Courtesy of xkcd.

Courtesy of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Two literature references in a row from my two favorite nerdy web-comics. I think this is a good sign that November is going to be an awesome month.

In other news, you can now sign up for the class I’m teaching in Spring semester. It’s been a crazy busy semester and I haven’t really had a chance to blog about my teaching experiences so far, but I will say that I really love it and it’s honestly the best part of my week. My students are adorable and they warm my heart so very much. It also helps that they’re pretty darn smart. :]

Animals exist on earth of such courageous

sight that they dare to face even the sun;

others, because they’re harmed by such great light,

do not come out until the sun is setting;

and others in their mad desire hoping

for joy in fire, perhaps because it glows,

learn of its other power, that of burning.

Alas, my place is with this latter race!

I am not strong enough to face the light

of this lady; I cannot shield myself

in shadowed places or in evening hours;

and so with eyes of tears and weariness

my destiny directs me to behold her,

and well I know I follow what will burn me.

(translated by Mark Musa)

I wish I could read this in the original Italian (SLI 2.0?). For my Renaissance Poetry class, we’ve been assigned to read the first 263 poems of Petrarch’s Canzoniere this week and the sonnets pretty quickly start to feel monotonous and run into one another. Laura’s eyes, her gaze, Petrarch’s suffering, his unconsummated desire. We get it. Move on. But every now and then, Petrarch jolts you with an image that just sticks and makes you want to hear the language, to imagine the way it would sound to recite this to a lover, to feel the pleasant rhythm of the Italian as it rolls off the tongue.

From the Coroner’s Inquest on Marlowe, 1 June 1593 (following a detailed description of the events leading up to the murder of Christopher Marlowe):

“And thus it befell in that affray that the said Ingram, in defense of his life and with the aforesaid dagger of the value of 12 pence, gave the aforesaid Christopher then and there a mortal wound above his right eye of the depth of two inches and of the breadth of one inch, of which same mortal wound the aforesaid Christopher Morley then and there instantly died. And thus the aforesaid jurors say upon their oath that the aforesaid Ingram killed the aforesaid Christopher Morley the aforesaid thirtieth day of May in the thirty fifth year abovementioned in the aforesaid Detford Strand in the aforesaid county of Kent within the verge in the room aforesaid within the verge in the manner and form aforesaid in defense and for the salvation of his life, against the peace of the said lady the Queen, her present crown and dignity.”

And this is why sentences in early modern English are so very, very, very long. At least it gets rid of any ambiguity… Right???

Hopefully I’ll get the hang of things soon enough, but whenever I feel young and intimidated, I plan to remind myself of this quote:

“I began by acting like the person I wanted to be, and eventually I became that person.” — Cary Grant

I may be one of the youngest kids in the incoming class, but I’m going to prove that I can run with the big dogs.

So I thought I’d give you a pep talk and remind you to chill out. To quote the great (albeit eccentric) Bear Grylls, “Keeping morale up is the key to survival.” For Bear Grylls, this means making a nice warm fire and catching (and roasting) some poor critter. For you, this might mean drinking in the gorgeous view of the “Harry Potter room” in Alderman library or seeking out super tasty (and cheap!) seafood in downtown Charlottesville. Indeed, sometimes all it takes is a nice hearty meal to clear away the frustrations of a particularly grueling day. Whatever ritual you develop, find the sparkle in each day and just keep trekking onward. Grad school may be daunting, but as long as you stay positive (you and I both know that is when you are most productive), things will go along swimmingly.

Grad school is going to be puddle-wonderful. You’ll see.

Sincerely,

Tummy

- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Preface to Prometheus Unbound

I am currently in the middle of writing an essay, but I just had to post this quote. Sometimes, even when you’re busy scrambling to finish a paper or take a test or just get through the reading so you can go to bed, you come across a passage that makes you pause and just go, “Wow.” And then, if you happen to have a blog, you hurry to copy it into a post so that you can preserve that serendipitous feeling of finding some sort of glorious treasure hidden in plain sight. :]

In other news, this time tomorrow, I will be officially free of UCLA library books for the first time in over a year! Super exciting. But perhaps not as exciting as winning this! Let’s hope I get these papers done, do well on my finals, and finally get to the fun business of graduating.

Almost everyone going into academia pretty much knows that finding a tenure-track job will take a great deal of determination, good luck, good timing, and a downpour of fairy dust. With all things being equal, a select few get the job and many other qualified candidates don’t. My departmental honors advisor told me (paraphrased), “You should go to grad school because you want to learn, you want to enrich your mind. Don’t expect to find a job at the end of it. If you’re OK with simply immersing yourself in a passion that you love with no expectation that your degree will be worth anything, then go to graduate school.” (Tangent: which, of course, is why it perplexes me when fellow undergrads say, “Oh the job market sucks. I can’t find a job. I guess I’ll just go to grad school.” I’m going to grad school because I’m willing to be worked like a slave and live around the poverty line for love of literature. You want to go to grad school because you have nothing better lined up? Don’t insult me.)

I get mixed feelings when people tell me they want to go to graduate school too. On the one hand, I’m thrilled that someone is considering a career in academia not only because I personally can’t imagine doing anything else with my life but also because it’s such a great feeling to find someone who feels such enormous passion for their field. And yet, on the other hand, I worry that they don’t really know what they’re getting themselves into. They don’t know what’s involved with grad school; they don’t know the difference between an MA and a PhD; they don’t know the job market or even what the job entails and they don’t know how high the bar is set. I feel an urge to warn them, as my parents vigorously warned me, but I also don’t want to dismiss their hopes when my own are so high as well.

Sometimes, however, it does an aspiring scholar good to humble himself with the facts.

This article is not a comprehensive study, but it does give an indication of the state of the field.

In a humanities graduate program, this is what is required of you:

These programs almost always take at least six years, but often upwards of a decade, to complete. It’s common that students learn two foreign languages, though students are required to learn as many as four (e.g. Classic programs frequently require two modern and two ancient languages). By their graduation, it’s expected that students will have a distinguished record of presenting papers in professional conferences and publishing articles in professional journals, in addition, of course, to writing a dissertation which is supposed to be an original contribution to their field. These expectations are part of the reason that so few students actually complete their programs. Whereas almost everyone who enters a top-tier law school graduates, top Ph.D. programs in the humanities often have attrition rates of 50% or more. And again, among these noble few, 92% will fail to find tenure-track jobs. It’s fully expected that a Ph.D. candidate who has any hope of gaining employment anywhere should have a command of her subject that will rival junior professors in her department.

It’s not uncommon for applications for entry level, tenure-track positions to include five or more published articles and a dissertation published by a noted press (such as Cambridge or Oxford) that’s been reviewed by the leading scholars in the field. And we’re talking about hundreds of these applications for a single job that might pay $40,000 to $60,000.

Here’s what the job market looks like:

The market for Ph.D.s in philosophy of the mid 1990s was far better than it is currently, but still was farworse that the legal market of today. One widely reported study (from the Review of Metaphysics, September of 1996) showed that of 341 Ph.D.s granted in 1995-1996, only 6 had secured tenure track jobs in top 15 ranked philosophy departments by 1998 and only 11 more had landed jobs anywhere in the top 50 departments. So, of 341 Ph.D.s, only 26 found tenure-track positions within two years of graduation, or a whopping 7.6% placement rate. Put another way, 92% of Ph.D.s in philosophy failed to find tenure-track positions during this period.

Let’s all just agree that if only 7.6% of law graduates had found associate level employment within 2 years of graduation, there would be rioting in the streets. Moreover, those Ph.D. numbers are from the mid-1990’s days of wine and roses. Today it’s far worse. Duke University, a top-30 philosophy department, announced that they’re not accepting students into their Ph.D. program next year (presumably because of the current economic climate). Indiana University of Pennsylvania is requiring its faculty to explain why they shouldn’t eliminate their philosophy major altogether. Anecdotally, I know quite a few recent Ph.D.s from top 15 schools, and the vast majority of them are either severely underemployed or have left the job market all together.

And this isn’t restricted to philosophy either. In History, English and other disciplines in the humanities, the market for tenure-track posts has been extremely constrained for years. With dramatic cuts in government educational spending and corresponding cutbacks in private institutions, market conditions have become downright harrowing. Graduates of institutions outside the top twenty are likely to never find a tenure-track position at all, and even graduates from top 10 schools are likely to spend years on the market taking adjunct and terminal positions as they wait for a tenure-track position to open. Even when you get one, jobs are apparently never safe in academia. Kings College (London) is forcing all of its humanities professors to reapply for their jobs in the coming year, and the same is being required by a small university in Texas.

Whereas everyone else is so excited to graduate and be done with school, we’ve signed ourselves up for another decade’s worth. Whereas everyone else is competing for the big bucks, we content ourselves with poverty-level paychecks. Secretly, I think all grad students are just a little bit masochistic. :]

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.“

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

- The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

“I will call the world School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read — I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School — and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, It is the Minds Bible, it is the Minds experience, it is the teat from which the Mind or intelligence sucks its identity.”

- John Keats (Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, Feb-May 1819)

It is at least somewhat comforting to think that identity is shaped by what one learns from suffering. Our souls are shaped by experience and how we react to those experiences. Perhaps like the Velveteen Rabbit, our souls become battered through time, tired, dirty, and worn down by life and love. But by the time we are old and wrinkled and discarded for something more appealing, we too can say that we are Real. And the lines on our faces will tell people that we have learned to read the heart and have found our souls.

More and more, I’m finding that pursuing academia means something different everyday. Tomorrow, it means giving up an A Fine Frenzy concert to oversee a Mark Twain Reading Marathon for Sigma Tau Delta. In August, it will mean moving away from the people I love to live on the other side of the country. For the next five years, it will mean earning one-fourth the starting salary of my engineering pals. In the future, it might mean putting off having children. It might mean never earning enough to buy my dream house. It might mean never having enough time for myself. Pursuing academia means missing out on a lot of fun. It means making sacrifices. Sometimes sacrifices so big you wonder if one day you’ll regret it.

Academia can be a cruel mistress. A professor of mine once told me that you should only pursue an academic career path if you honestly can’t imagine yourself doing anything else. You’re either in or you’re out. Go big or go home. There can be no wavering. You need to love your field that much, or else you won’t make it. Or else, you shouldn’t even bother. “Are you really willing to give up everything for some dead playwrights?” I can just hear my dad say. The years are long, the jobs are few, the pay is low, the work is hard. At the end of it all, you count up the sacrifices and wonder, “Is this all worth it?”

But pursuing academia also means many many beautiful, Coachella-level-amazing things too. And for now, those things are enough to make the sacrifices seem petty in comparison (after the occasional 10-min pityfest moment of weakness). Besides, I’ve always been a stubborn child. When people tell me I can’t have it all, I sense a challenge, a demand to prove them wrong. Maybe there will be sacrifices along the way, but I won’t let myself miss out on the important things. I will have it all one day. Even if “all” doesn’t include camping out at fancy music festivals (Hey, this could still happen one day. )