Let me start by quoting Cary on this one:

"Just make getting the Ph.D. your primary goal. Avoid anything that distracts you from that goal."

Absolutely niave advice, cary.

I agree with the other letter writer who pointed out that getting a PhD has no bearing whatsoever on whether you will get a job teaching. The system produces a vast surplus of PhD's precisely because they want you to be desperate to get a job teaching. A PhD is not a professional training degree. There are no jobs and the jobs that exist will go first to people with connections.

Overall the issue is why do you want to teach anyway? People who want to teach are people who want to stand in front of a room full of people talking while everybody listens.

God I can't tell you how many idiot lectures I had to sit through when I was in college.

Wanting to be a part of University life is it itself a form of mental illness because all you are saying is you want to be seen as intelligent. Well, if you are so smart then why aren't you rich?

You could teach children in slums whatever you want to teach them without any degree at all. Just move to a slum and start telling people what you know. Why do you want to stand up in a room full of University students and make them take notes while you talk? Because you want prestige.

You want something that has nothing to do with working for a university. The university is a means to an end. The people you want to teach are the last people who deserve to be taught if they are in a University.

I once taught the child of Nicaraguan dictators philosophy and I regret it entirely. I think you all know how THAT turned out.

Thanks for listening.

As a 25-year-old, female, PhD candidate I empathize with the LW. Although my field of study is in the sciences, and I am provided with a stipend and health insurance, it is still difficult to live on minimal pay in an expensive city, while still paying for several hundred dollars of textbooks each semester. There have been times when the need to pay emergency bills (car breaks down, medical bills, etc) have literally made me sick to my stomach, made it very hard to concentrate on my studies, and made me very desperate for cash.

I have considered doing fetish videos before. I try very hard to keep my professional and public life very separate, so I am terrified of doing something that may come back to haunt me in the future. I would hate to be in an interview and get “that look” from a potential coworker. However, there are other fetish videos that reduce the number of identifiable details. I considered doing foot fetish videos at one point. There are web sites where you can upload your own videos and you get about half the profit for each video sold. There are people that buy videos of women simply dangling shoes from their foot. In my mind, this was a decent way to make some money; my face would not be visible and I could do the filming myself in the privacy of my own home. Ultimately, I just decided that it creeped me out, and I could find other ways to make money.

Here are some suggestions that you can actually do as a graduate student that don’t involve sex work and will earn you some respectable money. First, tutor as much as you can. You want to teach—get the experience. When I tutor, depending on the subject, I get anywhere from $20-$35 per hour. Plus, I get teaching experience and I can put it on my CV. A second option is to work for a company like Kaplan. They are often looking for instructors for their test prep programs, or for people to write test questions and they pay fairly well. Another option is to do temp work. If you have a free day or two each week, answering phones is not a bad gig. Depending on where you work, you may be able to even bring a book or paper for class and get some studying done (this is not appropriate at all places, but sometimes it works out). If all else fails, take your student loans. That’s what they are there for. I have more debt than I would like (both student loans and on my credit cards) but I know that it’s a necessary evil and I will be able to pay them off once I have completed my degree.

I wish you the best of luck supporting yourself through graduate school. I know it’s tough. Work hard, take care of yourself, and please, please, do not let any other strange individuals learn where you live. It’s hard to study if you’re worried about a stalker.

Dear LW,

I agree whole-heartedly with Cary...don't do the video, and continue to pursue your dreams.

First of all, no where in her letter does she say she invited the skeevy dude to her house to sell him her underwear: those were _Cary's_ words. Go back and read her letter. Amazing to me that people too stupid to read carefully feel confident in dissing other people's intelligence.

Second, all the people bitching and moaning about the academic job market are themselves failures in the academic job market. (Right, adjunct?) You need to go in the direction that you feel your life is taking you and have faith in yourself, your abilities, and life itself that things will take care of themselves. People lacking this basic bit of courage never end up being worth a damn anyway.

"I already sold my underwear to some skeevy dude. It felt great not to dip into my savings account just to pay for gas, but also, I was shaking for an hour after he left."

You eediot!