Just posted this squib at my favorite time-wastin’ site, Quora.
Is a PhD really worth pursuing? How many PhD students can really get ‘productive’ or real-time use output from their PhD research?
Victoria Hay, Ph.D.
Retired academic; owner of The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc.
The Ph.D. may (or may not) be worth pursuing…if you have an independent source of income.
You need a working spouse or an inheritance to keep a roof over your head and food on your table while you’re “pursuing” the Ph.D. Otherwise, you’re certainly not going to be “productive” or generate “output” from your research, because you’ll be too busy working two full-time jobs: one to support yourself and one to generate credit toward the doctorate.
Would I do it again?
Huh…let’s think about that…
I got a great job at Arizona Highways Magazine after I’d finished the degree. But that was only because the boss was impressed with academics. For him, it was a grand ego trip to have a someone with a doctorate on his staff. The job I landed was in journalism; it had nothing to do with academia.
Most employers are not that easily flamboozled.
I got a nice ego trip of my own when my dissertation was picked up by a prestigious publishing house. Does it matter that I’ve never seen a penny from sales on that book? Meh! Probably not: again, because the flamboozled boss thought that publisher was so awesome that he wanted to hire me.
Eventually, I got three books published through respectable presses.
All very nice…except I’ve never seen a penny in royalties from two of those books.
Later in life, I got an academic job.
Whoop…de…doop.
One of my academic colleagues and I did a little pragmatic research and discovered we would be earning more cleaning house for a living than the university was paying us at the associate professor level. In fact, we seriously considered going in together to start a house-cleaning business.
Would I do it again?
Hmmmm…. Probably not.
If I had gone whole hog into magazine publishing starting the minute I finished the bachelor’s degree, I would have had more fun in life; I would have had a lot more people reading my published words; I would have been paid a helluva lot more than I earned in academia; and I would never have been tempted to think about starting an enterprise as a cleaning lady.
Yes, I did climb in the car and turn on the ignition. About the time I got to the end of the driveway, a thought occurred: Why am I doing this???????
Got about 200 feet down the road…and then drove around the block, returned to the Funny Farm, parked the car, and proceeded back inside. Where I’ve been fairly happily ensconced ever since, except for a dog-walk or two.
Yes.
Thought:Hey, estúpida! What do you think you’re doing?
Human:Driving to the credit union and to the grocery store on…uhm…some road over there.
Thought:You’re kidding, right?
Human:Uhm…
Thought:Tell me you’re not serious. You’re REALLY going to drive FORTY MINUTES so as to avoid farting around with the accursed Internet for 10 or 15 minutes to deposit two measly checks?
Human:Well, but…
Thought:And this vaunted grocery store is on…WHAT road?
Human:I think it’s at 43rd and Peoria.
Thought:NO, you moron! That’s an Albertson’s, not a Fry’s. And it’s not even a halfway decent Albertson’s. It is, in a word, a CRUMMY store!
Human:Oh. Yeah. Well…but…
I gave up. It took less than 10 minutes to deposit $2500 worth of client monnaie online. This was good. There was plenty of food in the house: two chops from a rack of lamb; tiny delicious little beets to grill (this worked exceptionally well, BTW); excellent buttered spinach to heat, also on the grill. And half a bottle of wine.
Truly, I hate farting with the computer and the credit union’s website to deposit checks electronically. But…hate it SO MUCH that it’s worth driving 20 minutes to the CU, standing in line, and driving 20 minutes back?
Maybe not.
As for today’s proposed introduction to the midtown writer’s group: they meet weekly. The local Play-Nooz reported that the police and fire department are occupying lovely downtown Phoenix with a mock Emergency Response today…and that chivaree sounds like something to avoid.
So I decided to put that little marketing maneuver off for a week: Next Sunday, thankyouverymuch. This will give me time to schlep the printout of the current installment of Ella’s story down to the UPS store and put them up to making and stapling together 10 or 12 copies, rather than expending my own ink & paper for the purpose.
Hmmmmm… Lookee here: for $30, you can get 50 pens with your bidness name on them. 😀 The MO of these writer’s groups is that you hand out a few pages of your golden words and people critique the stuff. What if in addition to a sheaf of paper, you gave each person a pen with your editing outfit’s name and URL? 😀
Apparently this outfit will deliver in four or five days, which would get said little treat here by the end of the week if I ordered it today.
If ten people show up (that’s how many were signed up for this weekend), one order would last for five weeks. Lots more then 10 show up at the West Valley Writer’s Workshop, but there’d still be enough to hand out gift pens there and still supply one or two of the in-town meeting’s participants.
Putting it off for a week will also give time for me to get off my virtual duff and write a plot outline. One of the reasons (one of several reasons) this story has petered out is that I’ve been writing it like topsy, as it grows. Frankly, I have no idea where it’s going.
Well. I know where Ella’s recollected life on Zaitaf goes. But what happens on Varnis, where her currently lived experience is happening, is as much a mystery to me as it is to you. It’s topsy…I do need to cultivate that garden.
And speaking of uncultivated gardens, now I need to return to the client’s magnum opus…
So today’s conundrum — it’s huge, hyuuuge, I tellya! — is whether to dork around with scanning and uploading checks to the credit union or just to schlep them up there.
I need to pick up some groceries, too. The credit union is way over on the west side and the grocery stores where I would look for quality produce are way to the east or down to the south. And…few things do I hate more than driving around in Phoenix’s noxious traffic.
However…the other day I discovered a Fry’s (Kroger’s, for those in more civilized venues) over on West Peoria, conveniently on the way (more or less) to the credit union. The neighborhood is sketchy. But probably only a little more so than mine. It doesn’t look, at a glance, like the parking lot is too dangerous to walk across — and now that I no longer carry a purse slung over my shoulder, there’s relatively less risk of mugging.
So much do I dislike the scan/scan/crop/crop/upload/upload hoo-hah (x however many checks you have to deposit) that really…sometimes I’d actually rather drive all the way up to the CU and just fork the money over to a teller.
This is do-able when I have to go to a Costco, too — a decent Costco resides on that side of town, only about six or eight miles from the credit union. (Yeah…jolly, eh?) It’s also relatively safer than the one closest to where I live — although you’ll see a fake crippled vet sitting in a lawn chair holding up his sign at one of the entrances to the parking lot, you never run into anyone in the lot actively accosting you to panhandle.
Don’t need to make a Costco run, though. All that’s really needed is just enough produce to tide me over until next month’s Costco junket. Which, we might add, I would like to put off as long as possible.
Meanwhile, I need to meet people.
Do I want to meet people? Not especially. I’m happy enough here in my cave. Indeed, I’d be just as happy if the cave were in the side of a slab of southern Utah sandstone. But…I suppose, for one’s mental health, one needs to meet people.
Also, conveniently, I’ve discovered that folks who crave to be published writers will pay The Copyeditor’s Desk’s going rate of 4 cents a word, just to get me to read their golden copy and advise.
For the current client, what I’m doing, really, is instructing: essentially teaching the guy creative writing techniques at about the university sophomore of junior level. This is pretty easy for me…because of course it’s what I spent 15 years doing at the Great Desert University. It crossed my mind, as I was contemplating that project, that I could actually offer to teach people creative writing, along with editing their copy. And that would be worth paying 4 cents a word for.
Or more. Whatever the market would bear.
The problem is, I’d need to find folks who crave so much to give their golden words to the dark and the waiting sky that they’re willing to pay for the privilege.
Well, here in Amazon’s Self-Publishing Dystopia, the woodwork is crawling with writer’s groups, some small and some large. This weekend one meets downtown, at a coffeeshop associated with the Episcopal Cathedral — and one can (usually) park for free in the Cathedral’s lot.
To engage oneself with this group, one has to send in 1500 of one’s golden words for members to read and critique, and then print out a half-dozen copies for the purpose.
Do I want to do this?
Hm. The cave beckons (don’t leave me, humann!)
Well, I could send them the current chapter of Ella’s story, which no, I have not updated since I sank into the current slough of despond. It’s actually about 1800 words, if you count the blurb at the top. Close enough, I reckon.
How much explaining do I want to do, though? Do I seriously want to tell a passel of wannabe writers that I consider publishing stuff on Amazon to be a colossal waste of time and effort, and that I publish my stuff for free at my website, where it probably garners more readers than books on Amazon get? Do I really want to tell them that if you want to succeed as a writer you have to succeed as a marketer, and that if I wanted to spend my time marketing, I’d be making a decent living selling ad space for magazines, peddling cars for Toyota, or hawking refrigerators and stoves?
Not. so. much.
Well, I really don’t know. As you can see by the length of this squib, I’m having quite enough trouble bestirring myself to get off my duff and drive to a credit union & a grocery store.
So…yesterday I schlepped out to Tolleson, a far-flung suburb of shiny new elbow-to-elbow styrofoam-and-stucco housing tracts, to attend a meeting of the West Valley Writer’s Workshop.
This is a pretty good group, as hobbyist groups go, because its members are not all rank amateurs: Gale Leach, Ellen Buikema, Dharma Kelleher, Laura Kirwan, and this amazing guy whose name I don’t recall but who made himself a national name with his personal narrative/science book on the heart-lung transplant he managed to survive — all of these redoutable people and then some are very bright and competent writers with skills at a professional level.
This makes for an unusual writer’s group; normally these little clubs are full of people who have no clue what they’re doing, telling other people who do not know what they’re doing what they should do.
I haven’t attended for several months, because — truth to tell — I’ve developed such an aversion to driving in the Valley’s homicidal traffic that I haven’t been able to force myself to make the traipse. It’s an hour’s drive each way, unless you’re willing to drive on the freeway, in which case the drive (one-way) is 40 minutes. But I will no longer drive on the I-10, period: it’s just too damn dangerous. That highway is utterly unpatrolled. The only time you see a cop down there is when he’s cleaning up a wreck. Of which there are a-plenty. I’ve been cruising across that freeway at 80 mph and had people pass me like I was going 45. And half the drivers around here are either yapping on the phone or intoxicated on booze or drugs. Or stupidity: one could come to believe stupidity is itself an intoxicant.
The surface streets aren’t much better: on the way out there yesterday, I missed a wreck by about eight feet. But a crash at 40 miles an hour is a helluva lot more survivable than a crash at 80 miles an hour.
BUT…. But one of my current clients was a direct referral from Gale. This is a guy who did not even blink at my present per-word rate…something for which I was exceptionally grateful when the China Trade collapsed around my ears. I now have two book authors as clients, each of whom is paying enough to keep baby in shoes for awhile. So I figure I should trick out a flyer (done!), print out about 40 of ’em (done!), staple my business cards to the things (done!), and schlep them over there today to hand out to the eager wannabe writer masses.
Bob, the passionately dedicated guy who runs the thing, has no objection to shameless marketing, so when I arrive, I put a flyer at each seat along the assembled desks. This is good. I guess. Maybe.
But…except…but…
Yeah, but none of the usual suspects are there!Well, except for Bob, who emcees. Not only are none of the named talents present, neither are any of the other budding but highly creditable lights!
In their absence, this get-together devolves into a meeting of a more typical wannabe writer’s club: a lot of folks who have no idea what they’re doing advising other people who have no idea about what to do.
Don’t believe me? Think I’m too cynical? Okay, get this: one guy wanted to know how he could copyright his name, lest someone steal his by-line!
No. I kid you not. That was not a joke.
These meetings go on for three hours: noon to 3:00 p.m. Along about 1:30, I begin to wonder if there’s some way I can slip out unnoticed. Not a chance, of course. There’s not even a bathroom break that I could use to claim I have appendicitis and must away to the emergency room.
Finally, a little early (ten minutes to three), the meeting breaks up, and I fly out the door. Speaking of the which, it takes a full hourdoor-to-door to get back to the Funny Farm.
Was traipsing across the city to hand out 15 or 20 flyers worth the time and effort? Highly dubious. If you figure my hourly rate at right around $60 — which I think is about right — schlepping out there, sitting around, and schlepping back home cost me three hundred dollars! While it was indeed lovely to meet new people and excellent to see the redoubtable Bob in action again, I very much doubt that the five hours sunk into this effort will return that much in earnings.
El Niño has arrived, bringing with it a large, wet weather system: inches of rain in the desert and feet of snow in the high country. This is good, since the region has been enjoying a decades-long drought. A whole LOT of rain is in order.
SDXB had planned to drive into town from lovely Sun City but changed his mind upon peering out the window into the gloom. His decision was clinched when I remarked that I may have a cold. But am not sure. I’ve thought it was the usual allergies — pollen-laden plants are starting to grow, what with the rain we’ve already had this winter. That was why I was camped out at the Albertson’s yesterday, trying to extract a dozen Sudafed pills from the pharmacists. I’d already discovered that a Claritin just about disappeared the runny nose and the scratchy throat, indicating the issue was more allergic than viral. Today we’ll find out how true that is, since I just dropped half of a Sudafed. Much more than that and I’ll be awake for the rest of the year…but if the issue is actually an allergy, a small amount of pseudoephedrine will send it packing.
It is unusually cold here. Enough so that, for the first time in many years, windshields on cars left outside overnight are icing up.
A-n-n-n-d lest you think I exaggerate about Arizona’s legions of driving morons….
No kidding. One of them hopped in his car and charged off down the road, surprised and confused because he couldn’t see through his iced-up windshield. NOT surprisingly, he ran into a traffic-control box and put out all the stoplights for a mile or two around him.
It is impossible to exaggerate the number of morons who infest Arizona’s fine roads. 😀
So at any rate, with SDXB out of my hair today, the next 12 or 15 hours are cleared for work. We’re almost done with the Latina feminist journal — everything is finished except for one long article I farmed out to our new intern, who promises to turn the thing around soon. It’s a long and complicated thing, but I’ve already given it a read. I’ll merge her edits with mine, which will allow me to spot any changes she’s made that are different from mine, collate them, and come up with clean copy. Then it’s off to the editors with that magnum opus!
Two new works of Chinese science came in, both by urban infrastructure engineers. The articles are strangely interesting — the one in hand has to do with the dynamics of plumbing water all the way to the top of a tall high-rise, problem-free. Both are written in fairly dense Chinglish. To the natural difficulty of the subject matter, this feature adds the authors’ wrestling match with the weirdness of an alien language. And make no mistake about it: English is a weird language!
One of the Latina scholars has written an extraordinary story whose quality and interest are so high that, IMHO, she should be proposing a version (of the literary nonfiction variety) to The New Yorker. Most academics are not, when you come right down to it, very good writers. But this lady? She can write her way out of a paper bag. I intend to suggest to our editor that she encourage the woman to send a proposal to that august magazine and also to The Atlantic. Editors at either one, I suspect, would fall all over themselves to get a version of this story written in the mode of John McPhee. Which, we might add, this writer is fully capable of producing.
Ruby is lobbying for food. A clap of thunder rolled through. We must have food to soothe our doggy nerves. Water is falling out of the sky. We must mark that with food. We got wet running outside in the rain. We must dry off with food. The Human says we are a good and a cute and a wonderful dog. Clearly that must be celebrated with food.
Hm. Here’s some spam fromSmart Bitches, Trashy Books. This particular amusing website was the only market that sold the Racy Books we put out through the now defunct Camptown Races Press. It far outpaced Amazon. Occasionally, it even broke even. You have to pay to get your books up there. You’re certainly not likely to make a profit (unless you know a lot of somethings I don’t know). But if an ego trip is what you’re after (which, far as I can tell, is what most self-publishing authors ultimately come away with), there it is.
Speaking of authors…{sigh}…I suppose I’m going to be reduced to actually working, by way of making a few of them publishable.
Another week has blown past. The older you get, the faster time passes…remember when you were a little kid and an hour seemed like an eternity? Yeah…now it doesn’t even make it up to five seconds.
Finally managed to finish and post this week’s chapter of Ella’s Story. Slowing the post schedule for each bookoid — Ella, If You’d Asked Me, and The Complete Writer — from three a week to one a week was a good idea. That seems obvious in retrospect. But Asked and Writer are already written. And really, if I would get off the dime I could (in theory) write a chapter a week for Ella’s Story.
It’s just that, well…I’m not about to get off the dime. Too many distractions beckon, not the least of which is the doggy drama. One could say it’s not that I have too much to do but that I overly enjoy doing too little.
Right this minute, for example, the dryer buzzes angrily. Yesterday Cassie waddled over to the dog bed parked under the computer desk, dragged herself onto it, and…yeah. Squatted right there and pooped all over it. So much for writing. Get up, drag out the bed, clean up the mess, see that the dog is in a bad way, carry the dog outside to do its business, pick her up, carry her back inside…on and on it goes. Instead of doing this — right this minute — I should be dragging out the garbage, picking up the dog shit out of the back yard (again), cleaning the dog shit off my shoe from where I stepped in it this morning, taking down the leaking hummingbird feeder and power-washing the flagstone beneath it before the day gets warm enough to awaken the Ondt Queen’s hordes, drafting a kind of “g’day” email to send out to my missing clientele, returning to LinkedIn and rebuilding a presence there, starting to work more seriously on Drugging of America, putting a load of actual laundry in the washer, sneaking out with Ruby to squeeze in a mile’s walk, checking the pool chemicals, applying a coat of silicone lubricant to the rubber gasket on the pool’s pump basket, calling my friends to see how they’re settling into their new abode, downloading and entering data into Excel for the tax accountant…
Ugh! There’s the hangup: I hate hate HATE the job of entering day after day of income and expense data into a complicated spreadsheet. So, the chore becomes one of entering month after month of data… And, that, having been put off in a monthly fit of aversion, is going to take several long days of drudging away. I don’t want to do that, so…I don’t do anything. Because really, that should be the first priority (January being more than at hand…), and so of course I can’t do anything else before doing that. Can I?
Right…
I fail to see the point of recording every single goddamn transaction. Why can’t we enter tax-related transactions only? Income: sure. Medical-related expenses: yeah. Business expenses: of course. Property tax, state tax, and car registration: yep. Capital improvements on the house: yes. But come ON: every trip to Costco, Walmart, and Safeway? Every bottle of olive oil, loaf of bread, package of dog food? Seriously? Why is that necessary?
Obviously, for the business “tax-related” would mean every single transaction. But for the personal stuff, what is the point of entering dozens and even hundreds of transactions that are irrelevant for tax purposes? If all I recorded were income, medical and insurance expenses, charitable contributions, tax payments, capital improvements, investment income & expenses…wouldn’t that be quite enough? I mean, for godsake…we know what net worth is, and we know what net income/expense balance is: all we have to do is enter the bank balance at the beginning of the year, the bank balance at the end of the year, and figure the difference. Quickbooks downloads bank transactions and preserves them, in a clumsy way. Fidelity provides reports for all IRA and non-IRA investments. So…why are we doing this?
Add to the list of things to do today: Ask accountant why are we doing this.
Ruby just peed all over one of Cassie’s pee mats. Suspicions confirmed. Because Cassie has come un-house-trained, now Ruby figures she can forget that “outside” rubbish, too.
Cassie fell into a disturbing relapse yesterday. On her best days, she’s far from well. On a bad day? Well: disturbing.
She started having difficulty walking. The past few days, her chassis has just kind of given out: her hind legs either collapse or, on the slippery tiles, slide out from under her. Yesterday she was very weak, and by evening clearly was in pain. I dosed her with half a Benadryl and a baby aspirin at night, and by this morning she seems better.
Sometimes she becomes confused. A few minutes ago I found her standing in the office with her nose sticking into the bookcase. She seemed not to know how to disengage herself from this pose. More and more often, too, she goes outside, she looks around…and she appears mystified. Her expression and body language seem to say What is this place? Where am I and how did I get here?
So…that’s depressing. Yesterday I thought it was “Time,” but knowing she may spring back to at least a marginally acceptable state discourages me from whisking her off to the vet to be put down. And yea verily: this morning she’s not well, but she’s not in those desperate straits, either. Far as the human eye can discern.
I discovered that closing the doors to two of the bedrooms cuts down considerably on the excreta pick-up. Why? That is unclear. But without the freezer/crafts room floor and the spare bedroom floor to use as outposts of the doggy loo, they’re both more inclined to arf at the door when the mood beckons.
But Cassie really needs to be physically guided outside and reminded to do her business about once an hour. Sometimes, if she’s feeling feeble, this entails picking her up, carrying her out the door, toting her to the peeing ground, setting her down, and then picking her up and carrying her back inside. Besides the obvious joy entailed, this poses yet another problem:
SDXB is determined to get me to go on a day trip to Castle Hot Springs with him. So enthused is he about this expedition that he has engineered an entire party with his present girlfriend and one of his other ex-girlfriends., which he expects me to join. He now has this scheduled for early February.
The problem is…if Cassie doesn’t accommodate his plan by shuffling off this mortal coil before then, there’s no way I can go with them.
I can’t leave her with my son: he has a job. (Remember those?) I can’t leave her outdoors all day: for one thing, she’s always been an indoor dog, and for another, even if she were accustomed to spending hours out of doors, it’s too cold now for that.
So…uhm… I really don’t quite know what to say… “Sure, I’ll come along if my dog is dead by then”?
The Ph.D. may (or may not) be worth pursuing…if you have an independent source of income.
No kidding. One of them hopped in his car and charged off down the road, surprised and confused because 
