… for some Locker Room readers, but here’s some advice: don’t pursue a Ph.D. in the humanities. If you are considering doing so, please follow these four simple steps to a brighter future:
- Slap yourself. Hard. Make sure you really feel it.
- Wake up.
- Smell the coffee.
- Read today’s Clarion Call on the Pope Center website by Troy Camplin, in which he describes the atrocious job market for humanities Ph.D.’s. Camplin, an English Ph.D., now works the graveyard shift at a hotel in order to feed his family.
If you’re still not convinced, check out the first 36 or so out of 100 very good reasons not to go to grad school. Or try Mark Bauerlein’s essay from Monday about the plummeting job market for Ph.D.’s in literary studies.
If that doesn’t work, watch this slightly macabre but still funny Youtube clip in which an adviser tries to drill some sense into the head of a young woman determined to go to grad school.
If that still doesn’t work, watch this other Youtube clip in which the Simpsons mock the “terrible life choice” of some Ph.D. students.
And if none of those work, I would suggest going back to step one and starting over, although I fear your condition may be terminal.
