On Friday Open Thread
@Lemonnier Seriously, stay off it, and do PT. I haven't broken my ankle, but I've sprained it badly enough to need an air cast. Not taking care of it now will lead to years of aches elsewhere in your walking muscles down the line.
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On Friday Open Thread
@Apocalypstick this question is a really, really excellent excuse for you to watch Paris Is Burning, the almighty grandmother of drag documentaries, which will answer this and so many other questions for you. Available on Netflix Streaming!
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On Ask a Clean Person: Dude, Where's My Coach?
Wait, I should clean my (J. Crew, not Coach) leather bag with soap and water? Clean Person, you are freaking me out.
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On Ask a Humanities Grad Student
@itstimetopaytheprice Can I also suggest that you spend some time looking at WHY you do not have the drive to finish? You may be trying to tell yourself that it's time to go do something else.
It would suck not to get the Ph.D., but it would suck SO MUCH more, three years on, to have even more debt and still not have written anything. Think about cutting your losses, and why you would or wouldn't want to do that.
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On Ask a Humanities Grad Student
@Cavendish are you the kind of person who will refer to yourself as an ABD till you die, or are you OK with saying/believing "I got an MA and decided not to go further"?
I think that even if you're loving it, it's good practice to ask yourself regularly "is this still the right place for me right now?" when you're in grad school. This is also a good practice to continue into your professional life, as well! I still revise my resume every January.
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On Ask a Humanities Grad Student
@Ingrid Nilsson Goatson@facebook Live in a city with an arts scene, or make one. Go to lectures and start/join a reading group. Read and contribute to literature blogs. Believe me, you have no time to be a literature enthusiast in literary grad programs.
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On Ask a Humanities Grad Student
@Cavendish I could talk all night! Short version is - I did a whole bunch of humanities computing work to help keep body and soul together in grad school, decided I liked it a lot and it would allow me to move back to New York, and I got into what used to be called information architecture and is now sometimes called interaction design. It's a field that asks for (a) creativity (b) insight into people and their situations (hello, cultural studies coursework); and (c) analytic, systems thinking, so it was total catnip to me.
If I can soapbox for a minute, I think it's a great career for anyone who is comfortable with tech and likes asking the question "why?" You don't have to be a great coder, though some basic HTML savvy helps, and while there are now grad programs in the field, there's enough demand that a self-educated person with a good portfolio of work they've put together themselves ("here's how my idea for an app would work!) could get in the door.
I did get a lot of sympathy from my peers for my "failure," and it took a lot of effort to get past that. As a friend of mine in college and grad school put it, all of grad school is about pushing your head down and keeping your eyes on the path. Looking up is hard, and there are a lot of people actively trying to stop you from doing it. But when you manage it, you see there is a whole world out there, not just the path you're on, and you can step off it. He spoke wise. (And then went off to Hollywood, but that's another story.)
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On Ask a Humanities Grad Student
@Bri Lee My experience is that the first job is harder to find, and you will end up having to start at the bottom of the totem pole along with (not below) new college grads, but that humanities MAs and Ph.D.s rise through the non-academic career track fast. It helps if there is another field you are interested in enough to want to start at the bottom, of course.
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On Ask a Humanities Grad Student
@mackymoo what, if you get an advanced degree in the humanities and there are no jobs in your field? My cohort from my English Ph.D. program, 10 years on, includes a high school teacher, an environmental lobbyist, a retail marketing expert, an equine bodywork therapist (!), a museum development officer, a Federal attorney, an education researcher, a magazine managing editor, an interaction designer, and I think three total (out of an entering 20) with tenure or tenure-track jobs.
There are a bazillion things you can do with the research, thinking, and presentation skills you gain from a humanities advanced degree. And while that is NO REASON AT ALL to go to grad school in the humanities, if you already have done so, don't feel like you've wasted your time.
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On Ask a Humanities Grad Student, Part One: Scotch and Lentils
@harebell I agree completely, except with the caveat that your Ph.D. program will be designed to socialize you mercilessly into PhD professionalism, and there will be people and situations that will try to make you feel bad about leaving at the MA level. Heck, I finished my doctorate and the spoken and unspoken pressure to stay on the academic job market was a couple of years of therapy worth. So, yes, avoid a terminal masters, but do everything you can to treat your program, in your head and your heart, like a terminal masters program.