A college friend, Corey Olsen, knew before his freshman year that he wanted to be an English academic. During his senior year, a professor took him aside. The prof explained that he gives the same advice to all student considering graduate school: Do not pursue a doctorate in English unless you cannot imagine yourself doing anything else with your life.
My political science advisers never put it that bluntly. But the maxim applies nearly as well and, I suspect, to many other social science and liberal arts degrees. (I cannot comment on the “hard sciences.”) For all Northwestern undergraduates seriously considering graduate school, here is some advice:
• Don’t go unless you are prepared to apply for endless grants, applications and fellowships. If you can’t put yourself on the line time and again, most hiring institutions will pass you over in favor of someone who can.
• Don’t go unless you can handle a yearly stipend of under $15,000 (sometimes well under $15,000). Tuition is usually covered. But consider footing the bills for rent, food, discounted-yet-still-expensive health care, books, travel, maybe a car and occasional entertainment, on $1,200 a month, while acquaintances join investment banking firms and climb toward six-figure salaries.
• Don’t expect to teach at NU, at least not for a long time, unless you study at a prestigious school. There is a pecking order in academia. The doctorate from Yale is going to get more job offers than the doctorate from Podunk U. You want a highly ranked program if it’s your ambition to someday work at an elite institution.
• About teaching: You’re NU undergrads, you know this already, but don’t go if all you want to do is teach. You should be fully reconciled that you will spend a large percentage of your life not only reading academic articles, but also often really stupid articles, ones your professors shielded you from but are expected to know and comment upon as part of the job.
• Don’t go anywhere unless you know there is a group of scholars there interested in your issues — scholars who are not about to leave or retire.
• Don’t go if you hope to directly change the world. Even if you’re very good, your big reward will probably be to give advice to somebody who is directly changing the world.
• I have to add, for at least one of you out there, don’t go if you are hoping to meet that special somebody “just like me,” with all your quirks and obsessions. It could happen, but I wouldn’t count on it. Most folks in grad school are already married (to people or their work) or in serious relationships.
• Do go, if you can truly say there is nothing else in the world you would rather do. If you love ideas and talking about them so much you want to spend the rest of your life studying them, and at some level you pity the poor bastards with their six-figure salaries who troop to their 9-to-5 office cubicles and, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, measure out their lives with coffee spoons. It can be a great life. One where, at 65, you just want to keep working — and can. How many careers can you say that about?
