In response to recent threads on going to grad school, going to law school, and teaching at the secondary school level, Mo Snyder of Deep Shag writes:

Though Iíve tried my hardest to divorce myself from the academic world altogether, I find your blog hard to resist because it deals with so many of the issues that plagued my academic life (and still do, to some extent). ÝI am now an adjunct at a community college, which I generally enjoy because I love to teach, not because I can live off of it. Ý[The author of Tiny Voices] and I met doing our masters (hers in creative writing, mine in lit) at the University of New Mexico, a university and program in collapse. ÝI entered with a plan to eventually get a PhD. ÝI exited with the sick feeling that I never should have entered. ÝAcademe was not for me. ÝIn response to your wonderful comments about your responsibilities as an instructor, I will say that my undergraduate degree left me ill-prepared.

As an undergrad at Michigan State, I was lucky enough to trip across a few professors/instructors who really appreciated my...unconventional approach to literature and life. ÝMy primary mentor, a man who chaffed at academia himself, really believed in me and encouraged me to go on to grad school. ÝHe was perhaps being optimistic for his own reasons, hoping that I could infuse some program with a new energy. ÝI was his best student, and he wanted someone else to experience what he had with me. ÝBecause of this, he was perhaps too supportive, and though he offered the warning labels, I knew him to be a generally morose guy and took them with a grain of salt. ÝMy other big champion ó actually a PhD. candidate ó was enjoying his time in grad school and was still hopeful for a bright future. ÝLater, after three or so years of teaching at a small liberal arts school in Iowa, he ran like hell. ÝI took 3 years off, bartending and living in new places and enjoying my college friends ó the greatest people in the world; then I settled in at UNM.

What, regardless of my young age and inexperience, I could have never been made to comprehend was the difference in politics between undergrad and grad school. ÝFor those of your readers who assume smart 22 year olds to be prepared, this is just not possible. ÝThere is no way to apprehend that, to get your wonderful but flighty advisor to read the latest draft of your thesis, you must pick her up and drive her to school because her car has been towed due to parking tickets. ÝThere is certainly no way of understanding that, as an undergrad, a smart, interesting student is a blessing; in grad school, sheís a threat. ÝThat was the curse of some of my smarter colleagues, not of me. ÝI was ignored, invisible, unworthy. ÝAfter an amazing experience with a number of excellent champions (in two departments) as an undergrad, I was completely uninteresting in grad school. ÝI ended up finding my true home in the film department, where I met perhaps my greatest mentor. ÝHe was a freak, too. ÝHe was wonderful. The politics in grad school are fierce because they are the politics of the department as a whole. There is no longer just learning and writing and studying. ÝThere is catfighting and jealousy and crap that I could have never imagined. ÝThe best thing I did was teach. ÝI loved teaching (T.A. is so the wrong name for what we did, since we assisted no one, no one helped us, and no one ever saw us teach). ÝBut most of the T.A.s were awful. ÝA handful were great. ÝThe rest did the job because of the tuition waiver and hated it. ÝThey did not respect their students. ÝThey did not bother to learn how to be good teachers. ÝThis was the worst part, watching them infuse their students with their own apathy. Ý

So I finished, and my (now) husband and I moved to L.A. because he got into the MFA Film program at UCLA, which has been another nightmare of pedigrees vs. talent. ÝI think, now that heís finishing, heís even more jaded than I was. Ý

I bet that grad school is great for those people who know how to play the game, who went to private schools as kids and were trained to circumnavigate. So many went on to nice schools and have pedigrees that open doors, and thatís great for them. ÝBut for those of us who have always been in the middle (because even great grades from a mediocre public high school wonít go too far) are chewed up and spit out by academia. ÝIt is a system that eats itself, that is afraid of true diversity ó a diversity of spirit. ÝIím sure some of your readers would attack me personally for this ó that Iím jealous and not that bright and just...angry. ÝMaybe partially, but I also have stayed very true to myself and my interests. ÝI know that an advanced degree in English was the wrong choice for me, mostly because I realized in grad school that the things people obsessed over had no bearing in the real world. ÝI had spent a lifetime working with teens, leading adventure trips, exploring myself and pushing my limits. These people just spun their wheels. ÝI hated their self-importance and their belief that the work they did was important. ÝTo them, yes. ÝAnd it was good that they did it, but puhlease, give me a break. The most important thing they had to give to the world their teaching, and they backburnered it for the applause of invisible people. Ý

Wow. ÝIím getting long-winded and I apologize. ÝReally, my point is to say that I believe you will fare wonderfully in a school where you can reach your students daily. ÝHigh school aged teens are amazing when you can get them in a setting that goes beyond the classroom. ÝIt seems you will have this opportunity. ÝYou will be in a position to affect people without, hopefully, having to pray to the invisible gods of academia.

After reading this entry, all I can say is am I ever glad my grad school experience was in the sciences. I never saw anything like this. I'm not doubting the story in any way; it's just that I never encountered such contempt for grad students. Sure, some advisors were jerks, but nothing remotely close to this.

The difference is that science grad students- as cheap pairs of hands in the lab- are at least potentially valuable assets to their advisors, albeit usually less productive than postdocs or even technicians. Of course, that value can lead to other kinds of abuses, like forcing students to stick around well after they should have been able to defend their theses. As a result of the fact that grad students are attractive as cheap labor, there is also at least as big a problem (periodically reinforced by idiotic projections of future scientist "shortages") as in the humanities with encouraging more students to go to grad school than there will ever be jobs for, though in some fields a Master's can actually be quite useful for employment in industry thus giving students a better escape route.

I am sorry that Mo had such a difficult time in graduate school, and her experience indeed resonates with my own at Ivy U. But is it so necessary to impugne others to justify oneself? Those of us who are passionately committed to our research do believe that the work we do is important. Apparently the most important thing to Mo is her teaching; I don't criticize her for it. Give *me* a break and show some awareness that priorities, values, interests, strengths, and goals differ greatly among academics and that differences are not always reducible to class.

Mo says: "I bet that grad school is great for those people who know how to play the game, who went to private schools as kids and were trained to circumnavigate. So many went on to nice schools and have pedigrees that open doors, and thatís great for them. ÝBut for those of us who have always been in the middle (because even great grades from a mediocre public high school wonít go too far) are chewed up and spit out by academia."

Sorry, but that's pompous crap. I have never met an academic who didn't go to a public high school, and a lot of them went on to a state university for grad school. I certainly did.

Wow. Does that _ever_ resonate with my current experience! I'm sad to see that I'm not the only one suffering from this type of academic myopia, but I'm glad to find out that I'm not overly sensitive to this type of abuse (i.e., feeling like it's worse than it actually is).

Though perhaps it's not necessary, in my own defense, I finished grad school four years ago and so my recounting of that experience is not immediate and is, by now, a black and white story more than a colorful life. My entering class at UNM was a particularly good one, and by the end only three went on to PhD.'s (two, really; one quit about three months in because she was sick and tired). I'm sure so many of your experiences were different, and I'm so happy for you. But this school, as I said, was a total freaking mess. A nightmare. And I'm sure that (the best professors were in the process of jumping ship just as we were finishing up ourselves) those who studied in a more stable environment had a better time of it. When a heartbeat is healthy, it's easier to see the applied use of everyone's work. When the whole situation is crumbling, it all begins to seem a bit silly.

I have to say I agree with "Michael". I actually dropped out of high school, went back at night, went to comm. college, transferred to my local BIG NAME (public) U, went there for the BA and much later for my Ph.D. Most everyone I knew was a public product. I somehow managed to get my advisors' attention, and I really enjoyed grad school. But then I was also an older returning student and knew that while academe is nasty, it's no nastier than other collections of people and believe me, I found it WAY more pleasant than retail, the corporate world or law firms. But then again I really wanted to teach, and write on my own terms and when I wound up at a small liberal arts college on the other side of the country I was quite satisfied.

One thing I note with a lot of these posts, and I know it's hard not to fall into, is the assumption that somewhere the "perfect" job or "perfect" occupation is out there. It isn't. There aren't any. You *can* make some combination of the good and the bad work for you, and for some of us that's still the academy, even though it may be more out-of-the-way parts of it.

"I bet that grad school is great for those people who know how to play the game, who went to private schools as kids and were trained to circumnavigate...But for those of us who have always been in the middle (because even great grades from a mediocre public high school won’t go too far) are chewed up and spit out by academia."

To be honest, I think you're reading way too much into it. Some people have the requisite talents and skills to navigate the academic minefield regardless of their class, prior schooling, IQ, etc.; some don't. Same with most other professions - in fact, I would argue that the class bias you identify would be even more pronounced in other professions, in which tuition waivers and cost-of-living stipends are a lot harder to come by.
While I've only been at this a few years and could very well be way off-base on this, my experience has been that the people who "know how to play the game" in the academe are those who - regardless of their socioeconomic and educational background - are open-minded and willing to learn and play by the rules whether they agree with them or not. Those who start out already opposed to the rules of play get disillusioned pretty fast and usually don't hang around for long. To be sure, the "rules of the game" are problematic in many ways; that, however, is an entirely separate complaint that has very little to do with the issue you're raising here.

Wow, I had nearly the same experience at UNM. It was truly dreadful.

What was the cherry on top of my experience was I went into a severe depressive episode and got no support from my department. Not the department head, not the two people who were in charge of the TAs, not my thesis advisor, not nobody. Whenever I talk to people about grad school now (which isn't often because I frequently begin to froth at the mouth) I urge them to check out the campus mental health service. Are there psychiatrists on duty? Does student insurance cover medication? Are medical excuses from class/exams/papers provided? They usually think I'm joking. I wish I were.

The other thing I tell people who want to go to grad school is: line up as many fellowships, grants and scholarships as possible. Ask the Elks. Know no shame. If you have competing offers, call up universities and say you'd just love to come, but you can't afford to go and University X is offering you close to a free ride, so....The one thing you don't want to be is an underemployed/unemployed thirtysomething with student loan debt you envision yourself paying off for the rest of your life. In this economy, never mind trying to do it on a teaching salary.

In line with what Mo said, I would tell people (I would tell them but since no one is listening to me at this point I usually just think it) don't be a TA unless you love teaching. Don't be a TA unless you are unusually extroverted, self-motivated and can work on your own in a high-pressure environment without collapsing/panicking. The waiver isn't worth it, the pay is dismal and at UNM in the late mid-90s at least we had no union, no health insurance, no sick leave, &c. Better to work an outside job part-time or even full-time. (At UNM the TAs were also thrown into teaching full-sized classes of, in my case, freshman students who had failed the get-out-of-English-101 exam and did not want to be there with no preparation, no orientation and no fixed syllabus, so if my experience is at all representative of other TAs it might help explain why we were all so dreadful.)

As Invisible Adjunct said, grad school applications should come with an advisory warning. I sometimes think about what might have happened if I had gone from college into some kind of career -- any career -- rather than grad school.