9 ms·

My students never knew’: the lecturer who lived in a tent

80 points by ystad 5y ago

roenxi 5y ago
PhDs are an eccentric crew. Without any malice. This sounds miserable but it is untenable - totally untenable - for society to go out of its way to make life easy for someone who wants to devote a serious portion of their life to studying minority ethnic groups in American literature from a position in the UK. This sort of thing is really supposed to be a fun pursuit of the independently wealthy. It is very unlikely that there is a pay off from this degree in this field. Poor economic prospects are sort of baked in.
- tubby12345 5y ago
  >who wants to devote a serious portion of their life to studying ... She's teaching classes that are being attended by students. Doesn't that mean she has a product that has some demand? Maybe she should be better compensated? I guess the problem is there's really no way to sell education products outside of the two sided markets that universities function (with one side being sort of captive...).
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > This sort of thing is really supposed to be a fun pursuit of the independently wealthy. Not really, no. Studying requires time but little resources. Is there a reason we don't have more free time? At the end of the 19th century, anarchist thinkers predicted with modern techniques we'd be down to 10h weekly work. Instead, society took the wrong turn and doubled down on "bullshit jobs" (see David Graeber) and the social control apparatus (police, surveillance industry, private security). If we shared work equally and stopped working for greedy soulless corporate overlords, everyone would have time to spend on a PHD! EDIT: If you doubt how much work is required by capitalist society but actually useless by any meaningful standard, remember what happened during the COVID lockdowns. Most jobs are not "essential". If you work in an office, you're mostly (if not entirely) useless to society as a whole.
  - rufus_foreman 5y ago
    >> remember what happened during the COVID lockdowns I do remember. There were massive shortages of goods and services. It sucked.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      > It sucked. Strongly agree. And yet the system didn't collapse. I don't know about where you're from, but here in France: - products shortages was due to people piling up, and was very localized - the services shortage was organized by people in power to create drama: hospitals refusing non-covid cases, food banks and other NGOs closing their doors... it was all architectured as part of a "shock doctrine" All in all, i agree some useful jobs have been deemed non-essential and stopped, and that's a problem. But still, i think a lot of people usually working in offices (which are 99% useless jobs [0]) suddenly realized how their employment does not contribute to society. [0] You could argue working behind a desk to help people fill forms for social security and whatnot is a useful job, but i personally consider it a useless job because it's only required because the bureaucracy makes it hard to access social services on purpose (so people don't get it). If we had free healthcare, housing and food for all, there would be close to 0 (though never 0) useful office jobs.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    > ...anarchist thinkers predicted with modern techniques we'd be down to 10h weekly work... On the other hand, do you consider an end-of-the-19th-century lifestyle an acceptable target to aim at? I've found people tend to aim a lot higher when given the option.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      > On the other hand, do you consider an end-of-the-19th-century lifestyle an acceptable target to aim at? In some regards, yes. In others, not. I'm not saying we should throw away all medical progress from the last century if that's what you're wondering. Or that we should have factories in city centers spilling toxic byproducts directly into the street as was common back then. I'm arguing our modern comfort standards are not correlated with how much work takes place, because most of what we consider work today does not produce anything meaningful/useful. I believe a 10h work week is a high estimate for how much we need to work to maintain our lifestyle [0], accounting for the dismantling of slave labor in poorer countries which produce everything we consume. The amount of work necessary to produce food over a century has been cut by at least two orders of magnitude, and although there's a lot to learn from some mistakes (monoculture destroys soil and exposes plants to sickness, and fertilizers make the land sterile) we can benefit from scientific discoveries applied to traditional techniques, such as permaculture in the field of growing stuff. Also, you can take into account how much infrastructure has been individualized, which also accounts for resource/energy waste. Do we really need one oven/fridge per person? Mutualizing infrastructure saves resources. Overall, i'm convinced a decent modern life is possible [1] if we as a society decide to investigate the topic, instead of planning the next great scheme to steal money from the public for the already-insanely-rich known as "Green New Deal" which will certainly not do anything to save the environment. Only a global revolution can save us from doom. The people in power and the people who own the industry are precisely the classes of people who put us in this situation. They are both incapable and unwilling to address issues. I'm not exactly saying we need to chop their heads (though that is tempting) but we as humans must do our best without expecting anything from these psychopaths running the show. [0] Though it requires other measures such as fighting planned obsolescence and resource waste. [1] Not exactly as we know it. We would probably use different materials, build less tall buildings and live in overall less-urban cities (etc). But we could still enjoy what we consider modern comfort (abundant medicine/food/heat).
- vesuvianvenus 5y ago
  Indeed. While teaching myself web development I spent 4 months in a tent (Texas), then later 2 months in a tent (Alaska), and later 2 more months in a tent (Oregon). In the first two cases, I worked part time (event marketing; fish smokehouse) in order to focus on learning new skills rather than working dead-end jobs. If one is financially destitute though, definitely do research on skills which are in demand-- such a person can't afford to specialize in something which is financially unproductive. I learned software development primarily because I saw Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers showing its high demand and future growth. (Fortunately I found that it suits my personality and interests) But to live in a tent (or make lifestyle or financial sacrifices in general) as a PhD student studying something which doesn't have a high economic demand nor utility... To me is just unwise.
  - HarryHirsch 5y ago
    In other words: it's old news that only the wealthy can afford to study the arts and be productive as an artist. But the country doesn't have a workforce development policy either. You have to be independently wealthy to take a few years off to train for a career in a field that's actually in demand! That's not how it's supposed to be.
    - vesuvianvenus 5y ago
      It's not "supposed to be" any way whatsoever-- Neither The Universe nor The Global Economy depend on human senses of fairness or opinions. >only the wealthy can afford to study the arts and be productive as an artist. "study", "afford", and "productive" to me sound vague and subjective. One needs only sources of knowledge (even if its simply experimentation), willpower, food, and water, in order to download knowledge into their brain (and then to apply that knowledge by building small projects to demonstrate skills to future employers). Nor does a person need to be independently wealthy to take time off. I was in debt $3000 on a credit card by the time I arrived in Juneau, Alaska and within two weeks started working at $13/hr at a fish smokehouse, while camping on a nearby mountainside. And I had a janky 2003 toyota corolla (trip was in 2015). From where in your mind do you generate these fearful presuppositions? Success is determined by many factors, but they include Strategy, Willpower, Resourcefulness, Willingness to fail. And sure, you can throw preexisting wealth into there and weight it however you want, in a predictive equation. But ultimately that is taking the accountability away from the individual and presenting a false dichotomy ("a premise that erroneously limits what options are available.") [1]. There's no rulebook that says "You have to be wealthy to study art" or "You have to pay money to study art" or "You can't take time off to study <thing>." You definitely can. You can live in a tent, you can use your company's lunchroom for breakfast and lunch, and cook dinner on your camping stove. You can find public bathroom facilities. All of this can be done. Is it inconvenient? Does it require sacrifice? Hence one should do so strategically, and only for goals with high ROI (such as investing in yourself by building skills that are in high demand). ____________ Heck, Wealth and Art is a conversation all its own. The value of artists and art is different in different cultures. And the utility of art, in most cases, is very low. Hence it is a "luxury pursuit" that even primitive tribes engaged in back in prehistory-- when they had the "luxury" of some ... "time off" :) Lastly, just using basic reasoning, I ask you this: Has Art not existed before wealth? Are art and poverty mutually exclusive? I think your argument is lacking, in addressing these two questions, especially given the amount of artists (especially in music) who arise from impoverished conditions. I would also encourage you to do some research on artists from unconvential backgrounds. Such as former boxer and world-renowned architect Tadao Ando. Do a quick online search for "Famous Artists Who Were Self-Taught" to find many more. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
- Avshalom 5y ago
  And surely it is the idle rich who are best suited to understanding the world.
- Zababa 5y ago
  I don't think that applies to all PhDs. People studying things in computer science can often put in practice their skills, because big tech companies do a lot of research. But no big company does research on "minority ethnic groups in American literature". That's for studies in general. In my country lots of people study psychology, which doesn't have a lot of jobs opportunities, because way too much people study psychology. In software, it's the opposite, we're missing people. Lots of young people seem to follow a "do what you love" way of thinking. My parents always told me "try to find a balance between doing what you love and earning a living", which I think is a bit better advice.
- blunte 5y ago
  In an ideal world, we would all pursue that which was our own passion, without the concern of income. There’s probably enough money in the world for that if it were distributed and if we all could reduce our consumption a good bit. After all, who needs to buy dreams when we are living them?
- mFixman 5y ago
  Personally, I think going to the industry straight from college was a mistake. In half a decade of working in the real world I've learned nothing more than dealing with office politics and the importance of delegating work while still getting credit. I also learned that I suck at those things and get no fulfillment from them. If you are finishing your first degree and enjoyed studying, learning, and actually doing something with your life, I'd recommend continuing in academia.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Daub 5y ago
In my early years teaching art in the UK, I worked three days in a row in a uni around 60 miles from where I lived. To save money I slept in the studios. Worked well for one year till I was caught.
- mc32 5y ago
  Before the dot com bust, people who used to work for Sun or SGI who lived out in places like Sacramento or elsewhere would park their RVs (caravan) in the parking lots and save on commute time and also not have to buy expensive housing (even though compared to today it was affordable, but still they liked living where they lived). It wasn’t super common but a few did that.
  - hungrybrit 5y ago
    I used to work with somebody on a long-term contract in Glasgow. He opted to forgo hotel and restaurant expenses (we worked at a large tech consultancy) for a per-night cash credit (I can't remember if it was £30 or £60) and lived out of his camper van. I still don't know how he did it.
  - Fatnino 5y ago
    There are still people living in RVs next to the old Sun HQ on Fabian Ave.
- hyproxia 5y ago
  What happened afterwards?
  - Daub 5y ago
    After I was caught, I went to live with some students. Paid them in a few beers now and then. There was only one front door key between the four of them. To get it we had to climb up the front of the house. I was nearly 40 at the time, but didn’t mind too much living the student life style. However, Eventually that kind of thing got to me. The breaking point was realizing that primary school teachers were getting paid more than me. Left for a university management job in Asia.
cellu 5y ago
I can relate. I did my PhD with a £10,000 (per year for 3 years) scholarship, from which I had to deduct £3,465 for the tuition fees per year. If it wasn’t for the fact that I had a second “night” job as a freelance developer I wouldn’t had been able to pay for rent or food. I could write a compendium of tricks on how to live well below the poverty line lol
- erk__ 5y ago
  It is strange to read comments like that, I used to be under the impression that PhD was a paid job as it is that here in Denmark. Here they get around £3400 per month [0]. [0]: https://dm.dk/din-loen/loenstatistik-og-loentabeller/forskning-og-undervisning/loen-ph-d-stipendiater https://dm.dk/din-loen/loenstatistik-og-loentabeller/forskni...
  - johnchristopher 5y ago
    I think each country has different laws/rules/regulations for PhD. Where I live it's really common for the job to be tied to teaching hours for instance. It's also easier to do a PhD and live on it than going postdoc (it pays less and there are fewer positions).
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    Copenhagen University [1] has it as 35,250kr/month, which is almost £4300/month. Taxes and cost of living are higher in Denmark, but it's still more than double what a student in Britain gets. I had friends studying in both countries, and I was shocked when I found out the difference. (It was all science research.) A couple of years ago, I saw a job advert at a British research institute I was working with. It was a PhD position, funded and managed by Copenhagen University, but living and working mostly in England to use the special equipment the institution had. The salary was higher than a senior researcher position, also listed, and higher than all the developers I was working with. [1] https://uniavisen.dk/en/salaries-of-university-of-copenhagen-staff/ https://uniavisen.dk/en/salaries-of-university-of-copenhagen...
- Chrupiter 5y ago
  Front-end or back-end? Did you find short gigs online? What field did you do your PhD in? Thanks.
huitzitziltzin 5y ago
I feel for this woman because it sounds like her situation was really hard. At the same time, I have a hard time believing she didn’t hear what literally everyone who wants to do a humanities PhD hears: do not pay for it. Do. Not. Pay for it. She was paying £8,000 a year in fees! Nearly any professor in any humanities department will tell you that’s a terrible, terrible idea. Especially while trying to survive in London! A PhD can be a good idea or a bad one depending on what you are studying and where, but paying to do a humanities PhD is never going to be a good idea unless you are independently (very) wealthy.
- twoslide 5y ago
  In the UK, international fees are deducted from the standard fellowship. While already low, it then becomes a poverty wage. This practice should really be banned, if funding someone the university should do it a livable level.
  - derbOac 5y ago
    Yes, I agree with the OP who noted the frequent warnings about doing humanities doctoral degrees without being payed in total to do it. However, higher education is full of all of these dark patterns where people get looped into something, and gaslit into accepting certain conditions under some promise that it's temporary, etc and so forth. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it's not. The real scandal to me at some level is that the administration isn't just paying some livable wage with benefits, and so forth. If it's more expensive, pass those costs to the students and see if they pay for it. If not, don't string people into it as a career. Politicians constantly call for there to be some sort of costs to universities in terms of return on investment, with demands that degrees be paid as a percent of future wages, etc. But often the problems are more straightforward, with universities burying the true costs on the supply side. It's very similar to the textile industry, or fishery industries, where you get a nice-looking affordable shirt, and all the horrors involved in its production are hidden from society. Add in administrative largesse and it all becomes frankly immoral. I suspect if universities just paid people as they should be paid, with benefits, at the faculty levels that are necessary, and charged a true price, people would respond in kind. Higher education is a disaster at the moment. Sometimes we get news coverage of what matters, but often it gets wrapped up in tangential distracting political debates. Fraud, abuse, and corruption are the norm. It's not just the humanities either.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Reminds me of the story of the professor who died during Covid but had recorded all the lectures. One of the students randomly learned they were being taught from beyond the. https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/22262230/online-college-class-covid-professor-dead https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/22262230/online-colleg... Great Halloween story?
TomMasz 5y ago
I live in the US. When I was done with my Bachelors, which I did in the evenings while I worked full time, I had a choice of two local universities for graduate study. The CS grad course in one was really a PhD that granted a Masters part way through. Classes were in the day and students were expected to TA. The other school's was a Masters-only program and offered classes in the evenings. I had a wife and two young children, there was no way I could support them on a TA's salary. So I went with the Masters-only program. Tuition has skyrocketed, educators' pay rates have not.
farmerstan 5y ago
On a different note but not allowing student debt to be dischargable is a crime against humanity. This caused massive inflation in higher education costs and millenials got caught in this trap. There’s so many stories of people paying 5 figure student loans for decades and all that is because politicians value banks over the vast majority of their citizens. Why is no one looking to reverse this horrible law?
- gruez 5y ago
  >Why is no one looking to reverse this horrible law? because otherwise nobody would pay back their student loans.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Well, on the plus side universities are about the perfect situation for, uh, alternative living situations. They have bathrooms and showers in abundance, cafeterias, and washer/dryers. Universities get away with the minimum wage labor because the living experience of universities is basically the only successful mass communal living experience that doesn't look like a prison (like nursing homes, homeless shelters, military barracks, etc) and is arguably more enjoyable to be in than "real life" with apartments, commutes, office jobs, etc. And despite the fact you typically are living at arguably a sub-poverty line existence, you are either a "professor", "doctoral candidate", or at least "university student" all of which carry substantial prestige over what is basically minimum wage (or sub minimum wage) labor. Arguably this was a perfectly fine thing for ...centuries? But since the ludicrous explosion in tuition and the rise of various management vampires siphoning off that money, it has become decidedly exploitative, to the point it is beginning to destroy the value, prestige, and appeal of the institutions as a whole. I keep thinking every 10 years there will be a massive correction, but they are still holding firm to the class paranoia of the upper middle classes and the big lie of upward mobility to the middle and lower classes. And of course an entire generation of people that wouldn't normally have gone to college going there, getting drunk and a rubberstamp degree, and then defending the "value" (really a sunk cost) of that by demanding any new hires also have the same rubberstamp/sunk cost.

80 points by ystad 5y ago

PhDs are an eccentric crew. Without any malice. This sounds miserable but it is untenable - totally untenable - for society to go out of its way to make life easy for someone who wants to devote a serious portion of their life to studying minority ethnic groups in American literature from a position in the UK. This sort of thing is really supposed to be a fun pursuit of the independently wealthy. It is very unlikely that there is a pay off from this degree in this field. Poor economic prospects are sort of baked in.

tubby12345 5y ago
>who wants to devote a serious portion of their life to studying ... She's teaching classes that are being attended by students. Doesn't that mean she has a product that has some demand? Maybe she should be better compensated? I guess the problem is there's really no way to sell education products outside of the two sided markets that universities function (with one side being sort of captive...).
southerntofu 5y ago
> This sort of thing is really supposed to be a fun pursuit of the independently wealthy. Not really, no. Studying requires time but little resources. Is there a reason we don't have more free time? At the end of the 19th century, anarchist thinkers predicted with modern techniques we'd be down to 10h weekly work. Instead, society took the wrong turn and doubled down on "bullshit jobs" (see David Graeber) and the social control apparatus (police, surveillance industry, private security). If we shared work equally and stopped working for greedy soulless corporate overlords, everyone would have time to spend on a PHD! EDIT: If you doubt how much work is required by capitalist society but actually useless by any meaningful standard, remember what happened during the COVID lockdowns. Most jobs are not "essential". If you work in an office, you're mostly (if not entirely) useless to society as a whole.
- rufus_foreman 5y ago
  >> remember what happened during the COVID lockdowns I do remember. There were massive shortages of goods and services. It sucked.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > It sucked. Strongly agree. And yet the system didn't collapse. I don't know about where you're from, but here in France: - products shortages was due to people piling up, and was very localized - the services shortage was organized by people in power to create drama: hospitals refusing non-covid cases, food banks and other NGOs closing their doors... it was all architectured as part of a "shock doctrine" All in all, i agree some useful jobs have been deemed non-essential and stopped, and that's a problem. But still, i think a lot of people usually working in offices (which are 99% useless jobs [0]) suddenly realized how their employment does not contribute to society. [0] You could argue working behind a desk to help people fill forms for social security and whatnot is a useful job, but i personally consider it a useless job because it's only required because the bureaucracy makes it hard to access social services on purpose (so people don't get it). If we had free healthcare, housing and food for all, there would be close to 0 (though never 0) useful office jobs.
- roenxi 5y ago
  > ...anarchist thinkers predicted with modern techniques we'd be down to 10h weekly work... On the other hand, do you consider an end-of-the-19th-century lifestyle an acceptable target to aim at? I've found people tend to aim a lot higher when given the option.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > On the other hand, do you consider an end-of-the-19th-century lifestyle an acceptable target to aim at? In some regards, yes. In others, not. I'm not saying we should throw away all medical progress from the last century if that's what you're wondering. Or that we should have factories in city centers spilling toxic byproducts directly into the street as was common back then. I'm arguing our modern comfort standards are not correlated with how much work takes place, because most of what we consider work today does not produce anything meaningful/useful. I believe a 10h work week is a high estimate for how much we need to work to maintain our lifestyle [0], accounting for the dismantling of slave labor in poorer countries which produce everything we consume. The amount of work necessary to produce food over a century has been cut by at least two orders of magnitude, and although there's a lot to learn from some mistakes (monoculture destroys soil and exposes plants to sickness, and fertilizers make the land sterile) we can benefit from scientific discoveries applied to traditional techniques, such as permaculture in the field of growing stuff. Also, you can take into account how much infrastructure has been individualized, which also accounts for resource/energy waste. Do we really need one oven/fridge per person? Mutualizing infrastructure saves resources. Overall, i'm convinced a decent modern life is possible [1] if we as a society decide to investigate the topic, instead of planning the next great scheme to steal money from the public for the already-insanely-rich known as "Green New Deal" which will certainly not do anything to save the environment. Only a global revolution can save us from doom. The people in power and the people who own the industry are precisely the classes of people who put us in this situation. They are both incapable and unwilling to address issues. I'm not exactly saying we need to chop their heads (though that is tempting) but we as humans must do our best without expecting anything from these psychopaths running the show. [0] Though it requires other measures such as fighting planned obsolescence and resource waste. [1] Not exactly as we know it. We would probably use different materials, build less tall buildings and live in overall less-urban cities (etc). But we could still enjoy what we consider modern comfort (abundant medicine/food/heat).
vesuvianvenus 5y ago
Indeed. While teaching myself web development I spent 4 months in a tent (Texas), then later 2 months in a tent (Alaska), and later 2 more months in a tent (Oregon). In the first two cases, I worked part time (event marketing; fish smokehouse) in order to focus on learning new skills rather than working dead-end jobs. If one is financially destitute though, definitely do research on skills which are in demand-- such a person can't afford to specialize in something which is financially unproductive. I learned software development primarily because I saw Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers showing its high demand and future growth. (Fortunately I found that it suits my personality and interests) But to live in a tent (or make lifestyle or financial sacrifices in general) as a PhD student studying something which doesn't have a high economic demand nor utility... To me is just unwise.
- HarryHirsch 5y ago
  In other words: it's old news that only the wealthy can afford to study the arts and be productive as an artist. But the country doesn't have a workforce development policy either. You have to be independently wealthy to take a few years off to train for a career in a field that's actually in demand! That's not how it's supposed to be.
  - vesuvianvenus 5y ago
    It's not "supposed to be" any way whatsoever-- Neither The Universe nor The Global Economy depend on human senses of fairness or opinions. >only the wealthy can afford to study the arts and be productive as an artist. "study", "afford", and "productive" to me sound vague and subjective. One needs only sources of knowledge (even if its simply experimentation), willpower, food, and water, in order to download knowledge into their brain (and then to apply that knowledge by building small projects to demonstrate skills to future employers). Nor does a person need to be independently wealthy to take time off. I was in debt $3000 on a credit card by the time I arrived in Juneau, Alaska and within two weeks started working at $13/hr at a fish smokehouse, while camping on a nearby mountainside. And I had a janky 2003 toyota corolla (trip was in 2015). From where in your mind do you generate these fearful presuppositions? Success is determined by many factors, but they include Strategy, Willpower, Resourcefulness, Willingness to fail. And sure, you can throw preexisting wealth into there and weight it however you want, in a predictive equation. But ultimately that is taking the accountability away from the individual and presenting a false dichotomy ("a premise that erroneously limits what options are available.") [1]. There's no rulebook that says "You have to be wealthy to study art" or "You have to pay money to study art" or "You can't take time off to study <thing>." You definitely can. You can live in a tent, you can use your company's lunchroom for breakfast and lunch, and cook dinner on your camping stove. You can find public bathroom facilities. All of this can be done. Is it inconvenient? Does it require sacrifice? Hence one should do so strategically, and only for goals with high ROI (such as investing in yourself by building skills that are in high demand). ____________ Heck, Wealth and Art is a conversation all its own. The value of artists and art is different in different cultures. And the utility of art, in most cases, is very low. Hence it is a "luxury pursuit" that even primitive tribes engaged in back in prehistory-- when they had the "luxury" of some ... "time off" :) Lastly, just using basic reasoning, I ask you this: Has Art not existed before wealth? Are art and poverty mutually exclusive? I think your argument is lacking, in addressing these two questions, especially given the amount of artists (especially in music) who arise from impoverished conditions. I would also encourage you to do some research on artists from unconvential backgrounds. Such as former boxer and world-renowned architect Tadao Ando. Do a quick online search for "Famous Artists Who Were Self-Taught" to find many more. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
Avshalom 5y ago
And surely it is the idle rich who are best suited to understanding the world.
Zababa 5y ago
I don't think that applies to all PhDs. People studying things in computer science can often put in practice their skills, because big tech companies do a lot of research. But no big company does research on "minority ethnic groups in American literature". That's for studies in general. In my country lots of people study psychology, which doesn't have a lot of jobs opportunities, because way too much people study psychology. In software, it's the opposite, we're missing people. Lots of young people seem to follow a "do what you love" way of thinking. My parents always told me "try to find a balance between doing what you love and earning a living", which I think is a bit better advice.
blunte 5y ago
In an ideal world, we would all pursue that which was our own passion, without the concern of income. There’s probably enough money in the world for that if it were distributed and if we all could reduce our consumption a good bit. After all, who needs to buy dreams when we are living them?
mFixman 5y ago
Personally, I think going to the industry straight from college was a mistake. In half a decade of working in the real world I've learned nothing more than dealing with office politics and the importance of delegating work while still getting credit. I also learned that I suck at those things and get no fulfillment from them. If you are finishing your first degree and enjoyed studying, learning, and actually doing something with your life, I'd recommend continuing in academia.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Daub 5y ago

In my early years teaching art in the UK, I worked three days in a row in a uni around 60 miles from where I lived. To save money I slept in the studios. Worked well for one year till I was caught.

mc32 5y ago
Before the dot com bust, people who used to work for Sun or SGI who lived out in places like Sacramento or elsewhere would park their RVs (caravan) in the parking lots and save on commute time and also not have to buy expensive housing (even though compared to today it was affordable, but still they liked living where they lived). It wasn’t super common but a few did that.
- hungrybrit 5y ago
  I used to work with somebody on a long-term contract in Glasgow. He opted to forgo hotel and restaurant expenses (we worked at a large tech consultancy) for a per-night cash credit (I can't remember if it was £30 or £60) and lived out of his camper van. I still don't know how he did it.
- Fatnino 5y ago
  There are still people living in RVs next to the old Sun HQ on Fabian Ave.
hyproxia 5y ago
What happened afterwards?
- Daub 5y ago
  After I was caught, I went to live with some students. Paid them in a few beers now and then. There was only one front door key between the four of them. To get it we had to climb up the front of the house. I was nearly 40 at the time, but didn’t mind too much living the student life style. However, Eventually that kind of thing got to me. The breaking point was realizing that primary school teachers were getting paid more than me. Left for a university management job in Asia.

cellu 5y ago

I can relate. I did my PhD with a £10,000 (per year for 3 years) scholarship, from which I had to deduct £3,465 for the tuition fees per year. If it wasn’t for the fact that I had a second “night” job as a freelance developer I wouldn’t had been able to pay for rent or food. I could write a compendium of tricks on how to live well below the poverty line lol

erk__ 5y ago
It is strange to read comments like that, I used to be under the impression that PhD was a paid job as it is that here in Denmark. Here they get around £3400 per month [0]. [0]: https://dm.dk/din-loen/loenstatistik-og-loentabeller/forskning-og-undervisning/loen-ph-d-stipendiater https://dm.dk/din-loen/loenstatistik-og-loentabeller/forskni...
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  I think each country has different laws/rules/regulations for PhD. Where I live it's really common for the job to be tied to teaching hours for instance. It's also easier to do a PhD and live on it than going postdoc (it pays less and there are fewer positions).
- Symbiote 5y ago
  Copenhagen University [1] has it as 35,250kr/month, which is almost £4300/month. Taxes and cost of living are higher in Denmark, but it's still more than double what a student in Britain gets. I had friends studying in both countries, and I was shocked when I found out the difference. (It was all science research.) A couple of years ago, I saw a job advert at a British research institute I was working with. It was a PhD position, funded and managed by Copenhagen University, but living and working mostly in England to use the special equipment the institution had. The salary was higher than a senior researcher position, also listed, and higher than all the developers I was working with. [1] https://uniavisen.dk/en/salaries-of-university-of-copenhagen-staff/ https://uniavisen.dk/en/salaries-of-university-of-copenhagen...
Chrupiter 5y ago
Front-end or back-end? Did you find short gigs online? What field did you do your PhD in? Thanks.

huitzitziltzin 5y ago

I feel for this woman because it sounds like her situation was really hard. At the same time, I have a hard time believing she didn’t hear what literally everyone who wants to do a humanities PhD hears: do not pay for it. Do. Not. Pay for it. She was paying £8,000 a year in fees! Nearly any professor in any humanities department will tell you that’s a terrible, terrible idea. Especially while trying to survive in London! A PhD can be a good idea or a bad one depending on what you are studying and where, but paying to do a humanities PhD is never going to be a good idea unless you are independently (very) wealthy.

twoslide 5y ago
In the UK, international fees are deducted from the standard fellowship. While already low, it then becomes a poverty wage. This practice should really be banned, if funding someone the university should do it a livable level.
- derbOac 5y ago
  Yes, I agree with the OP who noted the frequent warnings about doing humanities doctoral degrees without being payed in total to do it. However, higher education is full of all of these dark patterns where people get looped into something, and gaslit into accepting certain conditions under some promise that it's temporary, etc and so forth. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it's not. The real scandal to me at some level is that the administration isn't just paying some livable wage with benefits, and so forth. If it's more expensive, pass those costs to the students and see if they pay for it. If not, don't string people into it as a career. Politicians constantly call for there to be some sort of costs to universities in terms of return on investment, with demands that degrees be paid as a percent of future wages, etc. But often the problems are more straightforward, with universities burying the true costs on the supply side. It's very similar to the textile industry, or fishery industries, where you get a nice-looking affordable shirt, and all the horrors involved in its production are hidden from society. Add in administrative largesse and it all becomes frankly immoral. I suspect if universities just paid people as they should be paid, with benefits, at the faculty levels that are necessary, and charged a true price, people would respond in kind. Higher education is a disaster at the moment. Sometimes we get news coverage of what matters, but often it gets wrapped up in tangential distracting political debates. Fraud, abuse, and corruption are the norm. It's not just the humanities either.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Reminds me of the story of the professor who died during Covid but had recorded all the lectures. One of the students randomly learned they were being taught from beyond the. https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/22262230/online-college-class-covid-professor-dead https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/22262230/online-colleg... Great Halloween story?

TomMasz 5y ago

I live in the US. When I was done with my Bachelors, which I did in the evenings while I worked full time, I had a choice of two local universities for graduate study. The CS grad course in one was really a PhD that granted a Masters part way through. Classes were in the day and students were expected to TA. The other school's was a Masters-only program and offered classes in the evenings. I had a wife and two young children, there was no way I could support them on a TA's salary. So I went with the Masters-only program. Tuition has skyrocketed, educators' pay rates have not.

farmerstan 5y ago

On a different note but not allowing student debt to be dischargable is a crime against humanity. This caused massive inflation in higher education costs and millenials got caught in this trap. There’s so many stories of people paying 5 figure student loans for decades and all that is because politicians value banks over the vast majority of their citizens. Why is no one looking to reverse this horrible law?

gruez 5y ago
>Why is no one looking to reverse this horrible law? because otherwise nobody would pay back their student loans.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

Well, on the plus side universities are about the perfect situation for, uh, alternative living situations. They have bathrooms and showers in abundance, cafeterias, and washer/dryers. Universities get away with the minimum wage labor because the living experience of universities is basically the only successful mass communal living experience that doesn't look like a prison (like nursing homes, homeless shelters, military barracks, etc) and is arguably more enjoyable to be in than "real life" with apartments, commutes, office jobs, etc. And despite the fact you typically are living at arguably a sub-poverty line existence, you are either a "professor", "doctoral candidate", or at least "university student" all of which carry substantial prestige over what is basically minimum wage (or sub minimum wage) labor. Arguably this was a perfectly fine thing for ...centuries? But since the ludicrous explosion in tuition and the rise of various management vampires siphoning off that money, it has become decidedly exploitative, to the point it is beginning to destroy the value, prestige, and appeal of the institutions as a whole. I keep thinking every 10 years there will be a massive correction, but they are still holding firm to the class paranoia of the upper middle classes and the big lie of upward mobility to the middle and lower classes. And of course an entire generation of people that wouldn't normally have gone to college going there, getting drunk and a rubberstamp degree, and then defending the "value" (really a sunk cost) of that by demanding any new hires also have the same rubberstamp/sunk cost.