Do you feel overworked and desparate as a PhD student or is it basically fun? Have you published any articles yet or are you planning to? What are your career plans?
The desperation: This is a very hard field to work in, psychologically, because there’s no reliable process for producing valuable work (this might be true generally, but I get the sense that in the sciences it’s easier to get moving in a worthwhile direction). It’s not rare that I doubt that anything I’m writing is valuable work. Since I’m at the (early) dissertation stage, these kinds of big picture worries play an important daily role.
The overwork: This is exacerbated by the fact that I have a family. I have much more to do than I can do, and I often have to cut something important. I grade papers on a 3 min per page clock, and that almost feels unethical. I just recently got a new dissertation advisor who wants to see work every two weeks.
The happy: I have a family! It makes this whole thing much, much easier. Most of my problem with being a grad student in the before time was terrible loneliness. Some people do well under those conditions, but I didn’t. Also, I do philosophy, which is like happiness distilled. When everyone is uploaded, and science is complete, and a billion years or so have gotten all the problems and needs and video games and recreational space travel out of our system, we’ll all settle into that activity that makes life most worth living: talking about the most serious things in the most serious way with our friends. That’s philosophy, and I’m very happy to be able to do it even if I don’t get a job out of it.
I haven’t published anything, but someone recently footnoted me in an important journal. Small victories. I have a paper I’d like to publish, but it’s a back-burner project. As to my career, I will take literally anything they can give me, so long as I can be around my family (my wife is a philosopher too, so we need to both get jobs somewhere close). Odds are long on this, so my work has to be good.
This is a very hard field to work in, psychologically, because there’s no reliable process for producing valuable work (this might be true generally, but I get the sense that in the sciences it’s easier to get moving in a worthwhile direction).
I think you’re right that philosophy is particularly difficult in this respect. In many fields you can always go out, gather some data and use relatively standard methodologies to analyze your data and produce publishable work from it. This is certainly true in linguistics (go out and record some conversations or whatever) and philology (there are always more texts to edit, more stemmas to draw etc.). I get the impression that this is also more or less possible in sociology, psychology, biology and many other fields. But for pure philosophy, you can’t do much in the way of gathering novel data.
Do you feel overworked and desparate as a PhD student or is it basically fun? Have you published any articles yet or are you planning to? What are your career plans?
I feel overworked, desperate, and very happy.
The desperation: This is a very hard field to work in, psychologically, because there’s no reliable process for producing valuable work (this might be true generally, but I get the sense that in the sciences it’s easier to get moving in a worthwhile direction). It’s not rare that I doubt that anything I’m writing is valuable work. Since I’m at the (early) dissertation stage, these kinds of big picture worries play an important daily role.
The overwork: This is exacerbated by the fact that I have a family. I have much more to do than I can do, and I often have to cut something important. I grade papers on a 3 min per page clock, and that almost feels unethical. I just recently got a new dissertation advisor who wants to see work every two weeks.
The happy: I have a family! It makes this whole thing much, much easier. Most of my problem with being a grad student in the before time was terrible loneliness. Some people do well under those conditions, but I didn’t. Also, I do philosophy, which is like happiness distilled. When everyone is uploaded, and science is complete, and a billion years or so have gotten all the problems and needs and video games and recreational space travel out of our system, we’ll all settle into that activity that makes life most worth living: talking about the most serious things in the most serious way with our friends. That’s philosophy, and I’m very happy to be able to do it even if I don’t get a job out of it.
I haven’t published anything, but someone recently footnoted me in an important journal. Small victories. I have a paper I’d like to publish, but it’s a back-burner project. As to my career, I will take literally anything they can give me, so long as I can be around my family (my wife is a philosopher too, so we need to both get jobs somewhere close). Odds are long on this, so my work has to be good.
I think you’re right that philosophy is particularly difficult in this respect. In many fields you can always go out, gather some data and use relatively standard methodologies to analyze your data and produce publishable work from it. This is certainly true in linguistics (go out and record some conversations or whatever) and philology (there are always more texts to edit, more stemmas to draw etc.). I get the impression that this is also more or less possible in sociology, psychology, biology and many other fields. But for pure philosophy, you can’t do much in the way of gathering novel data.
Interestingly, my field, mathematics, is similar to philosophy, probably for the same reason.