People have asked me a lot of questions about going to graduate school. I’m not sure that I’ve given them good answers, and I’m definitely not sure that they have asked the right questions. So here is an imagined conversation between me and a questioner. If there are any questions that I haven’t adequately answered below, let me know in the comments and I’ll try to answer them.

Where are you going to graduate school?

I’ll be going to Brandeis University, a small school that is an unusual combination of a liberal arts college and research university. It is in Waltham, Massachusetts, which is eight miles west of Boston.

What degree will you get?

A PhD in American history.

What’s your favorite period in history?

We historians prefer to call our “favorite period” our “area of specialization,” just like lawyers don’t say, “My favorite kind of law is corporate taxation.” Unlike lawyers, though, I really do like what I’ll be studying.

My studies will be focused on two things. First, I’ll study primarily American religious history. Second, I’ll study primarily British North America during the colonial period and the United States from the founding to the beginnings of the Civil War. Of course, I hope to learn a great deal of history that doesn’t fit those periods exactly.

So it’s a church history degree, then?

No, it’s not a church history degree. Church history is a discipline in its own right, that tends to study Christian doctrine and denominations. Religious history studies all aspects of religion, and it isn’t limited to just Christianity. It’s not that I’m not interested in church history; it’s just that my studies will be a bit broader.

When are you leaving?

My wife and I will be moving to Massachusetts in mid-June, and classes start the last week of August.

How long will this take? A year or two?

I’m hoping to be finished in five years.

Five years! Why does it take so long? Are you slow?

Actually, that’s pretty fast for a PhD in the humanities. It’s difficult to know exactly how long it takes the average person to finish a PhD in history. The word on the street is that it takes eight to ten years. If you prefer more accurate numbers, consider these statistics. Out of all the people who start a PhD in history,

  • 9.2% will have finished it after five years,
  • 15.6% will have finished it after six years,
  • 24.7% will have finished it after seven years,
  • 32.9% will have finished it after eight years,
  • 41.2% will have finished it after nine years, and
  • 47.2% will have finished it after ten years.

In other words, if I finish the degree at all, I’ll be doing better than half the people who started it; if I finish it in five more  years (i.e., two years for the master’s degree I already have plus five more for a PhD), I’ll be doing better than 75% of the people.

So what makes you think that you can finish it comparatively quickly?

A lot of things affect how long it takes people to finish their degrees. Do they have to work full-time, or do they have funding? How old are they when they started? Do they really want to be historians, or are they just trying the degree on for size? What is life like at home for them? How long does it take other people in the same degree program? Are the professors they are working with helpful, or do they keep dragging out the process? Do they know how to get things done?

I have nearly everything going right for me. Brandeis is providing me with substantial funding, so I’ll be able to study full-time and work during the summers. I’m not starting the PhD right after getting my BA, but neither am I so old that my age will be an impediment. I’m convinced that I want to be a historian, and I have done enough history work as a graduate student and on my own for that to be a settled conviction. I have a wonderful wife, who is willing to help me get the degree. Brandeis has a very short average time to degree, compared to other history programs. (Compare Brandeis to the other school I visited, which never gave me a straight answer about the time to degree, and which made me feel like I had been impolite even to ask.) After talking to the Brandeis professors and graduate students, I’m convinced that the professors will be help me get finished. And I think I’ve learned how to finish the job.

And as Adam Smith observed, “The chance of gain is by every man more or less over-valued, and the chance of loss is by most men under-valued” (Wealth of Nations, 1.10.29ff)

Why five years?

Because that’s when the money runs out.

“When the money runs out”?

Many PhD programs in the humanities give their students funding. In my case, Brandeis is going to pay my tuition and fees, give me an allowance towards health insurance, and pay me a stipend on top of that. In exchange I have to teach for five semesters. I won’t say how much that is worth, but you could probably figure it out if you did some digging. Suffice it to say that it’s a very good deal, and I’m grateful.

That funding lasts for five years, so that’s when I’m aiming to be done.

What do you have to do to get a PhD?

You can read the requirements on Brandeis’s website. Essentially I have to

  • take sixteen classes and write two long papers,
  • learn how to read a foreign language,
  • read an awful lot of books so that I can
  • pass a series of comprehensive exams, and
  • write a book.

So what will you do all day long? Sleep in, watch movies, read a few books?

If you really want to know what it’s like to be a graduate student in the humanities, you should skim Gregory M. Colon Semenza’s Graduate Study for the Twenty-first Century. Don’t read it; just find a copy in a library and browse through it. (If you’re planning to go to graduate school yourself, then read every word.)

But essentially I will read a lot and write a lot. Lots of books (I’m guessing the equivalent of three or four books per week), lots of documents and manuscripts and the like. Lots of papers, lots of dissertations chapters. You get the idea. I also get to teach several classes.

True, I could probably party a lot during graduate school. But I’m going to treat it like a job, more or less: get up, go to work at class or the library, focus, go home, etc. Every now and again I’ll go to conferences, submit papers to journals, visit historical sites and other libraries.

Why so much reading and writing?

I recently read that it takes 10,000 hours of doing something to become good at it. That’s 40 hours per week, 50 weeks a year, for 5 years.

I think that’s boring, but I bet you’d like it.

Well, that’s why I’m going.

But you get summers off? I wish I did!

Yes, technically I get the summers off. But if I’m fortunate I’ll get short-term fellowships to do more reading and writing during the summer. Otherwise I’ll get a summer job. (I’m not getting a PhD to avoid work, you know.) But the summers are the times that I can get lots of work done on my own.

So what can you do with a PhD in history? Teach?

I knew you were going to ask that!

Yes, I will probably teach. At least, I hope so. You’re probably not aware that there is a serious glut of PhDs on the market, so it is very difficult to obtain a tenure-track teaching job, or even a teaching job at all. You can read some of the articles that I’ve linked to in this post, if you want. My situation is maybe a little different, because I have an untypical teaching job in my mind and prayers, so we’ll wait to see about that.

But there are many other things that one can do with a PhD in history. Like write, work at a museum, work for the government, work at a historical site, etc. The articles in the post I mentioned above have many more opportunities listed.

Am I concerned about getting a job after graduation? Sure. Are you worried about your job prospects?

Besides, I’m not getting a PhD primarily to do something; I’m getting it to be something.

Why are you getting a PhD anyway?

That’s another question for another post.