I was feeling very nervous, sitting there in Professor Bigshot’s office. I had just been accepted into the PhD program, and was visiting the department to get to know everyone and see if it was the right fit. I hadn?t applied to any other PhD program. If I didn’t go here, I probably wouldn’t get a PhD.<\/p>\n
You can figure out pretty easily who Professor Bigshot is, if you care. I guess you could say I’m giving her a pseudonym for SEO reasons.<\/p>\n
The student who was showing me around the department had asked, “Oh, have you met Professor Bigshot yet?” I had not. I had heard of her, but I had absolutely no idea what her work was: what she studied, what she had written, what her theories were. I was nervous, sitting there in her office, because I was afraid she would find out that I hadn’t read anything she’d written. I was right to be nervous, but for a completely different reason.<\/p>\n
“So Angus,” Professor Bigshot asked me, “You know that the job market in linguistics is very tight? You understand that we cannot guarantee you a job when you graduate?”<\/p>\n
I relaxed a bit. I knew this one. I had thought long and hard about it. I said, brightly, “Oh yes. But that’s okay. I have computer skills, and I can always get another IT job if this doesn?t work out.”<\/p>\n
“Well, at this university,” Professor Bigshot?s face abruptly twisted into a snarl. “We are not in the business of granting recreational PhDs<\/em>.”<\/p>\n That was the last thing I was expecting to hear. I did the only thing I could think of: I thanked Professor Bigshot politely, got up and walked out of her office.<\/p>\n I still had a day and a half before I left town. I had planned to visit classes and see the rest of the university.<\/p>\n I didn’t quite know how to tell my student guide what Professor Bigshot had said, so in a few minutes I was sitting down in Professor Littleshot’s office. I didn’t know what he had done in linguistics either, but at this point it hardly seemed to matter.<\/p>\n “So Angus,” said Professor Littleshot. “Have you made up your mind whether you?re going to attend our program?”<\/p>\n I opened my mouth. “Well\u2026”<\/p>\n “Is there anything I can say to convince you?”<\/p>\n I shut my mouth and thought for a minute. ‘Well, I guess you just did.”<\/p>\n That was slightly over nineteen years ago. Professor Littleshot retired before I could propose a dissertation topic. I wrote a dissertation in Professor Bigshot’s theoretical framework, received my PhD in 2009, taught linguistics as an adjunct for seven years, sent out applications for tenure-track jobs and was invited to exactly zero interviews. Last week I started working as a Python developer in the IT Department at Columbia University.<\/p>\n Recreational PhD? Well, there have been times that I’ve enjoyed quite a lot. And yes, I suppose you can get a back injury, chronic insomnia and thousands of dollars of debt from plenty of other recreational activities. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t tried so hard to prove Professor Bigshot wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was feeling very nervous, sitting there in Professor Bigshot’s office. I had just been accepted into the PhD program, and was visiting the department to get to know everyone and see if it was the right fit. I hadn?t applied to any other PhD program. If I didn’t go here, I probably wouldn’t get … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"","activitypub_status":"federated","footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=871"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1486,"href":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871\/revisions\/1486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}