Dear Friends,
Graduate school at Notre Dame (I received my Ph.D. in History in 2015) was just heaven for me. I’d do it again in a second.
But pursuing a doctorate in the humanities is not something to commit to carelessly. There are many wonderful things out there in the world for a young person to pursue, and more schooling is not a good reflexive choice. It needs to be a deliberate one.
Graduate school requires self-knowledge, flexibility, realism, and perseverance, as well as a certain degree of “fit.” You also have to be okay with working hard for many years a context of professional uncertainty and financial sacrifice. You have to eat a lot of ramen. It’s not for everyone.
How, then, should we advise young people who are considering grad school in the humanities? How, especially, should we advise young women or men who want to go to grad school, but also anticipate wanting to “stay home” with their children someday?
Read today’s essay here:
“On Advice for Potential Graduate Students in the Humanities”
Did you go to grad school? Would you agree with this advice?
Whether or not you work in academia, how would you advise your own child as regards grad school?
If you have any interest in homemaking (whether or not you would combine it with another career), you really should listen to the podcast episode that I mention in the essay,
's interview with :
Have a great day!
Dixie, even though I'm not in the humanities I would agree wholeheartedly with #3 and #4 for anyone considering a PhD of any kind. I left a fully funded STEM PhD program because no one told me what getting a PhD really meant, but in their defense, I didn't really ask! My discernment was basically, "I like school, I like to learn things, other people seem to think this would be a good thing for me to do, so OK." This is . . . insufficient to say the least ;-) My advisor told me that a PhD requires a "fire in your belly" to know as much as possible about your specific area, and I was definitely lacking in that.
But my dad gave me some good advice when I graduated from college that I think ties in to the question of being prepared to shift roles in life - "You can lose a lot in this life; people you love, money, your reputation, even your health. But no one can ever take the things you learn away from you." This is why I hate the notion (or even the implication!) that anyone who isn't "using" their college degree is "wasting" it. Nothing that you learn is ever, ever wasted.
I was so excited to read your opinion on this!
I think you've got great advice! I simply still do not understand how so many of our generation wasted years of their lives, and so much money pursuing degrees that would never in many hundreds of years pay for themselves, let alone if they became stay at home parents. And that's not to say that that education is in itself bad, or not useful, but we really were living in a dream world of actual usefulness when so many of us pursued degrees. I think the problem is how we view a college degree as a social status thing. If everyone had a degree in a solid liberal arts/humanties education that would be one thing--obviously everyone would be so much smarter, or other practical degrees that equal jobs, but for most people to have useless degrees in psychology or theatre design that they can never feed a family on is really sad and unfortunate. There were a few people I knew who, like you, had the genuine desire to keep learning and to pursue academia and have been really successful, but there were so many others who collected degrees and debt and no longer work in any of those fields today. I would definitely give your advice to my own kids and to constantly remind them that they should include practicality and the value of education in their discernment as much as possible.