My Director asked today, "Have you read any of the Chronicle?" No, I say. "Well, you need to read this article. It's about why NOT to go to humanities grad school." Her exact words I can't recall, but you get the idea.
So, off I go reading this article. (By the way, you can find it here and it worth every second of your time to read.) I said to myself as I read the article, "This was me like five years ago!" Unbelievable! I was a star-struck grad student working on my masters in history with great aspirations of getting my Ph.D. and becoming a professor. So, when the first go around of applications I sent out came back, it was nearly a unanimous NO, aside from one acceptance with NO FUNDING. I was extremely distraught!
By this time I had secured a full time job with with a state institution (I have been full time temporary for years) and this opened the door to free education. So, I bided my time by going to Archival Science school and waited for the next application season to begin. Ha! I got in another Ph.D. program, but with NO FUNDING!! Some decisions had to be made.
First, I got a whole ton of rental information mailed to me about where I was potentially going to live. Not good - way expensive. In addition, the first realization that I would NEVER find a job entered my mind. "What if I spend like 50 to 75 thousand for a degree and never get a job in like 10 years?" Something was wrong with that equation. Lucky for me, I had a Plan B.
Plan B was library science school. I had been working in a library for years at this point and applied to library school on a whim. I got in! I called them and ask if I could defer my admission one year and they said yes! Well, that year was up and I needed to get in, so I went to library school. Librarianship was my second career choice, but it was almost a certain bet that I would get a job upon graduation....within six months of graduation anway. (Took me three, actually.)
So, here I am, the cynical librarian that you see before you now! Grad school in the humanities was a course for self-destruction, a collision course with a moon, so to speak, and I was able to divert my flight path in time to avoid oblivion. I still consider myself an historian as much as I do a librarian, though there will never be a time when I will be history professor it seems.
Universities are too much about vocations and not about knowledge and the love of learning anymore, hence the decline of the humanities. I am glad I changed course when I did because being a librarian is a great job...a job with benefits...and not just an adjunct posting.
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Of course, if you had been a federally approved MINORITY you may have received more acceptance letters. You are a victim of the reverse side of affirmative action. As I said in another post, I KNOW FROM EXPERIENCE that colleges, especially those which are state run, are engines (just like industry is the engine of economy) that promote liberalism and Marxist ideas to the ninth degree. Liberalism only works in concept - in those hallowed halls of academia where elitists (like our current president) can muse over the slave state, the empire of capitalism, the "oppressive" nature of America, and so forth. When these concepts are applied to reality, they are self destructive. You don't believe me? Look at the failing state of California. Enough said.
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