8 ms·
I was a double major in CS and Latin, and once I asked my Latin advisor about grad school for Latin. I didn’t intend on going, I was just curious about what she
by seibelj 8y ago
I was a double major in CS and Latin, and once I asked my Latin advisor about grad school for Latin. I didn’t intend on going, I was just curious about what she would say as a tenured Latin professor at a good university.
The look on her face when I asked was complete shock and she went on a rant about how it was the dumbest idea ever. She told me how she was going on sabbatical to write a book that only 30 people would read if she was lucky, but was essentially required to do it. And how ignoring my CS degree for Latin was insanity, and her money problems, and on and on.
Additionally, I had a young associate professor who I became close with, had a degree from Harvard, and was essentially the definition of the future of Latin instruction. She told me she was going to leave the university to go to law school because she made basically nothing and had to work crazy hours.
When the professors themselves tell you not to bother, you know it’s a terrible idea!
- anoncoward111 8y agoWhich is a shame, because I would happily teach Latin for a guaranteed $18,000 a year. Latin is an amazing language that has a lot of tangential applications. At the very least, Latin shouldn't go extinct.
- seibelj 8y agoHard to live and work around Boston on $18,000 salary
- darpa_escapee 8y agoHard to be human and get sick on $18k a year.
- ams6110 8y agoOne good thing about university employment is that the health benefits are usually very good, even if the salary isn't.
- dominotw 8y agoTill you get laid off and get sick with no savings :)
- munin 8y agoAdjuncts aren’t employees.
- darpa_escapee 8y agoThe new trend in university employment is hiring adjuncts at <$20k/yr without benefits.
- Waterluvian 8y agoDon't bin us all in together. Most of the modern world it's really not that expensive to go get real sick.
- sonnyblarney 8y agoIt's expensive to get sick everywhere nowadays, it's just that the cost is spread out in most Western countries. Though socialized medicine countries have much less per-capita medical spending, it's still quite a lot. Or rather ... maybe getting sick is not so expensive. But getting sick and old is ...
- roganartu 8y agoI see what you're saying, but I think it's safe to say they were suggesting it is expensive to the individual if they get sick, not to their entire society. The two are very different problems. Yes, the burden of healthcare costs in places with universal healthcare are spread across all taxpayers, but for that you get a society that can be reasonably confident that getting sick won't bankrupt them (especially if your socialised healthcare nation also has good welfare). It's easy to dismiss as a "won't happen to me" kind of thing, but in reality it can happen to anyone. A couple of years ago my wife was suddenly admitted to hospital for a couple of weeks and then physical therapy for 6+ months and it didn't cost us anything except her lost income. In the US that could've easily run us several hundred thousand dollars with bad or no insurance. There's a reason medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the USA.[0] [0] https://www.fool.com/retirement/2017/05/01/this-is-the-no-1-reason-americans-file-for-bankrup.aspx https://www.fool.com/retirement/2017/05/01/this-is-the-no-1-...
- anoncoward111 8y agoMy rent and food in NYC are less than $14,000 with roommates. I have a savings if something goes wrong.
- dralley 8y agoTake out taxes, transportation, entertainment, medical expenses, etc. Living off of savings for emergencies is inherently not sustainable. Setting aside retirement entirely.
- anoncoward111 8y agoTaxes on $18,000 is $800 in usa. Entertainment we just do for free through torrenting and walking. Medical expenses, well, we live in the Usa. You just find a way to skate by until you don't. Obviously the political solution needs to be "Medicare for all", but I don't have the power to fight the multi billion dollar insurance lobby :) Living off of savings is sustainable if you have $50,000 saved and only $1,000 a year in excess spending. I currently make $50,000 a year. But, I usually get laid off, because I am precariously employed. So, after taxes, I usually only take home about $25,000 a year. I would be much happier with a guaranteed $17,000 a year instead.
- wallace_f 8y agoJust a nitpick, but medicare for all is not necessarily an obvious solution for those who want universal healthcare
- anoncoward111 8y agoI can see where you are coming from. Ironically I have been working as a group health broker for 6 months now and I can tell you that at least from my inside view, this industry is incredibly, incredibly broken. The incentive structure is perverse. There is no reason why losing your job should mean the choice between paying $800 a month for Cobra or going uninsured. Medicaid fills this problem ($30 in NY state for those who make I believe below $19,000 a year), but many doctors do not accept it. So I think it's time to either force doctors to work for less or to force the rich to pay for Medicare for all. Because right now prices are inflated and only the rich/employed can afford relatively accetable care. And no, even I don't have coverage in this job! XD
- foota 8y agoPart of me thinks it might be difficult for a well documented language to go extinct today.
- distances 8y agoI was going to disagree, but looks like language is considered extinct when it has no speakers left, including second-language speakers. [1] The total loss of native speakers is called "language death" instead. So yes, Latin will likely never be extinct. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_death
- schoen 8y agoSed ubi tum id faciens illo pretio habites?
- seibelj 8y ago“But where then will you have those doing... something something...” In 10 years it has left me, but a few hours with Wheelock and I’m sure I’d get it back!
- AlexCoventry 8y agoWhat is Wheelock?
- schoen 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheelock%27s_Latin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheelock%27s_Latin
- orbifold 8y agoIn Germany they pay teachers way more than that and some high schools teach Latin.
- distances 8y agoIndeed. Teachers in Germany earn more than many, if not most, software engineers. Then again, IIRC Germany has the third-highest teacher salaries after South Korea and Luxembourg.
- rhizome 8y agoYou probably can. I had a (public) high school teacher who was a Latin BA, and when he was hired at our school he taught English, then started a Latin club where he taught it to maybe 10 students the first year, several more the next. He also worked a lot of Latin into his English curriculum. Now, if you want to be paid to teach only Latin, that's a harder sell.
- woodruffw 8y agoI received the same rant/incredulity from several of my own professors (in Philosophy). It was incredibly disheartening to see academics essentially give up on any sort of robust future for their field.
- rdtsc 8y agoIsn't it better they are honest rather than set unrealistic expectations that students will regret years later.
- woodruffw 8y agoIt's one thing to be realistic about the economics of pursuing a field, and another to be defeatist or outright dismissive of the idea itself. Edit: I should say that my professors came off more as defeatist than dismissive. I was never told that I couldn't study Philosophy at the graduate level.
- xigma 8y agoThe thing is, when you are young and idealistic, you will say to yourself things like "I don't care about the money!", which is probably what these people told themselves. These people are disillusioned and so will the future you be, but your present you has to make the decision. It's incredibly valuable that they're being honest to you and to themselves.
- grimbly 8y agoHow funny that someone taking the holier-than-thou approach cannot even use the right punctuation.
- codeulike 8y agoI know people that were enthusiastically encouraged to continue, and completely wrecked their lives.
- watwut 8y agoI think that it is good thing that they talk openly with students who are deciding about their future. It was way more respectable then pretending everything is cool in order to sell you some unlikely dream.
- Steko 8y ago> law school Technically still part of the humanities :) I majored in math and history and my history adviser made it very clear to us how brutal the job market for history phd's was, although he did that in the context of how great the people they were hiring were (compared to the old guard). Basically there were so few tenure track positions open in the whole country that every open position would get world class applicants (or at least close).
- dragonwriter 8y ago> > law school > Technically still part of the humanities :) Law is usually considered part of the social sciences rather than the humanities (outside of the law schools that offer BSL as well as JD degrees, undergraduate study of law is often within political science departments.)
- gowld 8y agoLaw School for a JD is a vocational/trade school.
- BurningFrog 8y agoYeah, it might fall under a "science", but that is Job Training, and a whole other thing.
- Steko 8y agoLaw, political science and history all fall in the sizable overlap between the humanities and social sciences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanities
- InTheArena 8y agoI wise likewise told by my advisor that any sort of post-degree work in History would be futile. My chance of getting hired as "a white male" in a history department was not good, and frankly "there is not a lot of future in history" (which we laughed at).
- benbreen 8y agoFutile is much too strong of a word. I'm a white male, got a PhD in history, and ended up getting a good TT job in my first year on the market. Was I lucky? Undoubtedly. But some of the pessimism about history phds really is unwarranted in my view, for the reason the author mentions toward the end. I think the field has a strong future personally. It is just looking like the 80s through '00s was an enrollment high point. Doesn't mean there are no jobs left, or good work isn't being done. On the other hand, I fully concede that, for my history and CS dual major students, I'd agree that it's be a bad idea to get a PhD in history if you have the skills and inclination to get a CS degree or a job at FB/Google/etc instead.
- xigma 8y agoWhat's your sample size? One? Objectively speaking, if you spend five to six figures on a degree with a 10% chance of landing a job through it, that's not an attractive proposition. "Futile" may be the wrong word, a better word would be "foolish".
- azeotropic 8y agoIf you're paying tuition to do a PhD instead of receiving a stipend, you are being scammed.
- Hooke 8y agoExactly, it's a common misconception that people go into debts for PhDs. The stipends are low, but being paid to learn, travel and do research is not a bad choice for some people.
- 8y ago
- ellius 8y agoMy conversation with two of my professors pretty much sealed my future as far as getting away from a history PhD. I did a Master's, and I'm glad I tried it, but when I asked the two profs I was closest with whether it was worth continuing with all of the negative things I had read and experienced, they both gave a very clear "we aren't supposed to say this, but get the fuck out while you still can." It's really unfortunate. I love history, I love teaching, but the market is just a meat grinder these days. A few years after I had quit, I was working for the back office at a bank doing anti-fraud work. A guy who had been a sociology professor for about fifteen years had just left academia to join us. I asked him, "Do you miss it?" He said, "I miss the idea of it, but that's not what it is." It's a shame, but there you go.
- andrepd 8y ago>"Do you miss it?" He said, "I miss the idea of it, but that's not what it is." I... Wow.
- jseliger 8y agowhen I asked the two profs I was closest with whether it was worth continuing with all of the negative things I had read and experienced, they both gave a very clear "we aren't supposed to say this, but get the fuck out while you still can." Ditto for English: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-before-you-start-grad-school-in-english-literature-the-economic-financial-and-opportunity-costs https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befo....
- ozim 8y agoI get impression that people who are not that wealthy try to get into things that should be reserved for "high society". With Pareto distribution of wealth, most of us are just plebs. Of course we are not as poor as plebs in medieval but still we are vulnerable, one bad accident and professor is out of money and in debt. If you are millionaire or from rich family you can spend all day reading ancient philosophers. That was what high society was doing in earlier days, they had money so they could "waste" time being unproductive. Then you get all those kids and their parents who want to study something like philosophy. They feel like they are rich and their kids deserve degree. But brutal truth is if you are making $50k a year you might feel comfortable but it is still far from being rich. There are people who buy cars each year for that amount of money. In the end it is not all about money as people say, but stories like parent comment shows the truth, first make your money and then if you have time and possibility follow your passion. Which is easier for rich because they already have money.
- igravious 8y agoYou'll notice the tag-line for the blog is “Digital Humanities: Using tools from the 1990s to answer questions from the 1960s about 19th century America.” That's what I've been doing for the last half a decade, Digital Humanities (DH). DH is what you get when you ask yourself, “What happens when you add computational methods to the scholar's toolkit? What kind of questions can you ask? What does it imply for scholarship in the Humanities?” That's one thing that's happening. And it's a good thing. At my uni (a second-tier uni in Western Europe) we have an undergrad program four years old which combines elements of CS (mainly the non-theoretical stuff) with subjects of the students own choosing from the Arts. I believe that within a decade all higher-level institutions will offers programs like this. The Arts & Humanities is undergoing a paradigm shift the likes of which it hasn't experienced in decades, perhaps even centuries. Only those with backgrounds in the humanities are going to be able to write this new chapter in the story of human learning and understanding. Another thing that's happening. The economy. That's maybe not an unrelated issue. Are there going to be jobs that people will be rewarded for if they get degrees in the humanities? Not in this economic climate. I don't know if people recognise my handle here (probably not) but my area is philosophy. I can see that people are crying out for philosophical instruction. I just attended a Jordan B. Peterson / Sam Harris live event where 8,500 eager souls turned up. You know what a tenured philosopher of a decent institution said when I enquired of a table of philosophers about Peterson, “Oh, that idiot from Toronto.” Academic philosophy is failing philosophy. Could the same be true of other arts and humanities subjects? Academic institutions are as politically biased if not more so as the rest of society. And these are the people we are looking to for direction in our lives? I've been saying this for the last while but it is my conjecture that the humanities is broken to exactly the same extent and the same degree that philosophy has lost its way in the last century. What I'm trying to say is, the crisis in the humanities is deep problem. It is related to the current economic situation, to the current political situation, it's an institutional problem, it's an epistemological problem, it's related to the current cultural climate – ultimately it's a philosophical problem. Final note (though I could write a lot more) – the culture war between the arts and the sciences goes back nearly 150 years (I've researched this) so this has been brewing for an extremely long time. There have been multiple times in the past when the humanities were in the dominant position and the sciences the reverse so make of that what you will.
- PrincessZorlda 8y agoI was a hard Classics major, Latin and Greek, devoted almost 10 years of my life to it, and I just had to walk away. I'm going back for CS, and this touches my soul. I'm glad I tried for it, but I need to sustain myself and feel like I am worth something at my job. You are not alone, friend.
- seibelj 8y agoIt’s ok, life is long. Contact me if you ever want to chat, email in profile