Mastodawn

Doc Impossible Feb 12, 2023

I don't regret my doctorate. I don't.

But if I had everything to do over again, I would *never* get a PhD.

It narrows your options in ways you'd never imagine. But that's not why.

The process of getting a PhD--at least, at this point in time--is inherently abusive. It's cruel. And it demands that you accept the abusiveness, the capriciousness, the lack of control over your own life and your own destiny, as both appropriate and inevitable. That you internalize the abuse and perpetrate it against yourself, without end. That service to others is everything, that you don't deserve time to yourself, that you never,ever deserve a vacation from your work, that your only human value is in whatever knowledge you have--knowledge which is constantly devalued and denigrated by others.

The PhD process is nothing short of hazing.

I love teaching at university. It is a great joy in my life. But it wasn't worth the price of admission, and I can never get off of this ride now.

Think twice before you walk this path.

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Zeb Larson Feb 13, 2023

@Impossible_PhD I feel like all I do anymore is warn people away from getting a humanities PhD. The only thing it qualifies you to do is be a professor, and there are a vanishingly small number of professorships. If you're interested in literally anything else, there are more direct ways to do them, and like you say, the whole process is abusive. Decent mentorship is a crapshoot.

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Doc Impossible Feb 13, 2023

@Zeb_Larson Ehh... there are a few specialties where you can do things. Technical writing, for instance--if you like managing major teams at like Google or whatever, there's a very solid career path.

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Zeb Larson Feb 13, 2023

@Impossible_PhD Look, I've had a successful side-hustle as a SME and writer doing curriculum development. I bill at a very competitive rate, and I've got it to the point where my clients send me work without me having to apply constantly (though if I wanted to live on it...different story).

But the truth is, while my PhD did help me get that work, getting a PhD wasn't the easiest or most direct way to break in. I could have just gotten a degree in instructional design.

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Zeb Larson

@Impossible_PhD It's not that you can't do things with a humanities PhD; I've done a little buffet of them. But it was a lot of extra work to do something I probably could have done with just a terminal MA.