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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
TinaS1
Published Letters: 780 Editor's Choice: 21
online student forums like RateMyProfessor.com
A lot of the male TAs who are sleeping with the hot young 'thangs in their classes are outed there, even if they hang on until after class to get the ball rolling with their students, so to speak.
If you are a stripper, it will be on this forum or another one much like it very, very, very soon with a cute little chili pepper icon next to your name.
I think you know that.
I second the people who say the money is a trap and the demands placed on the upkeep of your appearance make it hard to save. I knew one stripper who was spending $400 a week on her hair, nails, tan, etc. back in the early 1990s...whether she had a bad week at work or not, these were constants...so whatever she was earning was offset by what she had to spend to be competitive in that job.
It didn't turn out to be very easy money when you considered the above AND the amount of physically hard work in a sleazy environment that she had to do.
and even travelled. I had no work except my TA job and an on campus weekend/summer job teaching for a program called Upward Bound.
It's possible.
At both colleges I went to for my M.A. and the Ph.D., the Upward Bound program went begging for teachers because the kids were from at-risk backgrounds meaning mostly inner city (Dallas and Chicago) African American and to be frank, I think people were scared of them.
It is certainly possible to graduate debt free without having to strip if you have realistic lifestyle expectations for yourself while you are in school.
And you better get well used to them, because very little in the humanities pays well once you are out. There are 45,000 humanities PhD graduates each year and 5,000--6,000 openings in academia for them. So even if you would love to be an associate prof making $35,000 out in the community college in Podunk, North Dakota, the chances are you won't even get that.
If the money is that important to you now, don't get a PhD at all. You are more employable with a Master's because you will cost less money to hire initially, but you will be able to move up once your are in. And you will have a wider range of jobs that you can apply for, including teaching jobs.
There are lots of PhDs stocking shelves in box stores. Especially humanities PhDs. I wouldn't go into a lot of debt for a PhD and I sure as heck wouldn't strip to get one. It's not worth it.
Your letter points out a couple of things I noticed in grad students who felt that they couldn't live on their wages. They felt they had an inalienable right to two things: 1.their own pad, and 2, their own wheels.
If you are a graduate student and rents are high in your area, find roommates and put up with them.
If you have a car, get rid of it. I didn't own a car the whole 8 years I was in college, and I didn't live in areas with good public transportation. I walked.
Cars and your privacy are very expensive things.
If you have kids, of course that pretty much knocks you out of the running. Some do complete school with kids, but that is a heavy blow. Sorry to hear about that.
Just Do It has not worked in the industry and perhaps should not be fantasizing about what it is like. Also, I would point out that you don't have to be beautiful or have a perfect body to be a stripper. It probably just never occured to Just Do It to even try to expose herself to that lifestyle with kids in tow.
That was a good decision, and she shouldn't be urging other people to do something that she couldn't bring herself to do.
BTW don't fantasize about having a PhD either; it's not a big boost during the job search and has little more than brag value for about 80% of graduates.
It is not unfair to point out that a PhD is not really very valuable in most job markets and is an active detriment in some cases.
This is honest advice, not the surly resentment of "washed out" candidates who "couldn't cut it".
If she wants a PhD, she should by all means get one. But she will need to be in the top 10% of her field to have a renumerative academic career.
Who knows, maybe the bragging rights alone will give her enough self-esteem to land a great job.
But come on, Mike, you are a prof yourself, you know that many people who complete their programs end up disappointed, especially if they thought they were going to get a lot of money.
I don't regret my PhD studies, but I'm not going to recommend it necessarily to my daughters. Getting my Master's was very important, but my PhD was just a nice extra once I decided I didn't want to fight the "publish or perish" battle for a living. So many of those "research papers" were nothing but so many trees sacrificed for no reason.
I've also noticed that PhDs are a little defensive about the great worth of their accomplishments. They are so many Dr. Causabons, and they haven't changed on whit since the days of Middlemarch.
But hey, you can call us all "washed up" if it makes you feel better. But I think it is natural to ask her to question why she is degrading herself for something like a humanities PhD. If she were that big an academic star, she wouldn't be needing to strip. And if she's not showing potential already, there's a 99% chance her PhD is going to be just objectively useless to her.
PhDs are just funny creatures that way. People who don't have them completely fail to understand that.
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