Yea Forums career/university thread

re 1: You should kys
re 2-4: Oll-Korrect
bonus: You write too much

based hard-truth-poster

Just to conclude: I do not hate or despise academic life. I just had different expectations about it and the people in it and I had to adjust. Around 25, that was very difficult. Now I have managed, with some work and some "silence, exile and cunning", to make enough room for my own personal artistic pursuits and kept exploring things outside of my field. I like the people I am working with, but I do not stand out among them. People are very committed when they enter Academia in the humanities. It is very difficult to compete with students who use 100% of their time and energy to win the academic game, while you also want to put your effort into something else. That is true for most artistic careers: if you write, or paint, or do music seriously, at a certain point you'll have to choose whether to do it on the side, and be an amateur, or whether to renounce something and try (without necessarily succeeding) to become something more. But you have limited time to do things: you won't be able to excel in everything. Some people do, but it is very rare.

As for now, enjoy your undergrad years: these are the years you can really do both things - studying and developing artistically. You have time, read widely and be curious. But in 5/6 years you won't have as much time, so be ready to make serious choices and sacrifices.

not OP but thank you for this

kek, another phd student here and this is pretty accurate

>It's not a 9-5 job: it does not end. You work all day to a paper, you go home and you keep writing.
this is true but i think it depends on a few other factors. i only went into this shit because i would be doing it whether i got paid just better than minimum wage for it or not. i agree there is no 9-5, and i think it is outright dangerous and will probably destroy a lot of people's lives to not have any "end" to your work (you could always be doing something). but for the VERY lucky person who is deranged enough to want endless work on something they're passionate about as a lifestyle, academia can be decent.

the problem is that even if you are this lucky, you also have to jump through another 5 or 6 hoops of getting into a top tier program, getting a job even with those credentials, etc. even phds from top ranked prestigious schools have like a 50/50 chance of getting a job, IF they network and have good luck.

the rest is all true. honestly, for 99.5% of people, a phd is a miserable worthless waste of time, with no certain light (read: tenured professorship) at the end of the tunnel. and even if you do get that tenure track position, it'll probably be at a third- or second-rate school in a smelly industrial town; and after years of that, of grinding to pad your CV and stay upwardly mobile, you can maybe move up and start your "real career" as a professor at a great school when you're 45 and already looking to retire. even if you do manage to escape this trap, and somehow get one of the handful of truly great positions available, really early in your career, you will STILL spend the rest of your life writing letters of rec and grading awful papers and running from meeting to appointment to meeting nonstop until you're dead. again, there is no 9-5.

you should only go for a phd for two reasons. one, if you could do it if you're a natural entrepreneurial type and very good at twisting institutional rigmarole to suit your own career needs - i know a lot of "junior professional" types who are getting their phd just to pad out their resume and have a relatively laidback hipster lifestyle in their 20s (because they're somehow great at managing grad student life). they will either get second-rate academic positions and be comfortable there, or become a curator or some similar "that's a job?" type shit. two, if you are downright deranged in your passion and commitment, and you genuinely want to throw yourself into intellectual production for 5-10 years, AND you are reasonably confident that you could get into a good program and survive the endless drudgery.

i guess a third reason could be that you're OK with getting your phd from a less prestigious school and almost certainly not getting a job within academia. i know some people who got phds in medieval poetry until they were 35 and then just became software developers. but not sure the drudgery is worth it at that rate.

What the fuck is someone who is a top student suppose to do for a career if they want to discover and invent now? It was obviously go into academia because that was the place to nurture your talents, but it seems like that’s no longer the case. Where do these people go? The woods in a log cabin? The military?

Become a postman.

>woods in a log cabin
sounds based. how am i gonna afford it though.

My feeling - and I have very little experience in this - is that they work in collective STEM research. Individual intellectual research has very little value today, as everything is more and more collective. The humanities are failing to adapt to this as, despite the fact that you do work together with other people, the focus on hyper-specialization will have you being able to talk about your work with 20 to 50 people in total on the planet who can actually understand what you are talking about. You will mostly be alone and incapable to communicate what you do, or at least this is what following 100% the standard of your formation nowadays will do to you, if you don't maintain other interests by yourself and keep being curious.

Artistic pursuit, as a form of discovery and invention, is also taking collective forms (tv series, music production, etc.) but there is still space for individual ingenuity there - only there is not a precise path to follow and you risk a lot. This was always true though: except for born aristocrats/rich people, artistic pursuit requires everyone else to suffer deprivations.

this is so depressing. so i should kill myself after i graduate college?

We need intellectual heroism. Don’t fall for the specialization meme. They never said an Aristotelian genius could appear again, but then Hegel came. It’s always the darkest before dawn.

What's the point in getting so deep into something that you can't even communicate it to others outside your field? So there is no difference between an academic and let's say a patient in a psychiatric hospital?

that's the whole problem of modernity. it's not like the social world is some perennial thing, composed of objectively real institutions and career trajectories for you to navigate and choose from, so that the problem of "what the fuck am i supposed to do if i want xyz?" is a problem of finding the right point of entry and right combination of moves to make to navigate the system and end up at your desired goal. the social world is always changing, the values and material relations that constituted its institutions are always changing, etc.

you're living in a world of institutions predicated on the values of bourgeois self-cultivation, civic participation, and the pursuit of scientific knowledge. but all of these were conceived and constructed in an age when there weren't forty billion applicants a year, when managerial capitalism hadn't twisted all institutions into for-profit pyramid schemes. it's easy enough to believe that the self-cultivated genius scientist can ascetically remove himself from society and join the "life of the mind" when you're living in fucking 1800, when the modern university was just being founded, and when there are less than a few thousand such people and the talented among them can be immediately recognized. you can't do that when there are billions of people just to manage the managers of the managers of the human resource departments necessary for collating and designing all the testing standards to sift through half the human race applying to be an "English" major every year despite barely having a basic grasp of the english language.

there's no good answer. if you want to live your life in service to humanist values, you have to do so in a social reality that is not only fundamentally hostile (or at least alien) to those values, but which emerged out of a century-long process of deliberately subverting and parasitizing those values to sell pieces of paper marked "Doctor of Philosophy" to people who can barely fucking read.

Academics are mentally disgusting because of this. Loneliness is holiness. Moses was alone on top of Mt. Sinai when he received the commandments, wisdom, from the Lord. But what made him different is that he could bring this wisdom back to masses. He was not some crazed Schizo blabbering to himself, but instead shared his insights. We need a Reformation for academia anons.

Why delay?

i always thought grad school would have me working a 9-5 job with plenty of time to read and then maybe even write so I can publish something after i acquire my phd. Like do you see anyone in your department working on a revolutionary book? Or they inspired to break the grounds of philosophy? My guess is no, but I do imagine people have this attitude?

Anyways despite all thats been said, I can imagine doing any job with a cap on my abilities and I a phd could be much worse?

>The only issue is how will I pay for a phd? I'm assuming they don't have scholarships after you get your masters. I might join the military or just double major in something that will keep me connected with academia so i can finish my degree later but, :/ i guess thats reality

Do you come from a wealthy background?

yeah, and i know i'm not hegel, so I should kill myself. Got it

Cause I quite enjoy college. Might as well enjoy this glorified daycare center while I can, then I’ll end it right before my life goes to shit.

>Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.
Shakespeare

Biochem lab technician. I'm a depressed wreck and just did this because muh pragmatism.
I can be a slow, unmotivated thinker so this is why I've always doubted myself about going into academia.
My anxiety is holding me back the most though. I can't step outside my room without feeling on edge lately. Can't focus, can't hold up conversations, all that stuff.

So become a postman and use your college education to recapitulate that experience outside of college. Subscribe to three scholarly journals and write essays for online journals of letters.

It isn’t hard. Proletarianisation on your own terms beats the academy as a factory.

1590 would not be high enough to get into an ivy, you'd have to break 2000 to even be competitive.

Im almost 22 and have decided to enroll in a philosophy, politics and economics degree.

Hmmmm maybe I can try to get my shit published before I’m done with undergrad and hope that it becomes well known or try to get enough of an online following to live off of Patreon. If that doesn’t work by the time I’m done with my Masters I’ll just become a humble, educated laborer

They’re on a 1600 scale now you boomer

I’m also a current PhD and I feel most of this thread is bullshit.

Seems the main complaint is that this career path leads to a less enjoyable life. Truth is it is a doctorate of philosophy. If you love wisdom, truly love it, then it is a really enjoyable life. Yeah, I always work, but my work is the pursuit of wisdom. The currency is ideas and rhetoric. The cost is time and effort.

If you aren’t getting what you want out of it that is an issue with you, not with the nature of the profession.

This world isn’t so tough. It changes if you push it. Do what you will.

Any of you younger folks should take this to heart: intelligence and perspective will lead the way to salvation. You are never trapped. Each day is a new possibility.

Cheers. Good luck out there.

Fuck anyone who disagrees.

It’s out of 1600 now

Thrust into them, it is thrust into them.

fuck your mom

>cozy, well-paying job
>be able to write novels/poetry
>have a minimalist bucolic home life with a qt where we have goats and a vineyard on our land would be nice
These parts of your "plan" are more conducive with becoming a firefighter or a postman than an academic.

>you get to conduct research in a PhD
Spotted the undergraduate.

>boomer
I'm barely old enough to go to a bar

Firefighters die young. Postman get injured and workers comp.

That shit would get boring. Eventually all you would give a shit about is money/ tenure/ retirement so you might as well just try to get a job tht makes the most money in the first place.

>groundbreaking
It is a concept that's very related to the field you are working on. There are indeed groundbreaking works, but they are relative to their fields and generally not accessible to the great public. People do try to be groundbreaking and impactful - sometimes even too hard - but the impact of something in the humanities is very little. I mean, even the most popular young adult books are not that read anymore, let it be philosophy of any kind.

>scholarships
The good thing about PhDs is that they are funded most of the time. Don't even think to get into one without being funded, it will be economically draining unless you are rich and it looks very bad on your CV. I don't personally come from a wealthy background but my scholarship got me financially independent from my family during the PhD. There won't be much left after you rent a room and buy food and books and it's rarely the kind of money that you can spare to buy things afterwards as you'll have to buy lots of plane tickets for conferences (though depending on your scholarships/departments they may be able to give you the money back). Financially speaking it's not heaven, but you can have a comfy life until you're finished - after which you're poor again. Consider also that people who study finance and are younger than you will be getting rich and buying apartments in skyscrapers.

Yes, and philosophy PhDs suffer from a lack of well paying job, a lack of an ability to write novels and a lack of qt girlfriends.

>lack of qt girlfriends
What about other academics?

I just want to live in a log cabin in the woods. Any advice?

I know people who have won several prizes and got published before starting their PhDs with fairly good novels, but the problem is you don't make money off books nowadays. Literary life is not glamorous and there's very little financial gain from it. So publishing won't solve economic problems nor career choice path as you will have to do something else anyway, but it is definitely worth trying if you want to pursue a literary career anyway.
The point is just if you want to work on the arts as your main pursuit, you'll end up living "incognito", which means you'll be surrounded by people who put all their efforts in things you're doing as a side-activity to your main (possibly secret) activity which is artistic pursuit.

Find a forest that no one seems to own, declare some space as your own, buy some wood, and build a cabin

I'm 18 entering Uni next year for neuroscience. I plan to double minor in philosophy and mathematics and try to get as much research experience as I can in four years. Hopefully these extra qualifications (I'm also pretty good at CS and art) will somewhat offset the unemployable undergraduate degree to say, make me employable in a lab that needs a code monkey; but ultimately I plan to get a PhD in neuroscience and pursue research.

I've been autistically interested in the brain since I can remember and over the past couple years, philosophy, so I hope a background in both neuroscience and philosophy will allow me some important insights. Hopefully being a bit of a polymath will give me insights above that of your average STEMlord bug man.

20 studying literature and philosophy and want a career in pedagogy. Still deciding if I'd rather become a highschool teacher to (hopefully) form deeper connections with my students and have more of an impact or become a professor and teach higher literature

Thank you for this. I can't help but think that there is an over representation of burnouts and people who should not have attempted a PhD in these threads.

18, almost 19. I'll start studying Telecom Eng. Trying to write my first novel but I'm incredibly autist and I can't seem to concentrate enough to write the damn thing.

found the urbanite zoomer

Too busy writing to fuck.

I am working as a paraprofessional while I wait for some sort of unexpected deus ex machina to save my life, or to die, whichever comes first.

This is all true, espcially #3

people always make fun of me for being a lit major but i get the feeling that any majors these days (Except maybe computer engineering/science) are equally useless given how oversaturated their fields have become as of late. the worst part is, I KNEW this before going to college but I still went anyway. What is wrong with me?

t. midwit who never had an original idea to capitalize on, and just kept grinding away at the few obvious problems that grew into his field of vision

>grinding away at the few obvious problems that grew into his field of vision

Oddly insightful critique of the archetypal "great and successful but never achieved real uniqueness" graduate student desu

yeah well i am insightful thanks for noticing

Just graduated with a degree in psych, and I’ll probably take a year off before grad school. I like psychology and would do well in a research position, but my three greatest passions are history(really archaeology), literature, and playing music. I’ll probably go for psych, but I’m a little concerned because my gpa is 3.2 thanks to a rough patch in college. I’m a strong writer, have graduate-level experience in psychometrics, and can get some good recommendations, so I hope that will make up for what I lack. I noticed there’s a surplus of payed research assistant jobs in psych that only require a bachelors, so that sounds like great field experience and maybe an “in” if it’s at a school I’d like to apply for. Any opinions/advice?

Just finished Junior year at a small Catholic university with solid grades, pretty comfy experience so far, some classes are annoying but I get by. English major with Political Science Minor if anyone cares, but I tend to loiter around the Philosophy department, the faculty are all very bored and willing to have a chat about Zizek or accelerationism or whatever nonsense. Thinking of getting a Nick Land-adjacent article published soon (or trying, anyway) and then leveraging that into a book with Zero, they seem to publish every yahoo that sends them a proposal these days so it shouldn't be that hard, and having a title in print would assuage my ego even if it only sells seven copies to friends and relatives. Meanwhile, I work a shitty retail job and try (in vain, it seems) to fix my car.

You're on the mark about neuro labs needing code monkeys, but no neuro school or lab will care about philosophy, and serious neuroscience research is too specialized to get entangled in higher level philosophical problems anyway, outside of the ones that are implicit in a standard science education. If you are set on pursuing this, I highly recommend that you emphasize biology and chemistry as well as computer science to increase your chances of landing lab tech jobs if you don't go straight into your PhD. Also, bear in mind that even if you make it to PhD you will never be paid well.

You seem like a nice person user

I like you too

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> I noticed there’s a surplus of payed research assistant jobs in psych that only require a bachelors
Not where I live, but if it's different for you, well, good for you.
>graduate-level experience in psychometrics
If you mean administering basic language skills tests etc. you will not be able to compete with the licensed and/or master's level psychometrists. And yes, there really are people out there who are genuinely unambitious or unachieving enough to stake that out as their actual career.
>gpa is 3.2
Same.
>Any opinions/advice?
If all else fails you can spend some time as a BHT and accumulate harrowing experiences that you can attempt to sell as you apply to clinical psychology programs.
>Any opinions/advice?
Apply this fall so that you don't get stuck taking two years off instead, like me. Application window closes around Christmas. I regret my major but I have a plan and I'm making moves.

Thank you user, I try to be, with mixed results sadly. Wishing you nothing but success too!

>The dream would be to have a cozy, well-paying job where I would be able to write novels/poetry in addition to my academic work in philosophy and try to build a following online. In addition to all of this, to have a minimalist bucolic home life with a qt where we have goats and a vineyard on our land would be nice.

Ohhhh dear.

Philosophy phd here to burst your bubble. There are very few well-paying jobs in philosophy, and they are evaporating vast. Professional philosophy is stuffed to the gills with professional philosophers all fighting over for scraps. I did my master's degree at a no-name university, and there were 600 applications for one position, which was non-tenure track. where i'm doing my phd was even worse because it's a research university. likely, you'll be extremely lucky to get some shit-fart non-tenure track position in the middle of nowhere (suburbia doesn't even cut it), and any position you get will likely be adjunct. you could probably expect to be stuck as an adjunct for more than a decade.

when you do get a job, you'll probably have a 4-4 teaching load. you'll be overworked with student requests because you'll be teaching classes with 30 students in them, and you'll hardly have time to work on the shit you want to publish on. fucking f-o-r-g-e-t about having some kind of hobby. all this while making $26k a year, which means that you'll need to rely on your parents or hope your significant other makes more money than you.

if you think you'll have a minimalist lifestyle, it'll be forced. that is, you don't get to spend your thousands on precious Home & Board bedframes and desks, but will constantly live in fear of getting sick because your insurance is so poor.

and good luck if you're white and male, because your chances just decreased by 30% as well.

each point more truthful than the next

So what does one do if you want to actually support a home and family, and your only real skill is writing nonfiction? Keep in mind I'm willing to sell out whatever scraps of """integrity""" I might have, at this point.

>I would love to be a professor and shit on 90% of my students while praising and mentoring the 10% with potential.

>I'm sorry, Dr. user, these student evaluations are just so poor. It simply does not seem that you took your pedagogical duties seriously at all. We think it's best for you and the university if we part ways at the end of the semester.

clickbait journalism

Pretty much your only option if you want a home and a family in this day and age is to suck fifty dicks a week. Honest work is dead.

Based, was surprised to see so many bright eyed zoomers here.

t. PhD student, though at least it's in a field with a private sector.

nice larp to stop people from following their dreams

Enjoy your 30 years of adjunct professorship.

Actually that goes to every PhD in the thread. Anyone considering it,

LOOK AT EMPLOYMENT DATA FOR YOUR FIELD!

Go into the few areas that need people. I know PhD in optics and geology who immediately started at high six figures in tech and oil, respectively. And many more in other fields who can’t land a postdoc for $40k. At least one hides his PhD when applying to private sector jobs because he thinks it hurts his chances. Not that he’s gotten a job either way.

oh no...

I wrote a lot of low-budget screenplays in my free time in the army. I'm going to college now as an English major at the age of 21. I do have an interest in literature and read quite a lot (but not as deeply as most Yea Forums posters) but I feel an instinctive revulsion towards formal education. I'm only here to meet creative people and see where that takes me. If all else fails I might drop out, buy a camera and go to some godforsaken war-torn country to film a documentary with undertones of an obsessive young man behind the camera desperately trying to find his way in life.

If I live into my thirties I'll start writing novels then. Judging from most literature writers it looks like the right time to start in terms of life experience and amount of literature consumed. I'm always worried that my writing now might seem immature.

I teach at a university. But it's not good for writing. It's even worse. I'm trying to move abroad.

I became a nurse after wanting to be writer. I sucked at writing anyways since I was pretty sociopathic when I tried it. Maybe after learning to help people and what it feels like to save lives then I will come back to writing with an actual perspective. Or perhaps I will just stay a nurse and cut writing out all together.

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I've seen enough PhD horror story threads to know I won't get paid well. I'm not stupid enough to pursue a PhD for job prospects; I'm fairly set on it because I'm deeply interested in the field. I want to contribute something to a field that's so young and burgeoning.
Originally, I wanted to pursue pharmacology because I'm also very interested in biochemistry, but after developing an interest in philosophy (epistemology, philosophy of mind) over the past year and a half I'm more interested in cognitive neuroscience (or computational neuro). I've been debating skipping the minors and double majoring in neuro+biochem, but I think I'll stick to my double minor plan to keep myself sane and my knowledge base diversified (even if it's not as pragmatic on the surface).

SAVE ME FROM STEM HELL CHRIST

Doing mechanical engineering, I think I'm gonna stick to teaching when I graduate.
People on campus look at me like a goofball when they discover I'm into literature as a hobby.

Starting medical school next year, will probably do a degree in philosophy on the side. Looking to become a philosophically minded psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Sounds comfy

Talk to a couple of teenagers before you make this decision.

Wrote a book and self published it, didnt sell a single copy
But admittedly I wasn't trying my best with it so im not sad that nobody read it
Working on my second book which I intend to give 100% on and im hoping to get it published for real once its done

CS I'm sure I'll eventually end up in some meaningless cushy white collar job in liberalville
basically selling my soul to the machine but there are worse fates I suppose

based

Finishing undergrad in philosophy, applying to theological seminary. Looking to be ordained minister.

What?, truth pill me

This is overly pessimistic. I think everyone (who didn't knock up a chick) can make room of 2 hours a day to read new things. Also, since it's the current year, pussy is free and no man who can look a woman in the eye need to settle for women their own age

Currently doing my master in comparative literature. I will be starting on my MA thesis next semester and am currently doing research on it. I just find it very hard to find a topic that excites me but could also interest my professor/the academic field generally. That of course also goes for a subject for a PhD which I definitely want to do afterwards. To all Anons in this thread that are currently working on their PhDs, how did you find your subject?
It seems to me that a juicy topic can help you a lot with your career in academia. In my case that would most likely be some feminist or post-colonial approach which I am really not that interested in.

get this man an upboat

Op, please listion to this guy,
If anything it is worse than he says.
You might as well not bother with a humanities degree unless you got into a Ivy League, the job market it’s dead becuase every poduct school now has graduate program and releases new phds every year, tenure track Jobs get 1000 applicants, so if your c/v doesnt say Yale or Harvard you are fucked. You will be poor most of your life, and most of you will NOT get that choosy job, you will get one year slave pay appointments, which mean you will have to move states, losing all your friends again for another one year grant, till you are spit out at age 38 and have to enter the private workforce with no job history.
The only way this life works is if you were born into money and can afford to be being paid 20 year old wages at age 40.
Can someone post the blog? I dont have the link.
Do something practical, if you want to read philosophy, do that on your own time. Get a 4 year degree, graduate when you are 21 and enter the work force.
If you still dont bealive us, google "grad school is hell" and other key phrases, nobody likes it

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Thank you friend, I wish you well in your endeavours as well

>always thought grad school would have me working a 9-5 job with plenty of time to read and then maybe even write
Oh Lordy, you neeed to research this more

>We need a Reformation for academia anons.
The problem starts when they decided everyone needed a high school degree.
They need to fail people in high school again, those people will go work as plumbers and construction labor. High school grads should be ready to start most office jobs if you can’t do the math and writing you should not have been given a h.s. Degree.
it is silly that you need a college degree to learn how to fill out invoices and other stuff that is better learned on the job (hospitality management degree? Lmfao), but with everyone having a h.s. Degree, the only way to screen them is to only take people with college degrees. It used to be you had to be able to spot translate Latin to get into any college, as part of the enterence exam, they need to bring stuff like that back.
Basically what I am saying is we need a lot less college graduates
Because fuck normies, ah e they will catch up in 300 years.

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Just read philosophy on the side and you'll still know more than at least 99% of people.
If you're in the US they don't even teach psychotherapy to psychiatrists anymore, let alone psychanalysis. Psychiatrists have developed a very specific role as prescribers due to the surrounding conditions of the medical and insurance ecosystem they operate in.

I'm not a burger, but in my country they don't teach that either. You can follow an additional program during or after residency here, there is one specifically for psychoanalysis as well. So that way you can operate as both psychotherapist and drug vending machine at the same time which is obviously less boring than merely doing the latter.

I'm finishing M1 in a week. Dont know what country you're in, but in Canada I have very little time to read. Its a fun time but you're really busy.

updoot; where's my bloomer squad at senpai

I'm in the Netherlands, medical schools takes 6 years here, it's pretty spread out and I heard the first 3 years aren't that intensive.

I have a bachelors and a masters in philosophy from two very good universities. I am unemployed, have 'limited capacity for work' according to the dwp, I mainly sit at home and take antipsychotics waiting for the burst of courage needed to hang myself with a belt over my bedroom door. Don't become me. I'm 29 btw.

Good CHRIST how absolutely horrifying.

god I wish that were me

I'm finishing my MSc in chemistry and have a job where I basically digitize old papers and organize them. I would really like to be an academic librarian one day, working in an old library hardly anyone visits, where I can read all day long and take care of all the books, while getting paid by the uni just because ">muh library tradition". It would be close to my dream job, but librarian is a trade in my country, so I guess it's not meant to be.

I could also imagine being assigned to one of the several big microscopes in the physics department that have to have their own shielded room. I like the idea of being in my own basement, doing measurements for others, and no one disturbing me.

Just anything that's reasonably quiet and where I don't have to see people.

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Wow in a year I will be literally you.
Nice. So to speak.

Seriously don't hang yourself broski. You have medical license to fool around, use that to find a way of existential salvation for yourself. Something as silly as dancing tango or carving wood or writing down your musings without hoping to ever have them read. It doesn't matter. Write, paint, let out the pain. Over time you'll get over it or realize how deep it is. Then you either return to normieness of become an actual cursed artist.

Could be worse tbhonest.

Based cheerful dogposter.

have an accounting degree and i hate accounting. what do?

account for your actions and follow your dreams

My primary dreams are offlimits to me now due to various reasons. My secondary dreams all involve doing something shameful. Do you advise me to follow them anyway?

Well, thank god my grandparents are already dead. My grandfather was a saint.

Starry-eyed zoomer here,
Does anyone know what I could do to merge career oriented academics and my intrest in literature and philosophy?
>without wasting away in student debt

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accounting is broad and pervasive enough to where you can basically do data entry jobs and live in poverty, while pursuing your actual goals

If you're in decent shape and haven't had haven't had any psychological episodes recorded consider joining the military. Your best bet is to go Coast Guard, Air Force, or Navy, and then use the GI Bill to have your bachelor's or master's paid for. Not only that, but you'll have an easier time gaining admittance into whatever university you wish to attend, receive stipends if your uni participates in the Yellow Ribbon program, and maybe even receive job training while you're in the service.

i've done those jobs and i can't stand them. only good because you can mentally check out. pay is total crap and i can't stand how management talks down to you and acts like one error is the end of the world. i went into accounting from medicine because i don't want to worry about one error being life or death... you fuck a number up all it costs is 5 minutes in a database pushing corrections. they need to chill the fuck out. hate the cubicles and hate the shit for brains coworkers.

rather do crime or benefits fraud

>no man who can look a woman in the eye need to settle for women their own age
what the fudge does this mean

so how do I become a triad-backed rogue scientist a la tracer tong?

this thread is either filled with larper haters or burnouts filled with nothing but angst seriously, I don't work in any of the philosophy fields but I do work in the humanities department and every graduate student i've met is really happy with their position and do tons of reading in their of time. Are philosophy department has really good seminars and everyone is working together( and on their own) to follow their dreams. We've had a few people release books already through the help of int. philosophy groups that you should really seek to join by researching well and "networking"

the point of my post was to make that pun...
I added the spoiler just to stretch the post out a bit with a meaningless phrase,
sorry

sorry for bad english main language is Spanish

Its filled with Anglos, who have destroyed their higher education systems, so what they say is accurate for their shitty countries.

>google "grad school is hell"
lmao

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I hate the diploma mill so much. People like me who have a genuine interest in the humanities and social sciences get shafted because normies take these degrees in droves under the assumption that it’s the “easy degree”.

At this stage, I just want to do something productive where I can genuinely help people. The thing putting me off a PhD is cost and also the fear that such work would be soulless.

I don’t care about money, I just want to live the Bohemian lifestyle, but I don’t know how.

i get it, i'm in the exact same situation as you, maybe slightly better off. my employer is trying to pay my CPA costs and carve out space for me to be an underpaid manager. they're fat mostly scumbags though, and i have to fight every day to not be like them. i also have a dislike for careers like medicine where the risk to others and yourself is so constant.

i wouldn't sell drugs or be a fraudster though. i don't know you but i doubt you have the constitution for it. be poor if you have to, until you find what you can tolerate, or possibly even enjoy. if it's something that helps others even better

Keep at it user

>i doubt you have the constitution for it
You're probably right. I think i just can't swing a fulltime job because i get too bored. gonna see about a setup of two part-time jobs. they have to be on the higher paying end though, to afford life. well, if i sell some manuscripts it might help. still, this means throwing away my degree which i made my parents pay half for. i'm sure they're happy about it. funny, i had the highest exam scores and helped the other students study. now no one wants to hire me for anything other than data entry. the harder you work the harder you get fucked. by now i've already forgotten everything i learned in college, no way would i get a cpa at this rate when i don't even want to stay in the field. if i had the cpa i'd qualify for better jobs but man. i've never met an accountant who looked happy. the job is so boring i get hysteric before long. more than 4 months working anywhere and i'm a walking corpse.

another thing i hate is how pretentious it is. the jobs don't pay very much, honest to god it's burger flipping wages, but the expectations of you in interviews is ridiculous. have to look like you walked out of a suit factory in italy, have to have fantastic experience in the exact same job and all these references and recommendations and all this bullshit, but the job pays shit and the work is insipid that even a trained monkey could do it. I just can't deal with the hypocrisy and unwarranted arrogance of accounting professionals. i have no problem doing the job, but i'm not going to put on a dance and show for what i could make waiting tables.

I think what killed it for me is sitting listening to my fat, paycheck to paycheck, miserable wretch middle aged coworkers spend an hour talking about what mattresses they bought and what cars they want. I think that conversation caused a delayed mental breakdown in me. i'm disillusioned with the entire "career" thing. and I'd rather bite off my own tongue than say, "I'm an accountant" like that's my identity now.

if only rent wasn't so high. my living costs otherwise are almost nothing. guess i'm in for a life of poverty.

>If all else fails I might drop out, buy a camera and go to some godforsaken war-torn country to film a documentary with undertones of an obsessive young man behind the camera desperately trying to find his way in life.

Fuck that was my plan.

take the STEM pill

>be consistently mediocre
>avoid anything smacking of originality
Why? Is this just mediocre people coping because they can't manage anything better?

lol this thread is filled with anglos or something because this is not the case at all in germany

I know, you have so many jobs for PhDs that you need to import doctors and engineers from Africa to fill them, truly the envy of the world.

herzog did it first my friend

When I was inlisted into the army, I came to know a guy who said he was planning to stay in the army for the rest of his life.
Army life is shit, but he was ok with that because it was secure, paid decently and he would be able to retire at an early age.

I understand the reasoning, but OP, philosophy probably has a less secure future than the army, and while you will be talking to smarter people, you can't know that it will be good when you finally get that PhD and realize you have wasted years of your life.

best of luck OP. that sounds like an uphill battle considering the # of teaching positions vs the vast # of PhD holders. I'm a STEM shit doing some shit STEM work and it's not bad. I took a bunch of philosophy electives while at uni and even took a graduate level course (which costed me a metric fuck-load of money, but now I can say I know Heidegger a little better?).

>1987
And it's only gotten worse since then!

Anyone working in the sciences can tell me what their work and personal life is like, and also what their relationship with literature is?

I’m a community college student who hopes to get into a neuroscience program after my required studies are done.

Become a clandestine chemist and synthesize shit people don’t want you to

History and LIterature at the top one school. I have a 4.0 and jsut read all day. I will go into academia and get paid to read all day and boss grad students around. feelsgoodman

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>jsut instead of just
>I have a 4.0
Yeah bHUDDY

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you're still here right? i assume you're a burger. which state do you live in?

>implying I have time to spend proofreading messages for your convenience

PhD student in STEM. Don't like my subject so it's tough. I was dumb enough to think this would be my only shot at a PhD, worst mistake of my life. I'm sure to get a job, the question is will it give me weekly bridge-juming urges. If yes, I'll stop, 3 years of that were enough. It's either satisfying job or straight career change.
Not-so-pro tip : never do a PhD for purely pragmatic reasons. Better drop out of academia than subject yourself to that drudgery. Look deeply into the subject before starting, even if it seems good at first glance, and (I stress this) keep in mind it's not the only possible path.

I'm a strange kind of limbo-dwelling half-autist. It sucks but it's no life-sentence. I had girlfrends in the past, friends that I like even if I don't see them often. I could get better and I think I will.
If you want to not waste 4 years like I did,be clear on what you want and commit to it. Don't just follow the motions even if the course seems a perfect fit and you're doing well. You can change your mind over time but be proactive in your career path, there is no university elite enough to guarantee you the job you want on its own (that's the lie I"ve been sold and man I regret buying it).
Try stuff outside of classes, including stuff you suck at. Don't give way to bitterness even when you fail (because you will). Failure is essential in science, it's even fun with the right mindset. The danger is obsessing over falling behind in a very competitive environment. So be wary or letting the rat race get to you.

Remember there are plenty of ways to knowledge, even if you feel like it's PhD or brainletism forever. Remember also science is no settled matter, even the famed "scientific method" undergoes changes every few generations. Avoid the scientistic mentality, challenge not only the content of scientific work but it's method, it's assumptions, it's procedures. Despite the 'I fucking love science' memes science absolutely has to justifiy its existence like any other field. It's also up to its student to make sure it does.

Literature always was a reliable source of pleasure for me, right now it's my only one besides eating. Silly as it sounds I doubt I could go on without books. However the workload and (above all) stress-induced mental bog have seriously impinged my reading. Right now I have a discipline of four books a month and though I'm two books behind already my reading habits have been partly restored.

I write more than I used to. Giving up the pretense of becoming a writer helped tremendously, now I write for pleasure and for coming to terms with my own failure. Publishing is secondary.

Sorry for the rambling, hope it helped. Don't be afraid, I'm depressed because I'm a cunt, but I don't have it that bad and I'm the worst off of my STEM friends. Just don't be passive, stay open-minded, read thoroughly and remember to chat up the qt Yea Forums types around you so that you don't shrivel into a stembot and you should be fine.

...why do you want to know?

I made my PhD in mathematics and design algorithms in the car industry now. I make very good money, got about 3 chicks a year for a few weeks and trade some crypto on the side. Since about 6 years, I work on various math and physics topics in my free time and I read only textbooks and philospophy. Mostly German idealists now to try to come up with some meaning. It's not having money or having pussy, so much I know. I had a fit phase in 2014 and being mired is nice. And doing math of course.

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I'm 17, have shit grades and terrible prospects for my future. This summer, I'm moving to a different city to be a janitor and live with my drug addict older brother and his friends. There's a community college in his city I can attend and a library from a large university I can access to read. I'll live in squalor and chaos, surrounded by violence and drugs. Only thing I'll miss about this city is my friends and the girls, but I'll make new friends and find new fuckbuddies.

You will be drug addict soon.

I appreciate you sharing and i’ll keep all that in mind. Do you believe it matters that i’m going to community college, I sometimes feel like iv ruined my chances of doing anything significant by not going straight to a uni

What field are you in?

i was just trying to figure out how bad rent was where you live. sometimes its location, sometimes its imaginary

>lads

stopped reading there.
too british. too homoerotic
op is a fag

>form deep connections with high school students
lol

i'm paying 1400 right now. average rent is 1800-2200 for a studio and hobo alley is 1200. i was tired of dealing with hobos every day.

pure cringe

>try to build a following online

Lol what is this 2015?

I could stand a decent chance for getting into graduate school, but discussions with my professors and posts like this user has made have finally swayed me for pursuing that path.

I'm not sure what other English undergrads are doing, but this is basically the only route I see:

Become an English teacher
Live at home (my family has a 20 acre vineyard, so it's not bad)
Seek out people in online spaces that are committed to understanding what I'm interested in
Create art in my spare time

What are you guys trying to do?

Good. That's what I seek.

>Entering college
>No idea what to major in
>Just want to read Guenon and religious books all day

Think I might become a monk. Nothing worldly brings me any pleasure and at least I can be hermit without disappointing my parents. I'm a bit underwhelmed by monasteries in the west though so I'm probably gonna learn Russian and try and join somewhere in eastern Europe. If anyone knows any good ones in the west although then the Carthusians, let me know. I think the Carthusians are a bit too austere for my personality. I still want community.
If not, I'm going to try and become a park ranger or some other /out/ job where I can be alone most of the day. I think I am rather good at understanding religious topics but I don't think I'd like the academic side of it.

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>20 acre vineyard
If you're just going to be born rich user, you can choose whichever dumb path you want. Go ahead get a PhD in Husserl.

also big h here. wondering if i should do grad school because it would actually be entertaining to meme my way through a humanities phd, know what i mean

And don't let a Proust scholar steal your wife!

read A Moveable Feast, then an art director at my alma mater's uni told me my generation lacked hunger and I starved myself for 3 years in despair; now I'm working full-time in pharma and I publish from time to time and I have enough money that I'll never starve again

she reads my lips when I tell her to hop on this cock

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Doing absolute meme STEM. I don’t have the interest for physics and I will probably change my minor, ruining my academic future.

Nice bait

daily reminder that university is a meme and daycare and you are literally better doing anything from 18-21 before deciding if going to uni is the right thing.

Bull-prepping (specialization in north African penis)

Nice
I am 20, 2 more years of school left. Definitely majoring in math, can't decide if I want to major in CIS or Economy though, any recommendations are welcomed

Hegel was still poor, unmarried and had no real publications with 37. In his youth he thought himself to be a joke next to Fichte et al. and then boom: Phenomenology of the Spirit. Don't give up so soon.

Dropped out of uni (archeology, german & Italian) after second year because I had no idea what to do with it. Now privately still studying the languages and trying to open a bar. Licences are shit.

what if "anything" is doing nothing but watching 30 films, smoking $1000 worth of marijuana, and having 1-2 instances of gay sex, per week?

Became a MD, now doing a second degrees in CS and philosophy, teaching future MDs on the side for 40$/hour.

If things work out, I should be going to the technical university of veinna this fall to study civil engineering. If they dont I have no idea what I'm going to do. I graduated last may and have spent the past year learning german and jumping through the series of hoops that lead me to TU veinna, so i need to be in college or uni of some type this fall. This basically limits me to community college or the shithile uni in Illinois that I applied to to get a letter as proof of my eligability to study in the US (which Is a prerequisite for tu veinna) but that offered to pay for me to go there.
I write when I can, but going all in and trying to make money off it would be too much of a gamble

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Learn German pls

Lately I'm think of abandoning all pretensions of learnedness and wealth-denying-wisdom and just trying to be rich. How should I go about earning at least $250k yearly as a stepping stone to future job growth into a less meager amount of money?

Great posts! I am enrolled for my master's in school counseling. I go full time and work 30 hrs a week. I barely had time for my music. I am getting comfy with the fact that I music is a hobby. But yeah OP. Doctorates become your life. If you go for a doctorate you need to make sure you are absolutely invested in your major. It will become your life.

Have fun meeting a lot of neckbeard STEMcels at TU

Please, it's custodian. Janitor is insulting. But fr, the best job i ever had was a custodian at a public school. theyre a unionised state worker so they really do well.

Don't sell yourself short; there are good custodian jobs

why was i born as a stemfag this is fucking unfair im literally crying right now

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I have been. I should be able to pass the c1 exam in may and I spend a great deal of time every day studying.
gonna be pissed if i cant end up going to TU vienna tho, because german probably wasnt the best use of my time.
I thought that was an american thing

how to avoid my fate guys

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>my family has a 20 acre vineyard
must be nice

>What are you guys trying to do?
fuck you

Darwin and Marx never did their work in the academy. Keep that in mind.

>i know people who earn tons of money destroying the earth!

I don't think I could ever be a custodian at a public school. I'd rather not have to clean up shit smeared toilet stalls and flooded bathrooms from all the juul pods kids stuff down the toilet.

> cognitive neuroscience or computational neuro

this has been the "hot new thing" in analytic philosophy for the past, like, 30 years.

probably best way to go

i work on environmental philosophy, and it interests me greatly but it's still a shit show

the philosophy phd scene is about 10 times worse in germany than it is in the us. in the states, you have some semblance of a fighting shot. in germany, it's beyond trudgery.

TU is notorious for being an all boys club here. Why do you want to go there specifically and why do you think learning a language isn't a great use of time?

All things considered, 30 years is very new. Especially with more recent developments in neural networks and increases raw computing power, modelling the brain (with artificial neural networks) is really in its infancy.

Work as archivist in library rn. If the lonesomeness of the job suits you it would be a dream. I can’t do it for more than four hours at a time.

you don't, you trudge through and somehow end up at the other side. That's how I got through my degree so far. Last 1.5 years were a haze of smelly, failed lab experiments, shitty classmates, average grades, awful cafetaria food, anxiety, depression and artistic pathfinding. I hated almost every second of it, yet here I am, getting my degree in june if all goes well.

there's something to mediocrity, cause it's so universal I think. This is the reality for most people, and it's kinda beautiful in it's own way.

I'm doing a MSc in artificial intelligence. I don't really know what I want out of life and that has lead me to read a number of existentialist works. Some of them were good but they didn't help much (I see some progress, just not a lot). My main problem is just a total lack of knowing what I really want out of life. I can't really think of any career I'd love to have. Whatever plan for my life I come up with I feel like it isn't enough in some sense, like I owe it to myself to aim even higher.

I think being a writer would be nice; I think it might be the best career I can imagine (still not very good), but obviously being a successful writer is a long shot.

100% this. PhD dropout here now happily working ~30 hours a week in marketing while writing a novel (3rd draft now), managing a healthy relationship, and starting my own growing charity. It's all working out now. In academia it was hopeless. Even with top-tier publications and grades. Hopeless.

I got ordained by church of life. It's just a webform and, in the usa at least, totally legit. I've only done weddings, but eventually they'll need a funeral too right?

I might have the mental capacity to go for a Master's or even a PhD in the humanities, but I can't see myself doing anything after that. I don't want to zone in on a topic to the point of tunnel vision, oblivious to everything else going on, as I've seen others explain multiple times.

some of the master students i met were some of the dumbest people I've come across. Don't hype it up to be this high point only a select few people can reach. In some disciplines that's the case, but mostly it's just hard work and willpower.

I study Earth-science and just have a bit of an interest in literature/philosophy because its a nice hobby to have and quite interesting. I'll get a good paying job for sure so i do not have to worry about my future to much, maybe i'll even be able to stay at university. Life is good.