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If I wasn't getting so damned old and wanted to be yelled at on a daily basis by a man in uniform I'd join the military for 4 years.

GI Bill would pay for any school I wanted to go to that would accept me, on top of getting $15k bonus if I joined the Airforce NG (would be a nice easy peasy 4-5 years though and very doubtful of having to set foot on foreign soil.

I work at a university here in Australia, and whenever we do international comparisons where we want to look good we compare oursleves to the Californian system. Value for money from Californian education is terrible - we spend less half the amount per student and are better ranked in every index than all but a few Californian schools.

Sucks to be me... .

When I look at how inefficient we are, I cannot begin to imagine how California blows that much money.

Corruption, stupidity, inneficiency... umm... oh, and lots of Cheese and Champagne.

My mother used to work in the accounting department, while in her job at UC Berkeley. If I remember correctly, she was working there, because they didn't have money to hire someone else. I heard several accounts of people trying to scam money out of the coffers. One guy wanted to build a deck or some such nonsense.

{Guy}: "50K, give it to me."

{Clerk}: "Why?"

{Guy}: "For... my, hmm... My deck. WAIT!"

{Clerk}: "No..."

{Guy}: "Dammit, I meant my new car.

{Clerk}: "No."

What did they expect? Can't be a scientist, can't be an engineer, can't be an artist, can't be an accountant, can't be a plumber, can't fire rocket propelled chainsaws. Its only useful for college or a being incompetent in a government job wasting tax dollars.

I've just applied for a Federal Govt job.

$120k for four years of college is easy to hit. Going to a state school in a state other than where you reside will get you there. My little brother went to Michigan State for a year, and it ran over $30k (and this was ten years ago).

My wife is currently in school. She went to the local community college for her gen eds. and then transferred to a state school for the specialized part. We'll have paid over $50k by the time she's done, and that's taking all the available cost-reducing steps and factoring price into the choices.

I dunno, if you go to school expecting to get a Ph.D. in comparative literature or something like that and sail through life with it... well you probably deserve to be disappointed.

I suspect I'll get blasted for this but if you chose to get a degree in a subject that's not useful don't expect to get anywhere with it.

I think the point is you can go to university and get a degree in nearly anything and you should learn a lot of skills in research and critical appraisal of information, and so on.

You can use these skills to do an MA or Ph.D or you can use them to go into industry.

Kilkrazy wrote:I think the point is you can go to university and get a degree in nearly anything and you should learn a lot of skills in research and critical appraisal of information, and so on.

You can use these skills to do an MA or Ph.D or you can use them to go into industry.

OR as we have witnessed you can use these skills to ARGUE on the INTERNET!

It's totally awesome.

No-one needs skillz to argue on the Internet.

As someone who went to school virtually for free thanks to scholarships and who now has an MA and a job in finance, I would like to point and laugh at all the losers would who wasted their degrees. You suck, and you should accept responsibility for that instead of whining and trying to pass off your responsibility to the people who gave you such fantastic opportunity that you proceded to squander.

Mark this day for it shall not come again. On this day Nurglitch and Frazzled agreed. It is a disturbance almost as if a billion voices all cried out at once and then were silenced.

Nurglitch, that post has finally convinced me that you will be the first person on my Ignore list. Your closed minded arrogance and snobbery disgust me.

As for the article, it hit close to home for me, a fair bit. I got a scholarship to do a PhD, and it ended up ruining my life and resulted in a nervous breakdown.
I'm hesitant to post about it, because I know how these things are viewed- there will be a large portion of readers who will assume I failed because of personal weakness alone, etc. I'm certainly willing to admit that I had several personality flaws going in that made my situation worse, and to accept my part of the blame. But that doesn't change the fact that graduate studies are sold dishonestly to students, that it is an exploitative industry that helps those who are "in" at the expense of those who are trying to get in, and that this is a very bad thing.

I don't really expect this post to make an impact of course. Those who agree with the article will no doubt understand where I'm coming from, those who don't can label me a failure and therefore disregard my opinion.
I just felt I had to say something, as my negative experience of graduate studies has had a huge impact on my life.

Tell us more DB? I know I burned the hell out in Law School. Fortunatley I had a(n ex) fiancee at the time who saw to it that I understood what real hell on earth was.

When I finish my War Studies degree here at Kent, I'll be approximately £18,000 in debt. I'll probably rack up another £4-5,000 doing my masters. But I honestly think its worth taking a masters. Why?

-It's another year before I have to get a real job.
-It separates me from the people who only have a degree, and there are a lot of 'em around these days.
-I'll be moving up the University chain to Kings College , which is in the top ten universities, as opposed to just sticking to solid slightly above average Kent (39th out of 102).
-Having a better university on my CV should help improve my chances of getting a job, theoretically.
-I enjoy my subject, and would relish another year of study and academia.

For these reasons, I think the pros outweigh the cons. However, for those people who go on to get PHD's in Media Studies from Wolverhampton really do have no hope. People who take pretend subjects kid themselves they're doing something people will employ them for, and refuse to listen when people tell them otherwise. It sucks, but can you do?

Hrrrm. Well, it's not an incredibly comfortable subject for me but I'll respond as well as I'm able. It's complicated and might be a bit longwinded though, so I apologise in advance for that.
Edited to Add: I am removing some details that would make it easy to identify me. They mostly pertain to technical details about the study I was doing and some details to do with the events afterwards that would make it easy to know who was involved.

I came out of my degree with a very good mark, where the bit I had enjoyed the most was my 4th year thesis. I had absolutely loved the free reign I was given by my supervisor to investigate a problem, plan my own experiments, and get on with the business of research, albiet on a small scale. It was so enjoyable, that I thought-hey, that doesn't seem half bad as a job. I asked a few people (lecturers, a post doc I was friendly with) and they were all encouraging, but emphasised that it was a major challenge. Okay, I thought, I enjoy challenges.

Right, so there's my mindset going in. Very niaive, very open, very optimistic. I applied for a position which tickled my love of stats and ecology. To my great suprise, I got the position, and started working. It paid more than I'd ever earned before, so I was pretty happy about that.
My first three months were a lit review, and also a lot of time spent on the hillside in Connemara with my hand in the bums of various sheep, helping another student out. This was fine by me, seemed pretty enjoyable though the days were long. I didn't have an office to work from though. I thought this was annoying but took it with good cheer.
I was also dealing with many challenging issues to do with the research.
I eventually hit on a good plan, and put the wheels in motion to get the study done. I was also working on a complex mathematical problem related to. I knew however that without it our survey wouldn't be breaking any new ground. I worked it out, which was fine.
Now, around this time, I started to have difficulties in my personal life. I'd been working so much, my girlfriend and I came under some serious strain. She moved out, and I had to move house 4 times in 2 months. I eventually ended up living quite far away from college.
All this upheaval set me back a bit, and I had to work like a demon to catch up. There was problems with the chemical test we were using, which I needed to sort out. Unfortunately while mathematical modelling and animal handling are some things I can do, chemistry is one of my weaknesses. Often my work would be contaminated and I'd have to start from scratch.

There were many other upsets and stressful, difficult to resolve problems.
My supervisor decided that I was not progressing quickly enough for his liking. He demanded a meeting every morning and another in the evening to report progress. In these meetings he was always incredibly negative about my progress and would constantly barrage me with lists of tasks. I was working (and I do not exaggerate here) 17-18 hours a day average, which would lead to crashes from exhaustion. On more than one occaision I crashed from exhaustion and missed a day. I remember sleeping in my car for an hour before going back to work on two occaisions. My relationship with my girlfriend had disintegrated. I spoke to my boss, laying out some of the stresses I was under, and he said "Stress is what it's all about."

(This may be my longest ever post on dakka and we're not even there yet)

When it came down to it, on the run up to deadline day, I just snapped. I went to my boss, told him I couldn't take any more of it, and that I was quitting. The night it happened, I desperately wanted to talk to my girlfriend. She'd started dating a guy with a good sense of humour and a twinkle in his eye. She now saw a man who never smiled, and acted mechanically, about once a fortnight. That night she broke up with me. I don't recall what exactly happened, but I believe I went catatonic for over 12 hours. I remember sitting on my bed staring at the wall, and then someone knocking on my door, the next day, and noticing I was parched, starving and my bladder was full.
I spent a week in a sort of dreamlike state.
Then I decided I had acted too rashly, and that I would renogotiate with my boss. I went in and told him that I would take back the position, but that we would sample in 4 months to give me a chance to get things properly ready, and that I would be validating the testusing a better method. He agreed.
Unfortunately, I was not well, mentally. I thought I was, but I was actually quite broken. I had a paralysing fear of phones, emails, and letters (any form of contact my boss had previously used.) I was absolutely cripplingly afraid of meetings. And I couldn't focus on my work at all. I also couldn't enter the building I used to work at.
If you've never experienced insanity, that's all going to sound hard to believe. The really bad part of it was that I didn't realise I was ill- I rationalised it all away. Sometimes, I had these wierd spells where I'd try and do something, and I'd go all funny and hyperventilate. I didn't know what a panic attack was, but one day I had 5 of them trying to walk into the building. Eventually I realised something was wrong. I went to a counsellor, who told me she couldn't see me because I was a grad student. I broke down crying, and explained some of my situation. She realised how bad it was and got me an appointment. I went in and told him I quit. And that time, it stuck. I had realised something was wrong with me. Unfortunately, my car got stolen on my second therapy visit thing. Because of the avoidance of contact basis of my crazy, I couldn't make myself go back, or call them to explain. I know this sounds crazy. It was crazy. I was crazy.
Over the next 9 months I got better, slowly. I was unemployed and very, very depressed for 6 months. I'm now on a career path which I love. So the story had a happy ending.

To be clear, I fully recognise that I had flaws that caused this to happen:
1. I had low self esteem going into this project, which made it easy to convince me I was lazy, which would make me work twice as hard to prove I wasn't. My boss used that to his advantage mercilessly.
2. I didn't stick up for myself enough. This is partly to do with not liking confrontation, and partly to do with liking to have all my facts exactly straight in important arguments.
3. I didn't look for help beforehand. This is down to my vaguely macho "I can handle it" attitude.

Things I won't accept are that I didn't work hard enough (I worked incredibly hard) and that I wasn't smart enough (my science was better than my bosses, and often involved things he couldn't do himself. I'm a fething awesome scientist.)

In the end, the experience showed me that PhDs vary wildly in quality, experience, and workload. I have friends who did far, far less work in 3 years than I did in 1. It also showed me that really, they are mostly a way to get cheap labor by playing on the self esteem of high achieving and hard working otherwise intelligent people.
It ate 2 years of my life, drove away a girl I was crazy about, and is a huge blot on my CV. And, yeah, every time I bring it up, there's those people who see a whiny loser making excuses for himself. Sometimes I worry that they are right. Mostly, I'm thankful for the wisdom it gave me, and I try not to be too bitter.
Tl, dr anyone?

I also think that my experience was probably unsually negative, but it does highlight what is wrong in academia quite starkly, I think.

@Ketara - But War Studies? Yeah, can't open a newspaper without seeing vacancies for jobs in that field...




Automatically Appended Next Post:
@Da Boss - Mate, I have nothing but respect for you. Fair play for giving it a go - no-one can say you didn't pour your heart and soul into it.

DB has been through the wars. Look at it this way, most of your future days will be better than what you have gone through already. that will get you through a lot of bad things in the future (I survived that, this is nothing).

Respect.

Cheers. It's certainly true, very few things will stress me out as much again.
At the start of teacher training the course co-ordinator asked us if we thought it would be a particularly difficult year. I looked back on 2007/8 and thought "Naaaaaah!"

Mind, I was funded and my education to undergrad was free. I can only imagine there are even worse stories in the US where it is an even more high stakes game. And funding is hard to come by in the humanities compared to science at the best of times (although they usually don't have to deal with quite so much annoying niggly detail)

I may leave a skeleton of that post up later, but I'm uncomfortable with how much information is up there. It wouldn't be hard for someone to trace who I was from that post.

Da Boss wrote:My first three months were a lit review, and also a lot of time spent on the hillside in Connemara with my hand in the bums of various sheep, helping another student out. This was fine by me, seemed pretty enjoyable though the days were long.

I liked this part the best. Not sure why though. Keep on truckin' man.

Yea wack it. So that was humanities? It sounds awfully sciency to me. I may have misjudged what the humanities are.

No no, that was science through and through. I meant that it's possibly even worse for humanities people, because similar things can happen to them without even the money I was getting as compensation!

Oh ok. gotcha.

The business man in me thinks once you figured out the mathmatics formulas etc and that your bosses ideas weren't going to work, that you should have blew him off and gone out on your own, else he'd just take your credit.

When I left I took all my data and my formula with me . Not much use without the infastructure to use it though.
The worst thing about it was I wasn't in a state to do anything about his crappy behaviour. I should have lodged a formal complaint and tried to have him royally screwed by I wasn't able for it.
I'm not much of a business man though

Hmm, all this talk of PhD's and the horror makes me glad I settled for a couple of certifications (A++ and Microsoft) and I am content to work on an AA in Accounting.

I won't make $100k per year with an AA in accounting (Ha, probably not even a BS) but I know I'll make enough to live a comfortable, FAIRLY stress free life.

And when you get down to it, that is a wonderful thing.

Frazzled wrote:Oh ok. gotcha.

The business man in me thinks once you figured out the mathmatics formulas etc and that your bosses ideas weren't going to work, that you should have blew him off and gone out on your own, else he'd just take your credit.

The producer in me says once you had a schedule laid out for a year, you would have known it was going to take longer. Risk analysis, blah blah, etc.

However that kind of knowledge comes from (often bitter) experience. It's in the books, but the books don't prepare you for all the things that happen in real life.

Bah, who needs to earn money!?!? Y'all need to visit cougar bars more often...

JEB_Stuart wrote:Bah, who needs to earn money!?!? Y'all need to visit cougar bars more often...

She Who Must Be Obeyed has determined such a course of action to be terminally hazardous to my health.

Nothing beats a good donkey show......

Just saying.

Frazzled wrote:She Who Must Be Obeyed has determined such a course of action to be terminally hazardous to my health.

Just sayin is all. Experience +Money +Free Drinks = Something better...