For a post on what it’s like to pursue a Ph.D. I’ve turned to a really smart guy I know. He breaks down what you should consider if pursuing a Ph.D. is on your horizon. There’s just something about a smart guy that can’t be beat. I think it’s the geek in me that recognizes the greatness in them.
“Z” shares on what getting a Ph.D is like in the next two posts.
When my favorite resident planner asked for a post on what getting a Ph.D. is like, I thought it was right up my alley after four (yes four) years on this path and probably two more to go.
You’ll be miles ahead if you take a few years off before grad school and work for a living. This is especially the case given that, as an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education [a supremely useful resource] put it, many of your peers will be “emerging from 16 years of institutional living where the uncertainty and yes unfairness of the real world is carefully guarded against.” A few years of work and you won’t bat an eye when your supervisor is chronically late with your pay or when a professor turns out to have graded your work without actually having read it.
That said, here are a few tips to make your stay in the park more pleasant:
- Enjoy your corner of the park. Enjoy your subject. I don’t mean enjoy in the ADD sense of playing a few
rounds of Tetris, I mean enjoy as in find fulfillment in it. You’ll be spending a LOT of time on it. Don’t take on a program just because you think you should or because you think the job prospects are better. I know I could make a living in computer science, but I have no aptitude or interest in it. so I don’t go down that path.
- Understand that a Ph.D. is unstructured. Coming from defined time lines- four years for high school, four for college- you and your parents/spouse/family expect the same sort of regularity here. You won’t get it, for two reasons. The first is that requirements get in the way. I need 60 credits. At 9 per semester that should take 4 years, maybe 3.5 But I need to take certain classes at certain times. The second is money. A graduate student is more profitable than a graduated student.
- Understand that the job market is insanely competitive. I once received a rejection letter saying that I was one of 83 applicants.
- Be international in your outlook. Learn another language (I recommend Mandarin or Hindi or Portugese: China, India and Brazil will feature prominently into the coming decades) and accept that nobody lives in one city/state/country forever anymore and nobody has one job for thirty years anymore either.
- Publish and present. Repeat. These two activities will be key to getting a post doctoral fellowship and a job. No venue is too small, no journal is too obscure. My resume includes Ohio University, the University of Wisconsin, and yes four publications in Europe. And if Taiwan or South Africa want me to send them proposals, I will. Sure there is still a hierarchy- the presentation I did during a meeting sponsored by Yale is high on my resume- but not much of one. In a multipolar world, snobs don’t get far.
Read tips 6-9 here: Guest Post: “Z” on pursuing a Ph.D, Part 2
“Z” is working on a Ph.D. in speech and language. He was born in Commietown, a large part of Eastern Europe in the late 1970s. After being told that Communism would prevail any minute now, he moved with his parents to Philadelphia and began to experience a nomadic existence that has taken him through North America, Europe and Asia. His work has been presented in some form on each of these continents. At the moment, he lives in Queens, New York, working on his Ph.D. and pondering his next connection, project or plane ride. He also enjoys, swimming, badminton and photography.
