Hi! I just wanted to say I love your meta posts on ancient history & TW. :) I was just wondering if you would maybe talk a little bit about your experience as a academic? Many people have been saying that academic life can be pretty rough (small salary/achieving tenure etc.) but being able to choose your areas of research like you do sounds pretty amazing. How do you think it compares to other forms of employment?
Thank you! Â
Well, I don't regret getting my Ph.D. (yet, anyway). Â There are certainly upsides - my schedule is extremely flexible and I get to do something I love.
Downsides: people who don't have other sources of employment in grad school tend to actually live below the poverty line. Â My colleagues qualify for food stamps. Â And then after you spend 6-8 years working insanely hard and being broke, you get to try to find a job which, depending on your field, can be an almost impossible proposition. Â In my field, all of the jobs get posted through one organization so they can do statistics - the year before last the ratio of job seekers to jobs (including one-year positions) was 4:1.
Which means that I'm not sure my Ph.D. is going to lead to a career. Â I might actually end up being a 31 year old with a doctorate who moves back in with her parents and has to decide what she wants to be when she grows up. Â
So I don't regret it, but I'd advise anyone thinking about going into academia in the humanities very, very hard. Â (Sciences can be totally different, since you're also employable in industry).
