Bupkis

You know those people who say that a PhD opens doors to well-paying jobs?  They lie.  They are liars.  Outside of a narrow range of specialized contexts, it is worth absolutely nothing.

God, I hate thinking about money!

Comments

[wolfangel]

It opens doors. Just only a very few very small doors, with lots and lots of people trying to get through them.

I'm sorry this is so difficult; I hope you find something you like better when you move.

[Rana]

I'm not expecting to. Oh, well.

Thank you for the sympathy, anyway.

[RussianViolets]

You are SOOOO right. My door finally opened, but it the money sure doesn't come flooding in. I'm in the middle of my "find lots of jobs to do over the summer to supplement my income" mode, and I soooo feel your pain. Hang in there. :-)

[Rana]

Thank you.

(I'm just so tired of this, and I'm not even that badly off at the moment.)

[ianqui]

What's ironic is that these days, even getting a PhD in a field like engineering isn't a help. In fact, it's a hindrance. If you could get your foot in the door with a BS (which is what most of the jobs are), you would be able to work your way up. But with a PhD, they won't even take you because you're "overqualified". This is what Super G is facing.

[Rana]

Yeah, it's that ol' catch-22. You're simultaneously "underqualified" (because of lack of in-field experience, no matter how many transferable skills you might have) and "overqualified" (because you have that big hoity-toity Ph.D. appended to your name).

It sucks.

[Friday Mom]

I'm starting to get a taste of this myself. It sucks!!!!

[miguel]

Money... yuck! Whenever I hear stories like yours and then find myself relating so badly to them, I end up letting my mind escape to our primeval years. Just what was the world like when no concept of money even entered anyone's mind? What is it like to wake up every morning, look out the dwelling window, and NOT immediately find your mind flooding with leechy thoughts of deniro? What was the world like without passports, security guards, door locks, uniforms, career goals, college payments, overpriced clothing, taxes, TV commercials, CNN, comment spam, politicians, nationalism, guns, mall sprawl, piles of garbage, high school Latin classes, prisons, credit cards, sewers, MacDonald's hamburgers, stupid managers, scented toilet paper, and resumés?

Really... haven't we kind of set ourselves up for a tumble in the avalanche? What did my masters in architecture ever get me? I make more money teaching English! Plus I have more hours to do the things I really enjoy doing.

[Rana]

I guess in my own case, money is a metaphor for security and the ability to do what I want, even when it is small scale, human things (like having yarn to knit). My rant's ultimately not about money, but about feeling insecure and powerless to change that.

I guess this is why early people developed gods.

[miguel]

That's true...money definitely symbolizes security, in part because money in itself is just a symbol. Intrinsically money doesn't really exist. It is a token of agreement between two people. It's like time.. the twenty four hours that we have all agreed upon is quite arbitrary. I guess what I was trying to get at in my earlier comment is that we have set ourselves up to such problems as you have with finding work with a PhD because of the tacit agreements we have all made with one another; we have decided that some things are important while others are not. It is what we have agreed is important and are willing to agree to exchange more tokens over that ultimately reveals what our societies takes seriously and doesn't, and also what we are foolish and wise about.

Though you have to wonder about university degrees sometimes. I had a friend in college who wrote his PhD dissertation on throwing a frisbee. He spent almost all his time out on the campus grounds playing frisbee golf.

[timna]

yes, we know that two phd's in the family does not equal material wealth. any of my brothers and sisters can show more lucrative routes. but after the last few years, esp now that Mr. T (actually another Dr. T.) has done that entry level time in engineering -- that time when he was overqualified by having the phd -- he's finally making enough money to allow us to make some of those choices you mention, Rana. like being able to take the summer off, for me. or for him, not to panic when one consulting job ends and another has not yet begun -- he actually looks at that as thinking time.

still not ready to wish I hadn't done the phd. we'll see in another decade.
are you looking for work in the new state yet?

[Rana]

I am -- and I have to say it's pretty bleak. I'm probably going to have to cobble together something from a mixture of temp work and whatever freelance stuff I can get going, and maybe a part-time service thing here or there. (It's the health insurance aspect of all of this that worries me the most. Expensive!)

[timna]

I have to admit that the health insurance part is one of the best benefits in this state at the community college level. It did take a year of working full-time before they kicked in, but then our payment was less than 10% of what we were paying through my husband's job.

[terminaldegree]

Sometimes the Ph.D (or other terminal degree) can really close doors. I once applied to teach music at a K-12 school, and the first thing the interviewer asked was, "Why would you get a doctorate?" So I explained that I had more learning to do and thought this was the best way to do it. :) He then said, "Then why are you applying for THIS job?" (Uh, because I like teaching?) In other words, he was actually disturbed that someone with a graduate degree would want to teach at his school. Weird.

Needless to say, I didn't get the job. One of my friends did, and they wanted her assurance that she wasn't enrolled in a doctoral program, or planning to be.

[Harrison]

I do think the PhD has helped me, although I certainly could have gotten to where I am by more efficient means. But I've recast myself as a techie (actually, I started out that way, went to the humanities, and now I'm back again.)

Though who knows. What counts as making a lot of money?

[Harrison]

(It's so cute the way Rana's comment system corrects me when I mistype my own url.)

[Pronoia]

Yeah, even though my job search is going pretty well, it's clear the PhD is more a hindrance than a help. Two of the three interviews I got were from people who had done graduate work themselves, and so know what kind of transferrable skills it has (nearly none, in some cases). And yesterday I was asked, quite seriously, if I was okay giving up the prestige of academia for a mid-level position in a field I've never worked in. Let me think about this ... yes!

I'm sorry it's being so hard, Rana. Is there a bigger city nearby you could look in? I know people have successfully lived between cities so each only commutes half the distance.

[Rana]

Yeah, there's a big city, but job opportunities are pretty crappy there too. Lots o' administrative assistant stuff, according to Monster, but that's about it, unless I go back to school and get a degree in something completely different (like nursing or physical therapy) -- which is NOT going to happen.

Really, for the types of work I'm qualified for and interested in, I should be living in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, New York City, or Chicago, where there is lots of demand for "knowledge workers."

This is why internet-based freelance work is starting to look good.

[Laura (geekymom)]

Staying in academics but on the administrative/support side of things worked well for me. When I was looking, I was considering mostly instructional technology, but I also considered admissions and programs, like study abroad. Outside of education, I was looking at non-profit--course the pay sucks there. I was seriously considering working for places that do SAT prep for underpriviledged kids. I think the hardest part for me in my job search is that I wanted to do something that "mattered" at least to me and I wanted to be able to use my brain. I wish I had more assistance to offer. If I knew where you were going . . . :)