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Everything You Need To Know About Graduate School (Episode 65)
597 Plays1 year ago
Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
In this conversation, Michael and Caleb talk about philosophy graduate school. We discuss the good, bad, and interesting. You’ll learn why we think it’s awesome, but fewer people should go to graduate school and whether we’d do the experience again.
(01:31) Our Academic Stories
(07:45) Logic in the Academy
(12:52) Getting Paid $$$
(18:15) Custodians of Civilization
(21:33) Surrounded by Serious People
(24:09) Bad Business
(28:56) Too Many Graduate Students
(33:33) A Culture of Perfection
(36:56) Philosophies of Life
(42:21) The Obsession about Prestige
(48:23) Making Graduate School Better
(52:10) Would You Do Graduate School Again?
***
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Transcript
Concerns about Perception vs. Quality
00:00:00
Speaker
I also found myself becoming more obsessed with the perceptions of others. Like it became less about writing a good philosophy paper. And this is my own advice, but became less about writing good philosophy and writing philosophy that other people thought was good because that was the way to succeed.
Introduction to Stoa Conversations Podcast
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us, and another we'll be an in-depth conversation with and experts.
Episode Overview: Graduate School Pros and Cons
00:00:31
Speaker
In this conversation, Michael and I talk about graduate school. We discuss what's broadly good about it, what's not, and much more. You'll learn why we think that graduate school is, in many senses, awesome, yet fewer people should go, and whether we ourselves would go again. Well, without too much preamble for this one, here it is. Welcome to Soil Conversations. My name is Kaitlin Bontiveros. And my name is Michael Trombley.
00:01:00
Speaker
And today we're going to be talking about the pros and cons of graduate school. So we're going to be talking about our impressions of going to graduate school.
Graduate School Experiences and Decisions
00:01:12
Speaker
So perhaps a little bit more of a conversation about how we think about an experience that we both went through generally, but also with by paying attention to some of these stoic themes and how that causes us to evaluate how we think about graduate school.
00:01:30
Speaker
Yeah, looking forward to it. So just to set the background, I went to school at the University of Notre Dame for two years. I did a master's, so I was in a PhD program, but I left after two years. So that's the extent of.
00:01:47
Speaker
experience I have with graduate school apart from, of course, thinking in undergrad that I would apply to different schools of philosophy and interacting with them at that level, going to conferences and so on.
Motivations for Studying Philosophy
00:02:01
Speaker
I went to graduate school because I couldn't really imagine doing anything else. And then after my first year of school I realized, you know, perhaps I could imagine doing something else other than being an academic professor. And the current track for becoming an academic professor is different than I thought it would be. So I wrapped up.
00:02:24
Speaker
what i was doing after two years and left with a master's what's your graduate school story michael so for me i mean i did seven years of graduate school which is a lot i did a two-year master's at carlton university in ottawa canada and then five years for my phd at queen's university in in kingston also also ontario canada in terms of my journey i
00:02:49
Speaker
I really liked grad school. I was talking about this before on some other podcasts, but I really like grad school as a compliment to my athletic training. I was pretty serious with Jiu Jitsu at the time. And then I just really loved philosophy and in particular, I discovered stoicism in my master's and I really loved stoicism.
Challenges in Academia and Alternative Paths
00:03:04
Speaker
And I thought, well.
00:03:05
Speaker
Look, if I can think about stoicism all day and then train all night, this is a pretty great life and I'll kind of keep that going for as long as possible. And I did. I wanted to be a professor, but really what I'm most interested in, I've explained this to a few people, but
00:03:23
Speaker
Being a professor is a lot about pushing human knowledge forward. So I would say if human knowledge is at a nine, it's about spending the rest of your life trying to get to a 9.1. And what I really found out I was interested in, I was really interested in taking people whose understanding is a two, three, four, five and helping bring that up. So I genuinely had more of an interest in popular philosophy. For me, the essays, the deep, deep research
00:03:49
Speaker
was something I would do so that I could then talk about stoicism or talk about philosophy with other people. And so at the end of the PhD, you know, I applied for the academic job market. It was very, very difficult. And I had faced with this decision of kind of jumping around at different postdocs or kind of staying in that game. And I thought, well, I don't really want to do that unless I really love it. And I think what I actually love more is this kind of popular philosophy. So that's what, that's what ended me leaving graduate school, but then leaving academic philosophy more generally.
00:04:18
Speaker
So did you apply to positions as a professor and then think differently of it? Or by the time you got your PhD, did you know, okay, I already know what being a professor is like and I think I'm gonna...
00:04:33
Speaker
join the non-academic world? Oh no, I applied to everything. I applied to every job in the English-speaking language. This also happened right at COVID. This is something we'll probably get into discussion. The academic job market for those listening is very, very hard. The reason it's so hard is because there's actually a limited number of jobs, as opposed to something like industry where you might get rejected, but you can keep applying and keep circulating. Academic job market, there's a set number of jobs every year. I applied to all of those
00:05:03
Speaker
I wasn't successful. And then at that point you end up looking, well, okay, I didn't get a professor position. I didn't get the postdoc position I was looking at. I can kind of start to look to keep myself afloat. And so it was like, it was also the reality of that experience compared to how much I wanted that versus the alternatives kind of pushed me into the alternative.
00:05:23
Speaker
But I'm really glad I left academic philosophy. I really love the, the popular stoicism work we're doing. I think that's really fun. I love engaging with the stoic community. I also like being
Graduate School Positives: Skills and Expertise
00:05:33
Speaker
a consultant, which is, which is what I do now, instead of, uh, working, um, with Stoa in this podcast. But it's, I certainly was in it to win it until, you know, things got very, very difficult and I had to introspect really hard about how much I did actually want it.
00:05:48
Speaker
Got it, got it. Yeah, yeah. There's a decision about, do you want to hold on to probably when you're in a little bit of a less than ideal situation, if you've got some teaching roles that a university hands out to keep you afloat, do you want to hold on for the next job market? What happens if you don't get a job then?
00:06:08
Speaker
Yeah, we'll talk about that some more. I was thinking in terms of structuring the conversation, doing it similar to the way you've done some of our book reviews where we shout out what's good, what we admire or look back on fondly from graduate school, and then some of our criticisms, ways we think graduate school can be improved or might not be for us or for other people.
00:06:30
Speaker
And then finally, end with discussion about some of the interesting questions, some of the open questions about philosophy and academia. Yeah. And I guess there's kind of three benefits to this conversation for those listening. You know, one is the group of people that are interested in philosophy and that are interested in grad school and saying, well, I really like philosophy. I listen to these kinds of podcasts. Would grad school be the right thing for me? Hopefully you get some information on that. Another, as you said, is
00:06:56
Speaker
You know, how do two stoics or two stoic leaning people kind of think about the experience of academic philosophy? And I guess the kind of exposure to really academic stoicism and academic philosophy more generally, and how that kind of bumped up against philosophy as a way of life or modern stoicism or whatever, you know, movement you want to say that we're a part of now, I consider myself kind of philosophy as a way of life, I would say.
00:07:20
Speaker
That's the second thing. And then I guess third is just a kind of a general interest, as you said, of, of, you know, something that we've experienced together, learning a bit about our philosophical backgrounds and you know, what has shaped the way that we approach philosophy or the pursuit of, you know, understanding stoicism better. So hopefully, hopefully it'll be, it'll be some fun. I think it'll be, I think it'll be an interesting discussion.
00:07:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's well put. We're trying to, I think it should be interesting for people at that intersection of philosophy. They like philosophy or they're wondering whether they want to go to graduate school, but also more broadly, hearing us how we think about this sort of issue and how stoicism, popular stoicism relates to the academy.
00:08:01
Speaker
So the first thing I wanted to note is the Stoics, they divided philosophy into these three spheres. You have the ethics, the physics, and logic. And one place where academic philosophy shines, one of its best attributes in my view, is in the logic side of things.
00:08:27
Speaker
in the academy are often excellent. You can truly find experts, some of the best people in the world at knowing the ancient texts are in the academy. So historical and academic expertise is high and in general academic rigor is also high and that means that
00:08:52
Speaker
There's a serious focus on clarity, analytic arguments, especially in the West, or if you're doing historical philosophy, there's going to be a focus on really grounding your views, what you say in the ancient texts. And if you think about this in terms of the three areas of philosophy that Stoics talk about, these are all aspects of logic, clarity, and training that you know what you are saying, coming up with
00:09:19
Speaker
plausible arguments and thinking through how you evaluate arguments. Generally, I think, you know, the Academy is good at that. And that's apparent when you move outside of the Academy and think through how people tend to argue or talk about things and subsets in many domains. I think they're just not at the same level as the academic philosophers are.
00:09:45
Speaker
And that's not to say that there aren't some serious blind sites in the academy or that perhaps philosophers focus too much on analytical clarity or rigor over other values that are important. That's certainly true as well. But I do think, you know, we should.
00:10:01
Speaker
Yeah, at least I admire a number of people in academic philosophy because of their logical abilities. And I think in general, as a culture, it fosters the ability to use reason well, at least in the spheres that you study in philosophy. Yeah. There's been this really popular movement of like critical thinking classes or logical fallacy classes. And I think it can be easy to be a bit skeptical about those because
00:10:31
Speaker
It doesn't matter how good of a critical thinker you are if you're not entering these arguments with good faith, but there is just something to be said for kind of a discipline of thinking, a discipline of reading, a discipline of deconstructing. That conclusion doesn't follow from that argument.
00:10:47
Speaker
You're appealing to authority. You've made some sort of logical mistake. And then, so there's that kind of discipline and thinking that I think philosophy is really, really good at. And if you study philosophy, you will get quite good at, and you're constantly in grad school surrounded by other people that are holding you to that standard, right? So you're.
00:11:03
Speaker
You're raising some point in class or you're coming up with something and other people are holding you to that argument. Everyone marking your papers or doing that kind of thinking is holding you to that. That's
Deep Specialization and World Expertise
00:11:15
Speaker
a real benefit. There's a kind of discipline of thought.
00:11:19
Speaker
And then there's also, I guess, yeah, your kind of floor raises. So you're more, less willing to put up with lazy thinking from other people, more focused on seeking out good writers or disciplined writers in your own life. That's been, yeah, that's been a huge benefit. And that's part of philosophy is like, it's one of those meta skills, right? And because of that.
00:11:42
Speaker
I mean, I think anybody that does anything thinks, oh, well, you become a good thinker. You know, any scientist, any, any ecologist is going to be, well, teaches you how to think. It trains your mind. A psychologist is going to say that, but I really do think philosophy as I would say the most kind of meta pulled out or general of the humanities really specializes in that. That's a great skill.
00:12:03
Speaker
Yeah, I think philosophy, well, you'll be surrounded with, as you say, you'll be surrounded with people who can't think at this sort of abstract first principles level about some of these fundamental questions. And, you know, does that mean it's training you how to think? I think people are right to be skeptical about that claim, but at the very least, it does
00:12:28
Speaker
give you a model of what clear analytical thinking looks like for these fundamental questions. And that's something you can use when you think about judging other domains as well.
00:12:45
Speaker
Do you want to ping pong them? So what about what's something that you want to shout out? So what I loved about grad school is just the opportunity to be paid, you know, not very much, but to be paid to hyper specialize in something that's not necessarily economically productive or not maybe traditionally economically productive. So I think grad school is best thought of in a kind of apprentice model.
00:13:07
Speaker
which is you're surrounding yourself with experts in a field, you're being paid very little, but enough to continue to do this and you're developing a skill that takes a long time to develop. And when you think of it like that, at least humanities, we're very lucky to be able to do this. I know people that are in science grad school, and in their case, it's a very different kind of model because they're actually being very productive. And in some cases, I think the science graduate students are being
00:13:37
Speaker
certainly underpaid or being paid less than they would get paid if they just went into industry. So there's this kind of choice, but there's no real opportunity to study philosophy in a dedicated manner and to, you know, hopefully break even depending on your funding. And that's amazing. I mean, I talked about
00:13:57
Speaker
academic philosophy being this focus of pushing human knowledge forward. And that is the case, right? When you publish an academic paper, the goal of that paper is to say something nobody else has said. It's to contribute to human knowledge. Whereas the most books you read are primers or summaries or look, somebody's done a lot of research and then structured that research in a way that presents the information as helpful as possible. In philosophy, in graduate school, you're really trying to push things forward, especially at the PhD level, but even also at the master's level.
00:14:27
Speaker
getting the opportunity because you're in this apprentice model to just do that, to just become, you know, possibly, I guess this is the second point, but also getting the chance to become a world expert at something too. By the time I left graduate school, you know, I, I was one of the people in the world that knew the most about Epictetus. And if not the most about Epictetus, certainly the most about his program of moral education and the specific part that I wrote my thesis on, right?
00:14:52
Speaker
And so you, you get this because you're, you're funded to hyper specialize, you get to just like drive forward, become an expert. You learn more and more about less and less, but you do learn more and more. And that for me.
00:15:07
Speaker
So there's that, there's one that, that privilege to get to study something. You kind of feel, I feel that way that some people, and I think it's best conceptualized this way in the jitsu world, you know, these people and they'll go and there'll be professional jitsu athletes, but there's no money in jitsu. So all that means is that somebody's paying for their apartment and their food. They're basically breaking even. And for them, that's the, the most amazing life, right? Because they get to do jitsu the whole time and grad school lets you do philosophy full-time and you get to be like that.
00:15:34
Speaker
But you also get to learn what it's like to become a real expert at something because you've constricted that domain to such a small area. So instead of like in business, there's a lot of generality. There's a lot of learning about a lot of different things becoming good enough for a lot of things. But graduate school shrinks the domain to such a small thing that you become a real expert at it. And becoming an expert at something for me has been
00:15:58
Speaker
I don't know, that's been a, a source of both confidence and a source of humility. I talk about this, like.
00:16:05
Speaker
Knowing I know enough about stoicism, knowing that I know enough about stoicism to sit in a room with anybody and engage them, even if they're the world experts, be that Brad Enwood or Anthony Long, even if they're literally the people that know the most in the world, I can have a conversation with those people. Knowing that, knowing that I've seen the ceiling and bumped up against the ceiling,
00:16:28
Speaker
That's given me also a kind of humility because I recognize that I'm nowhere close to that ceiling in any other domain. So I need to be very humble. It's also given me a kind of perspective. So when I see people talking about.
00:16:44
Speaker
stoicism online with a kind of extreme confidence or philosophy online with extreme confidence I go they're not, they don't know what they're talking about like they're kind of getting that wrong, but they're still speaking so confidently. And then I'm skeptical when I read other places I go okay well you know, most people are actually
00:17:00
Speaker
only ever engaging in that like, you know, two to eight level of expertise. So even the people you hear that are really confident, they're really just kind of like upper intermediates. And having that perspective has been really changed the way I view public discourse, frankly. And so I'm very privileged and very grateful for that. And then graduate school gave that to me.
00:17:19
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, those are all great points, especially the fact that you are fortunate to be able to study.
Academia's Role in Philosophy Preservation
00:17:27
Speaker
You basically, in graduate school, you get paid to read and teach things you enjoy reading and teaching. Yes, that's not to say that it's all a cakewalk, writing a dissertation is hard, so on and so on, but overall, it's
00:17:46
Speaker
a pretty good deal if you love philosophy. Well, it's consensual, right? Just make sure it's a good deal. Make sure you like philosophy enough that it pays off, right? It's not a good deal for everybody. Most of my family would be very upset if they had to do graduate school in philosophy. It would be very painful for them, but it's a good deal if you're the kind of person that is disposed towards and really enjoys it.
00:18:13
Speaker
Another point I wanted to mention is that historical philosophy provides an important civilizational service and that's something that I got to see by going to graduate school interacting with philosophers there and then of course outside of academia you see that
00:18:33
Speaker
Now academics do play an important almost custodial role in preserving the ancient works and translating them for modern day readers and noting the different complexities around how particular things should be interpreted and so on.
00:18:52
Speaker
You know, so our work here at Stoa has been heavily influenced by a number of academics from Pierre Hadeau to Chris Gill to Anthony Long and more. And they've all done excellent work that we can now, in addition with our own work, present to even more people.
00:19:11
Speaker
And I think that's, you know, sometimes people might be too negative on the academy thinking that, you know, critique people for merely mulling over these long-dead philosophers. But there's a serious and important role that the historical philosophers, you know, in addition to
00:19:32
Speaker
philosophers who think about sort of pushing the pain out of human knowledge forward, just historical philosophers alone play in keeping the ancient works alive for people today and keeping them alive in an accurate and digestible way. Yeah, and you can see the variations in this role, right? Like people may not know this, but
00:19:57
Speaker
I would say post-Renaissance pre-1970s, there wasn't really much discussion of stoicism. To my understanding, there was a bit in Germany to be specific. I'm sure most people listening, myself included, cannot read German, so it's not very helpful.
00:20:17
Speaker
Really, the popularity of modern stoicism is coming off the backs of a group of scholars around, you know, Hiddo and Anthony Long, in particular, that I think of, playing, as you said, this custodial role, going back, reading the originals, going back, reading the French-German scholarship, putting that in a state where it's like, we can be confident about that. They provide those, I think the custodial analogy is really good.
00:20:44
Speaker
They provide the confident pillars for everybody else to stand on and debate about and argue about. And if that work isn't done, it's really lost. You know, if that work isn't done, then nobody's talking about it. It's not in the public consciousness, or I don't know what's worse. Maybe it is in the public consciousness, but just getting it very, very wrong.
00:21:06
Speaker
Yeah, that's just like, it's great to be a part of that and great to contribute to that, I guess. And, you know, even if you don't want to contribute to that, I think the important point is that that is playing an important role. Even if, you know, even if, as you said, people might find it a bit obscure or opaque or maybe less useful than some of other, you know, some of the other maybe hard sciences or something like that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Community and Privilege in Academia
00:21:29
Speaker
All right. What else you got?
00:21:30
Speaker
I just wanted to bring up the social aspect. Like I use this term endearingly, like it's just, just nerdy. It's nerdy to read philosophy for years and years and years and have that be the primary thing you do, you do. And then it's nice to be surrounded by other nerds who are also really interested in that. And again, I mean that, I mean that term lovingly and self self-described nerd here. It's nice to be surrounded by other people who take these kinds of questions seriously. You know, the kinds of people where you'll sit down at dinner and they'll be like,
00:21:58
Speaker
You know, well, do you prefer Aristotle or Plato, and they'll mean that question, and they're not making fun of you. And then they genuinely want to know. And when you say Plato, they go off. What a terrible answer, and get engaged in debate, something really fun about that and especially if you're
00:22:15
Speaker
coming to stoicism on your own or coming to stoicism through the internet, you might not have the opportunity to do that and grad school provides that opportunity. Even if you might, even if you know you might not be around people specializing in stoicism, the people who will be taking these arguments seriously and taking these kinds of questions seriously and that's really lovely. I'm very grateful for the people I knew in grad school for that.
00:22:35
Speaker
Yeah, there is something wonderful about being able to walk over to any of your colleagues and engage them in whatever philosophical question you like. And I think it's also good if there's a general rule here, I think finding
00:22:49
Speaker
groups of people that are obsessive about particular fields or questions is always a good thing. So graduate school is one example of this, but I think being in Silicon Valley, you see a different version of this where people are obsessed about solving particular problems, ambitious, and at its best, such things can translate into, you know, virtuous behavior that you want to emulate. It translates into people being very good at what they do and taking great joy in what they do.
00:23:19
Speaker
And that's a good thing to see. Yeah, totally. One last thing I wanted to say on the positive side, I already said this point, but it's just that it is in fact, a privilege to be able to study philosophy for, you know, two to five years. And if you're, especially if you're the kind of person who thinks, you know, I could spend
00:23:40
Speaker
time studying philosophy for, you know, this amount of time.
Criticisms of Academic Job Prospects (Q&A)
00:23:44
Speaker
And if nothing comes of it, that wouldn't be a huge loss. Graduate school is a reasonable option. Great. Yeah. That's it. That's it for my good too. All right, sweet. Cool. So now if we try transitioning into criticisms or aspects of the Academy that could be better, do you want to kick this one off?
00:24:06
Speaker
Sure, I will gladly kick off the criticisms. Let me at them. No, just kidding. The first is unrealistic job prospects. So you need to be clear on what you want to get out of grad school, because for most people, especially we're talking about philosophy here, most people are not going to get a job.
00:24:25
Speaker
Most people are not going to be able to have a research intensive position or even a teaching position that I think is commensurate or represents the depth of specialization you have, right? You're likely to become highly specialized in something, I guess, charitably that has low demand, but we're often not sold on that and often graduate school, um,
00:24:52
Speaker
warns about that, but warns about that in a kind of opaque way. So you need to be prepared for that. I guess the lack of job prospects is not a bad thing. I think it is a difficult environment around obsessed people to properly internalize that and accept that fact that the job market is going to be difficult. And I know what happened for me is that you said it's a good thing. If you think, well, I could study philosophy for two to five years and not care if I don't get a job out of it,
00:25:22
Speaker
then grad school might be right for you. I agree with that. But I think the thing that I learned about grad school, over grad school, and I learned this as a philosophical reflection of my own life, is that I learned that I'm very good at knowing what I want. Where when I started grad school, I wanted to study philosophy and didn't care if I got a job. But I was very bad at knowing what I would want in the future. And five years after I'm at the end of my PhD, I was not the same person. I was the kind of person who wanted a job in philosophy.
00:25:50
Speaker
And so there's a kind of transformation that takes place when you spend all your time doing something surrounded by people who are only spending their time doing that. And at the end of that transformation, to be confronted with a poor job market is difficult. And it's something that I think the Academy hasn't figured out how to prepare people for. So for example,
00:26:13
Speaker
This is all finding good if there was more industry training, there was more networking, there was more connections with jobs outside of the job market. But I still think it is this insular kind of community of people who have, you're being taught essentially by people who haven't had jobs outside of academia, who went from undergrad to graduate school and then became professors or postdocs.
00:26:34
Speaker
So there's this kind of insular community that I think internalizes that an academic is the only way to go and then leaves a lot of people disenfranchised. I think a lot, there's a lot of people that are kind of upset and broken after the graduate school experience. Um, I think I bounced back reasonably well, but I understand why people are now in a way that I was kind of judgmental of them. I think going into grad school where it's like, Oh, just do something else after. So that's one thing that I think is a bad thing.
00:27:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think to put some color into that, I have people who were in my cohort. It started in 2014 and last year they still applied to teaching jobs and many of them
00:27:20
Speaker
You know, I can think of people who did not get any job when they're at their second or third round of applying for academic roles or others who managed to get a job, but it's a lower level teaching position. And for them, you know, that's the sort of thing they would have been excited about if they were say 25, 26 or something like this. But if you're later in your thirties and you're doing life planning, you're thinking about, okay, maybe I want to have children or
00:27:47
Speaker
How am I going to date or manage that sort of thing? Financially, there are real questions that arise at that point. And I think that's a good point.
00:28:00
Speaker
When you're thinking about these sorts of questions, your preferences may change, especially as you get older and especially about some of these questions about life planning and boring facts about your finances do in fact matter for, you know, whether you're thinking about raising a family or where you're thinking about living and this sort of thing.
00:28:20
Speaker
Yeah. Like, well, like I just, again, for example, when I was 22, the idea of taking a one year teaching position somewhere in the States and then doing it again and then doing it again, it's like, that's an adventure. Wow. I'm going to see the country, you know? And then when you're older, you're like, that sounds terrible. I'm going to have to move every year. I'm going to have to leave my community. There's just a bit more of a tendency, I think, to want to like life plan, settle down and.
00:28:46
Speaker
It's gonna be a rough go. It's gonna be a rough go for the vast majority of people in that case.
00:28:53
Speaker
Right? Yeah, I think one thing I have noted here is that just that there are too many people in graduate school, generally, there's not enough jobs. People who are going are, are in fact going to graduate school who should not be there, you know, and people can realize pretty quickly that they shouldn't be there, but they'll still hang out for six years. And then maybe at the end of that six years have
00:29:19
Speaker
Perhaps spend a decent six years, maybe not, who knows, but be in a tricky logistical situation.
00:29:28
Speaker
And I think that, you know, that's just part of a general problem in the States, that there's a lot of credential inflation. A lot of people pushed to graduate high school, then graduate college, and then go get that extra degree in order to prove something else to your employer or something else to yourself.
00:29:49
Speaker
that has a lot of these bad effects that people are spending. I think if we are better organized society, people would not spend as much time in school and would have better ways to route people where they need to go, better ways to find people their social roles early on in life.
00:30:10
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with that. I think you tend to see that at the master's level in particular, just because the PhD is so long. But you're right that you still see that at the PhD level. And there was this kind of thing where there's this kind of grad school culture, if you ever go on to see any sort of graduate school memes or any pages like that, where everybody just complains. Everybody just talks about how terrible graduate school is all the time. And it's exhausting.
00:30:35
Speaker
There are genuine issues in the field or in graduate school, but I just like, there's something exhausting around being with, around people who are not liking their lives, not because there's an issue. Like, you know, if you have a terrible issue with your supervisor, if you have a.
00:30:51
Speaker
If, you know, there's some sort of genuine problem, that's a problem. But if you're just in the wrong thing, you're just doing something, you would be happier doing something else. There's something, something exhausting about it. It's just like, just don't just please, please don't. And often, as you said, it comes, it connects this kind of inflation, this kind of pressure to, you know, I was good at school before, so I'll continue to be good at school. But I won't kind of take a second to reflect on that, you know.
00:31:15
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, there are serious, there's a serious culture of negativity in some parts of academia broadly and graduate school in particular. So that's something I think one should do one's best to.
00:31:26
Speaker
avoid. I was lucky enough to find people in my cohorts who didn't have that impression. They're happy to be there, happy to learn about Aristotle, Hume, what have you, because doing that is awesome. But it's certainly true that you are surrounded by people who, for whatever reason, I'm not entirely sure what the reason is, probably a mix of factors. Some of what we've touched on tend to be pretty down on the experience that they have chosen.
00:31:56
Speaker
Yeah. Not to laugh at unhappy people. I know it's difficult. And I know it's part of it, not knowing what you wanted and finding that out and then feeling stuck in something. I'm feeling there's a sunken cost. That's a genuine issue. It is also an issue you don't find as much in other places, I think. For some reason, it's a particularly bad issue in academia.
00:32:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's sort of interesting. I noticed that people who had experiences prior to graduate school were usually happier and had more conscientious, had their stuff together if they had a job before or if they had a family. But people who did not, of which I am one of these people, people who came straight from undergrad to graduate school, they are more likely to be one of these people who were less sure about themselves, more likely to be negative for whatever reason.
Academia's Focus and Its Shortcomings
00:32:50
Speaker
Yeah, no, I agree with that. I think, I think it comes from not knowing what you want it. I think, I think there's a general kind of life preparedness that people who have just lived longer or better at.
00:33:02
Speaker
So there's a kind of general resiliency and self-knowledge that comes from that. And then I think also, if you're the kind of person who's worked a job for five years and says, yes, I'm going to probably make less money to do this thing because I really love it, you're probably being motivated for the right reasons. When I think, I think coming out of undergraduate, you're more likely to be motivated out of the kind of prestige or kind of just a complacency, like I'm just going to continue to do the same thing. Right, right. Yep. Cool. What else do you got?
00:33:30
Speaker
So another thing, I don't know if this is a bad, but just something to keep in mind that as I've made this switch, so I was doing my PhD in philosophy and for the last two years I've been working as a consultant, management consultant, which means I solve business problems for companies, very broad, general type of job, but it's a business job. I'm getting to see the business world and really enjoying that. And one thing I've learned,
00:33:54
Speaker
from consulting is that I think the focus on perfection in academia distracts from good enough. I think there is, you're trying to do different things, but I think there's something interesting about spending three years on a paper, for example, or.
00:34:11
Speaker
this kind of insecurity that can come from like, I need to be so good. I need to know so much about this subsection of stoicism or philosophy that I'm not going to feel comfortable dabbling because I don't really want to get caught unprepared or caught without a level of expertise. I think I'm kind of mixing two things now, but there's this real kind of pressure
00:34:35
Speaker
to be very expert in a very sub-niche in academia. And I think we could benefit from more generalists. And in business, I've seen the effectiveness of generalists and the effectiveness of having confidence and being like, well, we'll figure it out, or this is good enough for now, or let's move on. And so that hyper-specialization
00:34:59
Speaker
It's a certain way of approaching problems, and I'm not sure if it is for everybody. You're not going to be able to finish graduate school unless you specialize. You can't be that generalist at that level, and I think there's something lost there. Yeah, I think that's right. I think you're pushed to come up with something novel, come up with something you can defend, and that pushes people towards what are novel,
00:35:28
Speaker
claims I can defend with some arguments that are usually not that ambitious. They're usually, you know, what's some other, some small change I can make to some existing program as opposed to, you know, if you think about what philosophers are doing in ancient Greece and Rome, they're coming up with entire systems, entire worldviews, really, and then smashing those up against one another in debate.
00:35:58
Speaker
Whereas in the modern academy, you often have people chipping away at particular edifices, which is a much slower process, much less ambitious process.
00:36:13
Speaker
Yeah, so like if you come into graduate school expecting to being like Plato or something and having this comprehensive worldview, more likely, you know, it'll be, I don't know, Wittgenstein's thoughts on something between this year and this year in response to one particular reading of it. That sounds much more like the kind of thing you'd write your thesis on than, you know, how to live your life.
00:36:38
Speaker
So you don't get these giant worldviews that you get to smash against each other. As you said, small little pieces that you chip away, often building on other people's. And that's good because we need people to be doing that. But it's just something to keep in mind.
00:36:54
Speaker
This is related to the idea that we talk about philosophies of life, thinking about philosophies not in terms of abstract theoretical systems, but things that one embodies having an account of what it is to live a good life and then systems practices around actually achieving that good life. And in general, academia doesn't have a
00:37:20
Speaker
culture around this is what we're doing. We're coming up with philosophies of the good life and then implementing them. Instead, the culture is really somewhat dis-unified. You have people working on these historical questions, you have people chipping away on some modern philosophical issues, and then maybe a handful of people doing these questions around, you know, founding or supporting a philosophy of life.
00:37:47
Speaker
And that's unfortunate. So that's the sort of thing that got me most excited about philosophy was the fact that you have philosophers talking about these fundamental deep questions and then answering them and thinking about how can we
00:38:05
Speaker
embody our answers. How can we practically realize them in our lives? And often in academic philosophy, you're just going to be stuck at that first level of fundamental questions, the questions they get abstract and theoretical without diving into satisfying answers and certainly without thinking about how do you actually implement these in your life? Yeah, there's no
00:38:28
Speaker
There is no emphasis on practice, application, training. That's not part of graduate school. There is often people who don't conceptualize philosophy about being a good person. That's something I brought from Greek, which is like, yeah, I'm learning epistemology, but I'm learning metaphysics. I'm learning logic, but I'm learning those so I can be a better person. Right. And that's not something that most people will be doing. They'll be doing metaphysics and epistemology because they think they're interesting questions.
00:38:57
Speaker
So if you come at it from philosophy of way of life perspective, you can often bounce off each other. And very few philosophers walk the walk. There are some that do that. The graduate school I went to specialized in animal ethics. And that'd be an interesting episode for us to do. But there was a lot of those people walked the walk. A lot of those people, they wrote about animal ethics, and they cared about animal ethics, and they combined training and theory. They combined practice and theory. That practice often looked like
00:39:27
Speaker
advocating for animal rights, making political progress in the animal rights space. So there are pockets that do that. I think Peter Singer is another person, another good example of that. Effective altruism, I think, is another example of that, where you're combining an expectation of action with theory. But that's the other thing I would say is that in philosophy, there's no real expectation that your action matches your theory, except in some small pockets. So I think about this example. And this doesn't necessarily need to be the case. But let's think about sports, for example.
00:39:57
Speaker
You know, we don't necessarily need the coach of the hockey team to be in great shape. We don't even need them to have been a good hockey player, but we measure them by their capacity to motivate good hockey players, right? To enact change in the world. In personal training, you do expect your personal trainer to be in good shape because you've said, okay, well, this person is, this person is expecting me to combine theory and practice and they themselves have figured out how to combine theory and practice.
00:40:22
Speaker
but in philosophy there's no expectation of that it is like you know famously you'll have this is going to happen in any domain don't get me wrong there's bad people anywhere but famously you'll have ethics professors you know who are being accused of assaulting students or harassing students or doing terrible things and nobody really i think looks at that as a
00:40:44
Speaker
as being ironic inside the academy because there's this kind of recognition that what an ethic professor is doing is something just entirely different from being a good person. An ethic professor is accurately and effectively describing meta ethical concerns. They're not practicing personal improvement. So yeah, it's too bad they were a bad person, but there's not really an irony there.
00:41:07
Speaker
And I've always been the kind of person that's viewed that as an irony and wanted that to be ironic or wanted there to be some sort of like unexpected fact that if you spend your life researching ethics, you should be able to embody that in some capacity. But that expectation isn't there. Yeah, it's frustrating for me. And I think I've found a community that shares that conception in on the internet more than I found that community in academic philosophy.
00:41:31
Speaker
Yeah, that's an interesting point. I think the internet also shows you that, yes, there are lots of people who do not have a good grasp of studied philosophy, even if they think they do. But on the other hand, there are also people who do not have professional backgrounds in ancient philosophy or any other field, but still managed to be just as good, if not better than many.
00:41:58
Speaker
academic philosophers, maybe not specialists, but I've certainly met people online who know more about Stoicism, a stronger grasp on what the Stoics actually said than many people who teach philosophy. That's certainly, certainly true. Now, what else do you have on criticisms of the Academy, worries about the Academy?
00:42:18
Speaker
Yeah, I think another issue with academic philosophy is that the point I wrote here was there's a general elitism that subtracts from a genuine meritocracy or impedes a genuine meritocracy.
00:42:30
Speaker
So I came from jiu-jitsu, right? Jitsu was the first thing I got good at. Jitsu is martial art. It's like form of fighting. And it was like very clear who was better because you would fight. And then the person who won was better. And maybe, you know, maybe they were younger, maybe they were bigger, but at the end of the day, somebody's better than somebody else. Same thing with track and field, right? Somebody's got a faster time than somebody else if you're running around the track. But philosophy, there's, when you, I think there's a lot of clarity around what bad philosophy looks like.
00:42:59
Speaker
But there's a lot of disagreement about what good philosophy is, even among good philosophers.
Impact of External Validation on Philosophy
00:43:04
Speaker
And you'll end up with these schools, well, this is an analytic school, this is a continental school, this school focuses on this style, this school focuses on this other style. So even among the best people, there's disagreement about what good philosophy looks like. And I think because of that,
00:43:19
Speaker
There ends up being this attraction to kind of names or prestige or institutions. You know, well, who was your supervisor or what's your kind of academic lineage and these kinds of questions. And I'm kind of I really don't like this type of obsession with.
00:43:37
Speaker
reputation or prestige, but I think it's necessary to succeed, but it's something that's like really, really unappealing to me. I don't know how to get a genuine meritocracy in philosophy because it's such an abstract thing, right? Who is the judger? Who is the person who says this is good, this deserves to be published, this doesn't, you know, how do you figure out these kinds of questions? You kind of defer to the judgment of others, but that was something that I picked up on that, you know, I'm glad to be outside of
00:44:05
Speaker
And I find the internet community or the internet stoicism community is much, much better than that. It's much less deferential and more willing to kind of wrestle with the ideas and not take anything for granted in a way that I really appreciate.
00:44:20
Speaker
Yeah, I would say there certainly is a focus on prestige. As you say, it's hard to know how to measure people otherwise, how good they are in the academy without knowing what's your lineage, where you've published, who you study with, how much have you read.
00:44:36
Speaker
And that, I think, can cause people to make mistakes in the academy or elsewhere, really, just when you find yourself in a prestige-focused domain. There are all sorts of complexities that arise with the fact that you can't just order people in a hierarchy based off of reality. Yeah, that certainly is. I also found myself becoming more obsessed with the perceptions of others.
00:45:02
Speaker
Like it became less about writing a good philosophy paper, and this is my own vice, but became less about writing good philosophy and writing philosophy that other people thought was good. Because that was the way to succeed, was to write something that other people thought was valuable. And that's how everything gets judged, right? Is by this external kind of this external test. And I don't know, there's something, there's something kind of
00:45:29
Speaker
I have the ring about that over time, or I don't know, it's just like something you have to watch out for, where you spend a lot of time in it. And, you know, even when people pick in their thesis topics, right? Like a lot of, a lot of times you'll get recommendations to like, well, don't research something you're interested in necessarily, research something that's like,
00:45:45
Speaker
other people are interested in that's kind of sexy right now or might give you a chance of having funding. It's always this kind of less about the pursuit of what you find interesting than you might suspect, at least if you want to be successful within the graduate school definition of success.
00:46:05
Speaker
Right, right. There's a book by a philosopher named Jason Brennan called Good Work If You Can Get It, which is a blunt and accurate view of what it takes to get an academic position. And the fact of the matter is, a lot of the advice is going to be mercenary, things that you just stated, ideally philosophical inquiry,
00:46:33
Speaker
is done for its own sake or done to answer the most important problems. But the fact of the matter is if you want to get a job, you're going to need to take into account all of these other factors, people's perceptions, how other people will judge your work, and so on. And that's going to, to some extent, it does corrupt the philosophical work you do. So that's a real con.
00:47:03
Speaker
Is there anything else you wanted to note before you move on to some of these final questions? Yeah, again, I don't know if this is a bad, but just the more like know what you're getting into. A lot of graduate school is lonely. A lot of graduate school is isolating kind of a solo venture, at least in philosophy, especially in historical philosophy.
00:47:26
Speaker
You know, a lot of my, I think I did well in graduate school because I was the kind of person who was willing to sit in my room all day and write. And that's a kind of a, that's not a disposition everybody has. And even when you think of Epictetus, you know, you think of him walking around, he's talking in groups of people, he's engaging in teaching.
00:47:44
Speaker
This emphasis on teaching goes away and the other way to research and learn is really kind of a solitary endeavor, which is to say that I think there's a real value to social philosophy. There's a real value to the kind of philosophy that comes from getting in the room with people and discussing and going back and forth.
00:48:03
Speaker
That's part of graduate school, but it's not all of graduate school. There's also this kind of solo philosophy, which is also rewarding its own sense, but know what you're getting into and make sure you're interested in both
Suggestions for Improving Graduate School
00:48:12
Speaker
of those. Otherwise, I know a lot of people who love the coursework, but then get really burnt out by the research, you know? Right, right. Yeah. So here's an interesting question. How would you make graduate school better?
00:48:25
Speaker
Oh, that's a tough one. I mean, I think what I would do is I think that I would make really, I think I would provide more information about what types of jobs you can get after to empower people to pick strains. I think like philosophy grad school, I would treat it more like business grad school. To be honest, I would get people talking to other people. I would have people networking. So it's a, Hey, here's a, you're our graduates and here's what they've done after. Here are people that have hired from us and.
00:48:54
Speaker
I think the reason for that, I know I'm focusing on the job market here, but it's this way of ideally you want these incentives to align. We were just talking before about
00:49:04
Speaker
Well, people's perception corrupts the pursuit of knowledge, but that's because you're juggling these two separate goals. One is to pursue knowledge and one is to succeed in the academic job market. But if you have a conception of what you want to do after an accurate idea that maybe doesn't look like academics, it empowers you to study and approach the experience the way you want to. That's one way that I would change it off the bat and I think is feasible.
00:49:33
Speaker
I think another way to change it is to have more of a social aspect when you get into research. So more graduate students reading each other's work, more graduate students marking up each other's work. I think kind of breaking down that student supervisor relationship and allowing kind of other people to intervene and participate in that could have some value too. I know I provided the apprenticeship model earlier, but I really think the social aspect is really valuable and it can get lost a bit in research. Those are two off the top of my head. What do you think?
00:50:04
Speaker
Well, I think first going earlier, I just wouldn't accept as many graduate students. We should have fewer graduate students. And that means I think that you can clarify this issue of what is the role of a graduate student. Are they someone who is?
00:50:19
Speaker
aiming to, as in the ancient model, become better through the study of philosophy? Or is it more of this sort of intellectual model where, you know, of course that's related to the project of becoming a better person but pursuing knowledge for its own sake?
00:50:35
Speaker
And I would like to see more people taking on the ancient model of we're going to create people who are going to be better people and come up with some account of what that is. That's not so vague that no one can challenge it. Like we try to teach people to think better.
00:50:53
Speaker
But perhaps something more specific like we're gonna make excellent Stoics excellent Epicureans or what have you excellent utilitarians I would love to see people do that sort of thing on and then on the other hand I think I would like to see people
00:51:08
Speaker
doing that rigorous academic work that's focused on pushing the peanut forward of human intellectual advancements, but realizing that you can't do that when only 10% of those people are going to have a role at the end of the light of
Reflections on Returning to Graduate School (Q&A)
00:51:28
Speaker
the tunnel.
00:51:28
Speaker
And that means that you're going to probably let a lot fewer people in to begin with. I think that's the right way of putting it because you stop trying to push the peanut forward when it becomes this kind of life or death. Only 10% of us are making it out of here alive. And so you end up with these really unoriginal papers. You end up with people just saying, I'm just going to try to get published. And they stop actually putting together big ideas, big unifying theories.
00:51:54
Speaker
Totally. So if people were more secure on where they'd go after, there'd be a lot more confidence in being creative and experimenting. Absolutely. Cool. What else do you want to add as we wrap this up? I mean, I guess I would open up the general question for you. Would you do graduate school again?
00:52:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think sometimes I would like to have a better grasp of, say, ancient Greek or Latin. I think when I go back to graduate school and just study some of those languages, so I have a stronger grasp of those. Probably wouldn't be the most efficient route to that, but it would be, it is appealing.
00:52:34
Speaker
Or I could think of going to graduate school for some other field. I want to study evolutionary psychology or something of that sort and pick another role. I mean, I think the short answer to that is probably not. There are often going to be more efficient routes to learning what I need to learn, but certainly there is
00:52:55
Speaker
the opportunity or certainly that you know if I thought about do I want to become an evolutionary psychologist yeah probably I go to grad school graduate school that's not a and that wouldn't be a bad life by any means you know if I think about the question
00:53:10
Speaker
would I advise my younger self to go to graduate school again? I mean, that's always a trickier question that's, you know, well, maybe I just, I don't know, that's always hard to know how to answer. Maybe I just advise them to work at a coffee shop and money in Bitcoin. I don't know. Yeah, you should invest in this thing. You haven't heard about it yet, but it's going to be huge.
Episode Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:53:31
Speaker
Yeah, that's great.
00:53:33
Speaker
I think I mean, I like there's a lot of doom and gloom in these kinds of conversations after we criticize the negativity of grad school culture and doom and gloom did a bit. I would do it again. I thought it was a great, great period of my life, but I think it was, I think.
00:53:48
Speaker
What's not is, as you pointed out, it's not the only way to learn about these things. We're very privileged in, as philosophers, you know, and it's like, how are you going to make that happen by yourself? You know, working at a coffee shop and then reading in the after, you just can't do science. You can't do that science.
00:54:04
Speaker
But, you know, if you're listening to this podcast, you can do everything anybody in grad school is doing. You can read the original works. You can enroll online, even the most extreme version, you can roll online in Greek and Latin lessons. You can go through and read the secondary literature. You can do, you can self-teach an entire graduate school program, and that is such a
00:54:28
Speaker
As you said, probably more efficient to do it on your own, unless you need that motivation, you like the structure. So it's an, it was an amazing experience, but it's not the only way to have that experience, not in today's age. Maybe it was in the 1970s, but not today's age with the internet. And so just, just be clear about what you want out of it. And, you know, I liked it because I liked the structure. I liked the rhythm. I liked the consistency and how it fit with my other pursuits, but not the only way to learn about philosophy by any means. Absolutely. Yeah. I think that's what I'll put.
00:54:59
Speaker
Excellent. Is there anything else you want to add? No, I thought that was, I thought that was good. And I hope it's helpful to people again, if, you know, if you're either considering grad school or you're interested about it, or, you know, maybe enjoyed a bit of our reflection on, you know, a previous stage in our lives from the perspective we have now, I hope people enjoyed it and you know, always happy to talk more about, about these topics. So yeah, let us know what you think.
00:55:24
Speaker
Let us know what you think if we want to do more episodes on these sorts of questions. Happy to chat more about these kinds of topics. Otherwise, we're going back to stoicism. Back where we came from. Awesome. Thanks, Gil. See you, Michael.
00:55:38
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Stoa Conversations. Please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and share it with a friend. And if you'd like to get two meditations from me on stoic theory and practice a week, just two short emails on whatever I've been thinking about, as well as some of the best resources we found for practicing stoicism, check out stowletcher.com. It's completely free. You can sign up for it and then unsubscribe at any time as you wish.
00:56:08
Speaker
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00:56:35
Speaker
stoa at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback, questions, or recommendations. Until next time.