Surviving Graduate School in Philosophy — a Guide
“When I was just starting graduate school in philosophy, I had a lot of questions.”
So begins the 221 page 7 Years Later: Surviving Graduate School in Philosophy by Trevor Hedberg, an assistant professor in the Honors College and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Arizona.
He continues with some examples of those questions and says:
I discovered right away that there was no shortage of answers to these questions. Unfortunately, they were scattered all across the internet (often as blog posts), and the available information was often inconsistent. Rarely did anyone attempt something like a comprehensive and consistent set of advice about graduate school as a whole. This made it difficult to get a clear perception of what graduate school would be like and how I could increase my chances of success.
This guide is my attempt to provide the resource I desired when I was a first-year graduate student—a unified document that covers the most important aspects of graduate school in philosophy and provides advice about how to obtain the PhD and have a decent chance at landing an academic job afterward.
The guide covers applying to graduate school, planning, course requirements, research and writing, dissertating, publishing, teaching, conferences, networking, the job market, work-life balance, and more.
Professor Hedberg hopes that the guide is useful, and he is also seeking feedback on it for future revisions, so check it out and feel free to share your thoughts about it in the comments.
Related:
Grad Traps!
Douglas Portmore’s Six Commandments for Getting the Most Out of Graduate School
Profs: What Do You Regret About Your Time In Graduate School?
Grad Students: What Do You Wish You Knew?
Grad Students: What Do You Wish You Knew? (Volume 2)
The “Secret Syllabus” of Being a Graduate Student in Philosophy
Being an “Awesome First-Year Graduate Student”
Profs: What Would You Tell Your Grad Students, But Can’t?
I would advise that for many (I dare say most) PhDs, surviving grad school is the easy part; the hard part comes after graduation, especially if, like a majority of PhD holders, you do not find a tenure-track job. I’m glad that Prof. Hedberg includes a section on alternative careers, but I think two pages is too brief. Especially: it’s a lot easier to get some training and background for an alternative career while you’re still in grad school and still have access to your university’s resources. I would strongly encourage Prof. Hedberg to include more details on doing so.
That is one area I have flagged for review when I do revisions in Summer 2025. The main obstacle I encountered is that generalizable advice seems limited. For example, some of my former colleagues with PhDs in philosophy pursued careers in business consulting, landscape architecture, technical writing, artificial intelligence research, and academic publishing. But there’s little that unifies these careers or how one develops credentials befitting these fields: what it makes sense to pursue is largely contingent on one’s prior education, training, and work experience.
Even so, I did consider including sections on how to write a resume for a nonacademic job and the challenge of balancing one’s “Plan B” preparation with being fully committed to one’s “Plan A” — which, for most readers of this guide, will be pursuing an academic job.
While I certainly think it is a good and useful thing to be able to offer advice to grad students in exploring alternative career options, it strikes me as an odd criticism of a guide like yours that it does little to address such preparations. Not only, as you note here, is there too much individual variation to provide general advice, but it’s also not clear that, once one has identified an alternative path, a grad program in philosophy is the best place in which to pursue it.
One of my motivations for the interviews I did at the Free Range Philosophers site (that you link to in the guide) was not seeing myself in any of the other ‘alt-ac’ and ‘quit lit’ stories I had read. Nor, indeed did I see myself in any of the career paths of the philosophers I profiled there, but I hope the site provides some inspiration to others and helps to illustrate your point here about the wide variety of paths philosophers take when pursuing other careers.
It would absolutely be useful for PhD students to have such advice. However, people who went from a PhD to a tenure-track job are not the best sort of people to give such advice, since we have no experience with these other career paths.
A friend of mine with an English PhD used Christopher Caterine’s Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide and highly recommends it. It seems pretty comprehensive and I don’t know if there’s much more to add about philosophy specifically. He also lists other resources here: https://christophercaterine.com/additional-resources/
One of the best pieces of advice I can give is to make sure you involve all of your committee members throughout the various stages of the dissertation process (or for any other milestones for which a committee is required). If you do, then you’ll almost certainly pass your proposal and dissertation defenses. If you don’t, then you run the risk of a committee member surprising you with some very bad news about, e.g., the quality of one of your chapters shortly before you’re about to defend.
More generally, solicit expectations from those who will be evaluating you. Unfortunately, expectations often won’t communicated to you unless you ask. This sums up the significant majority of issues I’ve seen: failing to meet expectations that graduate students didn’t know were in place. Much of the mystery and challenge of graduate school comes from this kind of guesswork, but when you know what the expectations are, meeting them is usually feasible.
Of course, this depends on your committee members reading and providing feedback, which is its own struggle at many institutions.
While there may be some institutions at which this is a systematic issue, and some at which it systematically is not, I think in most places, this is really an issue with individual committee members. First-year students who haven’t yet settled on a full committee would do well to talk to more advanced grad students about what various faculty are like on their committees, and take seriously any worries about people being difficult to get feedback on writing from, even if they’re great people to chat with in person!
This piece of advice – probably good advice in context – illustrates the point made by Daniil Gerov below. Like many another suggestion it presupposes an institutional framework peculiar to North America. In Australasia there is usually no such thing as a Dissertation Committee. You will have one or two supervisors who report back to Departmental meeting in very general terms on your progress and that’s it. (‘How is X doing?’ ‘Well she has had few personal problems, but she is turning in material and it is pretty good though a bit rough. I am trying to get her to firm it up’.) Your examiners may be completely external or they may include one internal examiner who will have had no part in the thesis except for occasional comments at seminars or casual conversations at the pub. All the three examiners for my thesis (La Trobe 1985) were from overseas and would not have known me from a bar of soap. The Australian system presupposes – and perhaps fosters – a great deal more intellectual independence than that of North America. You are the master or the mistress of your own time with nothing officially to do but to turn up to you supervisions, to turn in a reasonable amount of written material and (perhaps) to attend departmental seminars and workshops. [That’s unless you do some tutoring.] You do not have to worry about written assignments for your courses because you don’t have to do any courses. You need to develop a good working relationship with your supervisor (though I largely ignored mine) and it is highly desirable (though not absolutely vital) if you are on friendly terms with the faculty from whom you can learn a lot by picking their brains. (A lot of what I learned as a graduate student, I learned from sitting around in the Departmental common room and chatting to people. There were rich pickings in those brains.) A big problem is how to divide your time between thesis-related reading and the wider reading (and thinking) necessary to convert yourself into a reasonably well-rounded philosopher. This is a matter of balance. You don’t want to go chasing down too many rabbit-holes, but it is also a mistake to avert your eyes completely from interesting rabbit-holes for fear of getting lost down there. Given the current job-market you should also be working on papers and presentations (not necessarily directly related to your thesis) that you can boast about on your resumé. And of course, you should eat right, take exercise, have a personal life and reserve at least some time for love and friendship (if you can get them). But note, it is only the last two sentences (in italics) that would apply without amendment to both Australasian and North American graduate students. Under the North American system for a lot of the time somebody else is educating you. In the Australasian and European systems you are, to a considerable degree, educating yourself. I think this makes a big difference.
Like most people, I only have first-hand experience in one kind of graduate program. So I can only speak here of information that is half-composed of what I hear others say. But my impression is that US PhDs are much like Australian PhDs after the first two or so years, a US PhD has coursework, but after that, it looks a lot like an Australian PhD. There are some differences but also (e.g.) US PhD students are the masters and mistresses and ungendered commanders of their time with nothing official to do besides the stuff you’ve mentioned; one learns much from sitting around the common room; etc.
And (in addition to messing up the grammar in the third sentence) I forgot to mention that US PhDs are usually longer than Australian PhDs, I think (by about two years), such that whether one does one’s PhD in Australia or the US, one spends just as many years doing the things that people in Australia do. I think it’s also more common in Australia for programs to prefer applicants with MAs, and in an MA one does what one does in the first two years of a US PhD program. So there’s perhaps not much difference at all.
That’s a very good illustration of my point, and of how, lacking the necessary background, reading something like this guide can be as confusing as it is edifying.
It really is a funny thing, this common shared language, isn’t it? If someone wrote a book about higher education in French, then I would automatically assume that it covers the French system. And so I would probably pass it over (if I could read even French), however well it was written —unless I suspected it had special relevance to me. But with English, we see documents created about systems with the same name but often varying details (Doctorates, typography, etc.), and have no linguistic hint to go off when trying to understand how far things apply.
Again, my apologies to Hedberg that so much virtual ink has been spilt complaining/discussing side details about what is probably a very helpful piece of work, that likely took a lot of effort to write and has been provided to us for free.
I’ll leave my discussion about different PhD systems at that.
Thanks for sharing this resource. I haven’t read the book, but would like to chime in with a gentle criticism.
To table set for a moment: no one, especially I, should doubt that for some graduate school is a doozy. No one should feel like they’re failing bc graduate school is leaving them anxious, depressed, lonely or insecure. I’m still recovering.
Nonetheless, framing the discussion in terms of survival gets us off on the wrong foot. Not only does the metaphor of survival have unfortunate purchase in academia writ large (unfortunate precisely because these are institutions in which we should thrive, not merely survive). It arguably normalizes the profoundly misguided ethos that to suffer is to deserve.
Of course, the book’s author is looking to move us past suffering; I’m not for a moment implying he wrote this to exacerbate suffering. But the framing is the framing: why not, instead of ‘surviving’ graduate school, it was ‘thriving in graduate school’? Not only is this framing more positive. It escapes the tired, nasty and facile emphases in academia and other areas of high-achievement on suffering as a measure of worth and dessert, where tenured professors (say) reminisce wistfully about that time their adviser ‘ripped up’ a chapter or a committee member ‘forced 35 rewrites, all in the AM hours,’ all as ways of elliptically competing with younger colleagues, implying that their stressors are less significant.
Enough. If we’re going to graduate school merely looking to survive, then the culture is poison and the ambition to attend misguided if not delusional (and vaguely narcissistic, in some roundabout Nietzschean way).
This guide doesn’t sugarcoat things. Graduate school is long and difficult. It comes with major opportunity costs, and mental illness is commonplace. Graduate students, like many faculty members, are overworked and underpaid. Those who persevere through graduate school in pursuit of an academic position then have to endure an utterly brutal job market. Against that backdrop, I don’t think “surviving” graduate school is improper framing, and I think more positive gloss would be dishonest. I don’t think my guide is about thriving in graduate school, and for most people, the background conditions of graduate school — perilously low pay, high stress, uncertain career prospects — are not conducive to thriving or flourishing. Reading some portions of the guide might help reduce that stress and make the workload more manageable, but it’s not a panacea for those background conditions. I think the guide is primarily about knowing the challenges associated with graduate school, preparing appropriately for them, and then tackling those challenges and adapting your strategy as needed.
I share your view that it ought not to be this way. Academia should be more compatible with the good life. I also agree that the extent to which one suffers is not a measure of how much one deserves something (and I don’t think I said anything in the guide to suggest otherwise). But the circumstances are what they are, and this is why I defend the view (in Appendix A) that there is a strong presumption against going to graduate school in philosophy. For only a very small portion of people is it a worthwhile endeavor.
A question for anyone who has read this and isn’t from the US, or has experience of how the system works elsewhere in the world: how well does Hedberg’s guide transfer to those outside of America?
Of course English-language publication will naturally be dominated by its biggest speaker-base. But it sometimes feels like an increasing waste reading academic career guides that just don’t apply to those looking to do postgraduate study outside of America — however well said guide is written (as I’m sure Hedberg’s is).
Hence the question before I add another thing on the pile to read.
Note: Hedberg includes a disclaimer that though a European PhD is significantly different, there may still be something of use for people outside the target (North American) audience.
The problem, of course, comes when people who haven’t done a PhD yet anywhere, and won’t be doing one in the USA, read the guidance and don’t know what of it applies to them and what doesn’t!
I’m open to adding an appendix that covers some of the differences between the North American programs and those located elsewhere and tries to highlight what in this guide would transfer to other contexts. But frankly, I would need to rely heavily on input from others or be directed to some reading material on that topic. I am fairly confident that the general discussions of writing, research, work-life balance, and teaching would carry over to other contexts, though.
Thank you for the update, and for writing this guide in the first place!
My comment didn’t entail expectation that you *would* have included anything about PhDs outside of the US — at the end of the day, I expect someone who has worked and gone through a system in a certain country to both have the motivation to write about that specific system, and the expertise only about that system.
Asking the question is just more of a personal due diligence at this point: I have read many good guides on all sorts of topics, which teach very well — but I later have to unlearn some of it because I did not realise that it was specifically US-focused. Recently, for example, a well-written guide on typography by Matthew Butterick. It’s not marketed as “good typography by American standards”, but just as being about good typography. Yet in it he mentions from time to time that this is the American standard — “ok, wonderful, does this apply to my country? And what parts of what you’ve said don’t?” I guess this would have been less of a problem before the internet.
As for the questions of work-life balance, motivation etc. — yes, I imagine they probably are the most universal, even though the difference between three years in purgatory and seven must be quite stark!
Charles Pigden
Echoing Daniil Gerov’s point I am reposting a comment from an earlier thread.
This thread implicitly presupposes a taught PhD. If there is no offical syllabus (as with dissertation-only PhDs) then there can be no unofficial or ‘secret’ syllabus. In other words it presupposes the system that prevails in the US and some other parts of the world but not the system that prevails in large parts of Europe and Australasia. Let me quote from my contribution to a thread What to Teach in the Proseminar that I posted seven years ago:
Here’s a fact which some of you will find almost unbelievable but which suggests a big cultural divide in profession. Until I began to read this thread I literally did not know what a proseminar was. And this despite the fact that I am a well-published philosopher in his late fifties. (I gather from the contributions that it’s the seminar class you take in your first year of graduate school which is designed to ensure a general level lf philosophical literacy, and that it is therefore non-optional.) The reason is, of course, that, as is common in the UK and Australasia, having completed my (three-year) BA, I did a research-only PhD. with no taught component. Whatever general literacy I may have as a philosopher, over-and-above what I learned as an undergraduate, I either taught myself through general reading or acquired by picking other people’s brains. (There is a lot you can learn from casual conversation). This suggests something interesting about the OP’s query. It is not just that for a non-North American teacher the question would not arise. In so far as there is a corresponding question, it would be not even be addressed to the same audience. . It would not be ‘What texts should we set in our proseminars?’ It would be ‘What books or articles should we read (or make sure that we have read) outside our specific research areas in order to be reasonably well-rounded philosophers?’. The first question is from a teacher asking other teachers (and perhaps former learners) for advice on to run somebody else’s education. The second is from a learner asking other learners and ex-learners for advice on how to run their own. I’ve got suggestions to make and recollections I could post about the second question. As for the first, it is too alien to my experience for me to have an opinion.
—————
So here are two questions related to the original topic that might be of interest to European and Australasian graduate students
The best people to answer these questions would not be the graduate students themselves but young lecturers and professors (say people under 45) who did a thesis-only PhD and have achieved some measure of success.
There are things I could say, at least in answer to question 1, but my own experiences of PhD study is too long ago to be of much use or relevance to young philosophers nowadays
Thanks for writing this!