JoJo Dancer, your life is calling
Jun. 3rd, 2003 10:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupToday I was at the ultra-top secret Readings for US History. This is where "they" grade the AP Exams. I went to the balcony of a university gymnasium and looked down on a sea of teachers and college professors arranged in circular tables, quietly reading and marking the tests.
I thought how strange it was to be there. Fifteen years ago this month, three of those readers, without knowing one another, read my incoherent youthful essay on Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb and some how decided that I should receive a 5. Thus probably starting me on the track of thinking I was good at history and perhaps should study it in some depth. Leading me ultimately to a life of the mind and a Ph.D. in none other than US History. Which of course proved to be unmarketable, leading me, through an improbable chain of coincidences, back... to the exam.
To think that some poor nerd out there with a test on one of those tables is probably about to have their life altered, to perhaps start a similar journey.
Well, there you go. Anyway, I taught 4 hours last night, I got up at 3:50 am today, and I fly back to teach another 4 hours tomorrow night. In the meantime the Mrs. is very upset. She lost her wallet and I understand that feeling perfectly, as I spent a couple of hours yesterday tearing the house apart and yelling, "WHERE the FUCK are my KEYS???" (They had fallen into my shirt drawer, dontcha know.) So you can have a Ph.D. in history and still not feel like you have advanced much in your life past the age of twelve sometimes. Impersonating an adult, sometimes.
I thought how strange it was to be there. Fifteen years ago this month, three of those readers, without knowing one another, read my incoherent youthful essay on Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb and some how decided that I should receive a 5. Thus probably starting me on the track of thinking I was good at history and perhaps should study it in some depth. Leading me ultimately to a life of the mind and a Ph.D. in none other than US History. Which of course proved to be unmarketable, leading me, through an improbable chain of coincidences, back... to the exam.
To think that some poor nerd out there with a test on one of those tables is probably about to have their life altered, to perhaps start a similar journey.
Well, there you go. Anyway, I taught 4 hours last night, I got up at 3:50 am today, and I fly back to teach another 4 hours tomorrow night. In the meantime the Mrs. is very upset. She lost her wallet and I understand that feeling perfectly, as I spent a couple of hours yesterday tearing the house apart and yelling, "WHERE the FUCK are my KEYS???" (They had fallen into my shirt drawer, dontcha know.) So you can have a Ph.D. in history and still not feel like you have advanced much in your life past the age of twelve sometimes. Impersonating an adult, sometimes.
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no subject
Date: 2003-06-04 01:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-10 06:23 am (UTC)Oh, and I like your user pict. Is that from the Museum of Bad Art?
hard-earned wisdom
Date: 2003-06-10 07:45 am (UTC)Okay, so, yeah, grad school... Hm. Euro (I thought you studied Hebrew and Bible?) might be different from US history, but probably even worse. The real situation is that there are too few undergrads willing to "waste" their time in liberal arts classes in general, but the grad schools keep churning out PhDs. So it's a very hard nut to crack for anyone, even if you have great recommendations and some publications and teaching experience under your belt (which I do).
Having said that, I think in retrospect that there are some things I might have done differently. So since you asked, if you want some free advice...
One is to think about positioning from day one. It is hard and feels crass and mercenary. Also everyone will say "it is such a bad market out there" and you will think, "but that won't be me!" But it will be, of course.
So you might want to think about how to do something relatively marketable, given that there are so few jobs. It would be a REALLY good idea to go to Perspectives (http://www.theaha.org/perspectives/) (or find a copy in the library) and look over the job ads to see what kind of skills people are hiring for. What subfields are relatively "hot"? I don't know for Euro, but for US, as I have found out, intellectual history is the kiss of death right now -- undergrads don't take those courses, so there is zero demand for teaching slots like that. On the other hand, a lot of jobs mention things like women's history, Latino/borderlands history, Western history, environmental history. Might not just be that these are nifty subfields that no one has ever heard of -- it's that a) undergrads like those courses; b) very few people have that training, so if you have it, you're in a good position.
It's also important to think about why you are where you are and how that will look once you leave. What happened to me is that I took my fields in American intellectual, ethnic, and cultural history, but I wrote my dissertation on American Jewish-Christian relations. I think what has happened is that US "ethnic studies" or "immigration history" jobs now are not interested in white ethnicity in general (and what I did is not a standard "ethnic" study, either). Meanwhile, I don't have the coursework/language work to get a "Jewish studies" job.
A really nice double bind. Silly me, I thought that doing a little bit of everything would make me a "triple threat" or something. However, being hard to fit into a pigeonhole makes it hard for people to know what to do with your job application. No one cares about your work if you are referring to books and people in a subfield they have never heard of.
Of course, if I could have diagnosed all this when I started, I don't really know what I would have done differently. I wanted to study what I wanted to study and leave all that marketability stuff aside until I could concentrate on it. But by then it was too late, really.
Have you lost your mind? I would say no, so long as you realize that a professor's position is not necessarily waiting at the end of the road. My real advice is to ignore what your advisor tells you and do outside work in something you might enjoy, such as publishing or high school teaching, while you're in grad school. There are lots of unemployed history Ph.D.'s out there; there aren't a lot with publishing or law or business experience. It can never hurt to have a backup plan, even if you turn out to be among the lucky few who do get that academic job.
What can I say -- if you can't be dissuaded, at least enjoy the ride! Where are you applying?
Re: hard-earned wisdom
Date: 2003-06-10 07:39 pm (UTC)Okay, so, yeah, grad school... Hm. Euro (I thought you studied Hebrew and Bible?)
You have a good memory.
Right now I'm at Harvard Divinity School for a master's of theological studies (which isn't a ministerial degree, just Harvard's version of an MA for religion). This may sound like a random choice for a school, but HDS is quite fluid in the types of courses I can use to apply to my master's. Ultimately, it was a choice between them or Brandeis (where I went as an undergrad), so I decided to diversify. I'm primarily focusing my classes on modern Jewish thought. Last semester I suffered through Biblical Hebrew; mostly I decided to take it as a way to continue to work on my Hebrew without having to cross-register and take additional placement exams.
After dragging myself through Spinoza, I realized I was more interested in history than religious thought. Then I did some soul searching regarding history, and I decided to widen my net to include modern European history generally, not just modern European Jewish religion/history, so what you said about your own experience shed a good bit of light on my options. At the moment I'm leaning towards modern European history, maybe with a focus on cultural history... which would at least link up with my undergraduate major: European Cultural Studies. (Particularly I'm interested in Germany and England from the late 19th century to the 1930s.)
I would say no, so long as you realize that a professor's position is not necessarily waiting at the end of the road.
Yeah, I'd be shocked if I did end up as a successful academic. The odds are stacked so high against it. I'm willing to play the game as best I can and see what I come out with in the end. But weighing my options... if I got a Ph.D. and found no jobs of any kind relating to history, academic or other, the worst that can happen would be me returning back to a technical job with arcane historical knowledge that I can use at parties to bore people. I would have lost eight (ten?) years of income, but I wouldn't necessarily be back where I started. And that makes it worth it.
Where are you applying?
Brandeis, BC, Yale, Cornell, Brown, NYU, Columbia, maybe Harvard (I doubt I will get in... some of the others I doubt I will get in too), maybe BU (not sure if I would want to go there if given the option). Gak, all of these schools seem so fancy. Other schools I wrote down on a piece of paper were U New Hampshire, U Maine, U Conn. I'm still in the process of narrowing them down, figuring out which schools have professors with similar interests. If I don't get in anywhere, such is life. Both my partner and I have commitments in the area that make it difficult to leave the area entirely.
We used to live very close to MOBA's collection in a Dedham movie theater.
I made a pilgramage out to Dedham many years ago. It was great. The descriptions for the artwork were wonderful!
Re: hard-earned wisdom
Date: 2003-06-10 07:58 pm (UTC)That's because they never faced a job market anything like the one out there now. They tend to not take it very seriously. And they're not omniscient. My plan, such as it was, was signed off on by a number of my advisors at Hopkins, who only wanted the best for me. It's just that they are used to being on the other side of the table and they don't really spend a lot of time (except in their nightmares, maybe) remembering what it took to get there.
Anyway, it sounds like being in a Div School program already exposed you to a lot of grad school stuff. I did undergrad at Chicago and the Div Schoolers had all the best parties! On how you decide what to do, that's the sticky part. I actually got into Brandeis for American Jewish history and probably would have a job now if I'd gone there. But I couldn't see myself teaching Jewish History 101 to undergrads -- if I was going to teach, I wanted to teach something less parochial. Kind of ironic given what my dissertation was about, but even knowing what I do now, I'm not sure I would do things differently. If you're bored by what you study, you're less likely to finish, and less likely to enjoy life, and that's the whole point of doing what you enjoy as opposed to trying to make money. (And plus I knew I didn't have the Hebrew chops to be able to make it in that field. Languages are hard for me past a certain point.)
I also had some interest in doing modern Euro; I've been known to curl up with things like The Strange Death of Liberal England, or a good Oxford History of Britain volume. But, again, the languages. Truth be told, I'm a generalist, and I'll always be an advanced dabbler. I don't know that I've figured out yet what I would do obsessively with my time, and of course that's what makes a truly great scholar. (Ever read J.G.A. Pocock?)
Anyway, if you're doing well at Harvard, you should probably have a good shot at a lot of those schools. Hey, if you go to Brown, you could visit us down here in Providence some time! Good luck...