If you could give beginning philosophy graduate students just one piece of advice, what would it be?
I know that some readers will want to jump in to say “don’t”—either as a wisecrack or as sincere guidance.
But as humor it’s clichéd, and as advice it’s not helpful. All graduate students nowadays have heard some version of the warnings most of us know to give undergraduates who tell us they want to go to grad school in philosophy, and they’ve decided to go anyway. So let’s offer advice that will help them do well at what they’ve chosen to do.
I ask that commenters limit themselves to offering just one piece of advice, and to try not to repeat what other commenters have said.
(I know it’s probably too much to ask you all to refrain from raising problems regarding the individuation of advice, but try.)
I’ll start:
Communicate, don’t isolate. If you’re having trouble understanding something, if you’re struggling to keep up with all of your work, if you can’t quite figure out what to write or how to write it, if you feel inhibited from speaking up in class, if you don’t know what you are supposed to do, etc.—it is better to talk about it and seek guidance rather than to ignore or hide your issues, or absent yourself in significant ways from your department. If you have a faculty member designated as your advisor, talk to them; but feel free to approach other faculty as well. And of course your fellow grad students, especially those a few years into the program, may be of valuable assistance. Graduate school involves new tasks, but even familiar kinds of work takes place at a new level of difficulty or intensity, so it is not surprising that some students will be having a hard time. Know that many of today’s talented philosophers felt as you did once, sought advice, and succeeded.
Your turn, philosofriends.
Related:
Grad Traps!
Being an “Awesome First-Year Grad Student”
Douglas Portmore’s Six Commandments for Getting the Most Out of Graduate School
Prioritize understanding when reading.
If you find yourself disagreeing with something, assume for the moment you’ve misunderstood, re-read, and re-consider.
If you still disagree, try one more time.
If you disagree after that, then okay, you might be on to something.
I don’t understand what agreement or disagreement has to do with properly understanding a text. After all, couldn’t someone find themselves agreeing with a text and be mistaken about their understanding of it? What am I missing?
You’re missing the fact that (many) graduate students tend to read texts with an uncharitable eye, which leads to criticism that is superficial at best and completely off at worst. It also makes them dismissive of people who they criticize (which often comes in conjunction with completely opposite attitude towards their “idols”).
I was like this (hopefully not anymore), and I think Dan Munro gave excellent, philosophy-specific, advice.
The eye should be focused onto reality. Charity tolerates incompetence. Is that your hidden context??
The problem is that when you are a grad student your incompetence-barometer is typically not yet particularly well-tuned.
I think there’s probably a distinction to be drawn between incompetence and bad ideas. It seems that bad ideas, and those holding them, can get pretty far. Whether that also entails incompetence, and therefore that incompetence can get pretty far, isn’t clear to me. In either case, I don’t think recognizing that, and responding to it, can always be put down to misunderstanding, lack of charity, etc. Someone may be “on to something” from the get go. Or, they may not. So it goes with a lot of intellectual work.
I think students should be encouraged to lean into their dismissiveness with curiosity. If a student is having a strong reaction to a philosopher’s argument, seems like a great way to pique their interest in fully understanding what about the argument has caused them to feel that way. Their curiosity may cause them to find out they misunderstood the philosopher. I believe that is the intention behind asking students to be more charitable, but the phrasing could have the unintended consequence of making the student feel judged. The author of said paper is never going to hear the student’s underdeveloped critique (if it is indeed uncharitable), especially if given an outlet for it early on. Understanding why one defaults to dismissing a text seems like a useful form of self-awareness to cultivate, without assigning a value judgement to the dismissiveness.
Say “I don’t understand this” at least three times per day. Sometimes, younger persons think that this is shameful, but some of the most intelligent people I know say it all the time! (And: Socrates)
I read a part of a philosophy book 19 times beforeI understood it. Philosophy is very abstract.
Go back, it’s a trap!
On that note, my advice is: always do the reading (blog posts included).
Find the mental health resources on campus or affiliated with your program and make an appointment; if you’re already in therapy or have a mental health support practice, don’t interrupt it.
Graduate school raises all kinds of things that hard-driving folks keep under wraps, and having a therapist or someone outside the program you can speak to may be helpful in keeping the challenges and obstacles in an appropriate (and hopefully manageable) register.
Some demographic groups receive (sometimes weak, sometimes substantial) preferential treatment in hiring, while others face (sometimes weak, sometimes substantial) disadvantages. Find out whether you belong to a group that benefits, and shamelessly pounce on it if you do. Many people will dislike and resent you for it, but you will get a job and they will not.
My one piece of advice? Try to figure out how to ignore, and insulate yourself from, comments like what Viktor says above; in order to do so, try to form a community of people who aren’t like this and don’t think like this, but instead try to do philosophy together in a supportive, cooperative, wanting-the-best-for-one-another way.
That’s all very high minded, etc., except that hiring committees think like that (giving preference to certain demos over others) and it is bad advice to tell grad students to ignore and try to insulate themselves from how hiring committees think. Unless the student in question receives such preferential treatment and thus doesn’t need to worry about/work to counteract it, perhaps. Maybe your message is primarily for such students, Michaela?
“All graduate students nowadays have heard some version of the warnings most of us know to give undergraduates who tell us they want to go to grad school in philosophy, and they’ve decided to go anyway.”
It would indeed be wonderful if snarky, jaded TT faculty, who have already achieved what we hope and dream of, could keep this in mind.
My advice: Let yourself form friendships. Resist the urge to think of the journey solely as a competition (even if to some extent that’s exactly what it is). The satisfaction of “being right” fades fast, and it will never be enough. Ironically, the people who tend to do the best in the long run are those personable and humble enough to form lasting relationships. This is essential during job talks, especially.
Specialize in philosophy of AI.
/s
Get comfortable with the idea that you may not secure an academic job, relax and enjoy yourself. What a huge privilege to spend a few years thinking about such difficult and interesting questions!
I know this is meant sincerely, and I don’t know you’re career status, but if someone is a TT-track faculty with a secure job, don’t say this to your grads.
There is nothing more infuriating then people who have “made it” telling the under-employed to just enjoy yourself, lay back, and not sweat the impending unemployment. That isn’t a substitute for good career advice.
Both of you are right.
We can sincerely say “Life is short and a privilege. Enjoy it!” while understanding that everyday struggles are deadly serious. People are dying from a lack of healthcare, on the streets, in ICE concentration camps and worse. Grad students and millions of others can’t find jobs.
Suffering people won’t be excited to hear the sage advice to enjoy life while they can. But if they take a moment to reflect upon and appreciate the message, that can make their lives better regardless of whatever is happening in the world.
That’s just Stoicism: amor fati or love your fate.
I spent years out of applying for academic jobs and working outside of academia, and this attitude was in fact helpful in dealing with my setbacks.
@ERW: Like David, I find Leaver’s advice personally helpful. There are some significant caveats: I didn’t have so much debt from undergrad, I went to a program that paid well enough that I accrued meaningful savings during grad school, I didn’t suffer acute mental health issues during grad school, I had a supportive advisor, etc. I’m not saying I don’t get stressed; but I really do consider it a privilege and a joy to have been able to do a PhD in Philosophy, and it was more valuable to me than money or career advancement.
As the name implies I have left the profession! But I don’t agree with this. Since … let’s say the first cohort past 2008 (roughly 2013-14 or so) it’s been common knowledge that the academic job prospects for graduate students are not very good. That should be priced in to any graduate student’s mindset when they decide to attend, and reflected in the careers advice they receive (broadly construed).
> What a huge privilege to spend a few years thinking about such difficult and interesting questions!
Especially when garbage collectors and dishwashers are taxed for you.
Become a morning person.
Write for 2-3 hours each AM.
Oops.
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
suicide
Don’t be shy Quickly find a way to at least feel comfortable — and, ideally, enjoy for its own sake — doing philosophy out loud with other people in person. You already enjoy doing philosophy privately through reading and writing papers. But that will only be a small part of the philosophy you’ll now be doing for at least the next several years in seminars, teaching, conferences, hanging out with other philosophers in and out of your department, and so on. So much of this job is done in public; you might as well enjoy it. Besides, enjoying doing philosophy in public for its own sake will also likely bring a host of other instrumental benefits with it.
This advice comes from my own experience. It took me ~3 years into graduate school to stop worrying about what others thought — and, not to be too dramatic, it was agonizing. It wasn’t until I forced myself to start speaking up that I stopped worrying, and only when I stopped worrying did I start to flourish.
Hours spent on writing are one of the strongest predictors of publishing success.
Piggybacking to offer my version of this advice:
While in grad school, hours spent on writing is probably the biggest bottleneck to publishing. This is because your program is likely designed to give you ample of the other inputs into getting published: hours spent reading, thinking, and talking about the topic of your research.
You might find that you encounter other bottlenecks, especially after grad school. For example, you might find that you’re writing a lot, but that you are getting rejected for reasons that could have been anticipated if you talked to your peers about your project. Or, you are writing a lot but you aren’t up to date on the literature and didn’t see that your contribution has already been made by someone else. If you encounter these bottlenecks only after grad school, you might need to develop new practices to replace what you had in grad school to secure enough of the non-writing inputs in getting published.
A caveat: the bottleneck to getting published isn’t necessarily the bottleneck to writing high quality philosophy. Maybe you’d publish more if you wrote in defense of your first novel thought about a topic. But thinking more might be necessary for producing an idea that could become a high quality philosophy paper
Write every day. For the most part, view “discrete thought” rather than “paper” as the basic component of writing. If (in line with some above comments) you’re reading something and find yourself disagreeing, write the disagreement down; if you’re thinking about something from a seminar, write it down; if a (counter-)example comes to you, write it down; etc.
Connected to this (so, 1.5 pieces of advice), come up with a good file-naming and storage system as soon as possible.
Hard agree on both.
For file management, I recommend numbering your documents, and saving under a new version number every time you open the document. So, for example, in the folder Paper Title, I start with 1.0 – Paper Title. The next time I open the document, I immediately save it as 1.1 Paper Title. And so on. I shift to 2.0 either when I’ve made a ginormous alteration (e.g. total re-structuring) or after submission somewhere. This way you keep a record of your work (handy when something gets erased or you need to prove you wrote it yourself), and it’s super easy to see what the current draft is.
I third this. I use a similar method, but I number folders and I give them informative titles (e.g. after feedback from X), and inside each folder there’s a final draft of the folder and another inner folder titled “Drafts” with different versions that I wrote along the way, with paragraphs that I later erased or revised. The drafts in the inner folder also have informative names, like “before addressing Y” or “with long discussion about Z”.
Every piece of graduate school advice, every anecdote about what works and what doesn’t, will be true for someone. It may or may not be true for you. It may or may not work for you. It may or may not make you better at doing philosophy or getting a job.
The only way to find out is to be open to trying different approaches. Some write every day, I’m the most published person in my department and I absolutely do not write every day. I’m lucky if I write once a week. Some find success by being socially engaged and having good professional networks, others find success living largely cloistered monkish lives of teaching and writing.
You may think you know which one you are…but be open to the fact that you may be wrong.
Approach all of your term papers as though you’re trying to write something that could be published. Try to make a defined contribution, even if it is only of the “reply” variety. Don’t think about the paper as just the final paper for the class. Think about it as an opportunity to make a genuine contribution.
Most of your term papers won’t end up being published or publishable. But cultivating this kind of attitude towards your writing will be professionally useful.
Related to this – you will probably be required to take some seminars on topics that feel unrelated to what your main research project is going to be. But try to figure out how you can use them to benefit your work anyway. If you’re a philosophy of math student who is required to take a seminar on Heidegger, see if you can dig through Heidegger’s views on technology to come up with something relevant from his point of view for thinking about how to use the axiom of choice. (This might also work if you’re a Heidegger student who is required to take a seminar on philosophy of math!) Engage with the material seriously and respectfully, in a way that you can learn something from it, and turn it into something more than just a hurdle you have to jump over.
My first piece of advice would be in line with the others here that emphasize fostering social connections. But, my second piece of advice would be this:
Resist the tendency to think that what you know is a strict subset of what people you identify as “smart” know. You almost certainly see some things or have insights that others do not and what might seem obvious to you isn’t always obvious to everyone. Don’t sell the uniqueness of your perspective short.
Treat grad school as a job. For people going directly to MA/PhD from undergrad (which I don’t recommend to undergrads who ask me about grad school, but that’s already a second piece of advice–sorry Justin), that means not treating grad school as an extension of undergrad, where your professors are the ones directing the flow of your education and you can kind of let things happen as they happen. Develop a sense of yourself as responsible for how grad school goes for you, and start making your career your own.
Flip side: treat grad school as just a job. Don’t let it eat your whole personality. Get a couple hobbies, make friends who aren’t grad students, etc.
Trust your instincts. Strive to honour your own sense of what is important.
Build/join a community of friends who have nothing to do with philosophy or graduate school, and (generally) don’t talk about grad school or philosophy with them.
Learn how to do conscious streaming writing and practice everyday half an hour, with your favorite drink!
Make friends who are not in your graduate program. Join a graduate intramural team, club, whatever. Having another grad student to talk to who can understand the challenges of being a graduate student but at the same time is NOT a philosopher and not in your program is an amazing asset.
Agreed! I lived in the graduate student dorm at UCLA for my first 2 years there (back in the day), and that made a huge difference. I met lots of folks in other fields and they became my friends.
It’s been said, but I’ll reiterate: write every day. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but it should be a little. It will add up over time. Give yourself a small, achievable daily goal, then achieve it as early in the day as you can. You can return to it and exceed it later. But do a little every day.
Take your time.
I say all this as someone who took a substantial amount of time out of undergrad before returning to graduate school in philosophy. This advice may not be for everyone, but it is based on my experience as an older student, and I’m convinced now more than ever that it was better to wait than to have applied when I was younger.
Don’t go to grad school right away. Find something else to do for at least 2 years minimum. You’ve been in school (almost) your entire life up until this point; it’s good to get some outside perspective before starting graduate school. You will also appreciate your choice differently than those on the the K-PhD track (not that there is anything inherently wrong with this, but I prefer the experiential diversity that taking a break might bring).
When you do decide you want to go back, get to know the culture of your target departments as much as possible before hand. Take non-degree courses if you can, get to know people 1:1, learn how attentive / reliable they are, how they treat non-PhD students (and also, how they treat their PhD students). Do not rely on what people tell you about their department; even the students are incentivized to put their best impression forward, which is not what you need to decide if a department is the right fit for you personally. You are making a 5-7 year commitment with these people, do not rush it.
Taking your time has additional benefits besides gaining new perspectives. First, you can use that time to do some exploration on your own, gain some clarity on what you want to contribute, how self-directed you are, and develop a conviction about what you want to research. A graduate program may help you figure all these things out, but it’s better to develop these skills (or learn your preferences and/or limitations) prior to entering grad school if you can.
Second, taking your time allows you to save money. There is no money to be made in graduate school and despite the funding, you may sometimes find yourself sitting with peers discussing whether or not they qualify for SNAP. Moreover, your funding is the single most vulnerable part of your ability to finish graduate school and you may find yourself among those who feel they can leverage that to persuade you toward their own aims. The more money you have saved the more readily you can inoculate yourself from those sorts of pressures. Do not be overly optimistic. Do not underestimate how financial stress might impact your ability to focus, manage anxiety and even cope with otherwise normal academic stressors.
Third, become ungovernable. You are in graduate school to learn. Your professors know more than you about philosophical training, the literature, the profession – many things. But if you’ve done the work to understand your own goals and motivations (see additional benefit one), none of them will understand you as well as you do. Part of graduate training is also learning how to communicate your own research to other people. So sometimes that means otherwise well meaning advisors will steer you in a sub-optimal direction because they don’t understand your perspective, or you’re still figuring out how to articulate it in a way they can appreciate. You have to maintain a strong sense of self here. It’s very easy to get swept up in trends, or other people’s research goals, departmental political pressures or feedback meant for a different version of you than the one your advisors currently understand. You will want a clear sense of self and a strong backbone if you want to get through grad school without excessive self-compromise. You are not in graduate school for your advisor’s validation; you are here for research training and academic support. Be ready to find alternative paths to meeting your goals if you are not getting the support you need. Having money saved helps with this (see additional benefit two).
Say yes – or rather, don’t let fear make you say no. Seize the opportunities available to you – the connections your supervisor might help you make, collaborating with the people you meet at conferences, submit the conference abstract even if you don’t think your chances of getting in are great, etc. The only way to learn your limits is to push yourself, and there are already enough obstacles to success in this discipline; we ought not create more for ourselves by refusing to try.
Set up a backup system. You don’t want to learn this lesson after losing a paper (or more). There’s a bit of advice about this on my website (on the Resources page, at the “Suggested Software for Philosophy PhD Students” link) but what makes sense for you will depend on factors like your aptitude with technology and so on, so what matters is not that you have the best system but rather that you have something that functions.
I got it from here but as the blog post says, everyone has their own version from somewhere.
Use Zotero.
Take advantage of your university. Go to lectures, seminars, performances, etc outside of philosophy. It’s fun and it will make you a more interesting thinker.
This is such good advice.
At Michigan the students are required by university rule to take at least one course outside their home department. And sometimes they’ll try to hack this by taking a cross-listed philosophy class under the other number. But most use the fact that there are so many great people across the university to try to learn something new. In the most successful cases, the students end up with the professors of courses they took for this breadth requirement on their thesis committee. And they’ll end up with friends from that class who aren’t the same friends everyone else has in the department, which is good as well.
It’s possible this is an upside of going to a very good big state university like Michigan or Cal; there is so much interesting stuff happening within a few minutes walk.
Seek out and celebrate criticism. This doesn’t mean you should seek out mentors/peers/interlocutors that are abusive, but I’m observing an increasing tendency for grad students to think it’s somehow inappropriate for their work to be criticized at all. One of the greatest privileges of my time in grad school was that extremely smart people took me seriously enough to criticize me, and taking their criticism seriously has always made my work better.
Don’t do it! It’s an incredibly bad bet that’s only going to get worse for the foreseeable future. And if you’re smart enough and hard working enough that you can get into grad school there are rewarding careers open to you that offer much better prospects.
If for some reason you ignore this, the one piece of advice you will ever really need, I have a few follow ups: 1. Do something else for a few years, so that you can see whether you really even want to go to graduate school or if its just inertia. You may also see the world of work isn’t as bad as you think. 2. If you really must go to graduate school then don’t pick philosophy. Do something like econ that opens doors to non-academic employment. At the very least do something that will let you get a good teaching job outside the academy like English or math. 3. If you ignore all this other good advice, then at least pick your school on actual placement statistics and not the results of a [prestige] measuring contest.
Bro I agree with this but you gotta read the whole post before commenting.
Ha fair enough. So then I’d keep 1.
Then again I think don’t do it is best and really all that needs to be said. Especially since most philosophers have any idea how badly the Medicaid cuts are going to **** up state and university budgets starting next year. If you think it’s bad now, you have no idea. Come fall 2027 people will be talking about the before 2024 times like we talk about the 60s now. And it’s only going to get worse from there.
Respect. And, yeah, it’s gonna be rough…
Be patient with yourself and others as you encounter growing pains, especially with communicating your ideas, knowing that discipline can be very fickle. My very worst paper presentation involved a lot of nervousness, an embarrassing typo in my handout (brought to my attention during the Q & A), and a senior philosopher in the audience who started answering questions on tangentially related topics for me without being invited to do so. It was a humiliating experience, and I went home with my tail between my legs. But I still felt like my argument was good and no one had really interacted with the research question I was asking. I presented it a couple of months later with typos cleared up and a few footnote-ish digressions to ward off topic changes. The Q & A was wonderful and it won the graduate student paper award. This was a real learning experience for me. I don’t begrudge the people in the first audience and I don’t laud the people in the second one. I learned that presenting a philosophy paper can be like herding cats and you have to be patinet with yourself as you learn to herd them while recognizing that cats will be cats.
Enjoy yourself! You’re young! Grad school is tons and tons of fun and you’ll have more free time then than you will ever have again. So, be sure to do lots of things that have nothing to do with grad school: pursue various passions, play sports, get a job outside of the university, and, if allowed, take classes in disciplines outside of your own.
Grad school was a blast!
This! Engaging with philosophy and with your fellow philosophers is one of life’s great pleasures.
Be lucky.
Related to that: fortune favors the brave, as well as the prepared mind, as they say. So, do those things.
A prepared mind is also a calm mind—try to keep your life in order, and take care of yourself as best as you can, physically, emotionally, financially, etc. Get an outside hobby for balance.
Good luck!
Have a life outside of school. It’s all too easy to let something you’re passionate about become all that you do. It might even be praised by some faculty or students in your program. This tendency can and likely will be exploited in the workplace (which may also be your program). Developing habits for a balanced life begin now.
Being productive includes spending extended periods of time letting your mind wander.
This is helpful for figuring out what topics you are drawn to and might want to research. It’s also helpful for playing with ideas and exploring novel approaches to answering the problems you’re interested in. For me personally, all of my publishable ideas have required extensive mind wandering.
To that end, I also recommend reflecting on whether your daily routine has space for mind wandering. Reading and writing are among the most visible productive activities, and I think many grad students fall into the trap of trying to maximize these at the expense of other kinds of productivity. Additionally, there are multi billion dollar industries vying for our attention. I’ve seen many people incorporate practices for preserving reading and writing time (e.g. by using pomodoros) but don’t think about how to preserve their mind wandering time. Personally, I’ve found that bricking my device for the majority of the day helps.
The best advice I ever got was dissertation specific: Don’t think of your dissertation as your *best* work, think of it as your *longest* work.
In other words, dont get too hung up trying to produce your magnum opus. The point, rather, is just to demonstrate that you know your way around a literature well enough to contribute some insights to it.
Don’t get sucked into any drama going on with either faculty or fellow students. Do your business and finish on a reasonable timetable. For the most part, faculty want to see you do well.
Publish!
Sometimes, when you’re hanging out at the bar with non-philosopher friends, and someone is like “I used to hate beer, but now I love it,” don’t be all like “oh Dennett has an interesting view about this, he argues that there’s essentially two possibilities: first…”. Just be like “yeah, but I still hate IPAs” or whatever. Basically, just remember that academic philosophy is (while great) a pedantic leisure bubble that a lot of people don’t care about. (SOMETIMES.)
To be a bit more philosophical about it (yes, I see the performative contradiction): remember that “philosopher” is one mode of agency among many. While you will become a master of this mode over the next few years, you must not allow it to consume you. Maintain agential fluidity. It will be harder than you expect
Deliberately develop your teaching skills.
Here are some ways to do that: Read books on teaching (e.g., Make It Stick, What the Best College Teachers Do, and Slow Teaching). Volunteer to teach classes when TAing. Observe the good teachers in the department. Ask the good teachers to observe you and give advice. Angle to get some classes of your own.
Most jobs are teaching jobs.
I heartily agree with this! Depending on your program, you may have to seek professional development about teaching through outside sources — the profs who are teaching and mentoring you in elite grad programs may have no clue about what teaching-intensive jobs are really like, or what folks hiring for those positions (which is most positions) are looking for. The AAPT (American Association of Philosophy Teachers) is a fabulous resource for philosophy-specific teacher training, with summer seminars for grad students at there biannual conference (next one is in 2028), Teaching Hub sessions at all the APA conferences, and a free online “talking teaching” weekly discussion group.
If you have any interest at all in practical ethics, get some genuine multidisciplinary experience. There are a lot more jobs if you can both be a philosopher AND a clinical ethicist, or if you can apply to policy jobs, or whatever else sits at the intersection of your interests. Backup and alt-ac skills are worth pursuing and can also make you a more interesting, more well-rounded person. Ditto for administrative skills: not many philosophers are great at admin, so if you can demonstrate that you can run projects and programs, you expand the jobs you are qualified for.
Try to develop a growth rather than a fixed mindset. A lot of grad students (myself included!) find the transition from undergrad to grad school challenging and identity-threatening, in a similar way as undergrads sometimes struggle with the transition from high school to college. Depending on your background and what sort of undergrad program you’re coming from, you may find that you’re suddenly surrounded by philosophers working at a much more advanced level than anything you have been exposed to at that point. And that often means going from an environment where you were always one of the fastest, sharpest thinkers in the room to one in which you’re struggling to keep up. It’s easy to think that this is a sign that grad school is not really for you, or that you’re not as intelligent or competent as you thought you were. Instead, try to frame what you’re doing as having new opportunities to grow and improve, and expect that you’ll have growing pains (and know that many of your fellow students are going through something similar, even if they don’t always talk about it). That way, you can face challenges while holding on to your sense of yourself as a competent, intelligent person.
I’d suggest to tune out the noise and just focus on Top 5 publications. That will be the gold standard that can distinguish the wheat from the chaff in a tough job market.
Hear, hear! Looking back I wish I was told this, might have saved me years of publishing in crappy journals and fumbling around with temp jobs. As soon as I started putting all energy and focus in Top 5 ambitions, things dramatically turned around. (And yes, this factors in getting lots of rejections from Top 5s also, which is the norm).
What does this even mean? Who is wheat and who is chaff exactly?
I take it the reference to wheat and chaff was made from the standpoint of committees who evaluate dossiers in large part (at least initially) on the basis of whether or not there is a “top-five” publication, rather than an endorsement of that classification. We have to play the game as it’s being played already, after all.
Speaking only for myself, I’ve had a hell of a time even getting interviews, and almost everyone I’ve talked to has said I’m not making it to that stage because I don’t have a “top-five” publication. Looking back at when I was at the stage where this kind of advice would have helped, I had an essay on negation for expressivists receive R&Rs at Phil Studies, Phil Review and Mind when I was a PhD student, only to be rejected by the first two after the revision, so I set it aside in order to focus on my dissertation, thinking I could pick it up again when I was done. When I turned back to that essay 3 years later, it wasn’t even making it to the review stage any longer, and when I reached out to a couple of the people who work on the topic, I was told it was no longer interesting enough to merit consideration at those venues. Philosophy has its fads, too, and given the weight that committees evidently (in general) place on “top-five” publications, it turns out that what I probably should have done (from the standpoint of getting interviews) was shelve the dissertation and focus on that essay.
So I second Ichabod’s advice, even though I think it’s absurd that philosophy of all disciplines has become so focused on the idea of publishing in “top” journals, and that there should be only 5 that are widely agreed upon as the cut-off for consideration. But again, that’s the way the game is played so if we want to succeed we have to do our best to play it well ourselves.
Thanks. That’s helpful. FWIW, I agree that some strong publication helps get a committee to look further at a file, but I’m pretty sure it extends beyond the widely accepted top five general journals.
Thanks, Mark. I’m sure it’s not done this way everywhere, but I’ve had a couple of people on committees for jobs I’ve applied to tell me that the absence of a top-five publication was a factor keeping me from getting a first-round interview. Again speaking only about my own case, and going off Leiter’s most recent “top general journals” ranking, I have five top 10 publications and another six in the 10-20 range, plus 9 publications in Oxford, Routledge, and Springer volumes, co-edited volumes from each of those publishers, and a single-author book with Routledge. That’s been the trajectory since I graduated, and in all the years I’ve applied for TT jobs in North America I’ve had two first-round interviews in total, neither of which went beyond that stage. So at least in my case, and setting aside questions about the merit of my work (which I’d be happy to talk about otherwise), this hasn’t been enough to get my dossier a further look.
Thankfully, the job market works a bit differently in Europe. And just to be clear, I’m one of the lucky ones: I have a good position doing research I love, and so far I’ve been able to cobble together enough online teaching that I can support myself in the context of the U.S. economy. But there are definitely some facts about the way jobs are allocated in philosophy today that I wish I’d been aware of when I was a student, and the widely regarded importance of “top five” publications is one of them.
Mark I agree with what Preston’s said below. I’m also not suggesting that we’re operating in an ideal system either. My advice is to hold fixed the system as it is, and within that system, by far the best advice is to focus on top fives. I should make clear another assumption behind that advice, which is that I’m giving career-only advice. My claim is that the most instrumentally rational thing you can do, if you want a good career in philosophy while you’re starting out, is to focus on top fives. I’ve been on various hiring panels where we get 500 or so applications for permanent positions and sometimes even 300 applications for postdoc. Nobody has time to read all these application materials, and I mean that. If someone responds and says that they’ve read all 500 applications in full, they are an extreme outlier or a liar. It’s rational for the applicant to assume that, for the purpose, at least, of shortlisting, heuristics are going to be used. The fastest, most reliable heuristic you can get is to look at the gold standard, namely the hardest thing to do, which, for better or worse, is to make it through peer review at a top five journal. What a top 5 journal publication buys you a good chance at a shortlist. From there, the applicant is really on their own. The value of the top five publications, once you’ve been shortlisted, is going to go down relative to the other application materials, which the committee might actually read and look at and take into account, alongside the job talk, etc
Get a hobby. (Nb. Drinking is not a hobby. Neither is online shopping.)
There will be bad days in graduate school. Sometimes, there will be more bad days than good days. Unlike scientists, philosophy does not stay in the lab – it follows us around, wherever we go.
This is where a hobby comes in. Maybe you need something that brings joy, maybe you need something that releases anger, maybe you need both. Some people like painting, others like smashing weights at the gym. There is no correct hobby for everyone.
A hobby can serve the function of a useful and positive way of coping with negative things you might encounter. Your paper got rejected; so what? Maybe it is time to paint, or smash weights, or disassemble old electronics; maybe those reviewer comments will not seem so harsh after doing something else that feels productive.
A hobby can also serve as a reward for doing something productive, like finishing your essay, submitting your paper to a journal, or grading. So it can be used as leverage over yourself when you might not want to work, but need to get something done.
Bonus points for a hobby that involves a social group that is not exclusively or even largely composed of other grad students in philosophy. Maybe the social group is mostly postdocs and grad students from other departments. Maybe it’s people outside academia altogether.
Team sports, a crafting community, whatever. And “there is no correct hobby for everyone.” Though maybe online “communities” are not really what I have in mind for hobby-oriented activities.
Talk! Speak up regularly in seminars. Ask questions at conferences, colloquia and workshops. Start conversations with department faculty, or visiting faculty, whose work interests you.
It’s tempting to err on the side of silence: you’re new and untrained, senior faculty can be scary in countering ideas they don’t like or even mildly disagree with, etc. etc. But here’s the thing: nobody remembers the flawed or mistaken or insufficiently helpful comment or question from a grad student. It’s forgotten as soon as it happens. And it’ll never be held against you. But not talking will (even if it shouldn’t).
I wish it were true that faculty don’t keep mental catalogs of questions and comments they consider to be stupid or annoying, or rank graduate students in order of perceived ability. I wish it were true, but sadly in many cases it isn’t.
I’ve been around philosophy faculty for almost 20 years, many of them in top departments. While I agree, sadly, they do rank grad students that way, I have never once heard anyone discuss a grad student’s stupid or annoying comment. Really, never. But I have repeatedly heard them complain about a student’s quietness. Now, as AI is tainting the presumption of authenticity that pertains to written work, a grad student’s oral contributions are only going to become more important. So as I said, speak up…
I agree that that’s good advice. I’d simply add that sometime during my first MA year, I resolved to make ONE good comment or ask one good question per meeting. I found myself thinking more and more deeply about things, and becoming my own toughest critic. I also noticed the tendency of some people to be bulldogs who’d suck up lots and lots of discussion time. So I tried to steer a course between those two. It helped (me, at least).
Make sure you have some friends who are grad students in your department, some friends who are grad students in other departments at your same university, and some friends who are not affiliated with your university. There are times when you want to talk about your work with your friends, and you need friends in your department for that. There are times when you want to vent to someone about the joys and sorrows of being a grad student, without it getting back to your department, and you need friends who are grad students but not in your department for that (ideally, not in your field at another university either). And there are times when you want to do something that is unrelated to work, and you want friends outside the university for that.
Another piece of advice:
The people around you (generally) want to help you, but the professors in your department mostly completed their PhD in a different decade than you, so they faced different issues than you. Their advice is worth considering, but it won’t always be right, especially when it comes to things that are different now than they were then.
In particular, your PhD will probably be something like 5 or 6 years long. Anyone who thinks they know what AI will or won’t be doing five or six years from now is uncertain at best, and fooling themselves at worst. So don’t confidently take advice from anyone who says you *must* be doing such and such with AI, or who says that you *must* ignore AI. You and the rest of your cohort will be forging your own way on this, and will likely come to different policies on this than us who are older (and also different policies from each other). Just like in your dissertation work, if you’re creative and intelligent about it, you’ll come up with something good and new that none of the rest of us has thought about yet, but it’s also true that some people’s ideas just won’t work out – and we can’t tell whose are which in advance.
I am a third year PhD student at a top university and successful by all possible metrics. The best advice that I repeatedly received and ignored was “don’t do a PhD.” The best outcomes for academia are still very far below those in other professions.
I am now moderately convinced that academia is a psy op meant to discourage the best minds from serving their country (half-joke).
Prioritize financial stability and freedom to explore intellectually in your free time, neither of which you will have as an academic. If you really regret not devoting your life to reading about Plato or whatever, get a PhD when you are retired from your other, real job.
If you don’t have it already, develop the ability to work on long-term projects without clear deadlines. Learn how to make yourself get things done, rather than doing things only because others are making you.
Going to high school doesn’t teach this. Going to college doesn’t teach this. And the first few years of grad school don’t teach it either. For this reason, you might not know whether you have this ability or not. But that’s a problem, because most people who drop out, or who take forever, do so not because they aren’t smart enough, but because they wander aimlessly once they lose the guardrails of the one-semester-at-a-time-with-clear-deadlines life style. This, and not lack of intelligence, is how honor-roll undergrads end up taking ten years to write a dissertation.
If you don’t this ability, and you can’t acquire it, drop out and live a normal life with a normal job. There is absolutely no shame in doing this.
Not finishing is not failure. Each year sincerely evaluate whether this is the right option for you. There is nothing wrong with leaving at any point.
Strongly consider moving from philosophy into clinical ethics consultation. The philosophy-to-bioethics pipeline is of course tried and true, but jobs in specifically clinical ethics are particularly desirable these days, and it’s not hard to distinguish yourself as a philosopher. Part of this is because bioethics in general has become less philosophy-focused and includes more non-philosophy academically trained people, which means that deep thinking philosophers who are also committed to doing clinical and practical work are actually becoming rarer. Clinical ethics jobs are often located in hospitals which offers job security without the tenure track, and also opportunities to do interesting scholarship. These jobs also pay significantly better than entry level TT philosophy jobs. The trouble is getting the experience necessary to do actual clinical ethics consultation work; thankfully the clinical ethics fellowship world is rapidly expanding and offers opportunities to do a range of work including research. As a philosopher, it’s often enough to qualify to have taught some bioethics courses and be able to talk in generalities about common clinical ethics situations. Lastly, clinical ethics work in a philosophy environment is very peripatetic, and feels in some ways like the truest version of philosophy. It’s not uncommon to be walking back from the cafeteria and bump into a clinical colleague, who says ‘hey, I have this patient situation that I think might be an ethics issue’, and all of a sudden you’re doing real intellectual work that affects real people over coffee with an ICU doctor.
Of all the decisions I made in my career, the decision to move to a clinical bioethics department in a hospital from the traditional academy world is the best one.