September Research Update

It is now October and I believe that 2020 has been approximately 612 months long.

We're marching along our series on iron-production on the blog.  I had planned that originally as a 3-part series, which then morphed into a 4-part series.  It'll also be getting at least one addendum (on Indian crucial steel and Chinese cast iron in the premodern).  It seems like there is also a lot of interest to know how copper-alloy might be different, so I may do a short post or two on that as well.

September has been an exciting month for the blog; the discussions of farming and iron-working (along with the brief tangent on CK3) brought a bunch of new readers making September the busiest ever month on the site. 

On to the updates:

My first peer-reviewed article, which those of you who have been around since the beginning may have recalled me talking about way back in March, has finally appeared in print, in Historia 69.4.  I also just today finished recording a guest-podcast with the History of Ancient Greece podcast (which touches on the broader ancient world more than the title implies) mostly covering the main points of the article.  I don't know when that podcast will air - possibly not for some time, as the THOAG podcast is stocking up on guest-spots to cover for a long break coming up.

Unfortunately, for those looking to read the article (which, I must stress, is one of those academic-to-academic publications and may be difficult to follow) unfortunately cost-effective options are few.  The publishing agreement doesn't allow me to do things like post a copy on the blog or here.  Those with a university library likely can get a paper copy of the physical journal, but if all you have is JSTOR, Historia has a 4-year delay, I think, on making its issues available.

I am allowed to distribute PDFs narrowly to colleagues and the like, so if any of you really want to read it, if you pop me a message with an email address, I can send it along that way (though I will need a promise from you that it will not be further distributed or uploaded or shared!).  I should note that if you pay for it, exactly none of that money goes to me.  Academics are not generally paid for journal articles (in contrast to stuff for places like Foreign Policy or The Atlantic, where I do get paid for what I write).

For those wondering how exactly that works, its important to remember that, in theory, what is supposed to be happening here is that I would have a tenure-track academic position which provided ample time to research (which is why, for instance, my academic affiliation is listed at the end of the article in its print version - so that my university can bask in the glory of my publication...although ironically my academic affiliation has changed since then because I'm an adjunct whose contracts are shorter than journal publication cycles).  These days, though, it is necessary to be fairly well published to even get considered for such a job (something the system was not designed for), which thus leads to the absurdity of underpaid adjuncts having to write for free in order to be in a position to get a job which will pay them to do the thing they've been doing for free.

It is not a good or stable system.  My ability to keep doing this even through the Deep Freeze of the job market due to COVID-19 has been in no small part through all of your incredible generosity.  Thank you.

But that leads me to my musing this month:

Graduate School.

This is about the season I generally get questions from students about going to graduate school and now that my blog is well underway and reasonably visible, I'm also getting questions from readers considering the same thing.  Though I will, no doubt, make a longer post on this topic on the blog proper in the same style as my defense of the humanities (https://acoup.blog/2020/07/03/collections-the-practical-case-on-why-we-need-the-humanities/) and outline of the field of history (https://acoup.blog/2020/07/09/collections-how-your-history-gets-made/) posts, I'm going to give you guys the over-coffee version of the this talk (in part as a way to organize it myself).

I should note at the outset that this is mostly for folks considering graduate school in an academic humanities discipline (History, Art History, English, Classics, etc).  Obviously an advanced degree in Biology works somewhat differently.

My first response to when a student tells me they want to go to graduate school is always to quote one of the better lines from Game of Thrones, "Have you tried wanting something else?"

And I mean this very seriously.  Many students move from undergraduate to graduate school by force of inertia.  School is what they know, the business world is scary and foreign and it just seems easier to stay in school.  This is a mistake.  Graduate school is not like a few more years of undergrad.

You should only go to graduate school in an academic discipline because you really want to do that.  There is no guarantee that you will get through to the final degree (programs differ, but I'd guesstimate wash-out rates at top programs to be about a quarter and much higher at lower ranked programs).  There is absolutely no guarantee that you will get a job at the other end. I mean, I don't have one, not a permanent one, at least.

And I have publications, a successful blog and a meaningful web presence, an absolutely stellar teaching record, if I do say so myself, with a PhD from a top-10 program and an advisor prestigious enough to have his own Wikipedia page.  The job market is rough, it is also very random.  There are no guarantees.

What is the graduate experience like in a discipline like history?

Many graduate programs still are in theory built on the 5-years-to-PhD setup, but effectively no one finishes that quickly.  We're going to break this down very roughly on a 7-year plan (note that you may do your MA in your PhD program or separately).

Years 1-4: Coursework!  Graduate students generally take fewer courses but with much higher demands than undergraduates; three courses is a standard load and four is very stupid (don't do what I did).  To give a sense of the reading load, the 'book a week' course is a common graduate course style, which may mean 300-500 pages of reading a week for one course (and you have three).  In history, especially, historians are effectively taught to rapidly absorb scholarship by being given effectively impossible reading loads as a sink-or-swim exercise.   Those 10-page undergraduate research papers are now 30-40 page graduate research papers where the expectation is you are turning in something that could be a conference paper with some polish (I actually turned three of my graduate papers into conference papers).

Professors are also a lot less willing, generally, to sand off the edges for graduate students in their coursework, compared to undergraduates.  The joke that the graduate grading scale is A(cceptable), B(ad), C(atastrophic) is largely true: a consistent pattern of 'B's' will generally get you asked to leave the program.  And while that is happening, you will probably also be working as a teaching assistant and have a non-trivial grading load (grading anywhere from 30-70 students).  The upshot of this: you are going to have 80-hour weeks, often several of them in a row.

What motivates these hard-edges is that at the end of all of this, you need your professors to write letters of recommendation which can potentially break your career, which means you need to make a positive impression.  Great recommendations won't get you a job, but bad recommendations will prevent you from getting a job, which generates a pretty intense competitive need to show you can pass the work with flying colors, that you are the super-star in the program.  Which also generates crippling imposter syndrome and therapy bills your pathetic stipend absolutely won't pay for, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

If your field requires languages, most programs will expect you to already know them (at least to an intermediate degree) before arriving.  In Classics, the expectation is generally going to be that you have at least 2-4 years of Latin and 1-2 years of Greek before you walk through the door into an MA program.  Likewise, if you do Russian History, they're going to expect that you already know Russian, and so on.  If you do American history, the rest of us are going to make fun of you because you didn't need to learn any languages; you'll be fine though, because we'll be doing it in languages you don't know, o discipule stultissime.

In Year 2 or 3, you will have to write a thesis (using American terminology here).  This is a research project that ought to result in a roughly article length paper that should do original research - that is, push the bounds of human knowledge, ever so slightly.  In many programs, you will get a slight reduction in your course-load (perhaps from 3 to 2) to accommodate the working tasks, but your coursework does not stop.

Completion of a thesis (and occasionally some comprehensive tests) along with coursework gets you an M.A. and you now move to being a Ph.D student either in the same program or a different one.

Year 4 (first or second year in the Ph.D) program will be spent preparing for 'comps' (Comprehensive Exams), a battery of tests administered by the faculty meant to demonstrate your broad grasp on the scholarship if your field.  In the normal form of these, you and your advisors generate a series of reading-lists (typically somewhere between 150-200 books and articles total), which you spend the year working through; these will be important, seminal works in your field.  At the end of it, you take a series of massive essay tests on the topic, demonstrating your mastery of what you have read.

My comps were  a pair of 6-hour essay tests.  Between the two of them, I wrote about 15,000 words (closed-book, to be clear, so you have to remember which scholar said what in which book).  Needless to say, this is a major source of stress.

You go straight from comps to writing a 'prospectus' (often comps are fall year-4 and the prospectus is spring of that same academic year), which is a research plan and outline for your dissertation.  In the process of writing that, you'll assemble you committee - a group of typically 5 senior scholars who will both in theory guide you in your research and also evaluate it when it is done.  The prospectus is a serious document in its own right (mine was 6,500 words and had footnotes and a 5 page bibliography).  You'll then 'defend' this prospectus to the committee in a hour-or-two meeting in which they work to punch holes in it.

And now is when I note that while you have been writing a thesis, then doing your comps, then doing your prospectus you are still taking classes and still working as a teaching assistant.  

Typically at the end of Year 4, the end of your required coursework will coincide with the end of your prospectus and you will move from being a Ph.D 'Student' to being a Ph.D 'Candidate' or All But Dissertation (ABD).  Note that 'ABD,' while seeming informal, is actually a formal designation;you will rarely see people use it post-nominally (So-and-So, ABD) to mark that they've gotten this far.

Now you just have to execute on the research plan in the prospectus, which ideally should produce a piece of truly original research that pushes the boundaries of human knowledge outward in your field; this is called a dissertation.  Many departments will have ABD students teach courses on their own at this point, but fortunately, your coursework is all done, so it is all-dissertation (and teaching) all the time.

Dissertations generally take around 3 years to complete at the shortest.  4, 5 and 6 year long processes are not uncommon.  I defended my prospectus in March, 2014 and filed my completed dissertation (defense and all) in July, 2018.  The final product of all of that work is generally a book-length piece of writing, typically around 200-400 pages (mine is uncommonly long at 788 pages; do not do this to yourself, it was not worth it).  The real demand of the dissertation is to be able to be taking practical, incremental steps towards the completion of a goal that is four years away - which is harder than you think it is, unless you've done something like that.

The entire process provides little room for work-life separation and demands very long hours.  You will have very little control over your schedule until the dissertation itself.  And you will do that while chronically short of financial resources.  Graduate stipends are typically quite limited (note: in history at least, if they won't fund you with a stipend, do not go - if they won't pay for it, they won't invest any resources in you anyway and it's not worth your time), but the schedule means you often can't take on other work.  My stipend for my last year in my Ph.D was, I think, $18,000 pre-tax.  That may be almost-decent in some places, but college towns are not generally cheap places to live.

All of which is to say that pursuing a Ph.D in history means spending most of your 20s (and potentially some of your 30s) in a very stressful, extremely low-paying job, with cut-rate health insurance at best.  Rates of mental illness among graduate students are comparably high to the rates of mental illness among active duty military personnel.

To be clear, I don't think it needs to be this way.  The system is very broken: programs admit too many applicants, fund them too little, graduate too many of them into a job market that cannot absorb them all.  That pressure to compete adds a lot of stress on top of everything.  It doesn't need to work this way.

But it does work this way.  And students considering graduate school in an academic discipline, who want to be like their professors, need to know it works this way.  Which loops around to my original question, "Have you tried wanting something else?"

You should only embark on a graduate career in an academic discipline if you would do that sort of thing as a hobby even if no one paid you.  Because there is a good chance that no one will really pay you.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and I'll see you all next month for, one hopes, a cheerier topic!