So you want to get a PhD in the humanities?

I came across this video the other day and as much as it made me giggle, it also hit home a little.



I plan on doing a PhD but I'm constantly worried that I'll be wasting a big chunk of my life and then not have anything to do with it afterwards. What topic will I choose? How will I survive? Am I going to have to do shitty retail work to support myself? What if I lose interest halfway through? Who would want to employ a linguistics PhD? What would I do? Or, before all of that, will I even manage to get in? And hell, I haven't even thought about Honours yet. There are just so many things I'm unsure of.

But all of that said, I know that academia is very different here in Australia than it is elsewhere in the world, especially America. According to Wikipedia (I know, collective mediocrity, shh), Australian professors are the highest paid in the world, and we still seem to have a healthy respect for academics. While Americans are deriding academics as crazy Marxists who are leeching off the government, we are still throwing huge amounts of money into research funding, which is fantastic.

I also haven't seen the same sort of competition and hopelessness in grad students. Of course, this is only based on what I've seen and heard (and I could be way off), but there seem to be a lot more opportunities here. Morale of PhD students is generally high, the money situation is better, and job opportunities seem more, well, existent. Not to say it's not still a difficult few years of your life, full of stress and criticism and wondering where the hell you're going to end up, but I feel better knowing I'm in Australia. And if you actually can get a job at a university (which is my aim), one look at the salary scale on any university website shows that you certainly won't be living off mi goreng anymore.

Furthermore, I wouldn't be like the student in the video. I'm making the effort to get to know the relevant lecturers and professors so that if I ever need any sort of academic reference, I won't be that C-student they've never seen or heard from before. I'll be the one they recognise instantly as that interested girl who got HDs. In high school, or even in my last degree, I would have laughed and cringed at the idea of being that student. In fact, in the entire four years I spent at Murdoch, I could probably count on one hand the number of times I ever spoke to one of my professors after class or during their office hours. But I've blown that number out of the water each semester this year and not only does it feel good to have a decent relationship with my teachers, my grades are all the better for it. And it's not just about using them for my own success, absolutely not. They have actually been worth getting to know too. Maybe it's simply that I'm more enthusiastic and I'm projecting, but they all seem happier, friendlier, funnier, and genuinely more passionate about their fields here, with more time for their students. And that's exactly what you look for in a teacher.

I've also had an offer from a lecturer at another university to help put me in touch with useful people in the area of computational linguistics, after I voiced an interest in natural language processing. Unfortunately, I'm not particularly good with programming and I don't have any concrete ideas about areas of study, but it's still very early days and I may well take him up on it eventually. Psycholinguistics is another area I'm interested in, and that's the type of thing where there's always research to be done, so there's another idea. Either way, it's nice to know there are plenty of options out there.

See, I've psyched myself up now and I feel much better. Maybe there isn't so much to worry about after all. Not that I should even be worrying about all of these things yet anyway, but it's never too early to start looking to the future, right?