Responding to Wednesday's post about how too many consecutive years of school can affect both maturation and career choice, J.V.C.--who wishes someone had levelled with him about academe ten years ago--asks a pointed and interesting question:

...we should probably be disturbed or perhaps saddened by most students in their late teens or early twenties who aspire to become professors. What exactly does a 19-year-old aspiring professor long for: Authority? Cultic Status? Elevation above the mediocrity of one's demographic peers? Shelter from the non-academic world?

There are probably as many answers as there are 19-year-old aspiring professors. Whatever the case, the pseudo-scholarly daydreams of graduate students remind me of melodramatic teenagers who aspire to be writers. They're enamoured by promises of glamour, but they haven't the foggiest idea what it is they want to write about.

Case in point. I had an English professor my freshman year at Berkeley whose sheer unmitigated eloquence made my head spin. He would pace the stage, lecturing without notes, in perfect, ornate sentences filled with gloriously well-chosen words that added up to insights that rocked my eighteen-year-old world. He did this while lecturing about Puritan sermons. I couldn't believe it. I had never seen such a thing. It sure beat the crap out of all the boring high school English classes I had slogged through. I felt blessed to be in its presence. That was what I wanted to do, too. I developed a kind of ad hoc shorthand so I could take his lectures down verbatim. Then I would race back to the dorm, while his words were still in my short term memory, and recreate his lectures on the computer. I had never thought of being an English professor until that moment--I was still rather in that mode of being a melodramatic teenager who wants to write novels but has no idea what to write about--but everything seemed to click. Shortly after, I declared a major in English, adopted this professor as my advisor, and sped forward with nary a doubt, never looking back.

You could have knocked me over with a feather when my second year of grad school rolled around and it was time for me to start teaching. Teaching? I had known this would be a part of the job, and the funding, but I hadn't known, if that makes any sense. The disconnect between the fantasy of being like the eloquent early Americanist--whose eloquence I only ever witnessed because he taught classes--and the fact that I was signing up for a life that would involve me also teaching classes was so profound that I really was surprised and disturbed by the advent of my teaching years. Clearly I've adjusted a bit since then. One does. But those early moments of life-altering decision-making were not the wisest or most rational moments I've ever had, and I know from experience that my thought process was awfully typical.

What did this professor say to me when I told him I wanted to be a professor, and expressed my concern about the academic job market? "Don't worry about it. There will always be a job if you're good enough." I think a lot of people hear advice like that. They feel secretly stroked by it--it suggests that they will be one of those who are "good enough." And they just don't find out how much more complicated things are until they've already committed themselves to the academic life.

To J.V.C.'s list of possible reasons why someone in her late teens or early twenties would aspire to be a professor (which, as he notes, is an awfully stuffy, pedantic thing to which to aspire), I would add "a basic confusion about the ways and means of intellectual inspiration." For me, and for many like me, that first experience of being truly turned on by ideas, and of being truly inspired by the spectacle of someone else--the professor--living those ideas, inhabiting them, creating and shaping them, happens in college. The person who does that to you is very likely to have a profound effect on your idea of who and what you would like to become. You mistake the inspiration you are feeling--as a very young adult, having adult discussions and grappling with grown-up ideas for the first time--for the inspiration felt by the professor himself; you think that if you become a professor, that inspiration will be yours forever. You don't realize that you only get to be introduced to the world of ideas once, and that the life of the teacher is in many ways a life of repetition and performance, one in which one often finds oneself modelling an inspiration for students that one no longer actually feels. Good teachers can recreate that experience of inspiration in themselves, and they can communicate it to others, and the best ones do that pretty readily and make it look easy. But it is work of a very particular kind to do so--repetitive, tiring, sometimes grinding work. This is entirely lost on starry-eyed undergrads, and even on many grad students, for whom teaching is still itself a fresh and new experience. This particular truth only reveals itself gradually, over time.

An interesting theory, but my experience was quite different. My father was an academic, and the part I really liked about his job was the leisure time that he had to read (or so I thought). No other adult of my acquaintance could be found with a battered copy of an old Ukrainian history in the middle of the day. I decided that the only way to keep up with my reading was to become a professor.

All of that changed, contra J.V.C. and Erin, when I attended my first few college lectures. One lecturer (not yet on the tenure track) in particular seemed bored and haggard, and informed me that his job search, having started in the first semester of graduate school, left him absolutely no time to read or even care all that much about his ostensible field of study. Since then, of course, I've met academics who have more healthy relationships with their subject matter. Perhaps it's just early influence, but much of their job seems arduous and unfulfilling, even from the spectator seats. And don't get me started on over-specialization in the humanities. My father, who is 70 this year, went job hunting in a very different era.

It doesn't seem to me, however, that the trend in academia is any different than in other fields that require extensive training. How many people decide mid-high school that they want to be doctors, and spend the next 15 years of their life in pursuit of that goal, whether they still want it or not? I imagine their dreams are rather like those of an academic. The problem isn't necessarily academia, but the gamut of fields that ask you to make a decision about the entire course of your life at the precious age of 17 or so because you'll need an early start to have any hope of completing your training in time to have anything resembling a normal life.

There is such a thing as being too curdled and cynical about academia and the desires of others to be academics; I'm very struck that aspirant academics actually seem curiously divided between those with some relatively clear and "pure" love for what they understand scholarship and teaching to be, those who are pretty much careerists of an ordinary sort, and those who have no clarity at all about what they're doing in graduate school.

I always loved knowledge. I always loved both the idea of and the everyday activity of teaching. I always loved speaking. It was clear to me even as an undergraduate that being a professor was one of the few things that combined those loves. Maybe my favorite passage in any book, and it was my favorite when I was a kid, is a short speech by Merlin in The Once and Future King in which he extols the virtues of knowledge.

Gee. We grow up to discover that our youthful aspirations have committed us to "repetitive, tiring, sometimes grinding work" and must eventually give way to disillusion and compromise. How exactly does this distinguish academic aspirations from any others? And how does it show that those aspirations were misguided? Finally, do you really expect to find true satisfaction in a career of advising high-school students to aim low?

I definitely understand when people talk about graduate school as a sort of prolonged adolesence. I definitely understand, too, when people raise questions about why a young person wants (without any real understanding of what's involved) to become something like a writer or a professor.

At the same time, and as a person struggling to wrap up a dissertation of my own, I must admit to finding this line of thinking a bit off putting. Let's begin with the talk about graduate studies as adolesence, pt. II: how many young people do you meet who have the focus, determination, intellectual capacity, and the courage (yes, courage) to make a decision to undertake the writing of a book that most other people won't value highly? How adolescent is it to have to learn to survive on 5500/semester (what adjuncts are paid at my university)? Certainly those of us who choose to remain in school don't develop the same professional skills as those people who take "office" jobs after their undergraduate educations; certainly we may have different social abilities after spending many years reading books by ourselves; and certainly we may develop a different outrlook on many of the things people around us take practically for granted. But I don't see that this makes humanities graduate students any more or less adolescent than, for example, people who go into investment banking at 22 and then grow accustomed to receiving year-end bonuses larger than the salaries many people earn for a year's hard labor. Which life is lived more authentically, eh?

This, I guess, leads to the next point: why is it so different (and apparently wrong) to dream (even if naively) about becoming a professor than to dream about becoming an MD, a lawyer, a fireman, a cook, a professional athlete, or a movie star?

Sure, I wish I had received some more practical advice up front about the world that was waiting for me upon completion of my Ph.D. But even with more guidance I don't know that I would have made a different decision. Peole have different skills and personalities and are drawn to different things. So is it really any more distressing when a young person says he or she wants to be a professor than when a young person sets his or her sights on becoming an accountant, or working in human resources, or writing compute code, or building houses? I don't think so. In fact, I tend to think that those people who dream the more unusual dreams are more imaginative, more courageous, more interesting than those people who have more conventional dreams. Most everybody gets a healthy does of the reality of life as they get older, so why in the world would anyone want to discourage young people in pursuit of their dreams?

I know that academia isn't perfect. I know too that I wouldn't encourage anyone to pursue a Ph.D. But I find it a little strange to hear all this talk, much of it from people with their Ph.D.s, about how mistaken were their career choices. It strikes me as another iteration of the sort of dryness that Iris Murdoch found so distasteful in her colleagues in philosophy -- or the sort of cruelty Rorty suggests is displayed by enlightenened atheists who think it's important to convince believers that god is a construct. Is it possible that it really serves no purpose other than to stroke a speaker's ego in some weird way?

David,

That was totally uncalled for. I don't plan to advise anyone to aim low. I plan to continue to do what I do now: to advise them to aim knowledgeably, and to encourage those in advising positions to help ensure that young people do have solid information available to them to help them make their choices.

Because the post was getting long, I did not discourse on how I look at teaching now--nor did I think I would need to do so. Being honest about coming-of-age moments does not discredit one's present motives or intentions. It also may not say a whole lot about them. I don't intend to bare my soul here as a means of convincing you that you were way out of line with your post. I will simply say that my belief in the importance of good, inspiring, inspired responsible teaching grows deeper each year, as does the genuine joy I get from having the opportunity to do such work. Acknowledging that teaching is hard work, or pointing out that people often go into academe--or other kinds of work--for the wrong reasons, hardly seems to me to deserve the kind of snark with which you have favored me this morning.

Advising people to go into something other than academic English is considered "aiming low"? Intellectual snobbery can be very off-putting, you know. I used to want to be a math professor, because I loved math and didn't think a corporate job would give me any chance to learn new math or develop intellectually. I wouldn't have the collegial or intellectual atmosphere among the cubicle drudges.

Well, I've jumped into the business world and found my original assumptions about this life were wrong. And I'm much happier working on problems that other people actually care about (because their money is involved). I also get paid much better (but not anywhere near those Wall Street guys... I would bet there are far, far fewer people in that position than are adjuncts.)

I would think it would be difficult for professors to advise about jobs outside of the academy. Those career days we had at elementary school would be much more useful if done at college, when we're actually seriously considering possible jobs.

Erin --

No doubt, my comment seems uncalled for in light of what you believe and feel, but I would suggest that you re-read some of your own recent posts -- and posts on other blogs that you have recommended -- to consider whether the comment might have been called for by what you have written. My sense is that your blog has changed from a very incisive critique of academia to a campaign aimed at dissuading young people from attempting academic careers.

In any case, I am very sorry for having offended you.

David,

Apology accepted. Thank you.

I've posted nearly a thousand entries on Critical Mass over the past two years, amounting to nearly a million words. The vast, vast majority of my writing on CM concerns the politics and dynamics of academia. To follow a train of thought suggested by recent events in my own life and in the lives of several prominent academic bloggers is not to launch a campaign, or to change the focus of the blog. You overstate your case rather dramatically.

For what it's worth, the woman whose email I posted a few days ago--the one who was thinking she wanted to go to grad school, and who wanted to solicit advice--has decided she still wants to go for it, and she has asked me to guide her through that process. Of course I said I would. She is making an informed choice, and I am now going to support her in that choice and do all I can to help her succeed. I have guided plenty of other students like her, and I have done the same with graduate students, and with former graduate students who are newly out of school and need letters, advice, feedback on their work, and so on. That does not sound to me like I have launched a campaign to dissuade young people from attempting academic careers. What I do feel adamant about is making sure that the choice to pursue a Ph.D. in English is as informed and responsibly-made as possible.

Of course it is vital to make students as aware as possible about the possibilities, problems, and politics of academe. But how to advise undergraduates and graduates at a lesser institution -- meaning non-Ivy, not top in the discipline -- where students have more than naivete to overcome?

Thanks to the need to fill seminar seats as well as the self-serving blindness of so many senior faculty, I see graduate students who just shouldn't be graduate students. That may sound harsh, but obviously the overproduction of Ph.D.s begins with overpopulation. How to stem the tide, and how to shepherd -- gently but firmly -- the weaker lambs out the door?

David faults "a campaign aimed at dissuading young people from attempting academic careers." I think Erin's observation about the Student Who Would Not Be Dissuaded is spot on: We are ethically bound to attempt to dissuade them (using only truths, of course, but there are plenty), and if some refuse to be dissuaded, more power to 'em.

The reason we owe it to our students to make this attempt is that among the various reasons that they want to follow our footsteps are a number that range from misguided to just plain crack-smoking. Last quarter I had a couple of dozen students ask me for letters for grad school in English, and not one of them offered a good answer when I asked (and not in a challenging way), "Why do you want to go to grad school?"

"I love literature" was the most common one, followed by "I just can't see myself working in an office, can you?" and "Studying literature is what I'm good at, and What Color Is Your Parachute says to do what you're good at!"

C'mon, David -- what would your response to these students be?

If we buy the overproduction claim, then we need either to dissuade the weak from entering or weed them out severely once they've entered. And the former strikes me as a lot more charitable than the latter.

[I'll spare y'all my rant about going straight from undergrad to grad, because otherwise I'd never make my train.]

This is possibly a bit unfair...but maybe one reason that some kids want to be professors is that the perceive it as a way to combine *rebellion* with *security*. In many families, being a prof is probably viewed as a least a bit countercultural...but yet many of the kids probably think (wrongly, in most cases) that it would yield a high degree of security. So, compared with trying to support oneself as a writer or artist, it seems like a low-risk way of rebelling against the parental values.....

David,

Great point. I'm reading David Brooks' remarkably on-target Bobos in Paradise right now. The premise of the book is that the new bourgeois bohemian culture of America's educated upper classes is closely engaged in the work of reconciling their countercultural impulses with their massive drive for economic security. His chapter on the intellectual life dovetails nicely with what you sketched above.

Rejection and Leadership

It is not necissarly a bad idea to reject a project the first few times it is proposed, especially if it is a dificult one. This serves two purposes:

1) It forces the proponant (e.g. an aspiring prof) to do a complete job with the preliminary work and so get his ducks in a row. This makes it easier for both sides to evaluate the project and to decide if it really should continue.

2) It measures motivation. So, just how badly do you really want this? Any difficult and uncertain project will have a number of setbacks. Some can be predicted. Many can not. If the proponants can't deal with a little rejection up front then they won't deal well with setbacks.

Remember that Perserverance is the key--more than native intelligence and education--to most problems.

Just to clarify: I am delighted when students are utterly smitten by the literature we read together in class, and some of my proudest moments as an adjunct occur *after* the semester is over, when I continue to receive e-mails from former students who are still thinking about the works we studied.

My concern is that too many people think that the only proper way to indulge their love of history or literature is to make a career out of it. For some this is, obviously, quite appropriate, but I believe that for many others it's simply a continuation of the misperception that the humanities are somehow separate and disconnected from other experiences--a means of *escaping* the world rather than a guide to understand it better.

If you teach at a top school, odds are that many of your students who wish to apply to grad school have some sense of what they're getting themselves into. But if you teach at a second- or third-tier school, *please* remember that your students probably don't have any scholars in the family, nor do they know what a dissertation entails or how the tenure track works. They've simply fallen in love with the material they study--which is wonderful, and if you've played a role in that, be proud of it. But *please* give them the information they need to make practical decisions about whether or not they should make a career of their passion for Zora Neale Hurston or _Beowulf_. The world needs literate scientists and history-savvy lawyers just as much as it needs humanities scholars.

There are plenty of literate scientists; the world _really_ needs more science-literate (and numerate) humanists. Sorry, couldn't resist. ;)

Oh, and could we PLEASE have more science-literate lawyers? As a forensic scientist I can certainly vouch for the urgency of _that_ need. ;)

Here's a twist on this ongoing thread. What DO you tell students who love school (often part of the motivation to go on to grad school) and don't want to "work in an office"? As I read through the thread the jobs that seem to spring to people's minds are fairly narrow. My own recent reading of Shipler's The Working Poor is really making me reconsider my own ideas about the skilled trades. But lots of trades are being outsourced, lots of better paying service jobs are too (offshored, in the current parlance). What DO students who would have become a whole bunch of different things 25 years ago do now? Suggestions, folks?

I have been following these posts and comments with great interest. I don't have any smart amnswers for these very thorny questions---and I'm resisting my own autobiographical/confessional impulse to avoid from any implication that my path should be the "one size fits all" answer.

But as for the question of what to tell folks who love school and "don't want to work in an office"? My first impulse would be to ask them what they know about office work and why they can't picture abiding it. They might be as ill-informed about the possibilities of office work as they are about the possibilities of being a tenured Ivy Lague professor.

(Brief autobio, with apologies.) I didn't ever see myself as the "office type," and yet here I am. My assumptions were that "office work" meant days of identical, drudgery-filled routine. That's was an incorrect assumption on my part, and the office work I do now suits me just fine.

It is naive to think that the choice is between a classroom and an office.

The days of the American salaryman putting on his fedora and picking up his briefcase and heading off to the cubicle are long over. The business world is as varied as anything you can imagine.

The problem is that most young people want to start out in their 'dream career' right away. That's incredibly naive and unrealistic. You have to put in time learning and mastering the basics in any career, and for the large majority, an academic degree is just a learner's permit. This can be just as true for a career in academia as for one in business or science. The fun begins about 5-7 years down the road, when you get out of the 'newbie learner' mode in most professions and more opportunities start opening up for you.

Steve LaBonne's requests for science-literate lawyers is both amusing and accurate. In the area of intelletcual property law (particularly in the patent field) a science background is a pre-requisite. The large I.P. firms (in D.C. and SIlicon Valley for example) require (at a minimum) an undegraduate degree in the sciences (be it computer sciences, math, engineering, biology, etc.) and many require a graduate degree in same. In fact, I sometimes suggest the law to science undergrads who sometimes face difficult carrer choices between academia and the business world.

As a non-science-related practitioner (my focus is on trade and logistics), one of the great and continuing joys of my practice has been the acquisition of knowledge in science-related matters in order to represent my clients. These include: principles of the aerodynamics of flight and the causes and dynamics of fires (for aviation accident investigations); marine engineering (maritime accident investigations); and theories, principles and history of surveying and measurement technology (federal regulatory product investigation).

It is both fascinating and nescessary to my work. It is also a source of great satisfaction to obtain sufficient commercial/science/non-legal information about a client's business to be able to represent them competently. The ability to discuss a client's processes competently and cogently is critical to being able to advance one's legal arguments concerning the product, issue, etc.
Of course, it always helps to consult with a forensic scientist when the need arises!

Good weekend to all.

I wonder if it would be useful for someone to produce a videotape series aimed at showing students something about what it's like to work in various fields, complete with interviews with people who are currently working in those fields. Would also include information about the skills and personal attributes necessary for success in those fields.

Actually, I'm thinking this could have two versions: one for kids in junior high school, and one for college students.

Does this resonate with anybody?

What DO you tell students who love school (often part of the motivation to go on to grad school) and don't want to "work in an office"?

Try Civil Engineering and Environmental Engineering. They probably require being outside the most.

Automotive engineering--in the right place--can also involve some interesting remote testing.

The Prof and J.V.C. both raised questions of "non-ivy" and "second or third tier schools." Are those the same things? I was a bit troubled by J.V.C's insinuation that students who don't attend those schools come from somehow less-educated homes. There are many reasons people go to the schools they do (I chose MSU over U of M, arguably the lesser school, because I had been told that MSU's English Department allowed more room for an individual track of study, and I was never, not even in high school, one for the status quo). You are both right, perhaps, that students at those schools have fewer opportunities once they hit academia -- but I don't think, perhaps, that these students are less qualified. It's just that their qualifications are often less-valued, which I think is a real shame. As you all know, many admissions processes weigh grades from different high schools differently. So how does a kid who did an amazing job at her/his local public high school (perhaps one with a crappy reputation) get out from under that boulder? I've changed the topic a bit, I know, but this is troubling, this absolute need to go to a select handful of schools, largely on the east coast. In my house, I was told: you'll apply to public schools in Michigan because I can't afford to send you out of state. And that was that. Was that the moment (that and the sleeping through physics and chemistry) my fate as a "second tier" girl was sealed?

This supposed need to go to one of a handful of "top-tier" schools has a lot more to do with upper-middle-class status games than it does with education. The expensive eastern liberal arts college I used to teach at did not do one whit better at teaching biology than the Franciscan college down the road that charges half the tuition.
Not that the former wasn't very good, it's just that the latter was also very good.

Mo --

I intended no offense; I'm a "second-tier" school guy all the way, and I teach at one now, and I'm pleased with the education I received and will defend these institutions proudly and staunchly. I know from personal experience that students from those schools are neither less qualified nor less educated--only that they are far less likely to be familiar with the *professional* side of academia. Many of the people I knew who attended "prestigious" schools had that one advantage: For a variety of reasons, they had a stronger understanding of grad school, the admissions process, and what's expected of those who choose to pursue a career as a professor.

Curiously I find myself the 19 year old set on grad. school (albeit in economics...) and have been since I was 12 or 13 (over the years a drift across the social sciences: law to political science to sociology; always the same subject matter, just a different way of approaching it). I come from an academic family so have been surrounded by academics and the attendant lifestyle and politics and difficulties my whole life. It may seem destined that I would desire academia, but I'm the third child and the other two are, perhaps, smarter (and better students, both Ivy-educated) than I and neither intend grad. school, so this is, in some ways, from me and not simply an environmental thing.

So what makes a 19 year old want to be an academic? I cannot point to some charasmatic figure, it really does come down to intellectual work, and desiring that being the central (although not the singular) focus of life. Nothing is more pleasing than really understanding something and coming to new ideas. I have certainly experienced ideas as a grind and ideas as fresh and exciting -- that is the rythm of the semester and I find myself turned off those same ideas, but consistenly for half a dozen years I've come back to caring about and being interested in the same sorts of issues. And I've had my moments of thinking that my interests would be best manifested in activism, and discovering that what I really did care about were the ideas and not the attempt to change society. I realize that other jobs can be stimulating and all that, but to devote substantial energy to ideas for themselves (and no external goods), and the pure joy of exploring them and toying with them doesn't seem as accessible in other fora. You forget how appealing and fun ideas are. Plus, re-read your Plato and Aristotle, there you find the romanticization of the ivory tower right at the heart of "western culture."

Note the choice of discipline, economics, and this is partly that it does allow for work in the discipline outside of academia, and a "relevance" not normally ascribed to the humanities. So in some way I am entirely aware of the possibility of academia not working out.

I understand that the pure "life of the mind" is open only to a few, everyone else has other duties: administrative work (job searches, chairing departments and programs etc), fundraising, teaching etc.

I think that Erin O'Connor underestimates the possible levels of maturity and self-awareness in adolescents. It is possible to understand what you want and what you are capable of (and are not capable of). It requires being realistic and some people are.

Isaac, I don't think we "forget how fun ideas are." But, as several folks have pointed out (and as a thread on IA a few months ago debated in depth), academia isn't the only place ideas are found.

I worked (at all sorts of things, including being a copy editor at a major magazine) for 15 years before I started college. "Ideas" had nothing to do with my wanting to go to college; I got tons of intellectual stimulation from work and from friends. I never seem to persuade my students that "ideas" are not the sole property of academics.

Motivations for wanting to be an academic are really only the point to the extent that they help us (teacher-types) advise well. You (Isaac) say you're destined for econ. Fact is, econ jobs are a lot thicker on the ground than lit jobs. We humanities types have a responsibility toward the field (ie, the overproduction-of-PhDs thang) that econ profs don't currently face.

Isaac,

Two pieces of advice from an anonymous mathematician:

1. Take some time off between college and grad school. Live your age a bit.

2. When you go back to grad school, choose the subject that captures you the most, ignoring considerations such as which subject is more marketable outside academy etc...

Take some time off between college and grad school. Live your age a bit.

Wait, is the purpose of taking time off to grow up, or to "live your age"? Which is it?

I've been reading these comments with interest. I teach at a community college where we aren't bothered with the "publish or die" syndrome. I love teaching! Nothing more simple than that. I've wanted to teach at the postsecondary level since undergrad school. (And,yes, I had a prof that inspired me with her ability!) Instead of going straight to grad school, I learned about the world for 15 years, then completed grad school (in a different area) and have been teaching now for over 10 years.

I have to hire adjuncts for my program. Most of them are eager to get a chance to teach, even if it is at a community college. All of them have told me they didn't realize the hard work it takes to put together a lecture that will stimulate the students, keep their interest, and cover all the material. They never realized the amount of work it takes to teach. Add to that the fact that we do have some academically weak students so we have to teach many of our students some of the things they didn't get in high school. Writing skills are the biggest problem.

Lastly, the knowledge I gained from having been in the "real world" has helped me tremendously in teaching. I think many who go straight into academia without experiencing life behind the desk are missing much that can add to what they can relate to their students.

i just wanted to know more about parental influernce on career choice.