Alex Halavais has a post I can’t link to right now (there’s some issue on his blog I am sure he will fix) where he has an excellent quote about scholarship and graduate study from Norbert Wiener. Here’s a link to Alex’s blog; I am sure he will make the link work to this entry soon enough.
Alex offers his own solid advice on going on for a PhD in communication studies, and that got me to thinking about my own previous bits of advice on the matter. I do occasionally get these kinds of questions from students, and I figured since I wrote this up before, what the heck, I’ll link to it now.
So, blasts from the past in this order:
- Steve the Happy Academic, Part I, from 2003. This was back in the day when I was responding to a couple of different academic bloggers who were lamenting their sorry state. I still agree that working in academia is still a pretty good job, even with all of the stupid stuff that comes up.
- “Should I get a Masters degree?”, also from 2003. I never know if that’s “Masters” or “Master’s” degree, but you get the idea. The short answer is “yes.”
- “Should I get a PhD? (an answer in three parts),” which is from early 2004 but which is also only from web archives. This is when I was trying to run a blog off of the computer in my office, which was way more trouble than it was worth.
Thanks for the nudge! No more late-night blogging for me. Fixed now.
And thanks for the link back to your own Ph.D.-seekers’ advice. Amazing how similar it is to my own. I suspect lots of people would say the same thing, which makes me wonder that so many people still apply for Ph.D.s.
Not that hearing the same thing when I was considering graduate school would have slowed me down at all…