident in my writing abilities. I was aware that the dissertation stage was the most common stage at which students dropped out of their graduate programs, and I had heard many horror stories about just how painful and treacherous dissertation writing could be. Even so, I expected that writing the dissertation would go smoothly.
Things did not go as planned. The process dragged on longer than expected, and there were some major lulls in my production – in the most extreme instances, months passed with no new content written. In the spring semester of my last year of funding, I finally finished it and squeezed in a defense a little more than a week before the deadline for May graduation.
What made things difficult? On reflection, I think there were four major features of dissertation work that made writing it a challenge:
Over the next few weeks, I'll be reflecting on these four items and presenting some strategies for dealing with them. My hope is that graduate students can benefit from learning a little more about the process of writing a dissertation and that readers currently struggling with their dissertation might gain some insight into how they can finish it.
In this series, I will not discuss the dissertation defense or post-defense revisions. The oral defense tends to be straightforward. If your dissertation advisor greenlights the defense, then you should be able to pass it without too much trouble. I imagine that the extent of revision required could vary, but in my case, the revisions were relatively minor. Since these stages posed no major obstacles in my case, I don't have much to say about them.
I will also not be discussing how one should choose a topic or write a prospectus. Some topics are more suitable for doctoral dissertations than others, and choosing a suitable topic is important to one's career trajectory. But one of the Cocoon's most widely shared posts discussed this at length several years ago. I have little to add beyond what was said there, and I moved through this part of the process pretty quickly. (My advisor and I had been discussing potential topics for more than a year prior to me passing our program's comprehensive examination, and that helped speed up the process a great deal.) In my case, determining the dissertation topic was not the hard part. The hard part was the next 200 pages.
Is writing a dissertation really that difficult? Yes. Yes it is.
I had dinner with an early-career philosopher friend the other evening, and at one point the conversation turned to a topic I have cared a great deal about ever since I was in graduate school: helping graduate students succeed. As readers may (or may not) know, I attended two different philosophy PhD programs: Syracuse in the late '90s, and then Arizona (where I transferred because four of our star faculty at Syracuse were simultaneously hired away by other programs). I have very fond memories of joining both programs. It was truly exciting--and more than a bit humbling--as a young person who loved philosophy to join programs with so many talented and brilliant people. I particularly remember the grad students in both programs. Basically everyone who entered the programs was smart as a whip, with a history of academic success. As a naive newcomer, I confess that I expected that most of the grad students I knew would succeed, get tenure-track jobs, and go on to have long careers in the academy.
Of course, and unfortunately, I was wrong. While I don't have the statistics in front of me, I seem to recall coming across a statistic several years ago that something like only 50% of philosophy PhD students ever finish the degree, let alone finish and get a tenure-track job. At any rate, even if this statistic is wrong, every graduate program I've ever visited or heard about has plenty of students who fit that description--students who hang around the program for 7-8 or even 10 years, only to fade from view, never finishing the degree. Moreover, at least in my own experience, it tended to be very surprising which students those would be. A few cases aside, I don't think anyone--neither I, nor the faculty or other students in the programs I joined--could forecast very well which new students would succeed and which wouldn't. For my part, some of the students I felt sure would succeed didn't, and some who I expected wouldn't succeed did. Indeed, from my perspective at least, some of the most brilliant grad students I knew didn't make it, whereas some of the "less talented" ones did. Why?
This brings me to the conversation I had the other night. My friend, who came out of a non-Leiter-ranked institution, has in my view done spectacularly well on the job-market--far better, for what I can see, than many candidates coming out of fancier programs. In past conversations, and this one as well, I remarked that I think it has probably been because, in addition to being a good philosopher, he has been a "real professional." He has, as far as I can tell, done just about everything right as a grad student: he's published, networked, has a positive online presence, and so on. I knew a handful of students just like him in my many years as a grad student--and they too are to this day have gone onto have more successful careers than most of the other students I knew.
Anyway, my friend and I then discussed how grad students "go wrong." We both noted that although there are a lot of really talented grad students, for one reason or another many of them don't end up doing the kinds of things they need to put themselves in a position to succeed. Either they are brilliant or they don't publish, or they don't network, or they alienate their faculty advisors, and so on. As someone who made a number of mistakes in graduate school myself, I very much identified with our conversation here. "Doing everything right" in graduate school is tough. Many grad students are young, still "finding themselves" (and yes, making mistakes) as human beings. And grad school can be a real trial: journal rejections, competition for faculty support, trouble developing dissertation topics, comprehensive exams--they can all get you down, destroy one's confidence or zest for philosophy; and so on. I struggled with many of these obstacles, and so did many other people I knew...and I finished the PhD myself only by the skin of my teeth.
It occurred to me later on--after the conversation--that in my experience there are many different "common types" of graduate students. Although I don't ordinarily like "putting people into boxes"--and I by no means intend to generalize or derogate any category of person--I do think it can be helpful (for reasons I will give momentarily) to reflect on the different types of ways graduate students can struggle and/or fail. Here, then, are a few broad categories that in my experience grad students can fall into (and indeed, for my part, at different times in my grad career, I found myself more than a few of the categories I list):
Again, I don't mean to say that these categories accurately "define" anyone as a person (I myself fell into several of these categories despite thinking that none of them define(d) me as a person!). My reason for listing them is to simply draw attention to some common ways that--in my experience--grad students can either "go right" or "go wrong." Can you think of any other common categories?
This brings me, finally, to the point I want to argue for--which is that it seems to me rarely discussed what programs and faculty should do given that grad students predictably end up in many of these categories. As my friend put it--and this is my experience too--faculty and grad programs often appear to see it as their job to "give grad students information" (on how to publish, network, etc.) but then leave it up to grad students to either do those things or not. This common approach--if indeed it still is common--fits with the common saying, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink." Alas, I want to suggest that this approach is a mistake. If my years as an educator--and my recent work mentoring a PhD student at another institution--have taught me anything, it is that if you want people to succeed (as I do), you need to meet them where they are, providing some real, concrete, hands-on direction to help them successfully grapple with the things they are struggling with (including, yes, whatever character-deficiencies they might currently possess). I know, I know - I've heard it many times: grad school faculty aren't "baby-sitters." I agree, but I also think there's a difference between being a baby-sitter and being an effective professional mentor. Baby-sitters watch over children, protecting them from harm, doing things for them. A good professional mentor does not do things for a student. What they do is help those they are mentoring understand what they are doing wrong, and then learn how to do better.
Here, I think, is a helpful example - one I think I recently learned a great deal from. I currently mentor several people, including (as I mentioned above) a grad student at another university. This student does good work, but do to perfectionist tendencies and poor planning does not get work done and out to journals in a timely fashion--things she needs to do to succeed as an academic. For a while, I handled her situation the way I have seen so many academic mentors do, letting her "figure out her own problems", expressing some displeasure with her performance (viz. "You need to be more productive and get things out"), and so on. Alas, none of this worked. Then I took a very different tack: I carefully explained to her how I get things done--how I make clear, concrete daily and weekly goals in my head about exactly what I need to accomplish and when (by what date), and then hold myself to those goals, never falling behind (or, if I do, making myself catch up the next day). I then helped her draw out a daily and weekly plan of her own to illustrate--and, so far, it has worked like a charm!
I'm not saying I'm a perfect mentor, by any means. What I am saying is that I think PhD programs and grad faculty should think about and approach these issues more carefully than they often appear to, and at all relevant junctures--not only when it comes to particular students, but also when it comes to decisions about how many students to admit to a program to begin with. I say this, again, not because I think we should be "baby-sitters", but because I think it is the responsible thing to do with vulnerable people (grad students) who have so much at stake (7-10 years in grad school, even if they succeed!). Given how terrible the academic job-market is these days, I think we should move away from a "sink or swim" approach, and instead make it a point of ensuring that as many grad students as we admit go onto succeed--either by adopting more hands-on mentoring strategies, or by restricting how many students one's program admits (so as to better serve the students who are admitted), or both.
In my post the other day on Eric McCormack's, "Some Lesser Known Lessons from Academia", I mentioned how in my experience his lesson #3 ("You don't need to feel like you're succeeding") is really apt. One of the biggest challenges of academia is that you "fail" far more often than you succeed. Consequently, learning how to grapple effectively with failures--both large and small--is absolutely vital for burgeoning academics. Whether one wilts in the face of failure, or whether one finds away to recover and adapt, can make not only an enormous difference in whether one succeeds professionally, but also with one's mental well-being. I know this from experience. I went through some terrible times early in my career--both in graduate school and during my many years on the job-market--and, in all honesty, barely made it though.
Anyway, over at his blog Digressions&Impressions, took up McCormack's topic as well, discussing one of his own tough times in grad school:
A recent dinner with friends from graduate school and Daniel McCormack's useful post (see also this moving piece by the late Josh Parsons) brought to mind a painful memory: my equivalent of what McCormack calls the "candidacy defense."...For me this exam came in my fourth year.
I knew my draft-chapter was not very strong...[And] My Preliminary Essay evaluation process had not been a happy experience because the committee was very divided about the quality of my work (about that some other time)...
I don't recall much about the actual candidacy defense, except that it was in my supervisor's office, and that after, I felt like a total intellectual idiot/nitwit. (The more recent jargon would be imposter.) It was clear that my project relied on half-baked assumptions and badly understood distinctions. Even though none of them had any special expertise on my topic, they had seen right through the project and honed in on its weaknesses. They were not mean, and I sensed no ill-will toward me (and this made it worse); it was strictly business, and I was left holding unsaleable shmattes. While they were conferring on my fate, I recall sitting in the hall-way too numb too feel, but contemplating if I should apply to law-school at once or move with my Bullmastiff to Red Lodge, WY, and spend the rest of my life in exile from the world. (No way I was going home having proved myself such a failure.) Before going to graduate school, I spent a year working in corporate America researching by phone what kind of Linotype printers European print-shops owned, and I was not eager to go back to such mindless drudgery.
Schleisser's story got me thinking that it might be helpful if we all shared some of our own biggest failures as early-career folk, and how we grappled with them. I think this might be helpful for two reasons.
First, in my experience, it can be encouraging to see that you're not the only one who has gone through difficult times. I distinctly recall reading Ruth Millikan's wonderful Dewey Lecture while I was still struggling on the job-market, and being intensely moved by her story. In brief, Millikan reports (i) having to walk out of an exam of Stanley Cavell's for personal reasons; (ii) her dissertation supervisor (Wilfred Sellars) leaving her program before she had made any real progress on the dissertation; (iii) having a serious back injury, two children, a divorce, and a summer being treated in mental hospital while in grad school, and (iv) a dissertation took her 5 years (!) to complete with basically no supervision. I remember thinking to myself how maybe, just maybe, if Millikan could make it through all that and make such a career for herself, perhaps I too could make it through. Of course, it could have been hopeless optimism on my part--but I recall reading her story helping me a great deal emotionally during what were some very tough times. [A brief side-note: Millikan's Dewey Lecture isn't the only one like this. I would encourage readers to go back and read more. I recall reading a similar lecture by Charles Mills that similarly surprised and encouraged me].
Second, sharing experiences of failures and triumphs can be instructive, showing those who are currently undergoing struggles how others have grappled with similar obstacles and challenges before them. Indeed, as I will explain below, if my experience as an early-career academic philosopher has taught me anything, it is the importance of trying to learn from others. It's very hard to make it all on one's own in this world, and in this profession. Because I'm a shy, introverted person, I had a problematic tendency early in my career of being a "shrinking violet", avoiding my grad department, other grad students, and grad faculty when I was struggling, trying to "solve all my own problem." The more I went along in grad school and my career, the more I found it crucial to seek help from others when times are tough.
So, allow me to briefly share a few of my own biggest failures, and how I coped with them--and then open up the floor to you all to share how you coped with your biggest failures:
Failure #1 (a failed prospectus): After passing my comprehensive PhD exams in my third year at Arizona, I lost my confidence as a philosopher. I'd had a few revise-and-resubmits at good journals (including Analysis), all of which were unfortunately rejected (in part because, you guessed it, I didn't seek out nearly enough help from others in my department). I got down on myself, suffered a failed long-term romantic relationship just a bit earlier, and got down on myself. To distract myself, I started playing videogames and guitar in a rock band (two of my passions)...and about a year later had accomplished basically nothing: no publications, no good dissertation ideas, etc. I hit "rock bottom" as it were, and finally got off my tail and worked about six months to put together a dissertation prospectus: I drafted a few chapters, and sent them to my committee. The night before my prospectus was to be held, my advisor called me (while, yes, I was playing videogames), and told me my committee was cancelling my prospectus defense. They told me they had decided it was not a viable project, and that I would need to start over. I wept.
However, the next day I swallowed my pride and walked into another faculty member's office for advice: someone I had TA'd for (Mark Timmons), and who had always seemed to me a kind, helpful person. I asked him if I could come in, explained what had happened, and asked him very frankly, "What should I do?" He told me: "Read. Read widely. Read outside of your areas of focus." So, I did. I stopped focusing on trying to come up with an idea, and just started reading everything in sight. At one point, I read all of Rawls' books again: A Theory of Justice, Political Liberalism, The Law of Peoples, and so on...and a light went off in my head: no one had ever extended Rawls' original position to "nonideal theory"--and this was known to be a huge, problematic gap in his theory. Voila, just like that, I had a viable dissertation topic. That was probably my single biggest struggle in grad school, and how--thanks to the right advice at the right time--I got through it. A critical thing, though, was this: I would have never gotten that advice if I hadn't taken the risk to approach Mark. I'd made the error of being a "shrinking violet" long enough. I learned better...and it ended up making all the difference.
Failure #2 (publishing): I finished my PhD with no publications, lots of rejections and a few failed R&R's, and felt constantly stressed about it during my first job. After several months of hard work at my job but little to show for it, I approached two early-career faculty at other universities who came from my same program (Arizona) and had been wildly successful. I asked them, "What's your secret?" They both gave the same answer: "I send out a lot of stuff." They basically both told me that since journals have 90% rejection-rates, you basically need to have ten papers under review at any given time if you want to publish consistently. That made sense to me, so I started writing lots of papers as quickly as I could. Just like that, I started publishing...and enjoying my work again!
Failure #3 (years on the job-market): I spent seven years on the academic j0b-market. Some years I got a couple of interviews, some years I got none. For a number of years, I basically did the same old drill: update my CV, rework my cover letter, research statement, etc.--but I got nowhere. My spouse suggested I hire a job-consultant. I was skeptical, and didn't want to waste a ton of money (it was very expensive). But heck, I figured, "if I've learned anything it's that when I'm having trouble, outside help has helped me before!" So, I hired the consultant, and started getting a lot interviews. Also, since I was a bad interviewer and wasn't converting many interviews into flyouts (like many introverts, I can come across awkward and nervous in new situations with people I don't know), my spouse suggested that we practice interviews constantly--on evening walks with the dog, during my evening shower before bed, on Skype a few times a week, and so on. Although I wanted to avoid practicing like the plague--as it created great anxiety every time I thought about it--once again I decided to accept the outside help...and what do you know: all of the practice helped! I'll never be the best interviewee in the world, that's for sure: but, I learned, practice and feedback can only help.
Anyway, these are just a few of the obstacles I encountered, and as you can tell, there's sort of a common theme: whenever I was in need but simply asked for and accepted help, I tended to "get lucky", getting precisely the help I needed! Anyway, what have your biggest failures been as an early-career philosopher, and how did you grapple with them? Is there a "moral to your story"? What did you learn, either about yourself or about grappling effectively with failure(s)?
My attention was drawn today (via Daily Nous) to this piece by Daniel McCormack on "some lesser known lessons of academia." In brief, McCormack's lessons are that academia is likely to be a good fit for you only if:
Aside from the obvious problem of knowing in advance (prior to spending 7-10 years in a PhD program) whether you'll be cool with any of these things, my experience is that they are all pretty spot-on, but especially #3.
Indeed, #3 is in my experience the real "trick" with academia--the thing probably most responsible for so many incredibly talented grad students not finishing their PhD program (last I checked, the attrition rate for many programs was something like 50%!). The reason academic philosophy is so tough--well, aside from the job-market and other sociological things--is that unless you are one of those rare people for whom everything is a breeze (and I'veYou don't mind moving frequently, or being very mobile in general. known a few of them), you get so little positive feedback and so much negative feedback.
In most parts of life--whether it is relationships, most jobs, or even graduate coursework for that matter--there is a pretty good balance between positive and negative feedback, depending on the quality of what you do. For instance, when I'm a good husband, my spouse tends to respond positively, and when I'm a bad husband...well, she doesn't. :( Similarly, when one does well on one's coursework, one gets good grades; and when one doesn't, one doesn't. But, in a PhD program, things change once one gets beyond coursework. Positive feedback becomes so much harder to come by, and negative feedback a near-constant. There's a reason why Lego Grad-Student is so sadly funny: it's uncannily accurate. You really need to be a "glutton for punishment" if you want to be an academic--and, while it can get better over time as "one learns the ropes", it is still (I think) one of the more unique things about academia. Heck, even Jason Stanley gets his stuff rejected the vast majority of the time!
Anyway, I think McCormack's list of "lesser known lessons" is pretty good. What about you all? Can you think of any good "lesser known lessons of academia" not on McCormack's list? (Feel free to be serious or irreverent!)
Is it worth trying to apply for a new PhD program (e.g. in the UK) given my current situation? I am a PhD student in a non-English speaking country at a small philosophy department. I am nearing the nominal study time for my PhD. However – given my current standing – it is not likely that I will graduate any time soon. Also, I feel that, once having completed the PhD here, I would not really have much chance of getting a career in philosophy with the degree. I am aware that all this might give the impression that I am simply a bad student. I could try to reduce this impression by explaining the various reasons why I've found myself in this situation. However, I prefer not to do so on this webpage. With one exception: at a certain stage I found myself working on topics that no one in my department knows very much about. So as one option to improve my situation, I am considering applying anew for another PhD program in a better school, possibly in the UK. However, as I lack insight into the acceptance policies and preferences of more competitive institutions, and into the nature of the job-market more generally, I am struggling to assess whether such a move would be reasonable.
My concerns are:
My alternative is to graduate from where I am currently, try to publish some papers (on which I am working on right now) and apply for a post-doc position with these resources.
Eleni Manis has kindly drawn my attention to her website, Phil Skills, which contains some helpful resources and interview testimonials for philosophers interested in non-academic careers. Along with Helen de Cruz's Doing Things with Philosophy, our own Alt-Ac Workshop, and APA's Beyond Academia Guide, it is nice to see the increasing emphasis on helping philosophers transition successfully to non-academic careers.
In the comments section of our most recent "How can we help you post?", a reader asks:
The following question will be relevant to people who are soon to decide about which graduate school to attend in the UK (but will also be relevant for US students currently at graduate school):
When one is selecting a supervisor for one's PhD thesis, what's most important: (1) the supervisor's energy, engagement with your project, level of expertise, etc; or (2) the supervisor's seniority and worldwide reputation? Obviously, in a perfect world, one would want one's supervisor to have all these attributes, but this isn't a perfect world. If one has to decide between a supervisor that fits the attributes in (1) but not those in (2), and one who fits the attributes in (2) but not so much those in (1), what should one decide? (Let me pre-empt an obvious reply: get them both on your supervisory team. Sure, but that's not possible if they're at different institutions.)
I've heard it said that one should never be supervised by someone who isn't at the top rung of the career ladder, because it will make it much harder to get a job after one's PhD. Does this sound right? Can relatively inexperienced supervisors place their students?
Really good question. I recall hearing the same things as this reader: that if one has to choose between the two types of advisor, one should pick the 'famous' senior figure over the less-well-known, earlier-career person. But, as someone who is generally skeptical of intuitions (both philosophical and professional), I wonder what the evidence actually supports. To that end, it might help to hear from readers who have personal experience on either side of the issue:
Here are my highly anecdotal impressions. I've seen some people really struggle--both in terms of finishing the degree, and the job-market--choosing the less-than-helpful "famous" senior person. I think it can probably be really hard to come up with a good dissertation topic, finish the dissertation, and publish successfully with a person who lacks enthusiasm or investment in your work, regardless of their notoriety. At the same time, I've seen less of the other case: students who choose an early-career person with less notoriety. So, I'm really not sure if I can make that good of a comparison between the two.
Here, though, is what I do feel safe saying: the students who I have seen consistently do the best--both in terms of finishing the PhD and success on the job-market--have been those who find the "ideal advisor" the reader talked about: the senior figure with a worldwide reputation who is also energetic and invested in the flourishing of their advisees. To me, this underscores just how important it is to both (A) find out about faculty before joining a grad program (are the "famous" people good advisors with a good track record getting their students jobs?), as well as (B) be really proactive in getting to find, know, and work with these "ideal mentors" early on in grad school, so that they are the ones you can have as your advisor.
Anyway, I will be curious to hear from readers with experience on this one!
In the comments section of our latest "How can we help you?" post, 'UK grad student' writes in:
I'm a graduate student now, but I was wondering what I can do to gain relevant teaching experience before I go on the job market in a couple of years.
The problem is that my institution, like, I think, the majority of institutions in the UK, does not allow graduate students to design courses or teach as primary instructors. We can apply for seminar teaching, and for giving one or two guest lectures. But if we never design a course, we won't have any evidence a committee can look at demonstrating that we'd be able to do so. I suspect that this could be a major issue when applying for teaching positions.
The official reason why graduate students are prevented from designing and teaching courses is that the university is concerned with the quality of teaching -- the assumption being that students are worse than more senior researchers and professors. (Of course it is not clear that this is a good reason!). I wonder if students at other institutions with such a policy have been successful in getting their institution to somehow allow students to gain some teaching experience besides seminar leading.
But I'm also interested in advice about how to put together some evidence that one would be able to design and teach an entire course even when one does not have a chance to actually do this during their PhD.
My query may not be relevant to all early career researchers -- especially not to those who have gotten their PhD in the US, where, as far as I know, gaining some teaching experience as a primary instructors is easier.
An anonymous reader followed up:
UK grad student,
I would think that this would not be an impediment to getting a job in the UK, given that it is the norm there. The US market is different. But then again so are the Ph.D. programmes. You should only worry if you plan to apply for jobs elsewhere.
I would recommend that you do some seminar teaching and guest lecturing. Then someone will be able to speak to your abilities in reaching such audiences.
Fair points - but (A) in my experience, many UK PhDs are indeed looking for jobs abroad, and (B) given the kinds of institutional restrictions 'UK grad student' mentions (i.e. grad students not being permitted to teach), it is not entirely clear to me how grad students in the UK might go about doing some seminar teaching or guest-lecturing.
Can anyone with experience in the UK provide more determinate practical advice? Is it possible to get seminar teaching or guest-lecturing gigs while in grad school? If so, how? If not, are there any other options available? These seem to me vital issues for UK grad students, as (at least in my experience) teaching-focused jobs in the US appear to care very much about candidates not only having teaching experience, but a track record of success in the classroom.
by JG
In the last installment of this very occasional series, I talked about learning outcomes in a big-picture, 'what are they and what's the point?' kind of way. Today I want to look at the issue more concretely, using an example from some of my own courses to make a few points. There are also a few ruminations about the point of graduate courses. So join me below.
A bit of background: this semester I'm teaching a graduate course for the first time. Two of them, in fact: one on Plato, one on Aristotle. And while this is an amazing opportunity (especially for someone who was a grad student themselves not very many months ago), it brings some interesting challenges with it.
As I was planning the class, I had to think about what the value for my students would be in taking these classes. I mean, there's some intrinsic value in learning about the content of the classes (soul and immortality in Plato, and Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics, respectively) but that could be said about any graduate course. And 'Hey, come be a captive audience to talk about my favorite things!' is a bit self-indulgent. It's great for me, sure, but what do the students get out of it?
The easy answer, and the one I presume we're all most familiar with from our own time in grad school, is that we take graduate courses to learn to do what professional philosophers do regarding that topic. This would involve having two learning outcomes, something like: (a) fluency with primary/secondary literature on topic, and (b) ability to write professional paper contributing to scholarly debate on topic. And for students who want to do research in ancient, that makes sense.
But not every grad student wants to claim an AoS in your course topic. Some are just there to fill a distribution requirement, or to prep for a qualifying exam. And writing a research paper isn't the best way to prep for this, because a research paper is typically going to address a very narrow topic. I also have a number of students who are aiming for teaching-focused jobs rather than research-focused jobs(note focused ≠ exclusive; see here), which let's be honest is the most likely outcome for most of us anyway. But there's almost nothing in a typical graduate course to help grad students learn to teach the topic you're covering (see here). Hence I don't think it makes sense to have a one-size-fits-all approach to the class.
So, I thought a bit about how to design a graduate-level course that could accommodate the various aims your students might have. What I came up with was to give students three choices for their assignments, which reflect the three sets of learning outcomes I could think of for graduate students. Everyone has to do a couple reviews of the secondary lit from class, but the bulk of their assignments will come from one of three groups:
AoS Track: Give an APA-style presentation based on a 3000-word first draft of a research paper. Comment on another student's APA-style presentation. Submit a revised 5000 draft of paper.
AoC Track: Give two 30-minute lectures on primary course content. Design a lower- division survey course syllabus and an upper-division topic- or figure-centered syllabus based on course content.
Exam Track: Write one additional article review. Take three mini-area exams, in epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics.
Corresponding to these three tracks would be three distinct learning outcomes:
AoS: Ability to write professional paper contributing to scholarly debate in ancient philosophy
AoC: Ability to teach upper- and lower-division courses in ancient philosophy
Exam: Ability to pass the ancient philosophy component of qualifying exams
This way of designing a course is a bit experimental, so we'll see how it goes (it makes sense in principle, but principles of good teaching are hard to discover a priori). But I think it helps illustrate a few things worth thinking about.
First, the notion that learning outcomes are just a bureaucratic hurdle to jump through is, I think, wrong and unhelpful. It makes sense to think about learning outcomes across the board, even at the graduate level. A little forethought and creativity can go a long way.
Second, it's important to think through the connections between the kind of assignments you're using. As I suggested above, research papers make sense for some outcomes, but not for others, because they only require a subset of philosophical skills. Ditto for other kinds of assignments. Whatever you take the learning outcomes of your course to be, you should think through what assignments are conducive to those outcomes. Conversely, if you're dead set on using a certain kind of assignment, then be aware that your students might only develop the skills involved in that assignment, not others.
Third, there is a variety of different learning outcomes even at advanced levels, and those outcomes might pull in different directions. Maybe you only care about some outcomes. That's fine, so long as you design the class accordingly. Or, if you want to try to help your students develop all of them, then you might have to make them do many different kinds of assignments (rather than, say, hoping the relevant skills will develop on their own). Or, you can decide that you can't have all your students meet all the possible outcomes for your course, so you need to decide how to pick and choose (or let the students pick and choose).
Like I said, this is my first time trying out this idea, so we'll see if the execution works the way I hope. But the underlying ideas are, I think, on the right track. So hopefully this gives a more concrete example of the principles I discussed in my last post, about how to think through the connections between outcomes and class activity.
I'll end with some questions, because I always like hearing what other people have tried. On either the student or teacher end, have you seen any interesting examples of the assignment-outcome relationship I've described? Tried something that failed in an instructive way? Or that worked better than expected?
Past Entries in this Series:
I am happy to introduce our second alt-ac workshop writer, Claartje van Sijl (Ph.D., Utrecht University).
Dr. Claartje van Sijl is a philosophical career counselor & trainer. She assists academics throughout the world with questions of purpose, direction, balance and confidence in life and career. She is a licensed Working Soft® coach. Read more about her work at on her personal website.
How to create an Alt-Ac Philosophical Company and do work that you love
"What are you going to do with your degree in philosophy?" Every philosophy student sooner or later hears this cliché question. Perhaps even more widespread is the assumption that a PhD in philosophy narrows down your remaining work opportunities to the academic job market. Go figure.
Fortunately, as you know, academic skills are transferable, and so are philosophical skills. In a previous entry in this series at the Philosopher's Cocoon, Calvin Warner already identifies a number of interesting skills of academically trained philosophers. My personal story of my transition from academic philosophy to an Alt-Ac career as a self-employed philosophical counselor is essentially skills oriented, too. But the interesting part of the transition begins only after you have identified the skills that constitute your craftsmanship…
Going Alt-Ac as an independent philosophy professional: why, when and how?
I did my PhD on Stoicism in its social and cultural context. About half way through my PhD project I realized I did not want to continue in academia. I struggled with the personal process of doing a PhD, for which I sought an external coach. I worked very hard to complete my PhD, but it depleted me more than having two children around that time. I could no longer see the meaning of my work and think as clearly and creatively as I used to. I had no idea what to do after my PhD. All I ever pictured in my post-PhD future was a happily-ever-after life as an academic. And so did almost everyone around me. Since then awareness about the reality of the academic job market has changed, fortunately. Marcus' and Helen's workshop here at the Philosopher's Cocoon testifies to the widening scope of options for philosophy PhD's.
After obtaining my PhD I was determined to use my talents to do meaningful work that did not drain me. In my PhD work I was mainly involved in academic discussions with people who have been dead anywhere between 20 and almost 2,500 years. I felt lonely and my work felt meaningless. But I still loved philosophy — as I do today. I am fascinated with the way philosophy helps to elucidate complex problems by questioning assumptions and suspending judgment about "self-evident" views. With more than 10 years training in academic philosophy, unsurprisingly the core of my craft is the ability to wonder and to ask questions from a fundamental position of not-knowing. My Alt-Ac path has enabled me to make a living of this craft in a way that is more energizing and satisfying, and that appeals to more of my talents than I ever imagined possible during my PhD.
Even if I did not fancy a future as an academic philosopher myself, I do love the passion, integrity, and curiosity with which researchers strive for knowledge and excellence in the face of failure, criticism, uncertainty. But I also look behind the scenes, at the personal struggles. Working hard is the norm in the academic world. I see how long-term career uncertainty confines academics and makes them doubt their worth. How they make their life's happiness dependent on the critical judgement of a supervisor, peer reviewer or grant committee. How the pressure to perform inadvertently disconnects them from the meaning of their work. These personal tragedies hurt. Hence the plan to combine the two and become a philosophical life and career counselor for academics. Since starting my company I have helped hundreds of researchers to connect reason with their heart's wisdom, to move forward harmoniously towards fulfilling their vision with enthusiasm and confidence in life and career.
But I am getting ahead of the story. When I defended my PhD thesis, this was not clear at all. I distinctly remember telling my former colleagues over drinks after my defense that I did not consider ever becoming self-employed. Within a year I had founded my own coaching and training company. Why? Because during that year I had realized from conversations with fellow PhD candidates and from my temporary gig as a student advisor that I am able to let people feel safe to open up and have deep, helpful conversations. I decided to professionalize these skills by enrolling in a coaching and training program. There I learned that self-employment is a common and convenient working format for coaches and trainers.
How to become a philosophical entrepreneur
There I was, highly educated as an academic philosopher, with a solid professional training as a coach. But I hardly knew a thing about starting a company. I have since met many people who are a lot more savvy about running a business than me. At the time I was basically clueless about marketing and initially did not take any business or marketing course. I made almost every mistake I could as a start-up entrepreneur. But looking back I realize that I did at least one essential thing correctly that made my enterprise viable: I sat down and defined really precisely what my niche was going to be. Whom was I going to help? And what exactly could I help them with? Some people doubted my plans to become a counselor for PhDs and postdocs, thinking my focus was too narrow. In hindsight, I can say it is not, not at all.
So this is my first piece of advice for you, if you consider starting your own philosophical company. Focus is key. Figure out who already loves what you are doing. What are their problems? What keeps them up at night? What golden future are they dreaming about? What solution do you have to offer them?
Philosophy and money
The second issue about starting your own company as a philosopher is money. Of course self-employment is financially risky. But this is not so different from the situation in academic employment. Likewise with respect to autonomy and flexibility. The issue with money is that many philosophers, once they make enough to eat and live, are not very interested in something as 'mundane' as profit. Let's be honest: most of us started our philosophical studies because we were in some shape or form drawn to valuing the Good, the Truth, or the Life of the Mind. We are not in it for the money or some other form of material gain. Indeed, during our philosophical training we get plenty examples of this mindset: a certain disdain for material goods is widespread throughout the history of philosophy. Not helpful if you want to make a living with your own company.
As a philosopher in business I am still learning about the power of money, the value of my expertise, and the need to be paid accordingly. For the sake of complete honesty, I will tell you about a mistake I made as an entrepreneur with one of my first clients. After being in business for just about a month a client heard my price and asked whether this was my job or a hobby, because it was so cheap. This was an occasion for applying another PhD and philosophy skill: to learn new stuff quickly.
If you are interested in being self-employed as a philosophy PhD, this is therefore my second piece of advice. Hone the entrepreneurial skills you already have. You are a fast learner, a creative thinker, self-starter with perseverance. You are used to positioning and presenting yourself as an expert. Take a critical look at your personal philosophy, your mindset regarding money and value. From there, allow yourself to be a novice. Go learn new stuff and expand your horizon.
Academic Renegade
So much for the 'easy' part of becoming an entrepreneur. There is also a more difficult part about starting your own company as an Alt-Ac philosopher that I want to warn you about. I encountered a major challenge as I started out with my independent counseling practice which had nothing to do with business strategy, niche finding, or money mindset. Once I had my website and all formalities and signboards in place, had helped my first paying clients, I went on to tell a lot of people in my academic and personal network about my company. This took courage. A lot.
I felt extremely vulnerable as I went out in the world still reinventing my new self. I felt like I was betraying the quality standards and rigor of academic philosophy. In fact, after 6 years I still feel like that sometimes. I no longer do academic philosophy, with its relative safety of neutrality or impartiality in the claims and arguments to hide behind, or extensive footnotes with references to back you up. I am personally involved. My own views on life and happiness are out in the open, for everyone to see including my former academic colleagues. Not complying with the standards of academic rigor and without the imaginary shield of 'academic objectivity'. This is scary, but at the same time I find this realness of my work immensely satisfying.
Excel at doing meaningful work that you love
When I went ahead and started my own company I intuitively adopted a different working strategy from the one I had during my PhD. I later discovered that you could call this method working soft, as opposed to working hard. The Working Soft® method that I am meanwhile licensed to teach.
My heartfelt wish for you, dear reader of this workshop-blog, is that you enjoy fully living your potential as a philosopher and a human being. Be it as an academic philosopher, an Alt-Ac philosopher, as an entrepreneur, inside or outside philosophy, or whatever else. Discover your unique talents. Do meaningful work. Stay inspired and energized.
By Marcus Arvan & Helen De Cruz
Helen and I are happy to introduce the Cocoon's newest series: our 'Alt-Ac Workshop', where guest-contributors with higher degrees in philosophy will provide concrete tips on how to transition effectively from academic philosophy to careers outside of the academy.
Before I introduce our first post in the series later today – a post by Calvin Warner (MA, Georgia State University) on how to identify one's marketable skills and potential non-academic jobs—Helen and I would like to each say a few brief things about why we started the series and what our hopes are for it.
As someone spent over eight years pursuing my PhD, came very close to never finishing my degree, and then spent seven years on the academic job-market, at many times I felt trapped and helpless: as though, if I didn't make it in academia, I had little hope of a successful career. I not only had no network outside of academia. I had little idea how I could ever market the skills I had developed in graduate school in a way that would land me a good non-academic job.
According to the American Philosophical Association's helpful new guide, 'Beyond Academia', only about 35% of philosophy PhDs since 2012 have secured permanent academic posts. Because permanent academic jobs are so scarce, Helen and I both believe it is important for our profession to help philosophers with higher degrees obtain good jobs both inside and outside of the academy. However, while I am heartened to see the APA devoting resources to this, in my experience there are still far fewer resources readily available to philosophers for seeking non-academic jobs than in many other fields. Our hope is that our Alt-Ac Workshop will contribute in some small but significant way in providing more resources here, by both
(A) providing academic philosophers with helpful tips from those who have experience transitioning to non-academic careers successfully, but also, insofar as we will be featuring philosophers in industry,
(B) presenting readers with non-academic philosophers to potentially network with (namely, our contributors)!
Helen and I have a diverse line-up contributors tentatively set up—including some philosophers who have made interesting careers in philosophy outside of the academy, as well as others who have pursued various careers outside of philosophy—and we hope you all find the series helpful. If you do know anyone with a higher degree in philosophy in industry who might contribute something useful to the series, please encourage them to contact me at firstname.lastname@example.com to express interest. Thanks, and hope the series is helpful! - Marcus
(taking over from Marcus here).
I've been fascinated with alt-ac for several years now – some of this is inspired by personal circumstance.
My sister got her PhD in medium energy physics and left academia right away for a job as a meteorologist. She told that she wasn't prepared to sacrifice her personal life to pursue an uncertain future in academia. I have been a postdoc for many years, having a total of 3 multi-year postdoc positions and getting 2 PhDs. At the time she graduated and moved out of academia, I was on my second postdoc position. I then thought that alt-ac is all very nice for people who have a degree in a STEM field, like my sister, but for us humanities PhDs, academia is still the only option. And there lies the problem.
By thinking academia's the only option, we're in a seriously weakened bargaining position. We're vulnerable to being exploited. So we need to create options. I'm not saying the system isn't seriously broken. But one thing we can do is seriously consider options outside the academy.
To this end, I've recently started a blog Doing things with philosophy – beyond academia which showcases people who studied philosophy and who are now engaged outside of academia. People not only with PhD degrees, but also with MAs and BAs. If you would like to write for Alt-Ac workshop and want to be featured on this blog, please contact me at firstname.lastname@example.com.
In the comments section of Johnny Brennan's entry in our Grad School Survival Guide, "Caring for a Newborn in Grad School", 'anon fem grad student' writes:
I'd be very, very curious to know whether there are any female grad students for whom this post will be relevant. I've wracked my brain and can only come up with examples of male colleagues who have been able to have children while in graduate school. That's not to say that this post isn't great; in fact, I'm all for more public discussions of balancing parenting with our professional demands. But it seems nevertheless worth pointing out that a "having kids in grad school" post will almost exclusively target men.
Another commentator writing under the handle 'pregnant grad student' then added:
As a currently pregnant grad student in philosophy, I, like anon fem grad student, would be curious if there were any mothers who were pregnant/had infant children during their time in graduate school who might be able to offer a companion post to this one. The post explicitly notes that it might not be very helpful for mothers...
I worry that a post about "Having Kids in Grad School" that is only from a non-pregnant-person perspective makes it sound like having kids in grad school is a more welcoming place for parenthood than it might be for all kinds of possible parents.
Because these are excellent concerns, I would like to invite any current or former women grad students who are willing to share their perspective (either publicly or anonymously) to do so either in the comments section below or in a companion guest-post (if you are interested in contributing a post, please do email me at email@example.com)!
A reader writes in,
I have read The Philosophers' Cocoon and I've got some really good advice from there (for example about publishing). For my knowledge there is one topic that has not been discussed before: publishing before grad school. I was wondering if you or any other contributors have any advice about this?
I am from a small European country with few chances to do a PhD in philosophy with funding. I have applied to universities in my country but I did not get a funded position even though I have published an article in a top journal of my field of specialisation [editorial note: I can confirm that it is a top journal in the AOS] . I was wondering if I should apply to PhD programs outside my country. I've got a few questions about it. How useful is it to have a peer-reviewed publication when applying to grad school? Can it be bad for the applicant to already have a publication – or a few – when applying to grad school (I've got a few papers under review as well)? I have two Master's degrees (one from philosophy) from two different universities in my country. Is there a chance to get a funded position from the U.S or U.K, since I do not have an undergraduate degree from a prestigious university, but a publication in a well-respected journal? If I need a writing sample when applying, can it be my published article and would that be good? Is there any general advice on whether I should apply to the most prestigious universities, "middle league" or just decent universities?
Some good questions! Any thoughts from readers?
Obviously, this person does have some grad school experience, having done a Masters in philosophy--but my general thoughts are these: it seems to me perfectly fine to publish before grad school if one publishes in a highly-ranked journal. However, I think it is probably advisable to stay away from publishing anything not in a top journal. This is for two reasons. First, given how much prestige plausibly plays a role in grad school admissions, publishing in a non-top-ranked journal might not be looked at favorably by highly-ranked programs. Second, since one has not done a PhD yet, if one publishes outside of a top-ranked venue the chances are significant that one may publish something of low philosophical quality--the kind of quality that could potentially hamper one's career prospects later, or which one might simply regret later on.
In terms of whether the person should submit their publication when applying to grad schools, my thoughts are that they probably should, since it is a very good journal (although it is a fairly narrow AOS). I'm also inclined to think that because they have a good publication and the academic job-market is so difficult, they should apply to highly-ranked programs as well as any other programs with a good placement record.
But these are just some of my thoughts. What do you all think?
I am delighted to introduce the Cocoon's newest series: our Grad School Survival Guide. This series will consist of a series of posts -- mostly guest-posts by Cocoon readers, but also perhaps by some existing contributors -- on how to navigate and flourish in grad school. As someone who struggled in grad school in ways I never expected (and who has spoken to many others who had similar experiences), my sincere hope is that this series will help readers who are considering, beginning, or already in grad school anticipate, avoid, and/or grapple effectively with the many challenges grad school can present.
Before introducing our first guest-post, I would like to note that the advice and guidance offered in this series is just that: sincere advice by past or present graduate students offered in a spirit of assistance, but which may or may not be correct or work for everyone. If some of the advice offered seems wrong to you -- or something else worked for you -- please feel free to let us know in the comment's section (bearing the Cocoon's safe and supportive mission in mind!). Above all, the purpose of this series is to be helpful -- so the more friendly and productive discussion there is, the better!
Anyway, without further ado, here is the first post in the series:
Starting a Philosophy Graduate Program: How to Hit the Ground Running
By Johnny Brennan (Fordham University)
I'd like to thank Marcus for letting me contribute to this new series at the Cocoon: Grad School Survival Guide. I just completed my first semester as a PhD student at Fordham University, and prior to that I received my masters from the New School for Social Research in 2013. In between programs I worked at the American Council of Learned Societies. Given that I'm a bit older than the average incoming graduate student with a wife and newborn (something I'll talk about in a future post), and that Fordham has a separate, shorter track for those entering with an MA, I knew going in that I wanted to make the most of my time while also being as efficient as possible. That's what I'd like to talk about today: how to start your graduate program on the right foot. Perhaps it goes without saying that these tactics have worked well for me and my temperament, but your mileage may vary; you may not find all (or any) of what I have to say helpful.
Grad school is a tough transition, whether you're coming in directly from an undergraduate program or, like me, coming back to school after taking some time off. There is an undeniable learning curve: figuring out how to handle all the work, what professors expect of you, planning for major program requirements that might be a year or more away, and fitting in professionalization opportunities such as submitting papers to conferences that, for better or worse, seem to be necessary to keep in mind from year one in order to best prepare yourself for the brutal job market at the end of your studies. It can be very disorienting and overwhelming. I thought I had a good sense of what I was getting into. During my time-off before starting a PhD program, I followed professional philosophy blogs like the Cocoon closely, and I worked at an organization that allowed me an inside look at how academia functions. I thought that I knew the pitfalls that graduate students often fall into and how to avoid them. I was wrong. I was still hit very hard by the emotions and insecurities that come along with graduate level work. As an example, early on in the semester, while I was still struggling to cope with the workload, I ate the rest of my pregnant wife's favorite ice cream and thought, 'no problem, I'll just replace it before she gets home.' I was under the naïve assumption that the corner store across the street would have it. After an hour-long wild goose chase that took me to every store in the neighborhood, I came up empty handed. My wife came home to find me on the brink of a meltdown, babbling about how I was not only a failure as a scholar but a failure as a husband. Despite my best intentions, I was letting imposter syndrome bleed into my personal life only a few mere weeks into the semester.
This (hopefully understandable) expression of anxiety aside, I have found a handful of techniques that helped me get through my first semester feeling on top of all my work and ready to take on what comes next. Hopefully you will find something valuable to take away and integrate into your own work habits.
Have a plan
It's helpful to write out a long-term plan. I'm talking five years long. Granted, the further out you get, the vaguer these plans become, but even having a general idea of what major projects you want to get done down the road helps you plan and prepare. In the summer before I started my graduate program I wrote out a general five-year plan so I could spread out all the program requirements and set myself up to accomplish professional goals by the time I graduate. I also made a more detailed plan for each year to set monthly goals. I shared these plans with my kind and accommodating director of graduate studies to make sure I wasn't being too ambitious (or not ambitious enough). This guards against getting into a situation where I have to complete an inordinate amount of work at the eleventh hour. It really helps minimize the stress of graduate school.
Make sure your hitting your goals
This is an extension of having a plan, on a more fine-grained level. I found it really helpful to keep a blank notebook in which I wrote down not only my weekly assignments, but I also kept a daily to do list. This helped me accomplish two things: first, to break up my weekly assignments into manageable chunks; second, to take actionable steps toward long-term goals that otherwise could easily fall off my radar and come back to blind-side me later. This could involve making sure you read some secondary literature for a term paper, study for a qualifying exam, edit a paper for a conference submission, and so on.
I don't know about you all, but at times I am goal-oriented to a fault. I write out a to-do list and I'll get upset if I don't complete everything on the list, or I'll get a little anxious if I don't make at least a little progress on all of the projects I'm juggling. I often need to remind myself that it's OK to put some less pressing projects on the back-burner so I can focus my attention on the more urgent ones.
Time management
Perhaps counter-intuitively, what has helped me most with managing my time is being flexible with it (this is especially true once the baby came along). I wasn't too successful at sticking to pre-established blocks of time devoted to reading, writing, graduate assistant work, etc. I did much better when I didn't worry so much about when I was going to work, or for how long, as long as I got most of the items on my to do list done. The one caveat to this is that I try not to work (not always successfully) after 8pm. I try to reserve time each day to just spending time with my family. A variation of the Pomodoro technique helps me be more productive. For those not familiar, the Pomodoro technique instructs you to work for 25 minutes without distraction followed by a 3-5 minute break. Once you complete four cycles, take a longer break (20-30 minutes). But since I like to think in terms of tasks rather than time, instead of working for 25 minutes at a time, I'll try to complete a certain chunk of work: read 10 pages, write a few paragraphs, etc.
Write early, write often
One of the biggest changes in my work habits was to start freewriting. I used to start writing only once I had a solid thesis and a detailed outline. I tried to write the best first draft possible, not wanting to make my thoughts "real" by putting them on the page until they were at least moderately well-formulated. As you can guess, this led to a lot of anxiety and stress. Over the summer I read a few books on writing—the two most helpful were How to Write a Lot by Paul Silvia and Writing with Power by Peter Elbow. There are many helpful tips in these books, but the most valuable to me was to incorporate freewriting into the process. Doing this helped me accomplish two things: first by getting words on the page I was more relaxed, and could play around with different ideas and writing styles; second, writing my thoughts as they came and following them to their conclusions in written words allowed my thinking to become clearer. I was now writing to think instead of thinking to write.
Take advantage of extra-curriculars
A lot of learning in graduate school takes place outside of the classroom. Take advantage of the myriad of opportunities that are available: go to all the lectures you can, participate in workshops, attend weekly reading groups. This can involve a bit of extra work, but can pay dividends: not only will you extend your breadth of knowledge by being exposed to philosophical ideas you wouldn't otherwise, you'll get to meet and talk with really interesting people, potentially leading to fruitful professional relationships later on.
Be proactive with faculty members
Related to the previous point, take advantage of your professors' office hours. It goes without saying, though, to be respectful of their and other students' time (i.e., don't drop in just to shoot the breeze; have an agenda you want to discuss, and don't take up all of their time, especially if there are others waiting). If there is a topic from class that you want to discuss further, or if you have ideas for a term paper you want to get feedback on, office hours are a great opportunity to get some individual time and foster relationships with your professors (and potential dissertation committee members).
While all of this may seem like a lot of extra work on top of all you have to do as a graduate student, once in motion it is remarkably easy to maintain. It is a very centering activity each morning to take a few minutes and think big picture about what's important to you, what you want to accomplish, and come up with attainable projects you can get done today to make progress toward those goals. It helps keep me from feeling like things are spinning out of control. I still have high-stress days, but they are fewer and less intense than when I wasn't using these techniques.
I'd like to thank Johnny for starting off the series in such excellent fashion. Are you a past or present graduate student with a topic of experience or advice that you think might make for a good post in the series? If so, just email me at email@example.com to inquire about contributing to the series!
In response to our most recent "how can we help you?" post, 'Potential PhD' wrote in:
I'm applying for a PhD, but now starting to wonder whether I really want to do it. To provide some background/context, I'm in the UK, so doing the PhD would mean writing the thesis without having any taught courses. I already have a master's, which I graduated from last year. The PhD would start next September, but if I want to apply for funding, I need to submit my PhD application, including research proposal, by January.
I love philosophy. I think there are lots of reasons why we need more philosophy in the world (or perhaps not more philosophy as such, but more public philosophy). I understand that academic jobs are incredibly difficult to get, and I don't have my heart set on going down that path. However, I do want to be a philosopher, i.e. devote a significant amount of my time to productive philosophical activity, even if that doesn't mean becoming an academic, or even doing something philosophy-related for a living. For that reason, and also for my own satisfaction, I want to become the best philosopher I can be, and a PhD seems like the obvious way to improve my skills.
On the other hand, I'm not sure if I want to spend three years focusing on one narrow topic, and if I don't really plan on becoming an academic, I'm wondering whether it's worth doing that. Though I'm not equally interested in all areas of philosophy, there are lots of issues I'd be interested in working on, and I don't want to become a narrow specialist if I don't need to. Or is spending that much time working through one problem the best way to improve my philosophy skills? The advice I've been given about the research proposal is that, although it's provisional and they understand that the project will evolve, it needs to be as specific as "I'm going to argue that P" with an explanation of how I will defend P that situates it in a significant body of literature.
Realistically, then, I need to do something related to my master's dissertation because that's where I know the literature the best. I'm also under the impression that that's what's expected. I'm still interested in my dissertation topic, and I've made contact with a potential supervisor who is keen to work with me on it.
However, I feel very ambivalent about the topic on a personal level, because it's about a demographic group that I belong to, and I don't want to fall in to the trap where people think that, because I belong to group x, I must work on issues pertaining to x. Some people (not academic philosophers specifically) have told me that x would be the particular thing I'd have interesting things to say about, and I do resent that a little because I don't want my life or identity to be reduced to it. I have other interests, too. I thought about steering it away from how the problem of y applies to group x and just focusing on the problem of y in general; I brought up this ambivalence with my potential supervisor, who said that writing about group x might help me to get funding.
Apart from issues with the topic, I'm not sure anymore whether it's worth the costs (not just financial) for someone who isn't necessarily aiming to become an academic. I might try to get into a non-academic role within a university, and I'd thought that becoming a student again might help me to get some more relevant work experience as it would open up opportunities for casual/part-time work that's only available to students. I did a little of that sort of work as an undergraduate, but during my master's I didn't have the time or energy for anything but my degree, so now I'm thinking a PhD might be the same way. Also, although I'm not in full-time employment, I have a few interesting projects on the horizon (not philosophy or university-related) and I don't know where they might lead, but if something good came of them I might have to turn them down if I wanted to do the PhD. I could do the PhD part-time, but I'd guess that dragging it out like that would make it very easy to become demotivated.
I know you can't make my decision for me, but any help with working through these issues would be very much appreciated.
Potential PhD raises a number of questions here, including:
As I'm not sure I'm the best person to answer these questions, let me make a few brief remarks and then open up things for discussion.On questions (1) & (4), I think 'Know the Market' made some helpful comments:
...you should also be warned that in the process of pursuing the PhD, you may come to really desire an academic job. I certainly did. Your desires may be transformed substantially in the course of the programme. And it may put you in a position where you will be far less happy not getting an academic job than you would be now (think "transformative experience")...
One further consideration is money. Do not go to graduate school unless you are being funded. That was the norm when I was applying, and it should be the norm. The last thing you want is 5 years of lost income, no PhD (if it does not work out), and a large debt.
My experience is that both of these things are well-worth bearing in mind. Time spent in a PhD program can dramatically transform a person and their priorities--and while it is surely good to try to avoid debt, my experience has been that a good many graduate students who receive funding end up in some amount of debt anyway (due to bad financial management or their program stipends not being sufficient to cover living costs). Consequently, I would suggest that it might be best for Potential PhD--and anyone in a similar position--to not only study the APA's Grad School Guide carefully (to learn of different schools' attrition and placement rates), but also be aware of and take seriously different possible outcomes:
Given that I don't think one can know with much accuracy which of these categories one is likely to fall into (in my experience a person's interests and career trajectory are very hard to predict), I think it might be helpful if readers who fall into different categories shared how they would answer Potential PhD's questions, including most of all whether in their view--given the actual outcomes they experienced--pursuing a PhD was worth it, all things considered. I think it would also be interesting to hear whether there are any differences between the experiences of people who pursued their PhD in the UK compared to North America (Canada & the US) given the many differences involved (e.g. shorter time to degree in the UK, more breadth of study and teaching experience in North America, etc.). Do people who pursue UK PhDs have good experiences on the whole? Bad experiences? Do they face unique challenges on the academic job-market, given the different approach to grad training in the UK?
Obviously, whether you choose to share is up to you, but I suspect sharing different experiences might help Potential PhD and others in a similar position make a more informed decision. I may share more of my thoughts and experiences in the comments section, but would like to open things up to community discussion (particularly discussion by UK PhDs) first!
We have discussed publishing strategies on the Cocoon many times before--and I have on multiple occasions questioned the conventional advice that one should only publish in "top" journals. As I will once again explain below, my own personal experience does not sit well with this conventional advice--nor, I think, does it sit well with some general reflections on the nature of the academic job market. Given that we have discussed these issues so many times, why do I want to broach them again? The answer is simple: I have repeatedly (and recently) encountered graduate students who, or so they tell me, are still receiving the same advice I received while in graduate school--the advice to only publish in "top" journals, not in lower-tier ones (indeed, I was actually told to avoid publishing in lower-ranked journals, as it might "reflect badly" on me as a job-candidate). Why are grad students receiving this advice? And is it good advice? Let's work through some of this again.
The idea that one should aim to publish in top-ranked journals and avoid lower-tier journals can seem, offhand, like good advice. After all, as we all know, today's academic job-market is brutally competitive, with not nearly enough jobs for qualified and talented candidates. Thus, at least offhand, one might think--as a grad student or faculty member in a PhD-granting program--that the way for candidates to become the most competitive for jobs is to publish in top-ranked journals alone. However, while this might seem intuitive, there are multiple reasons to doubt whether things are this straightforward.
First, as I have argued before, there is probably not one "academic job-market." There are many different types of institutions with very different priorities: R1 research institutions, elite liberal arts universities, non-elite liberal arts universities, community colleges, and so on. These institutions do not plausibly have all of the same priorities when it comes to hiring. R1 research institutions, obviously, are looking to hire the best possible researchers they can--people whose pedigree and research production will provide their institution with research prestige. And selective liberal arts universities are plausibly similar. But what about non-elite liberal arts universities and community colleges? Are they plausibly looking to hire the best possible researchers they can? There are several related reasons to doubt this. First, top-flight researchers are potentially a flight-risk if hired by a non-elite institution--and there can be strong institutional incentives to avoid hiring flight risks. Thanks but no thanks to shrinking budgets, here is the reality at some institutions today: if a person is hired into a tenure-track job and then they leave for a "better university", the institution who initially hired and then lost them may lose that faculty line permanently (I have recently heard of several cases of this occurring). Given that this is a disaster for the hiring department, there can be a strong incentive to hire someone who is a good enough researcher to get tenure, but not so good that they are likely to leave. Second, non-elite liberal arts universities and community colleges tend to have different tenure standards than R1 institutions. One does not necessarily have to publish in "top" journals to get tenure. I've known many people at non-elite SLACs and community colleges, and to get tenure one may only have to publish a few articles in "decent" but not elite journals, while being an excellent teacher and member of the university community. Thus, at some schools, there may not only be a negative incentive to avoid candidates whose publication records are "too good", but also a positive incentive to hire people who have a track record of publishing consistently in "decent" but not elite journals (who is more attractive at a non-elite SLAC or community college, a person who has one top-ranked journal publication or a person with a number of lower-ranked publications? I leave it to you to think about).
Here is a second problem with "banking" on publishing in top-ranked journals while avoiding publishing in lower-ranked journals. Given that top-ranked journals have a 90+% rejection-rate--and often take anywhere from 3-6+ months to get a decision--focusing on top-ranked journals alone can be a recipe for publishing...nothing. That's what happened to me in graduate school. I got a few R&Rs at really good journals (including Analysis) during my time at Arizona, yet none of them turned into publications. I ended up graduating with no publications--which, obviously, made the job-market really tough. And I was fortunate to come out of grad school in 2008, a time before publications in grad school became what they are now: an essential part of being competitive on the job-market.
These doubts about the conventional advice (to only publish in top-ranked journals) not only seems to me supported by these general considerations; it is very consistent with my personal experience on the job-market over several years. During my final two years on the job-market, I interviewed at exactly 20 different schools. All but two of them were either non-elite liberal-arts colleges or community colleges, and I ultimately got a permanent job...without any "top-20" publications. During the same period of time, I kept coming across job candidates--e.g. on comments on the Smoker and elsewhere--who reported receiving few or no interviews despite having one or more highly-ranked publications. This is when I initially sensed something amiss with the conventional wisdom of only publishing in top-ranked journals. My sense here was only amplified when I looked at the CVs of people in departments interviewing me (at non-elite teaching institutions). I noticed that they tended to be like me: they didn't tend to have "top-ranked publications" either! This isn't intended as a put-down in any way (on the contrary, I'm among those who dislike prestige hierarchies, and think work should be judged on its merits, not venue). It's just a set of observations that once again suggest to me that there isn't just one academic job-market, but several ones, each with different hiring priorities. Finally, on the same note, having followed the appointments thread at philjobs for a long time, I have noticed many hires of people with both high-ranking and low-ranking journal publications. High-ranking publications just do not appear to be a "magic bullet" for getting a job. All kinds of publications--high-ranking and lower-ranking--peer-reviewed publications both appear to help, but for different types of jobs.
In short, there seem to me to be many converging reasons to believe there are multiple job-markets, and that the "only publish in top-ranked journals" advice is apt for only one of them. There is both:
A research job-market (R1s & elite SLACs): a relatively small number of prestigious jobs that everyone is fighting for, where top-ranked publications make one more-competitive.
A non-elite-research & teaching job-market (non-elite SLACs & community colleges): less prestigious jobs where "decent" publications make one more competitive, top-ranked publications can make one a potential flight-risk, and teaching and service matter a lot.
Because there are multiple markets, if one wants to be as competitive as possible--in both of them--the way to go about it is to not focus solely on "top-ranked" journals, but instead try to publish in both top-ranked journals and lower-tier journals. That way, you get the best of both worlds: if you publish in top-ranked journals, you improve your chances at R1s and elite SLACs, but if you publish in lower-ranked journals, you improve your chances at non-elite SLACs and community colleges.**
Why, then, are grad students still (apparently) being told only to publish in top-ranked journals? Although I can only speculate, my sense is that there may be two reasons--one entirely innocent and understandable, and one a bit more cynical (if also, as I will explain, somewhat understandable). The innocent explanation is that faculty in PhD-granting programs may have only ever worked in an R1 setting, so they may not know from experience what priorities and incentives in other institutions (e.g. non-elite SLACs and community colleges) are like. A somewhat more cynical possibility is that faculty in PhD granting programs may have explicit or implicit biases in favor of their grad students getting jobs in research institutions rather than non-elite teaching ones. I say this not to cast aspersions on the motivations of grad faculty, as though they don't want their PhD students to get jobs. Rather, the point is still relatively innocent--namely, that in PhD programs there may be many faculty and grad students who perceive R1 jobs as more desirable, and therefore tailor advice and publishing strategies toward those jobs while perhaps unwittingly not giving due thought to how a broader, "mixed" publishing strategy (trying to publish in both high-ranked and lower-ranked journals) might be more advantageous for teaching jobs.
In any case, given how long grad students spend in grad school, and how much they have riding on whether they get a tenure-track job anywhere, I think it is important to question the conventional wisdom that I once received, and which (or I'm told) some grad students still receive today. As I have detailed in this post, I think there are many converging reasons to think that an "only publish in top-journals" approach to publishing may be myopic, putting candidates who successfully publish in those journals in a good position to obtain an R1 job, but not necessarily a teaching job at a non-elite institution. Given that high-ranking publications plausibly improve one's competitiveness for R1 jobs, and lower-ranked publications plausibly improve one's competitiveness at non-elite teaching institutions, it seems to me that the most advantageous advice for grad students is the mixed strategy: "Try to publish in top-ranked journals and lower-ranked journals, as are both likely to serve a job-candidate well in different ways."
[**Note: when I refer to "lower-ranked journals", I mean established journals with a legitimate peer-review process, not "vanity journals" that will accept anything you send them]
I have been following the recent Daily Nous post, "Grad Students: What Do You Wish You Knew?", since yesterday, and like some commenters over there, I cannot help but be distressed by many of the comments. Although there are a few positive reflections--and there may well be self-selection effects (viz. people being more likely to report negative experiences than positive ones)--the overall picture of philosophy grad school in that thread seems to be extremely negative, to say the least.
I have made no secret of my own grad school struggles, as well as my job-market struggles. I had a very difficult time both in graduate school and the job-market--more difficult than I ever imagined I would. Given that, short of empirical studies, it is hard to know what proportion of people have negative philosophy grad school experiences (though there a number of very disturbing studies on grad-student well-being and mental health in general), we may not be in a very good position to figure these things out here. What me may be in a better position to do, however, is discuss in a constructive manner what should be done--not only by individuals, but institutions--to improve things. Although there is probably only so much we can do, it seems to me a very important conversation to start, and indeed, keep going. In my view, at least, we should not just rest content with the status quo. Yes, grad school is hard, and yes, there are not enough jobs--but many of the concerns that people raise at the Daily Nous thread and elsewhere (e.g. grad school culture, unhelpful faculty, misinformation, etc.) plausibly are things that we can do something about, at least in time and with enough individual and collective will.
So, then, I want to pose several questions: what do you think can and/or should be done to help philosophy grad students have a more positive (or at least not awful) grad school experience? Is there a series of "best practices" that programs should adopt? If so, which ones exactly? Should professional associations (e.g. the APA) have any involvement here, perhaps formulating and recommending some best practices? And what can we do as individuals--as grad students and faculty?
One of this blog's main aims is to help early-career philosophers--grad students, postdocs, early-career faculty--grapple effectively with early-career challenges. One of the main things I think I've learned in my career--and something that is often emphasized in many different careers and areas of life--is that adaptability is key. If one is struggling as a teacher, or with publishing, or with the job-market, one must adapt--that is, one must "find a better way." But how? What does adaptability consist in, aside from being a vague slogan? And how can one cultivate adaptability? Although I'm not an expert on the empirical literature on adaptability, I'd like to share a few thoughts and experiences, in the hope that some readers might find them helpful.
In my experience, one of the biggest impediments to adaptability is the all-too-natural conviction many of us have that the ways we are "comfortable" doing things is the best way to do them. For instance, when I was in graduate school, I used to sleep late, and work in the afternoon and late into the evening. I worked this way for a few simple reasons: I've never been a "morning person." When I wake up in the morning, I feel absolutely terrible [my wife jokingly compares me to the "Engineer" waking up in the recent film Prometheus]. I don't fully "wake up" until about noon--and I am a natural "night owl", disposed to stay up well after midnight. And so, quite naturally, as an undergraduate and grad student I quite naturally fell into night-owl work habits. I just assume that they were "best for me." But, as naturally as those work habits came to me, were they actually the best habits for me? Allow me to share a surprising story I've shared before.
At one point in graduate school after passing comp exams, I worked for about a year and a half in the way that came naturally to me--that is, working in the afternoons and evenings. And I got nothing of any consequence done. Although I had a few failed revise-and-resubmits at some very good journals, I never published anything, hadn't come up with a viable dissertation topic, and hadn't completed any serious dissertation prospectus writing. I could have--and probably would have--kept the same thing up for another few years...if something lucky hadn't happened to me and I hadn't taken the opportunity to adapt. The lucky thing that happened to me is that I received, quite uninvited, a book on "how to write a dissertation" in my grad department mailbox. Although I had always been incredibly skeptical of "self-help books", I was so desperate that I actually read it. The two main suggestions the book gave were very surprising to me. They were:
Although I was skeptical--I wasn't a "morning person", after all--I gave it a try. Seven days later I had 25 pages of the first chapter of my dissertation drafted [no, I'm not joking]. Much to my surprise, and as unnaturally as it came to me, the advice worked like a charm. Why? I later learned a few things about the advice given:
Anyway, long story short, I still feel terrible in the mornings...but I have learned, very counterintuitively given my natural proclivities, that it is when I do my best work. Interestingly, though, when I often try to give this advice to people, my experience is that--even if they are struggling, and they have never actually tried it--there is often a tendency to immediately push back, saying things like, "Yes, but I really don't work well in the morning." In my experience, getting past these kinds of self-imposed "self-conception blocks" is absolutely critical to adaptability. Many of the things that have turned out to work for me--writing early in the morning, having students do group work in class, drafting articles very quickly rather than spending months on them [as I used to]--are precisely the opposite of what I used to think "work best for me." In order to adapt successfully, one must be prepared to take seriously the possibility that what one thinks works--one's self-conception of "how one works best"--might be profoundly inaccurate. That is, one must be willing to try out--seriously, not half-heartedly--alternative ways of doing things that take oneself far out of one's "comfort zone." In my experience, this is not an easy thing to do, and I have had to "relearn" it over and over again, mostly because, time and time again, I found myself with no viable alternative except for "trying something new" [for instance, several years ago when my teaching reviews were terrible, and I was at the end of my rope, so to speak, I simply asked everyone within earshot--my spouse, my mother, etc.--what they thought I might try. Once again, much to my surprise, as counter to my previous practices as many of their suggestions were--such as having students do graded daily group work [which I "never liked the idea of"]--some of the alternatives they suggested turned out to work wonders!].
Or so my experience has been. What is yours?
I want to preface this post by saying that on balance I enjoy my job more days than not, and that I feel very lucky to have the job I do. Indeed, I would add that I find my work very meaningful. I write on topics I care about, make arguments I believe in, often can't wait to get to the park in the morning to start writing, and feel lucky to be an educator in a world so desperately in need of it. All that being said, I think it is important to be honest--particularly to those who might consider going to grad school--what our lives as academics are actually like: the costs, risks, benefits, etc.
We have examined the issue of discussing grad school with interested students on a couple of occasions. Here, three issues seem immediately relevant:
Long story short, we all know--and should presumably tell anyone interested in grad school in philosophy--that grad school carries immense risks indeed. But, are these the only risks? In my experience, not by a long shot. Another, less-discussed issue is the long-term toll that a career in academia can take on one's psyche, even for those who finish the degree, get permanent jobs, etc. I think these long-term tolls are worth discussing because, at least in my experience, many people [e.g. undergraduates, grad students, people outside of academia, etc.] seem to dramatically underestimate them.
This morning I got to thinking about worry--that is, just how much a career in academia seems to be, for many people, myself included, a life of near-constant worry. I got to thinking about this because I am at a study date with some PhD students in another field [long-time readers may recall that my spouse is a PhD candidate at another university in another field]. I have known many of these students since they entered their program--and the changes I have seen many of them go through ring disturbingly true to my own experience. Their [highly-ranked] program is incredibly well-run, and their graduates generally very successful--and yet, time and again, I have seen students who started out as gregarious, happy-go-lucky people descend into an increasing morass of worry: worry about whether they were measuring up to faculty expectations; worry about whether they are the "worst student in the program"; worry about comprehensive exams; worry about not publishing; worry about the revise-and-resubmit they just received; worry about the job market; etc. In brief, I see a life of near-constant worry. And it is very, very familiar.
When I reflect on the past two decades of my life--most of which have been in academia--the story is the same, only far longer. First, there was worrying about grad school applications and the GRE. Then, once I was in grad school, there was worrying about whether I belonged in my program; whether my program's faculty thought I was terrible; whether I would ever pass my exams; whether I would ever come up with a viable dissertation; whether I would ever finish my dissertation; and yes, whether I would fail out of my program with a great amount of student debt and no degree to show for it. But that was only the start. Then there was worrying about the job-market for seven years. Once I got my first temporary job, there was worrying about whether I would still have a job the next year; worrying that I wasn't publishing enough; worrying that I wasn't publishing in good enough journals; etc. Then there was worrying about my student evaluations every semester, worrying whether I would get any interviews; when I got interviews, worrying about the interviews themselves; when I got on-campus interviews, worrying about the visits; after the interviews, worrying about whether I would get the job [which, on several occasions, was no]. Finally, after many years, I got a permanent job. But, did the worrying stop there? No. I do worry less than I once did, that's for sure; I no longer have to worry like I once did whether I will have a job next year, whether I will not be able to give my spouse and family any semblance of career or financial stability, etc. But now there are new worries: worries I won't get tenure; that I'm not doing a good enough job at various things; worries that I am not taking on enough at my university; worries that I am taking on too much; worries that a book I poured my heart and soul into for years will get terrible reviews; worries that I am being a bad husband/son by worrying all the time; etc.
Does all of this sound terrible? Notice that I am only giving one side of the story here. I'm focusing on a particular negative--worry--setting aside many positives [which I mentioned above: doing something that feels meaningful, being an educator, etc.]. There are also, in my experience, some [relatively rare?] people whose careers in academia do not appear to be beset with constant worry [I have known a few spectacularly successful academics for whom everything seemed to go right, and who always seemed supremely confident--though, again in my experience, they seem to be few]. I also don't want to overstate things. Many parts of life appear to give rise to persistent worry. For instance, I've heard more than a few parents [including my own] say that they constantly worry about their children--whether their toddlers are developing on schedule, whether their kids are doing well in school, falling in with the wrong crowd; and, when their children are adults, whether their adult lives are going well. I also hear from people who work in other industries--I have friends and relatives who work in the energy industry, apparel industry, music industry, photography, etc.--that their lives are full of worry too. And, of course, these are all "first world problems." Worrying about one's career prospects is one thing. Many other people in the world have far worse worries: worries about hunger, war, massacre, etc. In too many ways to count, those of us who merely have our children and careers to worry about are the lucky ones. But, for all that, the worries we have are a reality--a reality, I think, that we should honestly convey to anyone who's considering a career in academia. A career in academia, for all its risks, can have considerable benefits [some of which I mentioned above]. But, for all that, its risks are not merely confined to a terrible job-market, grad school difficulties. It is also, for some of us, a life of worry. And anyone considering it as a career should, in my view, know that heading in.
Hey ya'll. Sorry for the radio silence. I've been rushing to finish my dissertation so I can start a new gig in the Fall, and its been all consuming. I'll be designing some new courses from scratch later this summer, at which point I plan to continue the syllabus design series. But in the meantime, since all I'm thinking about lately is my dissertation, I thought I'd share my impressions of the process. So join me after the break for a look back...First Year:
Fifth Year:
End of Sixth Year:
Sergio Tenenbaum has an interesting guest post today at Daily Nous on our duties to actual and possible graduate students. Toward the end of the post, he lists what he believes to be some of the "less obvious ones in an admittedly dogmatic fashion" [my boldface-explained below]:
I'm on board with most--and perhaps all--of these, but like a few other commenters at Daily Nous, I would like to say a few things about [2].
Before I get to that though, and as a preliminary to lead into my discussion of [2], I would like to comment on another part of Tenenbaum's post--the part where he reports grappling as a graduate student, retrospectively, with his decision to enter grad school. Tenenbaum writes:
Attached to my graduate school acceptance, there was a letter explaining that the job prospects for the incoming class looked grim due to the end of mandatory retirement. The letter made no impression on me. First, I was truly outstanding (one of my undergraduate teachers showed me his letter of recommendation and it clearly said so). And even if, per impossibile, I failed to receive multiple offers from prestigious universities at sunny destinations, I would have enjoyed the life of the mind for four years; I would certainly be then deciding on a new career with a smile on my face.
Seven years later, when my most likely prospects seemed to be law school or shoe shining, I had a rather different view of the matter. I felt immense regret about my previous choices; they were the outcome of the foolish dreams of a deluded child. I envied my high school friends who had perfectly acceptable jobs with nice four-digit monthly paychecks. Worse, I had uprooted myself to take a dead-end two-year job. (Interesting story: I was told by the Chair that they were hiring for two temporary positions but that one of them could be converted into a tenure-track job. It turned out that this was strictly true, but ever so slightly misleading. The position that could be converted to tenure-track was not the one I was being hired into. I still admire this man's dexterity in handling pragmatic implicatures!). If I didn't get a permanent job during this stint, should I apply for other temporary positions? When should I give up? How old would I be by the time I quit? I seemed destined to a life of throwing good money over bad (metaphorically, of course, as there was very little actual money of any kind around). I realized that young me had not only deliberated badly, but that he was in no position to deliberate well; he could not have understood what it would be like to be where I was.
These recollections ring painfully familiar to me. When I first entered graduate school [at the age of 22], I recall being well-aware of many of the risks [though I do seem to also recall many programs misleadingly implying that their graduates tend to finish within five years]. However, like Tenenbaum--and, I suspect, like many other people entering grad programs--I suffered from irrational optimism. I believed that I would be the exception: that I would finish in five years, that it would be a fairly linear process of success, and that [of course!] I would get a tenure track job at the end, [obviously!] well before my thirtieth birthday. In a word, I was foolish--very, very foolish. Seven years later I was 29, hadn't finished, hadn't published anything, and didn't even have a viable dissertation project. Indeed, my first attempt at a prospectus that year was cancelled by my committee the day before due to its lack of promise. I was devastated, and hated my earlier self for his decision. I wished I'd never entered graduate school. Then, somehow--I still do not exactly know how [it still seems to me something of a miracle]--I finally came up with a viable dissertation, finished my program, and got a temporary job. For a brief period of time, I no longer regretted my previous decisions. Then came the next seven years of struggling on the tenure-track job market, wondering what in the world I would do with my life if I could not get a TT job. At which point again, many times, I regretted ever getting into philosophy for a living. Finally, last year, at age 38--or roughly a decade after my 22-year-old self assumed he would have a comfortable tenure-track job--I got lucky [yes, lucky]: I finally landed a TT position. And so here I am, as puzzled as ever. Was it a good decision to pursue a PhD in philosophy? I have to confess that I don't even know how to answer that question. In one sense, it retrospectively seems incredibly foolish. In another sense, it seems the opposite.
Which brings me back to Tenembaum's [2]. Do grad school professors have a moral duty to accept every request to supervise a graduate student as long as they [the supervisor] are competent and not oversubscribed? A couple commenters over at Daily Nous have raised concerns. "Interested" writes,
Supervision, as I see it, is a very serious commitment to the student and her project. I see an obligation to supervise only those students whose work has convinced me that their thesis/dissertation will be excellent — a genuine contribution to the given topic. Agreeing to supervise a thesis/dissertation without being convinced of its genuine promise strikes me as a mistake on many fronts. If I were a graduate student I wouldn't want to be carried along if my work weren't of the highest level; I'd want my faculty to tell me as much by not agreeing to supervise. (Of course, I wouldn't really want the experience of hearing the bad news; but I do think that it's news that I'd rather have.)
In my earlier days as an assistant/associate professor I used to follow your (2) in practice (though not out of some normative obligation). The end result: I had committed to supervising students whose work I could not sincerely defend as genuinely excellent. This helped nobody. I decided to change my practice as above (viz., agree to supervise only those whose work has convinced me of high-level promise to the field). I believe that my current practice is a better one than one that follows your (2).
I am not at all sure that "Interested" is wrong. But, let me offer another perspective for consideration.
Again, "Interested" speculates, "If I were a graduate student I wouldn't want to be carried along if my work weren't of the highest level; I'd want my faculty to tell me as much by not agreeing to supervise." Personally, counterfactual speculations like this tend to raise red flags for me. How, precisely, does one know what one would want as a grad student unless one has actually been in the relevant circumstance? It sounds perfectly sensible in the abstract to think that, if someone didn't think much of your work, you wouldn't want them to "carry you along." Okay, but I've been there. When I was at my lowest point--really struggling as a grad student, but working hard to make something of myself--I asked a faculty member in my department not to supervise me but simply serve on my committee. They declined. Frankly, I don't blame them. In one sense, they had good reason to decline: I hadn't done all that much to inspire confidence. Consequently, I'm not sure they had a duty to be on my committee [qua Tenenbaum's 2], let alone be my supervisor [had I asked]. Still, I would like to suggest that three things--kindness, epistemic humility, and fairness--all support presumptively taking on students through a kind faith about what they could become with sound mentorship. Let me explain.
I know the faculty member who turned me down wasn't intending to be punitive. Rather, their decision simply represented their estimation of my overall promise. Still, for all that, I was at the lowest point in my entire career. I didn't believe in myself, and I worried constantly about what a failure I was becoming. What I needed at that point--and eventually got from another faculty member--was someone to believe in me, or at least take me under their wing and help me find a way through. Indeed, given the very disturbing facts we know about the psychological stresses graduate school places on people, I am inclined to think that kindness alone supports helping out grad students in that kind of situation: mentoring them not because they are the most promising, but because they need it...and, as I will mention shortly, because of what they could become [the heights they could unexpectedly rise to] if provided that kind of kindness and mentorship.
This brings me to the issue of epistemic humility. Tenenbaum writes,
Admissions procedures are like the Dark Arts; the unholy incantations we use to cull files sometimes work, but often completely misfire. I shudder to think about what my batting average would be for predicting student career success in their first year.
My experience is that this is not merely true of admissions committees. During my time in graduate school, I saw a number of students that everyone underestimated going on to succeed in ways that no one [as far as I could tell] ever expected. The simple fact is, a lot happens during grad school. People change. Some stumble, some fall. Some pick themselves back up again. Some don't. I've simply seen too many "unexpected successes" to side with "Interested." Even if a student hasn't shown "great promise" by year four or five of graduate school, there are plenty of cases just like that where people develop great promise later on. Hence again, I am inclined to think not that kindness suggests taking on struggling grad students, but also charity: a kind of faith that, with the right kind of mentorship, even struggling students can develop. Again, I've simply seen too many cases of precisely that to think otherwise.
Further, this isn't just a phenomenon I've experienced: it is a common one in intellectual history. Long-time readers of the Cocoon may recall that one of my only hobbies is reading biographies. I am currently reading Einstein's German World, which contains biographical accounts of Einstein as well as a number of his famed scientific contemporaries: Paul Erlich, Max Planck, Fritz Haber, and others. One of the most striking things about these individuals is that many of them were deeply underestimated, and did not succeed until someone saw something in them and gave them a chance. For instance, Einstein's first doctoral supervisor, Heinrich Weber, is thought to have written him a negative letter of recommendation--one that effectively made it impossible for Einstein to get an academic job, leading Einstein to his now-famous job at a Swiss patent office [see Isaacson, p. 6]. Weber was by no means the only one to underestimate Einstein. Einstein's math professor, the great Hermann Minkowski, famously called Einstein a "lazy dog." [Brian, p. 31].
[Paul] Erlich's path as a scientist was not an easy one [p. 17]..."Shunted as an assistant, forced into impossible conditions, totally ignored by the university, I thought myself quite useless. I never received a call to even the most minor position and was regarded as a person without a field--i.e., as totally useless." [Einstein's German World, p. 25]
As quite a young man...[Planck] completed his Habilitation in Munich when only twenty-two, but discouragements ensued: Boltzmann did not read his thesis...theoretical physics had only two professorships in Germany...[and] Planck marked time for five long years, during which he had his first encounters with academic envy and professorial squabbles. [Einstein's German World, p. 37]
For years [Fritz Haber] cast about, trying to find metier and mentor...At every step he encountered failures and rebuffs...Willstätter commented..."his early failure was complete and of long duration.' [Einstein's German World, p. 76]
These are four of the scientific giants of their age, and they were all underestimated by most of those who thought they could reliably detect "promise." In the latter three cases [Ehrlich, Planck, and Haber], it was only when someone took a chance on them [Fritz Althoff] that they found their footing and developed. As Ehrlick wrote of Althoff,
I myself owe you...my entire career...If you, with your strong hand and brilliant initiative, had not come to my aid...I would have been left to wither away entirely. [p. 25]
And so, I suggest, epistemic humility presumptively supports taking on students, even when they may not appear all that promising. In this world, people can and do "surprise"--and we see in cases like these that humanity may have been denied some of its best minds had "unpromising" people simply been passed over.
Finally, I want to suggest that fairness presumptively supports taking on students as well. Grad students invest anywhere from 7-10 years of their life in a grad program--years where they could be making a viable career for themselves somewhere else. Not only that: the department they are a part of typically gets a great deal out of them [viz. course TA's, course instructors, etc.], for relatively little compensation in return. It is only fair, I think, to give them the best support the department can while they are there. So much hangs on it for them. Provided the student is willing to work hard--and the department does not think them so unpromising that they should leave the program entirely--it seems to me that every faculty member in that department should support the student to best of their ability.
Or so it seems to me. I could be wrong, and am [as always] willing to rethink the views I put forth. What do you all think?
Writing my recent post in our Real Jobs series got me thinking about an issue that I struggled with in grad school, and saw other grad students struggle with as well. And indeed, I suspect a good number of people struggle with similar issues after grad school. The issue is the difference between hobbies and distractions, and how to enjoy the former while avoiding the latter. Let me explain.
At a certain point in graduate school, I got frustrated with philosophy and lost confidence in my philosophical abilities. The two sort of went hand in hand. I was struggling to publish and come up with a viable dissertation topic, and my struggles made me frustrated with professional philosophy being a "rat race" (for publications, esteem, etc.). Like many young people (or so it seems to me) who go into philosophy, I went to grad school wanting to "live the life of the mind"...and, when I was confronted with (what seemed to me) to be the life of professionalization, I sort of rebelled. I was sick of worrying about little else that publishing, a dissertation, etc., and indeed, was frustrated at how narrow my life seemed to have become (viz. all philosophy all the time). So...I took up a "hobby."
I had played in bands all throughout my undergrad years and my two years at Syracuse (before transferring to Arizona), so taking up music again as a hobby seemed to me a perfect way to make my life in grad school more well-rounded. To put it bluntly, I thought I needed a bit of a distraction--something to make life more enjoyable. So, I put together a home studio, recorded a bunch of songs, joined a band, and started playing around town. And it was a whole lot of fun. Unfortunately, it was so much fun that I started spending more time on music and less time grappling effectively with my philosophical struggles. In essence, what started ("harmlessly enough") as an enjoyable hobby...turned into a harmful distraction.
I tell this (somewhat embarrassing) personal story in part because I know I am not alone. In my years in philosophy, I have known a good number of very talented and otherwise conscientious grad students who fell prey to the hobby-turned-distraction problem--and although I ultimately found my way out, I have known those who didn't: people whose hobbies distracted them so much that they never finished their degree. Accordingly, I figured this issue is probably worth discussing, for multiple reasons:
I suppose I will begin the discussion. :) I will begin by confessing that I have never found a good solution to it. All things being equal, hobbies can be a very good thing. They can add enjoyment to life, and make one a more well-rounded person. But, in my experience, they can be very seductive. The thing about hobbies is that they provide a whole lot of immediate gratification without a whole lot of stress. Whether it is playing songs, or brewing beer, or whatever, hobbies are enjoyable--which (in my experience at least) can be incredibly dangerous, especially when philosophy is not enjoyable (e.g. when you are struggling). This, again, is the trap that I fell into, and saw others fall into as well. What starts innocently enough as a hobby can morph, bit by bit, day by day, into a distraction. Indeed, to this very day, when people (including my wife) ask me if I will ever do music again, the answer is, "I hope so, but not now. I know how much I enjoy it, and how easily it can distract me from doing things I need to do." Further, I suspect that hobbies are the most "dangerous" precisely when we need them the most (i.e. when we are struggling). As I explained above, and saw happen to more than a few grads I've known, it is precisely when one is frustrated philosophically that hobbies can be so attractive...and so distracting.
So, then, hobbies are good, but serious distractions are bad...and hobbies can (and, all too often, do) turn into serious distractions. Can anything be done to resolve this problem? Although, again, I have never solved the problem myself, allow me to offer up what seems to me a plausible answer: If you have a hobby, ask yourself a simple question, "Is it plausibly hindering your ability to accomplish things that are necessary for you to accomplish your career goals?". If your answer to this question is, "yes", then you may well have a distraction on your hands...one should you should take serious steps to stop now. I say this because, in essence, it is the only thing that got me back on track and away from the career abyss. I quit my band, sold all of my guitars, and got to work...and finally got moving on (and finished) my dissertation. I wouldn't go far as to say I would "take back" my past, as, if I hadn't made the mistakes I did, I may never had met my wife (who I met very late in school in my grad career), and may never have learned many hard lessons that, in the end, may well have been for the good. What I will say is this: I paid dearly for the distractions that sidelined me in grad school. I dug myself a deep hole, as it were, and spent the next decade or so (even past finishing my dissertation) climbing out of it. I am very much a fan of hobbies, but know all too well (in the most personal way) how debilitating serious distractions can be. And so, if there is any way we can help our grad student (and other) readers avoid making these kinds of mistakes, I think it will be a good service.
So, then, I ask you all, did you grapple with the hobby/distraction problem? Did you find it easy to have a hobby without it devolving into a distraction? If so, how? What did you do to prevent it from becoming a distraction? On the other hand, did you fall prey to the distraction? If so, how did you grapple with it (successfully?, unsuccessfully?, etc.)? Finally, for the faculty/post-grads out there, have you found it possible to balance hobbies with good professional work habits? If so, how? I will be curious to see what kinds of contributions we get from commenters, as again, this seems to me an important problem to help each other (particularly grad students) grapple with effectively!
By Jerry Green
Hi everyone. I wanted to do quick post to make introductions before jumping into anything substantive. As Marcus mentioned, I'm ABD at UT Austin, in the Joint Program in Ancient Philosophy. I also have an MA in Classics from UT, and that's given me an interesting view of philosophy as a practice and as a discipline. So I hope to write occasionally about interdisciplinary work, about how philosophy looks from the vantage of another field, and about citations (I warn you now: I have a bee in my bonnet about citation practices in philosophy!)
I did an MA in Philosophy at Texas Tech before coming to UT, so I hope to say something about the MA-PhD pathway as well. I'm a big proponent of the terminal MA: its increasingly necessary to level the playing field in PhD applications. If you haven't yet, you should read the recent 'What's it like to be a ____' entry on doing a terminal MA. I know the application season is in full swing, so good luck out there.
Finally, I think a lot about teaching, and that's what I hope to write about the most here. I've taught courses at UT and Texas Tech, and I adjunct at St Edwards University in Austin, where I work with non-traditional students like military vets and moms who had to skip college. In particular, I give a lot of thought to course design questions, like how much reading to assign and what kinds of assignments to use. My plan is to (i) share the strategies I've tried, and more importantly (ii) talk about the principles that motivate them. And most importantly of all, (iii) I want to see how other folks do things, so we can all learn from each other. I'll also do an occasional review of works of pedagogy I like, collect links on various topics, things like that.
So that's what you're in for from me here at the Cocoon. I'm very excited to start, and I look forward to chatting with you all in the comments.
One last thing: If you have any suggestions for posts, especially on teaching, let me know! I want to write about things that people will find useful, and the less I have to guess about that, the better.
By Stacey Goguen
In this series, I want to talk about what goes into the work we do as philosophers, what sorts of difficulties arise when we're trying to work, and what we can do about them.
Hello! I am an ABD graduate student, and I've spent a lot of my nascent philosophy career so far struggling to figure out what I should be doing when I "do philosophy." When starting graduate school, I found talking about philosophy easy enough, as well as thinking about it on my own. But when it came time to sit down and write for any substantial amount of time, I often felt lost. And it didn't help that there seemed to be a voice in the back of my head asking if maybe I didn't belong in philosophy, if I was having this much trouble with what is supposed to be our basic activity. Furthermore, I was puzzled by the observation that people in philosophy rarely talked about how they worked. It was like some secret, mystical process by which we all retreated to our private quarters and returned some time later with the philosophy we had birthed in the interim. (Maybe I didn't have the right philosophical reproductive organs that everyone else had?)
Now, years later, after asking a bunch of professors and graduate students how they work, taking a cold, hard look at my own work habits (and lack thereof), and tripping over some life lessons as they came barreling at me, I think I have something of a grasp on how to be a working philosopher. By this I mean, I sometimes feel like I actually know what I am doing, and most days, philosophy does not feel like it is slowly eating my soul. In fact, some days I down right enjoy working.
So I want to talk about what I've found out—about myself, about doing work, and about some of the psychological processes that may be in play when we try to do philosophy. I want to do four things with this series of posts.
(1) I want to share what I have learned from struggling with my work, in case it is helpful to others.
(2) I want to solicit what other people have learned from their struggles with work, in case it is helpful to others.
(3) I want to talk about how our struggles with work relate to our health, for two reasons.
First, I have been floored by the proportion of graduate students I know who have experienced anxiety or depression during graduate school. I was floored when I found myself struggling with them. And this may be a trend across academia.
And second, we have certain health hazards in our field, which are not treated as such, because they are not physical things. I think our cavalier attitude towards our health relies on two mistaken premises: that many mental health issues can be solved by an extra dose of willpower or a positive, can-do attitude, and that, barring seriously mental illness, there are no negative, long-term effects of neglecting our mental health. Thus, we often praise the workaholic, even when they are exacerbating their chronic stress.
(4) I want to talk about how we talk about our work, and ourselves.
Many of us have heard that having a "growth" mindset about intelligence can be psychologically beneficial in all sorts of ways. But we often use terms and concepts that are entrenched in a "fixed" mindset about philosophical ability and interest. So, I think the way we often talk about philosophical ability is not only inaccurate, but also pernicious.
Here are some of my plans for posts in this series:
--That time I seriously considered quitting philosophy
--Me, Myself, and Imposter Syndrome
--My ridiculous thoughts about how other people worked
--My realization that to assess my work habits, I need to know what they are
--Why setting goals is not stupid and totally something you should do (maybe. probably.)
--How a semester of writing pedagogy was helpful for my writing, which was weirdly surprising
--Reasons for using more carrots than sticks, alternatively titled, why regularly being a mean asshole to yourself may not be as helpful as you think it is
--My rant about our cultural ignorance of psychotherapy (spoiler: therapy is awesome and totally not what I thought it was going to be)
--Why self-care is totally something you should do, if you are a mortal with cortisol