Mmm no. It requires someone with funding that likes you well enough to keep funding you, that is all. Eventually funds run out, even with departmental slush funds.
I see you read my first sentence. Did you also read the rest of the post? Exciting things such as punctuation await!
To say you can do it indefinitely is disingenuous, regardless of punctuation or caveats. It’s never done indefinitely and can’t be done indefinitely.
I finished my MA (History) in 1996. How much do you want to bet that there is someone in my old department still chunking away at graduate work - and getting money for it - that was there 18 years ago?
“Professional students” are the reason I became disillusioned with the field of psychology (I wouldn’t be surprised if the situation was similar with many if not most liberal arts fields).
I majored in psychology because I thought it was an interesting topic, with some vague notion of going into academia. But for every brilliant, dedicated professor that I had no doubt made valuable contributions to the field were five professional student type professors that gave the impression that they couldn’t/didn’t want to find a job after college so stayed in academia in a mostly nontechnical field. Most of them seemed to have this weird inferiority complex about psychology being a “real” science. Of course I could have striven to become a “real” academic like the professors I admired, but I didn’t want to spent a good portion of my career surrounded by “professional students.”
After working a couple of lackluster office jobs, I am currently attending law school, if anyone’s curious.
Yes, you’re right, which is why I said in the post you were quoting that you have to apply for a brand new postdoc every few years and then move to a new location. Theoretically, opportunities may become harder to get due to people not wanting to hire an older person, but networking can also theoretically take care of that. But there isn’t any upper limit to how many you can do. Unless your SO gets sick of it.
This all depends on the school, but there may be a maximum time they keep you in the program, and credits often expire, but that’s not usually an issue if you can cycle through all the requires “courses” (classes or just dissertation credits).
I don’t know about history, but all that takes is someone thinking you’re worth the pay or get your own funding, so that part should be possible, technically.
Good job if you can get it. It would be kind of hypocritical for me to begrudge anyone a life as an eternal student if they can make it work.
I used to jokingly refer to myself as a “professional student” but by the standards listed here I was really a “hobby student.” At 22 I transitioned from full-time student/part-time worker to full-time worker ( in an unrelated field )/part-time student. And I kept at that for another ~8 1/2 years with no real attempt to make concrete progress before burning out on the hours required. I just liked the milieu. The negative impact to society pretty much comes down to occupying a university slot that some other kid might have used more productively, but I don’t really feel all that guilty or regret it.
So I have to sort of shrug at university squatters. I wouldn’t be comfortable with the lack of security, but they’re usually doing something of value however minimal. Any hey, at least they are keeping their minds active which arguably has some diffuse philosophical value ;).
Tamerlane -
Good to see you again
I’m an engineer at a Big Three automaker, and plan to use a frequently-delayed-by-work Ph. D. as an excuse to hang around the University of Michigan more or less indefinitely.
Why’s that?
Possibly due to the article “Will Work for ??? (Anything at this point)” about the difficulty a 3L (what is?) is encountering finding a permanent position despite credentials a mile long.
The journal is very slow to load, so I was not going for eyestrain and a hour to wait on loading.
Point being, I guess, that a JD is no longer a guarantee of big bucks or even jobs.
I always wondered what would have happened if I had worked at school - I scored 96th percentile on LSAT, but with a C undergrad GPA, no school (that I would want to attend) would take me.
So I got a quick AS in CS and made bucks slinging code.
LinusK, I appreciate your… Sympathy? If that’s what it is but I was fully aware of the state of the legal market before deciding to attend law school.
Pretty much these. A professional student more or less has no focus and takes random classes and programs and/or repeatedly pursues parallel credentials at the same level as one they already have. E.g. a student racking up bachelor’s degrees with no real desire to go to grad school, or a student doing multiple MS’s, maybe doing TA’ing or research assisting over and over with no real interest in doing a PhD or moving on to industry or teaching.