Paid to read books

"I get paid to read books!" This sentence - always with the exclamation mark - is the easiest way to identify a new humanities grad student. I used to say it myself. When you're used to college (and maybe a masters program) where you paid to read books, the thought that someone would pay you anything at all for the same work seems too good to be true.

What follows isn't a don't-go. (Started this post before seeing Rebecca Schuman's great-if-bleak article. Guess something's in the air?) I don't regret going, and even if I do end up doing a joint degree in computer-science and air-conditioner repair once I finish my dissertation, I'd say it's overall been a positive experience. If you have humanities-ish strengths, and want/need to pay your own way/have your own health insurance, there's a lot worse you can do than end up in a funded grad program, researching a topic that fascinates you. And the problem with the don't-go genre is that it never answers the question of what else someone who ends up in humanities grad school might have done.

But, assuming the question isn't answered for you (i.e. assuming you do or likely could get into a good, funded program) these are some things to... consider:

-Whatever you're getting paid will seem like a ton the first year, and like a joke or an insult the last. When I started grad school, my rent was under $700 a month, and my stipend more than covered it. I taken a year off and worked prior to grad school, and worked during college, so I knew a bit more the-value-of-a-dollar than some, but mentally, I was still at the life stage when my working meant mochas, H&M, and lessening the burden I was on my parents. Self-sufficiency - with its electric bills, broker's fees, Metrocards - was something else.

-At most jobs, if you're doing well, you get something called a raise. If you do well in grad school, what happens is, they don't stop paying you. You will see things on Facebook from college acquaintances about how huge the seats are in business class, or one of your high school classmates will be one of the Facebook billionaires, and none of this will even matter, because you're too busy being jealous of other former classmates who are pulling in, what, $40-50k (in NYC - maybe less somewhere else) at an office job whose title means nothing to you but doesn't that sound wonderful.

-Even if no one in the history of your grad program has taken under seven years, by the time you've been in school for longer than four years, i.e. the expected length of an undergraduate degree, you will be asked all the time if you're going to finish up any time soon. You will hear about how you've been in school for so long, and not in a way that suggests a comprehension of this just being how long the program you're in takes. It will seem, to those around you, like a personal failing. What exactly have you been doing all those years? You will internalize this, and start to think there's something wrong with you that your dissertation didn't take five minutes. You will imagine that others are judging you even when they're just being friendly and asking what it is you do. It will get old. You will get old.

-Even if you go into your program already jaded, already aware that you probably won't end up a professor, this does leave the question of what you will end up doing. As this is WWPD and not career-counseling, I will refrain from going into the particularities of my own situation - a long and boring story about the pros and cons of interdisciplinarity. (Anyone hiring in French-Jewish Literature-and-History?) But the fact that I am and always have been open to alternatives to being a professor is either my saving grace (so many who aren't spend years adjuncting before changing course) or evidence that I lack whichever Sheryl Sandbergian ruthlessness is needed to for goodness sake teach novels in this job market.

Meanwhile, while I don't feel any particular shame in going and doing something else - bills must be paid somehow, right? - and am indeed actively interested in various routes other than "professor," I'm not sure what to make of a general job market in which "entry-level" means an internship one might apply for if one has previous related internship experience. Is any of what I've done thus far transferrable? I mean, in principle, yes, and I can-and-will make that case, and my sense is that professors understand this (or do if it's explained to them) and can serve as references for things other than tenure-track jobs, but will employers agree? Is this my fate, or does the fact that I don't have the full year's food-service experience TGI Friday demands mean... what, exactly?

And with that, back to the dissertation.