Does anyone here have an MA or PhD in Lit? How hard was it? What

>>8744743

The most challenging thing for many MA/PhD candidates is time management. A lot of this depends on how rigorous your undergrad program was, as well as what opportunities the grad program gives you (fellowship, teaching assistantship, or straight loans). Many new grad students spend that first year trying to learn the expectations and manage their course loads, classwork, and research. If you can do that, writing seminar papers and working on a thesis/dissertation is usually doable.

>Work
Most programs usually have 12cr terms, where you have two graduate courses (lit, theory, rhet/comp, whatever) and thesis hours. You may also be expected to teach 1-3 courses, help in a writing center, or conduct research for a faculty member. This is largely dependent on the program, as well as what kind of offer you receive.

>Teaching
The job market is very saturated. If you love teaching after an MA or PhD, you will likely be adjuncting somewhere (maybe multiple places) for fairly low wages, or accepting a lecturer position (4/4 teaching load) in a town that might not be your first choice. Many of those I know who pursued MAs ended up going back to school for the PhD because it wasn't a terminal degree. A significant amount of folks also pursued careers outside academia, like copywriting.

Source: MFA graduate with many colleagues and friends who did MAs and PhDs. Feel free to ask more questions if you want.

>>8744822
Thank you!

Is most your time spent on researching your thesis or actually writing it? Are professors usually flexible on thesis topic or do they have strict rubrics? Quality wise, what do professor expect from your final work? (say I'm going to a state school rather than a private Uni)

>>8744743
Yes. The MA was fairly easy, the PhD was very hard, and there are essentially no tenure-track positions left (over 200 qualified applicants compete for every posting, so unless you're top of the game and well-published before graduation with awards and honors, forget it).
I teach adjunct at two universities now, and have no job security, no benefits, a constantly-changing schedule with no income for months, and make less than a McDonald's manager per year, after over a decade of post-secondary school. So, suit yourself.

>>8744868
If I can get my PhD I could make near 60k teaching in a Public High School in my area. Are you saying I'd be better off if I did that and then tried to get some work published to maintain credibility?

>>8744878
Not really. While it's true that a teacher in a public school with a doctorate makes a lot of cash, school boards are very reluctant to hire you for that same reason (they're blowing three teachers' salaries on you, and they can't afford that). If you want to go public, start with just the B.Ed, and once you have a permanent position, upgrade to MA and get the pay boost (they'll have to give it to you then) and never get a PhD, it's just not worth the pain. Publications are an immense time drain for free, and only worth doing if your job applications or department demands include it. Otherwise, just do one or two early on (preferably before you are teaching FT). The school board doesn't care.

>>8744852

The time you spend on your thesis largely depends on your program, advisor, as well as yourself, I think (all coming back to time management). Many of my MA friends in my program were able to use some of their papers from their seminars as 'chapters' in their theses. This does depend on what the thesis topic actually is, of course. One of my friends wrote a thesis on Blood Meridian and was able to use three 15pp papers in his, while a lady colleague of mine switched her focus to Native American literature and had to write hers from scratch during her final year, because our program didn't offer any classes with that type of material then.

MA students usually write their thesis during their second year of school while wrapping up their studies, unless they are lucky to receive a fellowship for another year, or have a program that allots a 'thesis' year for writing with little to no classes. PhD students pass their qualifying exams at the end of the second year, and work on the dissertation in years 3-6 (depending on program) while usually teaching a somewhat heavy course load.

What you decide as your thesis is usually a collaboration between you and your advisor, and it's very dependent on what type of person that is and what initial ideas you bring to the table. Thesis proposals usually approach a text (or series of texts) with an angle that isn't typically common, but has some backing literature or theory to support that type of close reading, if that makes sense.

>Quality
The expectation from my program was that candidates were expected to produce a body of work that was "near-publishable quality." I'm sure people could argue for a while as to what that means, but in the case of my MFA, it was expected that my thesis stories could conceivably be published in reputable literary magazines after graduation, or be very close to that stage (essentially ready once thesis defense commentary was applied to the work). MAs could publish chapters as individual papers, PhDs would be preparing a longer monograph, etc. As I've mentioned, experience varies from program to program, but I received my BA from a Big 10 school and the MFA from a Pac-12 institution, so that appears to be the norm across state schools.

This is an interesting thread, given that I'm someone who is looking at a PhD in another subject/field.