academic jobs are always a gamble, in part because (unlike legal or medical professions, say) the job market is so tightly controlled that you’re able to apply for jobs (once the arduous process culminates in a degree) just once a year. plus you’re limited to a small number of institutions actually deciding to hire in your field in a given year. you have to make decisions about what kind of school you want to work at, where you’re willing to live, etc. and you have to realize that most positions will have dozens, if not hundreds, of people applying for them.

that said, and in spite of the fact that i know some really brilliant people who never got the job market to work for them for one reason or another, i feel basically pretty optimistic about it. my adviser, early in my grad school experience, stopped me on the sidewalk one day, looked me in the eye, and said, “do you really want this?” i said sure, and she replied: “well, that’s half of it, right there.” a good quarter more is blood, sweat, tears, and the willingness to let go of writing before you think it’s perfect (because it’s never perfect and you don’t have forever to perfect it anyway). the final quarter seems to me to be just plain luck, or maybe luck and pluck.

i don’t advise people to go into it unless they feel it almost as a calling. and unless they’re pretty damn good at it to start out with. and certainly not unless they’re decently funded. i wasn’t, unfortunately, and i’ll be paying for it for a while yet.

as for fields, you can’t just say you want to work in a certain underpopulated field in order to get into grad school. you have to be able to demonstrate some awareness of the field. it’s fine to say you don’t have a solid field commitment yet, but you should still specify major interests. and your writing sample should show that you’ve got a serious working knowledge of one of the fields you identify. it’s true that some fields are overpopulated already percentagewise and overrepresented in the application pool — post-war American fiction, for example. But if that’s what you’re devoted to, go for it.

Once you’re in school, though, remain flexible about your education. Take classes from good professors regardless of what they teach. I went in thinking I would do late-20c comparative American lit; my turn toward historical methodologies (and a few really amazing teachers) dragged me back in time, first into the 19c and then into the 18c when I started dissertation work.

My own desire to pursue graduate study definitely emanated from my sense of myself as a reader, not a writer (and maybe that’s why I was ABD for so long…but that’s another story). One grad student stereotype is the aggrieved, overworked and underpaid, snarky know-it-all complainer–and while there’s some truth to that stereotype, it’s far from the whole story. Graduate school can be heavenly. How cool is it to have several years during which reading and writing is your JOB?! Later comes the pressure to publish and engage in Machiavallian politicking, but hey–that type of jockeying exists in most careers.

During my first semester in graduate school I took a Faulkner seminar, and over the course of those four months, we read pretty much all of Faulkner. It was basically a full-time job. If getting that far into an oeuvre sounds appealing, then grad school is far you. Learn? And get paid for it? The reader in me knew that I would probably never have that luxury again, so I relished the experience. But some people, some very smart people included, would rather get their fingernails slowly pulled out than go on a four-month Faulkner binge. To each her own.

With the state of the humanities as they are, I wouldn’t advise someone to go to grad school without knowing the steep odds of turning it into a stable profession. A love of literature simply isn’t enough to bet on those odds. But it is something–the most important thing. And if you’re lucky, you’ll love research and teaching too, and then the odds start to improve. A little.

What’s the saying? Nice work if you can get it.

do you spell your name leisel or liesel? not that it matters. i just wondered.