My Experience Part III

As much as I objected to some of the structural features of graduate education in the humanities, detailed in my previous post on financing for MAs, I still loved much of the experience.

There was still, at heart, a good amount of the experience of reading fascinating and wonderful books and coming together with other people to discuss them, and that was what had led me to apply to programs in the first place, and what led me, during the MA at UVA, to decide to apply, again, to PhD programs.

I had intimations of how bad the academic job market was during my time in the MA. I knew that the odds of a PhD translating into a tenure-track job, down the line, were prohibitively long.

I spoke, during my second year in the MA, with a fifth-year in the department who had applied for over one hundred academic jobs during this, his job-market year, had received first interviews for four, a second interview for one, and had not been hired.

He was married and recently a father, and already had a public sector consulting job lined up at Deloitte (it didn’t hurt him that as an undergraduate he had been an English-applied mathematics double major). I knew the lay of the land would be similar for me, indeed, for all applicants.

I went into the application process assuming that a PhD would represent time spent researching things I loved, with a slim possibility of a career in that line at the end of it all. That felt like reason enough to give it another shot.

I applied to ten PhD programs, was admitted to two, and enrolled in one, matriculating in the fall of 2019.