Wednesday, October 27, 2010

So you want to get a PhD in the humanities?

This is far from my life, but it's sure funny ...

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think I'm missing something.... unless it's the title of the post that's the joke?

Anonymous said...

Ah, I see -- the flash was broken in my browser. Sorry for the false alarm.

Mr. Verb said...

I'm relieved!

Anonymous said...

Since this is so far from your life, what would the Mr. Verb version be? "I got a 'A' on my intro to linguistics midterm and now I want to go to MIT to work with Noam Chomsky"

Mr. Verb said...

Well, no. I see this from the faculty perspective. When students come to talk about grad school or the profession, it's people I've talked to and worked with extensively outside of class. We and our students aren't struggling to say something new about well-worn subjects, like in the video, but trying to decide which of a million different new kinds of data to gather and which of several new ways are best to use to analyze it. It's an incredibly exciting time to be doing linguistics for that kind of reason.

One point in the video does have to be made: Getting a PhD isn't an automatic road to an academic job. If you get a PhD in linguistics (or closely allied fields), it's cool to work toward an academic job, but you need to be doing it because you are really into it and want to do it. Our people are getting jobs, even academic ones for the people who want them, but it takes serious work these days.

Anonymous said...

Since when does "just down the hall from my office" qualify as "far from my life"?

Mr. Verb said...

It's very far. At least as far as East Berlin was from West Berlin in the old days. I've got no day visa and know that the guards will shoot if I look hard.