Tuesday, April 30, 2013

From Slate.com
Thesis Hatement: Getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor.
(My own area of interest is more history, but I assume that the same issues would apply equally in that discipline as well.)
From the above article, I also found this link very interesting: Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go and Just Don't Go Part 2 (Also when I go to the bottom of the article, I realized the author was a professor at Hope College, in my home of West Michigan.)
As I wrote in an earlier post, this was the decision I reluctantly came to myself, although I occasionally still have some regrets about not pursuing a career related to history.  But on the whole articles like the ones linked to above make me feel like I made the right decision.
On the other side of the coin, however, I have many friends and former classmates who are now working as college professors in the humanities.  And sometimes I think to myself, "Well, if they did it, maybe I  could have done it...."

2 comments:

Dean said...

You always still could...I think you'd make a very intriguing history professor. :)

Joel Swagman said...

For all the reasons listed in the links above, I've decided it's not the best career move at this time. but thanks for the vote of confidence Dean :). I appreciate it.