I'm getting out. This shouldn't be news to you my (very very small) audience, but I'd like to use this space to think about leaving academia. In the end, I don't think i had it in me to follow through on my desire to become a professor. I loved teaching--teaching my LAT 506 class this semester was definitely the most rewarding and enjoyable thing I've done while at a grad student--but the research involved never really grabbed hold of me. Or maybe it did once, back before the joy of going out and playing with the TLG was snuffed out sometime in the beginning of my 4th year of seminars and the accompanying seminar papers. I never really became a fan of the politics and constant bitching and back-biting that accompanies life in a big academic department.
As I grew disenchanted with what I was doing, I began to notice that being a grad student was just not fun. We spend our downtime in the office not talking about Latin/Greek/history/academics or about life and things we enjoy but rather about what we don't like. How the department is f*ing us over. Why we're sick and tired of reading for seminars. How much we want to get out. Perhaps it becomes a self-fulfilling attitude that if we are acting unhappy, by golly, we are going to be damned unhappy. Or perhaps it's more than that.
Classics, as a field, is dying. It's not dead, nor will it be dead any time soon, but it's dying. When I started grad school, we all knew that the job market was kinda shitty because of the recession. But we told ourselves "hey, as soon as the recession is over, there'll be jobs." Ha. What naive optimism that was. Universities across the country are cutting back, particularly in the humanities. Higher education budgets are being sacrificed to keep taxes low and now that they can see that these university systems are getting by, do you really think budgets will go back up? As a result, there are just so many fewer job openings in the field. Yes, people will still get jobs, but the cornucopia of TT positions that seem to have existed ten years back, I fear, will never return. Instead my peers getting their PhDs are more likely to spend years bouncing from one visiting professorship to another, endlessly chasing the mythical TT position at the end of the rainbow. Some will get it, some will become discouraged and leave the field. I am glad that I realized when I was 27 and not 37 that the great and glorious TT job at some SLAC that I dreamed about was probably not going to happen and now have made the move to do something else.
What is that something else? The future. I'm going into software development, in a role where I can put my love of languages to use with some that are more of the living variety.
I'll miss plenty of things about being a grad student and look back fondly at many of the things I've done here. I do not regret for a second the five years I spent grad studenting, as they have been, on the whole, spectacular and the people I've met have been superb.
How else could I have spent a month playing in the dirt outside of Rome
or took the role of the servus callidus in an Aristophanic revival
or fallen in love with the melodramatic plots of Greek novels
or spent so many Thursday nights with friends, beer, and football
or taught impressionable underclassmen how to read dirty Latin poetry
or spent hours chasing down all the uses of a certain word in the Latin language
or decided to name my cats after Hellenistic Greeks
or write a last-minute all-nighter pinch-hit conference paper after a speaker was stranded in London because of the Icelandic volcano
or fallen in love with a guy with whom I've had a wonderful long term relationship?
The answer is nowhere.
I'm proud to be a classicist, even though I'm damn glad I'm getting out.
As I grew disenchanted with what I was doing, I began to notice that being a grad student was just not fun. We spend our downtime in the office not talking about Latin/Greek/history/academics or about life and things we enjoy but rather about what we don't like. How the department is f*ing us over. Why we're sick and tired of reading for seminars. How much we want to get out. Perhaps it becomes a self-fulfilling attitude that if we are acting unhappy, by golly, we are going to be damned unhappy. Or perhaps it's more than that.
Classics, as a field, is dying. It's not dead, nor will it be dead any time soon, but it's dying. When I started grad school, we all knew that the job market was kinda shitty because of the recession. But we told ourselves "hey, as soon as the recession is over, there'll be jobs." Ha. What naive optimism that was. Universities across the country are cutting back, particularly in the humanities. Higher education budgets are being sacrificed to keep taxes low and now that they can see that these university systems are getting by, do you really think budgets will go back up? As a result, there are just so many fewer job openings in the field. Yes, people will still get jobs, but the cornucopia of TT positions that seem to have existed ten years back, I fear, will never return. Instead my peers getting their PhDs are more likely to spend years bouncing from one visiting professorship to another, endlessly chasing the mythical TT position at the end of the rainbow. Some will get it, some will become discouraged and leave the field. I am glad that I realized when I was 27 and not 37 that the great and glorious TT job at some SLAC that I dreamed about was probably not going to happen and now have made the move to do something else.
What is that something else? The future. I'm going into software development, in a role where I can put my love of languages to use with some that are more of the living variety.
I'll miss plenty of things about being a grad student and look back fondly at many of the things I've done here. I do not regret for a second the five years I spent grad studenting, as they have been, on the whole, spectacular and the people I've met have been superb.
How else could I have spent a month playing in the dirt outside of Rome
or took the role of the servus callidus in an Aristophanic revival
or fallen in love with the melodramatic plots of Greek novels
or spent so many Thursday nights with friends, beer, and football
or taught impressionable underclassmen how to read dirty Latin poetry
or spent hours chasing down all the uses of a certain word in the Latin language
or decided to name my cats after Hellenistic Greeks
or write a last-minute all-nighter pinch-hit conference paper after a speaker was stranded in London because of the Icelandic volcano
The answer is nowhere.
I'm proud to be a classicist, even though I'm damn glad I'm getting out.
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