Should I do a PhD in Classics?

 

Should I do a PhD in Classics?

I can imagine that there will be four groups of people reading this blog post. The first group of people will be new PhD students who are starting in September and are hoping that they haven’t made a terrible mistake after reading horror stories on social media. The second group will be those who haven’t yet applied and are wondering if they should do a PhD after hearing said horror stories. The third group will be PhD students deep into their projects, who are feeling immense fatigue after years of study, and are interested to learn if someone who’s finished the process thinks it was worth it. The fourth group of people will be those who have passed their PhDs and will want to compare their experiences with those of mine.

I think it’s hard to get a balanced and moderate view on the experience of doing a Classics PhD. You tend to get two different takes. The overwhelming opinion spread online is that Classics PhDs are traumatic and horrendous experiences. Even if you are successful and a part of the lucky few, you will only be rewarded with precarious work. The second view, often discussed privately, is that PhDs are actually amazing and that there is nothing wrong with them. Everyone complaining on social media are just being overly negative.

I personally think that a Classics PhD is a very rewarding experience and I enjoyed doing it on balance much more than I disliked it. However, I also found it incredibly difficult and often unbelievably dull,. It’s also true that the academic job market is absolutely dire. So I hope I can be honest about the many downsides of doing a PhD while also showing that there are a great many upsides about it. It’s not all doom and gloom being a PhD student. I think that if you want to do a PhD and have a project you really care about then you should do it.

The funding situation

                PhD funding is a disaster. I applied for over ten different funding bodies over two years of applications and got rejected by nine. I still remember the day I got rejected by four different funding bodies on the same day! I did of course get very lucky and got TECHNE at Roehampton. The only advice I can give is to write the best PhD funding proposal you possibly can and just hope that you get lucky enough to be chosen. Don’t think that it’s hopeless because you got rejected first time around and it’s almost certainly not a fault of your project. Sometimes panels will just choose a project for seemingly arbitrary reasons or because a certain project fits better with other students who they are funding.

Start contacting academics in many universities early in October. Then start working through proposals with them over the winter so you can submit as many applications as you can in January-March. Easier said than done of course! You have to write the funding proposals to fit your PhD supervisor and university. It’s an extremely time consuming and difficult thing to do. On the plus side though, it does make you really deliberate on your project and think about exactly what you want to do. The time spent writing all those proposals puts you in a good stead for when you start your PhD.

Should you do a PhD without getting funding? Honestly I’d say no. As I will say later, I think part of the value of a PhD is the work experience you can do during your studies, and that’s impossible without a good funding package. I also don’t think I’d be capable of completing the PhD part time. It sounds far more difficult than doing it full time. But of course, I know people who have successfully done their PhDs self-funded and part time. So up to the individual I suppose!

Should I do a PhD to get a job as a lecturer?

No. This is probably the worst reason to do a PhD. The academic job market is horrendous. Most jobs in Classics academia are fixed contract roles for a few years with no chance of extending beyond that point. Lecturers typically have to spend many hours securing publications in journals and with famous book publishers in the hope of securing a permanent job. It says a lot that PhD students are often advised to secure two publications and have years of lecturing under their belt by the time they pass their thesis and apply for postdocs. It was never easy to become a lecturer and there was always very few jobs, but the competition is so fierce now that you generally won’t get a permanent job unless you get extremely lucky and match perfectly with what a university department is seeking. It is also the case that recent surveys of department staff across several universities have shown that Oxbridge graduates secure most of the available lecturing jobs.

Things will only get worse. The recent announcement that the Classics Department at the University of Roehampton will close is likely only the beginning of a string of closures at other universities. Essentially, you are joining a profession which has no jobs and will most certainly have less jobs in future years.

You should pursue an academic career only if you are genuinely content to experience each rung of the career ladder in its own right. If you are happy to lecture for a few years during your PhD then do it. If you are happy to do a postdoc because you have an exciting research topic you are passionate about and want to explore then do it. If you are happy to work in academia on a temporary basis with no certainty of getting a permanent job, then apply for fixed term contract roles. But I think you should only pursue these roles if they are rewarding in and of themselves. Don’t go for these jobs expecting a stable career because you most probably won’t get one.

Why should I do a PhD?

I think the real reason to do a PhD is very simple. You should do a PhD if you have a research topic which you are really excited to study. This is why I think it’s a mistake to research a topic because you think it will be advantageous for the academic job market, which is a worrying trend I have noticed in aspiring students. In the grand scale of things, studying a niche topic probably won’t help you get a job and will make the actual research unenjoyable, which is definitely something you don’t want to do! PhDs are often a tedious and laborious experience and you need to be hooked to something you genuinely care about. Think of a PhD as first and foremost as an intense learning experience. That should come before anything else.

What’s the everyday life of a PhD student?

When I read about the everyday life of a PhD student online, and especially on social media, I often hear stories about working over ten hours every day. Maybe I’m the exception but I rarely worked more than around five hours a day on my PhD. I would often wake up at 9 AM (or 8 AM sometimes if I was ‘disciplined’) and would start working away at my research around 10 AM. Would take an hour lunch break and two half hour breaks. I would stop working around 4 or 5 PM. I think PhD students sometimes encourage each other to outwork each other in an unhealthy competition. I don’t think you need to do more work than what I did to do well in your PhD. Everyone’s experiences will differ of course. But really, the most important thing to do is to work consistently every day. If you regularly take a week or two off then it’s really hard to get back into the swing of things. It’s better to make progress on a five hour a day schedule than do a ten hour marathon then do nothing for several days.

What’s hard about a PhD?

I don’t think the actual everyday work of the PhD is difficult in terms of workload. I arguably did less work on my PhD on a day-to-day basis than I did compared to the minimum wage jobs which I did for a few years between my qualifications. They were a lot harder in a pure workload sense.

What I think is really hard about the PhD is that you have a project which goes on for so long (more often four years nowadays compared to three years in the past). It’s the marathon-esque nature of the thesis which can be crushing and it’s really hard to keep mental fortitude during it all. The best analogy I have is to imagine you have finished a MA thesis and then after a few days of a break you have to start and complete another five. A PhD chapter is also of a much higher standard than a MA thesis of course. I always used to find a blank folder and file of a new chapter the most difficult and mentally draining part of the PhD. It’s an experience which I think is unique to the PhD compared to previous qualifications. On the plus side, you have much longer to get things done, so you aren’t pulling out a polished and complete dissertation after a year like a MA. But you also have to play the long game with a momentous project.

If you do pursue an academic career, and let’s be honest the vast majority of will do so during our PhD, then you will probably work yourself into the ground. In my second year, I did an ungodly amount of work in addition to my PhD and it was just too much. I attended many conferences, gave a paper at an international Pliny conference (yes that really happened!), taught the Intermediate Latin module entirely on my own, and wrote a publication on Pliny. This was an excessive amount of work but I thought it was essentially mandatory to be considered for a starting lecturing job. In other words, if you pursue an academic career, you will most probably wreck at least one year of your PhD. I don’t discuss this very much, but I barely remember what even happened in the second year of my PhD because my mind blocked it out since it was so horrendous. Don’t be like me. Don’t take on too much work. I now think that your PhD should probably come before anything else. If the PhD isn't any good, then it doesn't matter how much work you do towards an academic career.

What’s good about doing a PhD?

So is it worth dong a PhD if it’s so tough? I think so. You get a great feeling of accomplishment when you complete a draft of each chapter, which in turn helps you keep going when you are starting the next one. Like any kind of creative project, you do the PhD because it’s rewarding rather than because it’s ‘fun’. And it is extremely rewarding. I got through the PhD by seeing each milestone as a major accomplishment in itself. Completing the PhD outline. Completing the PhD upgrade chapter. Completing the first full draft of the PhD. You get the idea.

I also personally found being in the Classics community a lot of fun on balance. Of course, there were occasions when I really got annoyed by the hierarchy in academia, such as when everyone just queues up to famous academics and waits for their 'turn' to be greeted. I found this particularly difficult at the CA. But more specialised conferences, such as the one I went to on Pliny, are almost always really lovely. And I think that going to a good PhD work in progress conference can be a really enjoyable experience. Honestly, I thought being with other PhD students could be difficult at time because of how competitive some people can be. But I really enjoyed UCL's Lyceum seminar and would attend regularly. Find a work in progress PhD conference you genuinely fit into and regularly attend. It helps you feel as a part of a community and it's a great help when times are hard.

The PhD can also be a really good time for getting work experience. I think this advantage of the PhD is not often discussed as much as it could be. For example, I knew that I wanted to get into Classics teaching in at least some form so I did lots of voluntary teaching and paid lecturing. This put me in a good position when I started doing my PGCE applications. But it’s not just teaching, there’s many kinds of experiences you can take advantage of during your PhD. In TECHNE, for example, students could defer their project for several months by doing a work experience project. Opportunities like this are hard to come by without connections and funding bodies are very useful in this way. There’s also just the fact that you have a lot of spare time during your PhD and if you aren’t pursuing lecturing you could easily do voluntary work as long as it's within reason. 

There is of course the obvious problem of actually funding doing these things. I was very lucky to have a generous funding package. But problems of funding are often just as much an issue in getting lecturing experience as they are for other industries.

              And that's all I have to say. Lol. Hope you enjoy the abrupt ending! It's a 'trapdoor' (if you get this hilarious joke then kudos). 

                Oh one more thing! When applying for a PhD, make sure you have a really good relationship with your PhD supervisor. When it comes down to it, I think the PhD supervisor is really what makes or breaks someone's opinion of their time doing the thesis. If the supervisor isn't being very helpful during the proposal draft process then it's probably not worth doing the actual PhD with them. One useful part of doing many different PhD proposals is that you can sus out who's good and who's likely not worth your time.

                Anyway that's it for real. Farewell all!