PhD advice welcome here please!

[Katkins1]

I'm an undergrad in the arts. Just been offered a conditional offer of 2.1 on a PhD (to skip masters). If I can get a career development loan and p/t job, will start this year. If not, then next and go for AHRC. Or get put in for AHRC next year.

I'm quite excited about it- it's my absolute dream, and thrilled to be skipping MA (if I get the grades- which I'm scared about, a LOT). I'm being a realist, single Mum so I know will be hard (have to work, pay my own way), but I'm so happy about it. I really want to be a lecturer and it's so exciting.

I'm determined to it; so can anyone give me practical advice- where to look for academic jobs and so on? And what to expect , please? I'm prepared to wait until next year to do it, though I'd like to start this year if I can. Considering part time too.

See, I would find that useful. upto. I think it's genuinely helpful.

I agree with buffy this would be an interesting thread, though, and maybe one that's worth starting? I didn't explain well enough what I feel about PhDs and mental health, but I think it is an important issue.

There are academic jobs eventually. It's just that they take longer to get, and success is less predictable. And you certainly won't get a secure f-t lectureship without a PhD now.

Well, LRD I always know what my answer to "what came out of this draft?" is, but I like my student to tell me what they found first, because they need to take responsibility. And I tend to think that in humanities research, writing is a specific research methodology.

That's long been an argument in the US, Buffy particularly in Humanities fields. But I know quite a few PhDs who aren't working as academics: they work in museums, galleries, in public engagement in public bodies, in industry etc etc etc.

There's quite an industry in the US of advising PhDs about careers outside of academia.

YY, I can see that would be really useful to hear. I think a lot of this is stuff I learned during my Masters, in terms of learning how to interpret feedback that's not a straight mark.

There's an industry right here about advising PhDs about careers outside academia!

Ooo LRD do you have links for that? I have a soon-to-complete Doctoral student who really won't have a hope of a lectureship IMO, but would be brilliant in the museums sector (he came from there) but I need to do some straight talking with about future prospects.

I don't, I'm afraid - what I was thinking about was the number of events my university sets up for PhDs not going into academia. Off the top of my head, we've had talks about getting into publishing, TV, journalism, museum curating, and politics. But I'm afraid I don't know how they get the speakers in because I'm too junior!

Sorry.

Buffy, I'm not sure myself any more - a adenovirus credentialism? A stage on the way if you know beyond reasonable doubt that your only dream in life is to be an academic? The most successful of my contemporaries used to say she thought of her PhD as merely a process of winning her spurs and that was all. Instead of choosing a project that she was interested in, she deliberately chose a topic that was very strategically placed in a small but very influential field, in which there were few younger scholars and taught herself a particular niche scholarly skill that is old-fashioned and dry as dust and which hardly anyone bothers to learn, but is very rigorous and necessary. She had a very influential supervisor, networked like crazy, worked crazy hours for years, and ended up very early in her career with a very senior research post because she was literally the only person in the UK under 50 who had the credentials for the job! Whereas, most of my contemporaries (including me) blundered about reading lots of stuff that interested us, giving papers, going to seminars and conferences, doing bits of teaching, and generally trying to work out what we wanted to do with the PhD thesis....

Certainly now it isn't and hasn't been for a long time the place to do significant or groundbreaking original work (some institutions have even tacitly dropped the requirement for significant original contribution to the field IIRC!) - the timescale for expected completion and the demands of the discipline mean that it isn't really possible for the vast majority of theses to be an amazing discipline-changing product. And neither nowadays is the PhD an enjoyable funded three-year reading period with lots of coffee and great ideas and great minds and then a quick scramble to write up at the end (as my supervisor's generation describe it from their halcyon days ;) ).

I think if one sees it as an arduous but necessary apprenticeship for an academic career, in which one is rigidly disciplined in turning out a strategically placed but just-good-enough piece which can be used to hook into the next job or the next bit of funding in order to revise it into a bigger or better project, then that sort of works. Sadly supervisors are not good at explaining to graduate students how to be strategic and ruthlessly disciplined, and PhD students don't usually realise that's what's really needed until too late (I count myself in this)

Har - my autocorrect has changed "academic" to "adenovirus". Scarily prescient....

So why aren't there the jobs any more? What changed?

Buffy oh god yes I could be your co-author on that project I am now a very good supervisor of dissertations, but I do sometimes feel a bit like the old hermit woman in that Douglas Adams novel who gives the secret to a great life as "do the opposite of everything I did"

Jane - university funding streams changed dramatically, and the universities were forced encouraged to move to total return accounting and themselves on profit-making market-focused corporations. The RAE/REF culture encouraged very narrow performance-related criteria for hiring and promoting staff. Lots of money funnelled upwards to management and VCs' salaries whilst rank and file lecturing posts weren't replaced. The admin load on academics increased massively with the advent of email, a tick-box reporting culture in university management, and a vast increase in the hurdles you need to jump to bring in soft money through grants. (My institution recently advertised a grant-writing research support position, paid on the lecturer salary scale, to help the school win more grants. Why not just open up an extra lectureship instead FFS!)

*and to model themselves on corporations

And neither nowadays is the PhD an enjoyable funded three-year reading period with lots of coffee and great ideas and great minds and then a quick scramble to write up at the end (as my supervisor's generation describe it from their halcyon days

I did my PhD about 20 years ago (yikes!) and it wasn't like that then. I graduated from my BA into a recession. I was offered a studentship, but I was also offered a teaching fellowship which was about twice the money, but required 8-10 hours a week of teaching tutorials, plus marking 3-4 essays a year of my tutees (I was responsible for around 100 students each year).

I did my PhD in 4.5 years and did a couple of conference papers a year, plus published one essay.

Post-PhD, I spent one year in a terrible job, and spent my time applying to get out. I was lucky (translate: worked hard, was an excellent colleague, got involved in the 2 national scholarly associations which covered my (inter)disciplinary field, and had a broad reach in terns of what I could teach) and landed a really nice permanent job 2 years after I graduated from my PhD.

Then had a child. But the job was a commute -- 2 hours each way each day.

IME, it's never been easy to get an academic job. It's tough nowadays, partly because there's not such a straight line. Which in some ways, is a good thing. UK jobs aren't limited to "Golden Triangle" PhDs (ie London-Oxford-Cambridge) as they could be when I was young[er]. There is more variety, but that also means more uncertainty.

UptheChimney neither was mine, but my supervisor did his PhD in the late 70s/early 80s, got a permanent lectureship at 24 before he'd even finished, never had to do too much teaching, and he and his contemporaries definitely describe it in halcyon terms as three years of reading post-structuralism on a punt or rose-tinted glasses He spends his time these days chair-hopping in the US, nice life if you could get into it before that all disappeared!!

Buffy I don't think the pockets of resistance trouble most VCs unduly

Yes, train although I feel old enough now, I always felt I was about 10 years behind the best times.

But remember those "best" times were very tough for women ...

But it did mean that my supervisor and advisors were worse than useless at preparing doctoral students for anything for the job market and finishing the thesis, because their model of PhD supervision was that you saw your graduate student once a term and didn't expect to read anything until the final year (and so didn't push for any work). This of course was totally unsuited to the research councils' demands of how you should work, or indeed any sensible model for completing a PhD. Thankfully most current PhD supervisors or advisors are more up to speed, but actually it can be far better to choose a younger, less well known in the field doctoral supervisor who knows better what the current state of the profession is and what us needed for the PhD, than a very grand person who may be a superstar in the field but may not have time for the nuts and bolts of what matters in supervising a doctorate (though obviously those things aren't mutually exclusive).