BA through phD, five schools too much?
July 5, 2010 2:23 PM   Subscribe

I had a rocky experience getting my master's, and am eventually looking at getting a phD. I am worried that having gone to so many schools will reflect poorly on me later in my career.

in 2007 I graduated magna cum laude from a fairly prestigious university (let's call it A). I did it in 4 years and double majored and won several awards and all that. Everything was looking peachy and I wanted to get a phD and have an academic career.

Initially, I was doing the combined BA/MA program at School A, but the year I was supposed to be classified as a master's student that program was cut, and I wasn't grand-fathered.

Luckily, I was offered a last minute assistantship spot at a private but less prestigious school, let's call it B. The only thing was that school B only offered music performance degrees, and I was more interested in a musicology degree. I started my masters in performance at school B anyway, but the program fell apart during my first year. I could not have finished at school B, so in February 2008 I applied to whatever school in my field that were still taking applications.

I got 5 offers and went to school C, a well-reputed state school. Since I was a music performance major at school B and I didn't finish there, at school C I finished as a Master of Music performance major as well.

Last fall, I decided that it's time to get back to my original intention of musicology/academic degree, so I applied to a bunch of phD programs. Unfortunately, my application paled in comparison to folks who's done their masters in musicology and I didn't get in to any of the phD programs.

Instead, I was offered a MA only spot at School D, a very prestigious private university.

I am now really contemplating whether or not I should accept the offer. I want to go to School D, and I want to get back into academics, but I am worried that my extensive transcript collection will paint me as a bum who bounce between schools. I will have to get my phD elsewhere, and that'd be FIVE schools. I will have so many degrees it'd be ridiculous.

In school B and C I've carried 4.0 and I know my professors hold very high opinions of me. So it's not like I suck at school. But still, I worry that I'll look like a total loser.

any thoughts?
posted by atetrachordofthree to Education (11 answers total)
 
I am now really contemplating whether or not I should accept the offer.

Not if it isn't funded. Not by a country mile.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:41 PM on July 5, 2010 [5 favorites]


Schools will know that programs were eliminated/defunded at schools A and B, no? A short statement to this effect would probably suffice. Whether or not you should pay for a second masters degree is another story.
posted by availablelight at 2:47 PM on July 5, 2010


Look like a loser to whom? Most jobs/future things aren't going to require a transcript from every school you went to, you only need to put down the ones you want to on any resumes or CVs. If the program is funded, and it's the right thing for you, I say do it.
posted by brainmouse at 2:51 PM on July 5, 2010


I would think sticking with academia despite all these programs falling apart on you would count in your favour rather than the other way around. From what I hear it's pretty uncommon to get a PhD in an arts subject without a masters in it first? Based on that (which I'm open to corrections on, I am but a scientist) I'd say go for the masters if you can afford it/if it's funded and then if you don't have your pick of PhD's there's something wrong with the world.
posted by teraspawn at 2:57 PM on July 5, 2010


Let me add:

I rather doubt that your history plays much role in your admission or rejection, so long as you state clearly and directly that you attended two graduate programs there were closed down.

But at the same time, unless admissions committee members have told you, in unmistakable language, that you were rejected because you were a performance major, you should not assume that that was the case. Prospective students and rejected job applicants, me emphatically included, can conjure up all kinds of stories about why they were rejected that have no foundation in any kind of evidence and have no relationship to the truth.

For that matter, even if they did tell you that you were rejected because you were a performance MA, that doesn't make it so. They might merely have felt that that was more diplomatic than telling you that your statement of purpose wasn't up to snuff, or that your GREs weren't high enough, or whatever. Or they might have felt that giving you that reason would get you to go away faster.

Anyway, the point is only that you don't actually know why you weren't admitted, and you shouldn't tell yourself stories about why it was.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:58 PM on July 5, 2010 [2 favorites]


that were closed down. Me am edit good in Bizarro English.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:59 PM on July 5, 2010


Get in touch with your former profs that are in your field and ask them for advice about the relative merits of the programs, etc. This kind of thing - and what matters in hiring etc - can vary a lot between fields.

But as ROU_Xenophobe says, if they are not funding you, in humanities at least this means that in pretty much every case you should say no and try again later.
posted by LobsterMitten at 3:00 PM on July 5, 2010


Previously on Ask Metafilter...
posted by caek at 3:17 PM on July 5, 2010


Best answer: I teach academic musicology, and have been observing the field in some form or other for 20+ years.

Now is the riskiest time to be entering the profession since the late 1980s, perhaps worse. Even the most prestigious PhD programs are having trouble placing their top students. The job market improved slightly this year over last, but was hardly robust and the signs are it will be anemic again this year (a spate of new postdocs has absorbed some of the overflow temporarily). With the conditions at major state universities sure to deteriorate further (and that's most big schools of music in the US), the future is not looking bright. In practical terms, ROU is right even in the *best* of times -- you should never enter a PhD program with the intention of pursuing a career in academic teaching and research unless you are fully funded. Period. End of story. The occasional exception proves the rule, which is that you cannot compete with people being paid to write their dissertations and develop teaching experience. Every dollar you borrow or hour you work at a non-career-track job costs you competitively.

All that said, this was always a risky career path, and it's likely things will stabilize and bounce back. But the good careers have always, ever, only gone to the people who pursue it as a calling, for whom the excitement of research or the joy of teaching overwhelms the rational risk calculation. Ironically, or not, it's those people who have what it takes to sustain careers at the higher levels of academia.

It may be strategic on your part, but you give no indication whatsoever of your actual interests, or even of a passion for musicology that goes beyond a sense that it's what you were on a path to do. If you're not sure you need to get the PhD, you almost certainly shouldn't, at least yet.

One more aspect of all this: it is the rare person relatively fresh out of college who can succeed as well in an academic career as s/he could with some non-academic experience. Take a year or several to learn a language well, to travel and live somewhere new, to work in a challenging personal setting, to read 50 books, to master a new instrument, and to discover a focus for your doctoral research that will be unique and compelling to you and to others, meaning it fascinates you and engages your passions. I never recommend people enter graduate programs these days with absolutely no clear idea of their dissertation topic, and nor do I think paying for an MA degree is the best way to develop such a thing. The market increasingly values early publication and that depends on having a relatively distinctive project early on in your grad school career. Musicology in particular was late to move away from a sort of replicative, normal science model of dissertation topic development, meaning there's way too much work on far too few topics, meaning it's easy enough to think of things (think big picture things) that are virgin territory. But spend a lot of quality time with the ProQuest dissertation database, and see what dissertations at top programs have been about in recent years. You can search by program and adviser on ProQuest. You can learn a ton from doing that about what it takes to do this well, about what a well-formed dissertation topic might be, and about which programs and advisers are producing innovative work (take a look at the dissertations of junior faculty members hired in major departments in the last 5 years, as another pass).

Take that year or two to build a portfolio of experience, knowledge, and thinking about your research interests on your own, then apply to only the top few programs in the field for the PhD. If someone funds you, you have a shot. A shot, mind you.

If not, it probably wasn't meant to be. But realistically, you have at least until your early 30s to develop a marketable profile for PhD study (again, exceptions prove the general rule). So you can make a few attempts at it.
posted by fourcheesemac at 3:21 PM on July 5, 2010 [5 favorites]


As an academic, although not in music, I would generally look positively on someone who has been through a number of different schools. It means that you have been exposed to a variety of views and approaches. I prefer to see my own students do their graduate study elsewhere, and for graduate students to come from other institutions. Of course, that's just my point of view; not all of my colleagues agree.
posted by Grinder at 3:24 PM on July 5, 2010


I'm a composer, not a musicologist and I had a few things to say in general about the field until I read fourcheesemac's comment. That nails it totally. I'll just add one last thing from my perspective as far as seeking out "virgin territory" for a dissertation topic is concerned: don't just limit yourself to looking at musicology dissertations. It might be worth checking out dissertations written by composers too (in programmes that require written dissertations by composers.) They will take a different tack to musicology dissertations but the subjects themselves might push you to look into different areas.
posted by ob at 8:01 PM on July 5, 2010


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