Acronyms scare me
Evening all,

I know the b3ta community generally has a higher-than-average level of intelligence and education, and I was wondering if some of it could rub off on me. (Careful...)

I'm going to graduate this year and it terrifies me. I want to go into a career as an academic, specifically a socio-legal researcher, but have no idea how one can afford the fees for the necessary qualifications without parental/corporate intervention. Also, the wide variety of degrees scare me: should I be applying for MAs, MRes, MPhil, MLitt or straight for PhDs? It's all so growed-up and scary.

Thanks in advance, post-gradded b3tans! :)
(Holloway_Girl To err is to be human, to be a fool is to believe, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 19:47, 15 replies, latest was 16 years ago)

I cannot help you. But I do sayeth to you:

Good luck!
( whenanimalsattackhumans clad in global hypercolour, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 19:55, Reply)

I don't know them either, being American
but I would simply advise you not to seek an MRS. Get your other degree first before you worry about gold bands.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Wed 20 Aug 2008, 20:20, Reply)

careers advice?
yes, I know uni careers advisors are generally useless, but they may be able to help you - if you can define exactly where you want to be in X years time, they can probably tell you how to get there. Also, look at other people in the position you eventually want to be in, then find out what they have done.

If you really want to do a post grad qualification and can justify it/have good grades, you can often get funding (in the UK anyway) - the people to ask about this are the ones who are running the course you're interested in.

One other point - only do a PhD if you want to do it - not because it seems like a good idea at the time. It is a massive undertaking, mentally, emotionally, financially (and physically when it comes to the write up...), and you need to be VERY keen on your subject area!! I know far too many of my peers who studied for a PhD because everyone else was, and dropped out when they realised how much work it is!

Lastly - good luck!!
( ascorbate, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 20:40, Reply)

Okay, well...
Don't become an academic because you like the idea of being an academic. Being an academic very often sucks, as evidenced by the bitching you will hear from academics on here. Why did I become one? I love my research. How much research do I get to do these days? Very feckin' little - mostly I teach, prepare for teaching, spoonfeed students and do tedious and huge amounts of admin. I'm not sure anyone chooses to be an academic - it just sort of happens. You start doing what fascinates you and your peers and mentors spur you on, and next thing you know you are hugely academically qualified but are earning less than your contemporaries who went into graduate employment.

How does one fund pgrad studies? Grants. (Enzyme will tell you a different story though he'll probably also recommend the grant route.) You chose a course/a study programme and you apply for funding. I got a European Social Fund grant for my MSc and EPSRC (the research council for engineering and physical sciences) funding for my PhD. It's not a lot of money - be prepared to have crappy part-time jobs too. I lived on about 6K a year for three years and that wasn't fun (though strangely I could always afford one bottle of wine and some nice cheese each week - priorities, I guess). There was no way my parents could ever have contributed to my pgrad education and so I went it alone.

I did not go straight from ugrad to pgrad and I (with bias) recommend to all my students that they get some time working in the real world before they return to university. This is so that they gain valuable experience, that they have a basis for comparison of life outside academia, and that they can fully appreciate their choices. Your mileage may vary, but never chose to do pgrad studies because you can't think of another job to do. That way lies frustration and high drop-out rates.

Dreaming of a life in the Ivory Towers is all very lovely, but then you get there and the ivory is actually concrete and the tower is a shitty, soot-filled office in a crumbling Victorian terrace in inner London, and you spend your days telling students how to use commas and how to spell "plagiarism" correctly.

Universities are turning into businesses. Sad but true. Fact of life. At the end of the day, if you're not bringing in huge amounts of grant money then your career will go nowhere. You have to play the game and the game is not fun.

My lovely-ex has played a blinder - he got his PhD and went into research in industry. He now gets to work on robots all day and then drives home at 5.30pm and forgets all about work 'til the next morning. By contrast, during term time I'm up 'til 1am or 2am working. Lack of specific contracted hours often means I work more than the average 37.5 week.

I wish I could've posted a more positive response, but I'm being honest. Good luck!
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 21:23, Reply)

I know who you are...
IIRC, you're at the end of your second year. That's a good time to start thinking about your next move.

If it's an academic career you want, there's no two ways about it: you need a PhD. You know Margot Brazier? She's one of the world's best medical lawyers, an honorary QC... and she wouldn't even be called for interview now because of her lack of PhD. I know someone else who has a Cambridge double-first, a Harvard MA and 4 years teaching at Harvard, and who was told by Manchester that it wouldn't even be worth her while filling in an application form.

Now: since you're a humanities type, the chances of you getting on to a PhD without experience at Masters' level is low. It can be done in the sciences, but not arts and humanities unless you're on track for a good first - and even then, the change in culture is such that you'd find the transition difficult.

Now: the difference between MA, LLM, MRes, MPhil and so on is... well... baffling. MA and LLM degrees are largely taught, and demand (usually) a dissertation by independent research of around 15-20k words, depending on where you go and the subject. An MRes is slightly more orientated to research, although that might be a research project as one of the course units.

MPhils are - usually - almost entirely research based. As such, they have a slightly higher prestige than an MA. Usually, they'll involve some kind of taught component as well in research methods, or as a leg-up. Having said this, Birmingham offers a "taught" MPhil - the so-called MPhil(B) - which has a slightly higher taught aspect. In general, though, your main assessment would be by dissertation - somewhere around the 30-40k word mark, generally. MPhils are usually done over 2 years, though they can be done in one.

On top of that, Oxford offers the BPhil. I've no idea what one of those is.


Now: funding. Funding at M-level is hard to get. It's hard to get at D-level as well. I did my MSc and the first year of my PhD self-funded (well: doddery-grandmother funded, but you get the picture). I got a fellowship from the Royal Institute of Philosophy for the second and third year of the PhD, which was worth £5000 each time. Clearly, that's not enough: more than half of that was needed to pay for registration.

If you can get AHRB funding, then go for it. Pester your tutors for help in framing your application. Bear in mind, too, that there are other sources of funding: given that you're a lawyer, there is, I think, a body specifically devoted to funding female law postgrads. There are various charities and things - again, being a girl, you might benefit here. Go and pester the careers service. It's what they're for.

Funding will be easier to get in the second and subsequent years of PG life - you'll've proven your bona fides, and others'll've dropped out, reducing the competition.

Occasionally, there are funded M-level studentships advertised. Sign up to email listservs for news of them - I'm not sure what the lawyers' one is, but I'll find out and gaz you.

There are other ways to save and make money - once you're a postgrad, there'll be opportunities to teach and mark, which pay. Also, consider being a supervisor in halls - that makes for cheaper accommodation.


Is it worth it? Well, I was almost 30 before I was earning minimum wage - in fact, I didn't even earn enough to pay tax before that. An academic career is a very hard treadmill to mount. On the other hand, the fact that I went so long earning so little is testament to the fact that I think it's worth doing. There are times when it's horrible - but there are times when it's fabulous. The pay is reasonable once you get it, and the conditions and hours, I've found, are pretty good too. There'll be times when you're up into the small hours - and there'll be times when you've got weeks ahead of you with nothing to do but to write a kick-ass paper on a problem that fascinates you.

Yep: it's scary. You do have to be a little...erm... different to be an academic. But, look at it this way. We could all be earning much more money as lawyers or accountants - but we aren't. We're here because we love what we do. (I even love teaching.... Christ!) We love pointing to stuff on a blackboard and saying, "Have you seen this? Isn't it cool?"

If that's you, then go for it.

And, come September, start pestering your lecturers. Failing that, you know where my office is (or at least how to find it). Finally, keep pestering people like me, CHCB, Rakky, K2k6, Negative Armadillo, and the rest of the b3ta academics. We don't bite - we suck.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 10:13, Reply)

well, your spelling sucks, Dr E!
"there's no to ways about it"

Thus rendering all your advice useless on things intellectual! :)
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 10:26, Reply)

@CHCB
Never liked you anyway.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 10:28, Reply)

in addition
Where you end up is also a big factor. Enzyme paints a rosier picture because he's at one of the top universities in the country. I did my PhD, post-doc and teaching at one of the top universities in the country, then - facing a hiring freeze there - got a permanent job at a much shitter place and now spend my time explaining over and over again 'til I'm blue in the fucking face why cutting and pasting from Wikipedia is not the way to write a piece of coursework.
On the other hand, my job is permanent and Enzyme's isn't.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 10:29, Reply)

^TRUE^
Go - or stay - redbrick or Oxbridge; keep in the Russell Group, too. Certainly, if you see yourself as a researcher, avoid most of the post-92s. SOME of them are building decent research reputations - but, for the most part, that's not what they're interested in. Decent research usually means decent postgrad life, and the chance to get a publication or two before you hit the job market - that's always good.

Have a think about those academics whose work you've enjoyed reading - you don't have to agree with them. Then make contact with them. See what you like.


I'm not permanent... yet. I have my fingers crossed.
*sigh*
CHCB makes a good point, though: career-wise, be prepared for short contracts while you're getting established. A three year contract is considered good: I'm now on my third straight one-year contract (though I breathe promises that they want to keep me on).
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 10:34, Reply)

^
"a publication or two before you hit the job market"
This, and: if you're not publishing internationally during the course of your PhD then you're not doing decent research.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 10:37, Reply)

^^
Not so sure about that, actually. I think you can be doing good research without it necessarily generating peer-reviewed papers in the short term. Publishing while a PhD candidate is good, but not doing so is not a sign that you're not doing good research.

You could consider doing book reviews, but they don't really count CV-wise (although they do show willing, and so are worth the effort for that reason). I managed to squeeze one paper out of my MSc dissertation while I was a doctoral student, and one paper for an edited collection. But for a subject like mine - and, largely, in law - most work is done alone, and, until you're towards the end of your studies, you simply don't know the field well enough.

Of course: writing papers - especially tp present at conferences - is extremely good experience, and it gets you known. Sometimes, they'll be picked up for publication.

But don't expect too much publications-wise before the end of the PhD. On the other hand, your PhD thesis should generate a couple of papers as it takes shape.

EDIT: In terms of collaboration, then bear in mind that I've just been second author on a paper from one of my undergraduate students' dissertations from last year: he provided the argument, and I just reshaped it slightly for publication. So there are opportunities.

Don't let me or CHCB scare you on that front. We both made it, so it can't be too hard...
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 10:42, Reply)

^ I disagree
A PhD is supposed to be an original contribution to the field, thus the research involved should be of a level that can be published internationally. Generously, I will make allowances that things may be different in the weird world of Arts n'stuff :)

You won't get much of a chance to publish in teh first few years of a lectureship, so publish early and publish often.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 10:53, Reply)

Hmmm
"Of an international standard" doesn't mean that you have to be publishing. I think that there's something to be said for concentrating on the PhD and looking at it as a source of papers towards the end. You certainly don't want to find that large chuncks of your thesis are inadmissable for examination because they've been published elsewhere.

Publishing while a student is good if you can, but it's not the whole story. Conferences, as I said, are often a good way to gague yourself, and, if you're responding to a specific CFP, you might be able to exploit an angle different from your PhD work. (That's how I got my first book chapter, way back when.) But the price you pay is distraction from your thesis for a while.

Nor is it necessarily true that you won't publish early in your lectureship. I've published more in the last couple of years as a relative newbie than I did before - but, again, that might have something to do with being in a good department. It gives you zip and incentive...
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 11:00, Reply)

^(sorry Holloway_Girl - digression time).
But Enzyme, you don't render your PhD inadmissable by publishing from it. In fact, it's perfectly acceptable to form your thesis from papers you have written over the course of your 3 years of research. (Okay, 3.5 years of research.) Not all the research you do will go into your thesis after all, or is that not the case in your discipline? Perhaps that's the science approach.

You are fortunate in getting to publish now. But then, you're not getting screwed over by your place of work... :) It is different though - you sit down and write a paper; I have to design experiments, come up with algorithms, test them, analyse them, then write about them. Different process.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 11:12, Reply)

You're right that the process is different...
As far as I'm aware, the thesis has to be original - although the examiners can ask you about anything you've published.

Of course, there can be overlap between thesis and papers. But I think, all the same, that there's an originality criterion (to at least some extent).

On the other hand, you might be doing a PhD by publication - in which case there'd be no thesis to begin with - or a hybrid.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 11:19, Reply)