Should you go to grad school?
2009-03-24 12:39:29.051631+00 by
Dan Lyke
1 comments
Various people I know are becoming disillusioned with the education diploma industry. I know that Eric took many issues mentioned in the following to heart when he was choosing his career path, but Should You Go To Grad School looks at The Chronicle of Higher Education: Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go and extends that out to Computer Science.
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#Comment Re: made: 2009-03-25 05:52:01.254112+00 by:
ebradway
Both articles are 100% accurate. The Luis' article helps make the argument
against the PhD for humanities. The Geography Department at the University of
Colorado is currently the #2 ranked department in the USA. They start their
tenure track faculty at $60,000/year - exactly half of what CMU starts their
CompSci faculty. That's pretty much an across-the-board trend.
But Luis also points out some of the positives. Even though the judgement is
pretty harsh at the end of the first six years - as a new tenure-track prof, you
are given an immense amount freedom. Freedom to shoot yourself in the foot...
After spending a decade in the software salt mines, though, I find I can't stand
how academics complain about how much they have to work. It's a total lie. I
think the overall effort involved in maintaining a successful academic career is
about 60%-75% of what I experienced writing software professionally. As an added
bonus, academics have immense freedom in determining how that effort is
distributed. It's very easy to, say, teach an extra class two semesters in a row
and get an entire semester off from teaching to work on research.
Another funny thing is staying on top of academic research. My biggest problem
is so many of many of the publications are immensely boring and poorly written.
For a naturally slow reader, it's absolutely painful to get through most of the
reading I need to do. On the other hand, I can also get a huge amount of the
same content via workshops and conferences (like I'm at right now).
Dinner last night involved some amazing Korean food and some great connections
that will likely foster my future career. Can't say it sucks...
Overall, though, I'm in a different position than many academics. I came into a
"humanities" field with a huge advantage. I can actually shut myself in a room
for a couple weeks and emerge with a few thousand lines of code that implement
some curious new concept. All I have to do is write it up and go through the
review process.
Another advantage I have is studying in humanities but with a very strong
CompSci component. I don't intend to compete for a very, very few humanities
jobs open up each year. I'll be applying for CompSci jobs. My advantage is that
I don't have a CompSci degree. That gives me a built-in differential.
Of course, I also currently have a research job with the Federal Government...
So I'm pretty well hedged.