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I think the title is wrong. Should read: Don't go if you're planning to get a job as a professor and would mind wasting ten years of your life waiting. On the
by asolove 17y ago
I think the title is wrong. Should read: Don't go if you're planning to get a job as a professor and would mind wasting ten years of your life waiting.
On the other hand, if you actually enjoy what you're studying and have any reasonable amount of skill in something else (as many humanities majors who read HN probably do), then graduate school can be fantastic. You want to use computers to solve problems, but unless you're a low-level systems programmer or a CS researcher, you'll need some specific thing to make websites or computer programs about. School is great for that.
Last year I finished my MA in classical Chinese literature. The problems of OCR'ing, transcribing, and translating Chinese are enormously interesting. Even simply trying to present digitized versions of ancient Chinese texts is difficult (no one told Confucius that only so many characters would be in the Unicode standard). I got a lot of attention (and should have productized it) by making free information available in a more convenient way with a simple Rails app. There's a huge gap in the field for a young grad student who wanted to digitize information, present it attractively, and sell it back to libraries or individual researchers. And these gaps exist in most traditional humanities fields.
Aside: I went to UW, which has the most rigorous Chinese lit. program outside of China. Obviously don't go to graduate school in the Humanities at a school that is only theory--you're probably smart and coherent enough to make your way through it without really learning anything--go somewhere that has a difficult program where you learn linguistics, philology, or serious history. I also got all of tuition, a nice stipend, and optional health insurance by doing some PHP programming for a lab at the school--don't go into serious debt for a masters in the humanities.
- brendano 17y agoHi - is your Rails app for ancient Chinese literature? Is it public anywhere?
- asolove 17y agoI have a couple of things up with demos/screens and code available: - A mapping tool that searches for Chinese placenames through about 2500 years of history and shows you when/where that name existed, what level of the administration it was in, etc.: http://www.digitalsinologist.com/places http://www.digitalsinologist.com/places - Beginnings of a Cocoa-based critical text editor. http://www.digitalsinologist.com/blog/index.php?id=40 http://www.digitalsinologist.com/blog/index.php?id=40 - One attempt to format a critical version of a text online: http://digitalsinologist.com/texts/XieLingyun/text.html http://digitalsinologist.com/texts/XieLingyun/text.html
- timwiseman 17y agoLargely agreed. My wife is pursuing her masters in history. Her plan is to start teaching at the high school level after graduating, but she is pursuing it for the love of the subject. If she cannot get a job directly in history she is ready for the possibility of working in some other field.
- pgbovine 17y agothere is a HUGE difference in time commitment and 'psychological toll' between a 2-3 year master's and a 5-8 year Ph.D. in the humanities. getting an MA is a great launching pad for new ideas and careers like teaching high school, etc., but i doubt people will still be so excited during their 7th year of Ph.D. with little job prospects in sight
- blarg 17y agoAye. My wife just finished her Ph.D. in psychology last year, and the whole process was quite an ordeal.
- Retric 17y agoIt does not need to take that long. My mother got her second doctorate at 58 for fun, and it only took 3 years. IMO, Getting a PHD is fairly close to real work. So, if you aproach it as a job it's not that bad. If you aproach it like your X year of collage you will probably fail.
- scott_s 17y agoPart of the PhD process is learning how to do publishable research, and learning how to get it published. So if you've already learned that once, the second time should be smoother.
- timr 17y agoI'd go so far as to say that a big part of the PhD process is learning how to be productive without external guidance. It's a lesson you only need to learn once, and it's broadly applicable to life.