Best of the Transparent Hummingbird
now, i always mention first up in my profile that i used to be a grad student in the humanities before i went to law school. i do this because the people i’m most interested in meeting are post-docs and junior faculty. this makes a lot of sense: someone at this stage of his career would be quite close to me in age, likely to lean liberal in his outlook, and comes from a world easy for me to understand and sympathise with i know something of their common frustrations and daily struggles, their intellectual anxieties, and i’m familiar with the rhythm of their lives and lifestyles, keyed to the academic semester, the sabbatical, the tenure cycle.
Now, I was speechless for a long time.
I showed it to another female grad student friend, who was online then. She flared up right away,
i cannot imagine what you think an “obvious reason” is; people leave graduate school all the time for an assortment of reasons, there are some more common ones but hardly one that would be “obvious” –
don’t get on with your director, your departmental politicking has , structural issues to do with your institution and your funding sources, disillusionment, dissertations being stalled,
please do not say to any american academic what you’ve just said to me; it is not merely presumptuous but full of strange assumptions about graduate school that i can only guess come from total unfamiliarity with american academia and what it means to be in a humanities graduate program.
the vast majority of people who go to graduate school (especially in the hard sciences and in the humanities) are people who are very, very good at what they do and who care passionately about research. if their interest in those fields did not persist beyond their formal academic training they would hardly have been the types to go to grad school in the first place, would they?! people do not seem to understand how much a person’s intellectual personality is tied up with their grad school career and professional reputation. and of course, it is ridiculous to call grad school a blast. everyone is unhappy in grad school. very unhappy. that is the default state of the grad student.
i don’t know why you describe my research areas as “a lot of subjects”. most academics have multiple research interests in contiguous areas in the same field. most academics need knowledge in multiple contiguous fields why would you say something like “that’s a lot to be studying”? what kind of academic would i be if i didn’t have a bunch of interests in various sub-fields and how would i be able to work in my field if i didn’t also work in these sub-fields and areas? and if you can’t tell those are contiguous and complementary areas within the same field you don’t know much about my field.
my background is presented this way for a specific reason. academics trained in the us automatically understand where i am coming from and the
“That’s a lot of subjects to be studying and for a long time at that. Why stop (Other than the obvious reason)? You sound like you were having a blast even before you decided to become a lawyer. How many of your interests in books and TV pre-date your stint in humanities and how many followed?”
?I can’t imagine what this person thinks an “obvious reason”?
What does he think call it being a stint? And
Quite apart from the fact this person chose to make a rude and uninformed comment on someone else’s life choices.
?I am a literary scholar by inclination and training; if my interests in my field don’t continue past my formal academic training what sort of
It teaches you how many misconceptions people have about graduate school
I don’t know if this person had some kind of that I was in the humanities “following my dream” but then decided to go and make money and switch to (
I don’t know what this person thinks an “obvious reason” for leaving
In your mind, there is a particular reason ppl leave grad sch, and an obvious one at that. Tha’t like askimg someone why did you get divorced other than the obvious reason what, waht is the obvious reason
People leave school for an assortment of reasons; there are some common ones, but hardly an “obvious one”, and most of it
No one ever goes to grad school and say
better when people who And really, you think grad school is a blast?
What do you mean by a stint in the humaities I haven’t had a stint That’ is my life!
Very smart people who If their love for their subjects did not survive formal academic training they would hardly have gone into it
knowing they would never have money; to imply that they stopped doing it for money is insulting — You have no idea of the systemic cr — emotinoal crippling it is for many , especially women, and whent hey leave it is painful and bittersweet — despite all else they loved their work
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