History PhD Admissions

juillet
Wed, 28 Sep 2016 21:34:50 +0000

Getting a PhD - and, at most schools, being a professor - is about having a near-obsessive love about a specific topic. You have to love that area, and sub-area, so much that you are willing to study a pretty narrow portion of it for a very long time - what could end up being 12-20 years at least (6-8 years of training in your PhD plus another 6-10 years as a postdoc plus the pre-tenure years as an assistant professor), and at most the entirety of your career. Normally I would say that jobs are not about finding your passion, but academia is one of the exceptions, much like becoming a musician or an actor or an artist: you gotta be really passionate about something, because much like artistic careers you will spend many years toiling long hours at low pay for the small chance of making it.

For that reason, few successful graduate students and professors had a sort of abstract desire to be a professor of “something”, nothing in particular. Instead, students usually go to a PhD program because they are really interested in how our brain processes memories, or the philosophy of science, or the history of African American sharecroppers in the early 20th century, or something else pretty specific - and because they love the enterprise of the field so much that they want to teach it to others. I’m not saying that you can’t get there, but what I am saying is that your focus right now shouldn’t be “I want to be a professor someday.” It should be discovering what your interests and passions are (subject-wise). First you have to figure out if you even like anything enough to consider being a professor of it. The answer might be no, and that’s fine too!

The other thing you may not realize is that getting into graduate school and to academia as a career is much more about research passion than teaching passion. If you want to be a professor because you have a dream of teaching philosophy or psychology to college students…that’s not really what academia is all about. It’s a complex issue to explain and I can give you more detail if you PM me, but even if you end up at a small teaching college for your career, you’ll still have likely spent the first 6-10 years of it pursuing primarily research - and even at that small teaching college, you might still be expected to make research 40-60% of your job.

The other thing that you should know is that the academic market in most fields is absolutely terrible. It’s really bad in history and pretty bad in philosophy. It’s not great in psychology. I urge you to lurk around the forums for the Chronicle of Higher Education, especially the Job-Seeking Experiences and Interview Process ones, and to visit the Academic Job Search wikis in history and philosophy (the psych one is not as active; it basically just serves as a job listing). You can also read articles about the academic job market in Inside Higher Ed, the CHE and all across the net.

The job market is bad; lots of humanities scholars end up spending years after the end of their PhD working as an adjunct (paid an average of $3,000 per class with no benefits and no office). Few of them ever get tenure-track jobs. In the social sciences, lots of scholars may end up either as adjuncts or as postdocs for years on end.

I’m not trying to be a downer, nor am I saying you shouldn’t get a PhD at all (I have one!). More like my advice to students now is only get a PhD if you have a really strong drive/passion to study something you love for 6-8 years, with the knowledge that you very likely will NOT be a professor at the end of it, and you’re okay with that.