Grad School? AAARRGH! (beats head on desk)

In My Humble Opinion
1

My fellow dopers, I find myself in a state of severe ambiguity compounded by stress and frustration. Fear not, I am drinking heavily, but I would like to ask you all for advice none the same.

I am a senior at a Venerable New England College ™. In under a year I will be graduating with an A.B. in Linguistics, which is one of the best fields ever, if a wee bit impractical.

And now that it’s time to make lots and lots of decisions, well… I’m not sure what to do.

The particular question is if I want to go immediately to grad school or not. I’ve been in school for awhile, and I think that it might be nice to take a year off, refocus, and get a job doing something. Teaching comes to mind.

On the other hand, what I want to do with my life is be a college professor- I want to teach linguistics and work in language preservation. I think. I’m not sure. It all seems kind of distant and scary… but in that ‘train tracks boring down on me’ kind of way. I know I want to do linguistics- it’s my passion- but what part of it, specifically, I’m not entirely sure. And the idea of looking at schools all over again, starting over again, is just… every time I think about it my brain wants to fall out.

And it’s a strange place to be, really. I hated every day of high school. The point of most everything I did was to Get Out. And I did. And now that I’m comfortable here in New England it’s time to move on again in some way or another, and… eek. Lots of eek.

I don’t want to stay in the Hanover area. I think that staying around a year would be fun on some level, but I’m afraid of falling into stagnation. I also think I’m ready to move on from here, as much as I love the place.

My reservations are basically that there’s a part of me that just wants to suck it up and go- apply wherever, move there after graduation, set up shop, and get me another bit of paper. I don’t know if I’d be able to find a good job that would help me save money, give me insurance, and let me spend a year taking a break and then getting ready to enter the academic grinder again.

I realize that the best thing for me at this point is probably to take a deep breath. And there are certainly resources here at school that I need to look at, but it never hurts to seek opinions from Ye Teeming Millions.

So… comments, advice, and the names of a few schools with kickass grad linguistics programs would be nice.

2

Take a year off but take the GRE first…

3

I didn’t take any time off, and in some ways I regret it … but that’s in hindsight, having learned that there are a lot of cool opportunities for recent graduates to do stuff like teaching overseas. Even if I’d known about all the choices I had when I was 21, I’m not really sure I had my head together enough to take advantage of them. Realistically, I would probably have spent the year working at some dead-end office job and hating it. So going straight through was probably a good thing for me. However, I didn’t feel at all burned out on school at the time – that came later. If you’re already starting to feel that way, it’s probably time for a break.

On the other hand, if you don’t wait, you have the advantage of being able to fill out the applications while you’re still on campus and in daily contact with the professors who will be writing your recommendations. This makes the whole process much less of a headache (especially if, like me, one of your recommenders is so disorganized that you end up having to go and sit in her office addressing envelopes in order for her to get the letters out by the deadline!)

4

You can always go ahead and apply, then possibly defer entrance while you take a year off, depending on what the school allows. This gives you the benefits of applying while you have access to all your professors, but doesn’t necessarily make you go straight from one to the other.
The other thing to consider when looking at grad school - if you go straight from one to the other, will you still be under 24 and required to submit your parents’ tax returns as part of the financial aid consideration? If so, are your parents willing to help pay for grad school (I don’t want to know the answer to this one, but you should find out).

5

Hey! This basically sums up my grad school experience at the moment. It’s not actually that bad. I’m halfway through my dissertation, is all.

I took a year off before I went to grad school. I took the GRE my senior year (I agree with Thaidog; it’s easier to motivate to take it when you’re actually in an academic environment; had I been in the real world I probably never would have gotten off my ass to register for a standardized test. And in college, you’ll have friends around to commiserate with.) and asked professors for recommendations, as well as researched programs I was interested in. I moved to Boston and worked retail. Ah, retail. This was a major motivating factor in returning to school. I can’t say I saved a lot of money, or even made a lot of money, but it did wonders for establishing an eager and ready mental state for returning to school.

I’m sorry I can’t suggest any linguistics programs; I’m largely unfamiliar with the field. Have you spoken with your professors about possible schools to apply to?

6

Prof Checking in.

Andy - I went to a Venerable New England College™ for my undergrad. Then a week after commencement I drove across country and onto an adventure that guess what landed me back in New England working as an instructor for my Alma Mater - thats where I am now 6 years later - a psych instructor for a small Liberal Arts College in Southern New England.

Anyway back to a hopefully inspirational story. Yes agree with other posters. Take your GRE. I took it my Senior year Fall and was accepted to ASU Graduate Program for Environmental Psychology. I was working uner a Melon Fellowship grant I managed to get but the grant did not start for a year. Ideferred gradschool for one year and meandered around the desert southwest for a while looking for lot’s of interesting parts of my own psyche I knew I had not been in contact with yet. Things that I would need to learn if I was going to be an effective grad student for my own self. things like Fear, Humility, Love, and most important the ability to be Honest and Truthful the the one who meant the most to me…Me.
I knew I was going to be in school in the fall in a year. So I enjoyed myself. I met interesting people, Rockhounded all over the sonoran desert, worked as a bar tender and in the summer before I went back I was aching to get into a classroom.
I ended up with a PhD from ASU in Applied Environmental Psychology. And a job offer from my Alma Mater as an adjunct Prof. A year after that I got Full recognition and have been teaching ever since. This is my first summer off in 6 years and I’m enjoying everything about it.
The point is taking a year off can be a very good thing to do. But see if the school you are applying to will defer your enrollment for a year. If so then you know you will be in school in a year, but you have a full year to find out more about a very important individual…yourself. Email me if you’d like to talk about new england school. And I think I may know some at Dartmouth you may be interested in talking to. I graduated with him and he is a fantastic academic advisor…really down to earth… Good guy to get some direction from.

7

Well…

I’m pulled in a few different directions about this, just as you are. I don’t know if I can be of much help, but here are some observations based on my experience.

I bopped around for two years before starting grad school (worked as a temp in a bunch of offices in Portland and Boston, worked at a lumber yard, was a roadie for a band, drove cross country, went to Europe for a few weeks) and I’m really glad I did it. I think it gave me a perspective that I wouldn’t have had otherwise, and when I applied to grad school I knew it was what I wanted to do.

I think it is good for academics to have some non-academic experience, and I wish more of them did. Now, let me be clear. I am not criticizing academics (even though I’m not one of them any more). I’m sick to death of hearing about the ivory tower, and how academics don’t get it, etc. When I was in grad school, I was particularly sick of friends asking whether, and when I was going to get a “job.” Being a grad student is a job: you’re an apprentice academic, meaning you teach, and do research, etc.

But, it’s a job that is different from most, and a lifestyle that has real costs to it, and I think it’s good to see some other kinds of lifestyles before you commit to it. Part of the trouble with a college environment is that your role models are all professors: people who went to grad school and then became teachers. Nothing wrong with that path, but when ALL your role models have followed it, then it may give you a distorted picture of things.
Spending some time being exposed to other paths may be a good thing.

And now a word about linguistics. I agree that linguistics is a fascinating field, and I came very close to pursuing a graduate degree in linguistics at Berkeley. In the end I wound up in a cognitive science program instead. If you are going to pursue this field I urge you to starting thinking NOW about employment prospects when you finish your PhD. Linguistics is a funny field because (1) there are plenty of sub specialties (e.g. speech recognition, machine translation) where the job prospects are pretty good, but (2) there are plenty of specialties where the job prospects are crappy and depressing.

There are very few undergraduate linguistics programs or majors in the US. That means that often a job teaching linguistics means teaching in a graduate program, which means teaching other people to teach linguistics. As you know, there are very few of these positions. When the time comes to visit various schools, be sure to ask them what their recent graduates are doing NOW. This may be an uncomfortable question, but if it is, FIND OUT NOW. I don’t mean to sound like an alarmist about this, but I have several friends who got PhDs in fields like linguistics and philosophy, who had an absolutely miserable time when they got out, and planning from the start will be a huge help.

And now a word about graduate school. Unlike undergrad, the purpose of grad school is not to take classes, but to do research in your field. Grad school classes don’t matter all that much. Starting now, think about what research you want to do, and find the school that will help you most in accomplishing that research.

Sorry for the lengthy post, but I feel like I’m writing a letter to my self of 14 years ago, and I find I have a lot to say to my younger self!

8

andygirl, my husband is a PhD grad in linguistics – I’ll sic him on your thread next time I talk to him.

What little I know is this: linguistics professorships are few and far between. Think hard about (and research) what you would do with that degree if you couldn’t get a tenured position. Would you be happy working for a nonprofit or in business?

Cornell’s linguistics department is truly evil. Don’t go there.

U of Texas linguistics, on the other hand, is a friendly place with a great academic reputation and a minimum of professorial neuroses.

But it really depends on what, exactly, you want to do, of course of course of course, since a department with the best possible reputation is useless if they don’t have good profs in your specialty.

Wherever/whenever you do decide to go, I strongly recommend taking time to hang out with some of the grads there first, preferably away from campus! It’s especially good if you can go out with a group to a bar or a party – they’re more likely to come clean on the department politics then.

9

I took 5 years off (well, I didn’t exactly take them off; I was working full-time) between college and grad school, and it’s a darn good thing, because I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do when I finished undergrad. If I could do it over again knowing what I know now, here’s what I would have done differently:

  1. Some schools have something called a “credential file,” where you can have recommendations stored and sent later to as many schools as you need for a nominal fee. This is great because a) the profs write them when you are still fresh in their minds (one professor who gave me outstanding marks on everything didn’t even remember who I was when I called him 4 years later), and b) you have more control over when they are actually sent to schools. (I found out after my undergrad advisor didn’t submit hers that she had been in chemotherapy, so well, she was a wee bit preoccupied). The credential file people will send the letters directly to schools where you are applying in sealed envelopes, so it’s just as good as if it were coming directly from the professor. Plus it saves the professor a lot of work if you’re applying to several schools. And if a professor leaves and goes somewhere else, you don’t have to engage in any detective work to get your letters.

  2. Talk to your undergrad professors in the field you’re interested in. Listen to their sage advice. They generally know what they hell they are talking about. Someday I’ll call up one of mine and tell him what happened to me because I didn’t listen to his advice about the politics of academic funding.

  3. I highly recommend working at a job related to the field in which you are considering grad school. Nothing beats a real-life perspective, and you might decide you hate it.

  4. Take the GREs now. By the time I took mine, I hadn’t had a math class in 8 years. I still did quite well, but would probably have done better if it had all been fresher in my mind. (Even if math isn’t super-important for admission to your particular program, it’s surprisingly easy to get out of practice on standardized test-taking strategy.) And you can always take them again later.

Good luck! And hold onto your current level of enthusiasm!

10

I took about 3 years off prior to grad school and it didn’t suit me well.

I had a job, an apartment, got married, all the standard stuff.

Then when I went to grad school I found that I wasn’t one of them anymore. I enjoyed the learning and research…no worries there.

But the students (both undergrads that I taught and grads that I had classes with) all struck me as lacking the depth necessary to hold my attention.

It was like I wanted to grab everyone in Iowa City, shake them and yell ‘What the hell are you doing? Have you ever worked in your life?’

Argh.

I am certain that if I had gone straight to grad school I would have enjoyed the time and finished my PhD and maybe be teaching history in some small state school somewhere. But the added responsibilities and the changes brought about by living as an independent adult made me want something else. It was like going back to childhood or something.

And there was nothing on earth I wanted more than to be an academic while I was an undergrad.

Not saying that would happen to you. I’m only saying that those early 20 years are very formative and changes can happen that you don’t expect. If you go out into the ‘real’ (HA!) world you shouldn’t be surprised if your goals and interests start changing in ways you wouldn’t have imagined.

11

M.A. in Linguistics checking in (actually did two years of a Ph.D and left with terminal M.A.).

I went straight to graduate school after undergraduate but I was a bit older (late 20’s) when I finished my B.A. so I had already worked, traveled, and done all of those things that one thinks about doing when one finishes school and is considering graduate school. With that in mind, I would suggest going straight do graduate school. My personal experience is that once you find a regular job, regular friends, steady S.O. , etc. it is difficult to once again adjust to a student lifestyle (not even mentioning a graduate student lifestyle which is a another thing entirely).

What areas of Linguistics are you interested in? The “big” departments (UMass, Rutgers, UCSC, UCLA, U of Chicago, U of Texas, Cal, etc,) tend to have a particular flavor and you would be expected to follow a course of study and was compatible with the department’s interests. Language preservation is likely to be associated with Linguistic Anthropology so you may want to look at those programs as well. So, in the immortal words of that knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade - choose wisely. I would be happy to give you any and all dirt that I have gleaned through personal experience or rumor but I would rather not do it on the board. My email is in my profile.

In any case, good luck with your decision. It will (hopefully) be a tough one deciding between equally lucrative offers of support from your top two choices!

12

Let me give a different view. I did not take any time off, and I’m glad I didn’t. When I finished my undergrad degree I was ready and eager to do some research. I went right from working in a lab continuing my bachelor’s thesis (for money - not much) to grad school. I stayed in grad school until I got a PhD, and then worked for industry, so I’m not an ivory tower type.

Why did this work for me? First of all, when I went to grad school I didn’t have a lot of stuff - a car, a stereo, some minimal furniture, and a bunch of sf books. I could live on my stipend and save money. I’d worry that I’d be used to a higher standard of living if I worked.

Second, I could have made reasonable money, and I even had a job offer. But I would have been just one more body in the mass of people. I didn’t need a 9-5 job to teach me a work ethic, I had that already.

If you want to be a professor of linguistics, what do you care about the real world? (I was a computer science major.) Do you have ideas that you’d like to do research on? If you do (and I hope you do) get cracking - you’re not getting any younger. If you can get a job that will expose you to real world situations involving the research you want to do that would be great, but it seems unlikely, especially in this economy. Don’t expect anyone outside of a university will be excited about linguistics.

I do agree that you should research job prospects and be realistic about them. You might want to look for summer jobs. But if you really know what you want to do, why wait?

13

I second what Voyager said.

I went straight to grad school after college. People recommend taking time off between the two, but I don’t think that would have suited me. For one, I was used to the grind and stress of undergrad. So when I started grad school, the coursework was a cinch. Two papers due in one week? No, problem! I think I would have gotten too acclimated to having free time if I had done the “real world” thing beforehand.

Secondly, you have to be prepared to be poor as a grad student. College students are used to being broke. People used to “real jobs” aren’t. I should say, however, that the grad students I know who worked beforehand were able to supplement their meager fellowships with savings they had accumulated. I had no buffer when I started, and let’s just say I was living on the edge.

But if you are feeling the tiniest burnt out with school, a break may be in order. Grad school will always be around. A cool job opportunity, however, may be once-in-a-lifetime.

Good luck in whatever you decide to do.

14

I’m going to be meeting with my advisor to mull this over… thanks for the advice, all. Ol’Gaffer, I’ll be emailing you in the near future- thanks for the offer.

15

No advice. Just support.

OK, a little advice…
Whatever you do, quit drinking before you make your decision. There’ll be plenty of time later to get drunk whilst second-guessing your decison. :stuck_out_tongue: :wink:

16

More support here.

First, the advice portion-

Take your GREs early. You make have an off day/severe illness/small disaster, like my roommate, and have to take them again.

Apply early. Do not wait, do not rush. I missed an opportunity to apply to a grad school I wised to attend because one of my profs couldn’t be bothered to tell me if he had actually mailed his letter until two weeks after the deadline.

Be thankful you know what you want to do. I finished my BA in Bio with a minor in Irish studies because I “kinda liked James Joyce”. Uh-uh. Wrong. I spent another year taking my BA in English so I could go grad for English. I was rejected by a round of schools for not having my English BA and wasted application fees. Do what you want from the beginning. I hated school at first, just doing what I could to get out. Now I want to be the prof so I can show people it’s not really supposed to be like that.

Support:

I’m still waiting on some acceptances. I’ve got one in Northern Ireland. It’s distant and it’s scary. So’s any thought I give to a real career. It’s nervewracking, but worth it. I’ve known too many people, including my own mother, who have been out of school for so long that they won’t go back because they don’t think it’s possible at all after such a long time.

AL

17

What are you going to do with your time off? Do you have the money to travel? Can you really get a teaching job? Is working in some crappy job for a year going to give you better insight into what sub-field of linguistics you want to go into?

Graduate school is a whole different program from undergrad. You’re still in the college “culture”, but in a completely different way. It will be a break, even though you are still in school.

I’m assuming this is obvious to you, but you want to go some place that will give you a graduate teaching position–and pay for your tuition.

I say, “Go right away.”