Hello everyone, unfortunately, I have bad news, which is that I have been informed that the classics PhD program at the University of Washington has made their two offers of funding for this year to other applicants. I am on the waitlist for funding, but I don’t know where I am on the list at present. Neither of the offer holders for funding this year has officially accepted their offer yet, but, based on what I’ve been told, it sounds like all signs indicate that they will both most likely accept. I cannot afford to accept my offer of admission to the program without funding. Meanwhile, so far, none of the seven other PhD programs I applied to this year have made me any offers of admission and, at this point, it is late enough in the season that it seems unlikely that any of them will, so the unfunded offer for UW is most likely the only one I will receive this year.
Thus, unless something unexpectedly good happens, it appears most likely that, yet again, I will not be going into a PhD program this year. This is my third time applying to PhD programs in classics and ancient history and I haven’t gotten in anywhere any time I have applied. I doubt that it would be worth applying a fourth time, since my odds won’t be much better next year than this year. This most likely means that I will not be going into a PhD program at all. By this point, I know enough about the application process to understand that a lot of random and arbitrary factors influence these decisions, that it is mostly a matter of luck, and that it is not in any way a reflection on my talent or abilities, but that doesn’t do much to change how I feel.
Becoming a professor of the classics has been my dream ever since I was in middle school and it is what I have (very foolishly) built all my plans and life decisions around for roughly the past thirteen years. I have known for a long time that it was very unlikely that I could achieve that dream given the current state of the academic job market. Now it appears that the dream is definitely over. As you can all probably imagine, I feel very disappointed, frustrated, and disillusioned about this whole process, about academia, and about the world in general. I planned to make this post a week ago after I first found out, but I’ve put it off until now out of shame and embarrassment.
This means that I need to find a new career path and a job. I’m in basically the exact same situation I was in last year, only this time for the long haul. I had a part-time job as a fully remote research assistant to my former master’s thesis advisor throughout summer and fall of last year, for which my main task was copyediting the forthcoming Oxford Critical Guide to Homer’s Odyssey. That job paid enough to bring in some income, but not nearly enough to cover rent on my apartment in Waltham. Since I graduated with my master’s degree last May, I had no compelling reason to stay there, so I decided not to renew my lease when it was set to expire and to move back to Indiana. I have been living in my old bedroom at my parents’ house since last August.
Now the copyediting project is finished, so I don’t even have that anymore. This blog is now my only source of income and it isn’t making nearly enough to support a living for anyone. I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to do now with the life I have left ahead of me. I feel very lost and uncertain. If anyone has any ideas, opportunities, or connections, I am interested.
My best chance of finding a job with my degrees and skills is probably as a high school Latin or history teacher. While I was in the master’s program, I worked as a course assistant all four semesters and had the opportunity to teach some class sessions on my own; I really enjoyed it and even won an award from the classics department for my outstanding work.
I know that high school teaching is completely different from university teaching and I have been warned repeatedly to stay away from it. Nonetheless, I know that, since I only have a master’s degree and not a PhD, I am not competitive even for adjunct jobs at the university level. High school teaching is much more stable and pays much better than university adjunct positions and, at this point, I doubt I’d be able to find a job doing anything else on the current job market. I applied to jobs last summer in university lecturing, copyediting, university admin, and online content writing, but I didn’t have any luck. I don’t have many connections or work experience outside of academia and all my skills are very academic-oriented.
I have thought about starting a YouTube channel for years now, which might at least bring in more money than this blog is currently making, but I don’t know anything about video-editing and, to tell the truth, I’m afraid to do it.
I said in my previous update that I feel less of a need to impress strangers than I used to. That is true, but it is only part of the story. The truth is that I’ve always struggled with poor self esteem. Now, three rounds of rejection from PhD programs, my failed search for a job last summer, and other experiences in my life have also taken a significant toll on the confidence I had previously built up by performing exceptionally in my classes, impressing my professors and classmates, and winning praise online by writing heavily researched posts on Quora and for this blog.
I’ve realized that part of the reason why I don’t feel as much of a desire to post online anymore is because I realize that most of the people who have praised the posts I’ve written on this blog are only praising them because they have very limited knowledge of the ancient world themselves and they find anyone with more knowledge than them impressive. It just means that I know more than most people; it doesn’t mean that I am anything close to a real expert.
I feel increasingly that I know far less than I once thought I did. Part of me feels that I don’t really know enough to be qualified to write this blog and that I’ve just deluded myself and others for years into thinking I was far more intelligent and knew far more than I really did. I know that this is partly imposter syndrome, but part of the reason why, for the past couple of years, I have been reading and studying heavily on my own instead of writing for a public audience as much as I used to is because I feel that my knowledge isn’t deep enough and I want to become as truly knowledgeable as I can through self-study.
I have also grown increasingly afraid to post online, in part because I worry about how my posts—especially those about controversial or political topics—could potentially negatively impact my applications to PhD programs and now my nascent job search. At numerous points in the past couple of years, I have either written or started to write posts dealing with controversial subjects only to abandon writing them out of fear of what kind of impression that having them publicly visible at the top of this blog could have on members of an admissions or hiring committee. I only wrote about those topics before because I was a student and I wasn’t as worried about such things.
My most marketable skills are that I am extremely good at writing, speaking, and communication, I have a very strong memory for facts and strong attention to detail, I have strong critical reasoning abilities, and I am very good at humanistic research. (I also have an encyclopedic knowledge of world history, literature, philosophy, and religions, but I’m afraid that doesn’t count very much outside of academia.)
I worry that these are no longer marketable skills or that they will not remain marketable for much longer, since these are the same skills that Big Tech markets AI as having. In reality, I know well that AI isn’t nearly as good at any of these things as the marketing hype portrays it as being and I still believe that I am significantly better at all of them than AI is currently, but AI is faster and cheaper than a human, we are constantly told that it is rapidly improving, and I don’t know how much longer I or any other human will be able to compete with it in terms of quality. I am only twenty-five and I most likely have many years of work ahead of me. Will there still be any career possibilities for me in five years, ten years, forty years—other than cleaning toilets for the tech billionaires who own and rule everything?
I know that anything I post online in any form on any platform will inevitably be scraped and used to train generative AI models. By posting content online, I am therefore only helping to train the machines that corporations are already using to replace human workers. I know that these machines will only continue to train regardless of what I do or don’t do and there is nothing I can do to stop them, but, emotionally, ethically, and instinctively, I feel averse to helping them—or at least averse to helping them unless I am paid a great deal more than what I currently make off Google AdSense for this blog, which is very little.
As I’ve said before, I don’t want to give up writing about the ancient world for a public audience. There are still many things about it that I enjoy, but I am currently in a phase in which it is much harder for me to write and post online than it used to be.
In the meantime, I’ve continued working hard on my novel, Mother of the Gods. I’ve poured so much of my knowledge, heart, and soul into this book and it has become so many things: a myth retelling unlike any that is currently on the market, an attempt at a historically realistic portrait of life in Classical Athens through the eyes of an OCD autistic sapphic woman, a work of social criticism, a reflection on the mundane horror and suffering of existence in a cruel and capricious universe, and much else.
The novel critiques many aspects of ancient society and, by implication, modern western societies. This has been an element of the story since the very beginning, but it has taken a somewhat stronger tone in the months since the 2024 U.S. election. From the beginning, I wanted to reproduce the ancient belief that capricious divine forces were at work in the world by including the ambiguous possibility of divine agents influencing events in the story. As I have made progress, the potentially supernatural elements of the story have grown. Nothing that violates the laws of nature or physics occurs in the novel, but the concatenation of very unlikely events does seem to tip the scale in favor of actual divine influence.
I am more personally invested in writing this novel than anything else I have ever written. Writing it is sometimes grueling, but it has given me a sense of purpose over the past year like nothing else. It still needs significant work, but I think it is really taking shape and I sincerely hope that I will be able to publish it for my audience to read. I have shared the first third of it, which is relatively polished at this point, with my cousin, who is also a writer, and he really likes it, even though it is not his usual genre. Everyone else with whom I have shared parts of it has found it very exciting.
Dear Spencer:
Your novel sounds extremely interesting and I can’t wait to read it when it becomes available (in whatever form).
Teaching seems like a good idea or perhaps even librarianship or archival work. Your story makes me wish for the days when artists had patrons, though I realize those situations were not ideal either.
Things are tough these days. You are not alone. May the powers that be look favourably on you, may the stars align, may the tides turn. Your work has meant a lot to me and I’m sure to many here. We are rooting for you.
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Unfortunately, it’s very unlikely that I could land a position as a librarian, since all the librarian positions require at least a master’s degree specifically in library science, which I don’t have. Even then, there are far more people with master’s degrees or PhDs in library science who want to work as librarians than there are openings for them to fill; it’s just as competitive as academia. Museum curator positions are the same way; they all require at least a master’s degree specifically in museum studies and are extremely competitive. One of my roommates during my first year in the classics MA program actually had a master’s degree in museum studies and still couldn’t land any kind of curator position anywhere.
There are some jobs in libraries and museums that I would be eligible for, but they are all part-time, menial-labor or customer-service types of roles such as working at the front desk selling tickets or at the help desk or as a gallery attendant where you just stand there all day and tell people not touch things. Those jobs usually don’t pay nearly enough where I could afford to live in an apartment on my own; I’d either have to continue living with my parents or live with probably multiple roommates. They also have little or no potential to lead into better roles. Even for those positions, there aren’t a lot of openings. Last year, I actually applied for a position at the public library in my hometown (the only one I could find there), but I didn’t get it.
On top of all that, many local governments in red states like Indiana are defunding public libraries and, as a result, many libraries are either closing or just barely hanging on. Part of the reason why I don’t think it would be worth it to pursue a master’s in library science is because it’s a professional degree with a tuition cost and there’s a fairly strong likelihood that there won’t be any libraries left to work in five or ten years from now.
Spencer, you have absolutely nothing to feel shame or embarrassment about. Many years ago I screwed up badly at school, and I *did* have cause to feel humiliated, as it was purely though my own laziness and cluelessness. It ruined any chance of a career for several years. In the end it was the making of me, and if I could go back to that time now I wouldn’t change a thing.
You’re feeling low now, and that’s allowed. Hang in there, start looking for new possibilities when you’re ready. They’re out there. Best of luck with the novel in the meantime.
Dear Spencer,
I admire the strength of conviction and the clarity with which you wrote this vulnerable post. In addition to teaching at a HS level, might I suggest reaching out to Community Colleges, if your area has any? I come from a CC background, and there were many competent teachers with MAs that helped guide a ton of non-traditional students through their academic careers.
As for the YouTube path, I would encourage it. I understand a need to be (somewhat) anonymous, so you could be one of the many faceless content creators who post videos. Along with having a YouTube channel, or in addition to it, would you consider podcasting? I listen to a few podcasts and have grown to appreciate the work they put in.
Finally, have you considered something like a Patreon? I would genuinely look into it, as someone with your talent and ability to reach the masses. I know that I would personally be happy to contribute towards your research around your posts. Also, an advantage of Patreon is that it could be used in parallel to some of the other suggestions mentioned.
Regardless, I am wishing you all the best!
I actually already have a Patreon, which you can find here. I haven’t advertised it much and I don’t really offer benefits to patrons, partly because, for most of the history of this blog, I’ve just been writing for my own enjoyment and didn’t really have plans to turn this blog into a living or anything and I don’t really know what benefits to offer. I created it because, a few years ago when I was writing more frequently, I had a lot of people asking where they could join my Patreon assuming that I had one and I reasoned that, if people wanted to send me money, I would be happy to create a way for them to do it.
If I do start a YouTube channel, then I will show my face. I think it is better when a channel has a name and a face attached to it because it helps create a sense of personal connection with the audience. Also, using my real name and stating my credentials (since I do have a master’s degree in this subject, after all) gives the audience a reason to trust me. Lastly, I can be a rather charismatic presentational speaker and the physical presence is an important part of speaking. If I do start a channel, I would plan to follow the model of educational channels like Religion for Breakfast with Dr. Andrew Mark Henry, Esoterica with Dr. Justin Sledge, Let’s Talk Religion with Filip Holm, Jackson Crawford, etc.
I applied to some community college positions last year, but I didn’t get any of them. Most of the listings I’ve seen in the humanities are adjunct positions that probably won’t lead anywhere long-term.
Have you thought about crowdfunding for even some initial student funding? Yes it is basically but you might have luck.
I’m sure you’ve also heard of Professor Jeanne Reames at the University of Omaha, Nebraska Dept of Ancient History and Classics. She posts on Tumblr and has written about ‘imposter syndrome’. Maybe she can give you some advice or a new direction.
As for teaching, hell on earth. My husband is a retired teacher. But consider Robin Water field, a British classical scholar. After his degree, he didn’t go for a PhD, he taught classics in high school and kept on writing books and articles. He kept up contact with other classical scholars and is now a respected published writer.
You’re a smart cookie. There is a life out there for you my dear.
I’ve admired you and your blog for years and continue to do so! Academia sounds soul-crushing and I wish you the best as you explore other options. (side note, my small town high school English teacher (our graduating class 2002 was 35 kids) went on to become a professor at the University of Alaska, so if you enjoy teaching, I know things are possible in the right market/time period)
There is a lot of change and uncertainty in this time, but one benefit is that people can more easily support small independent creators through platforms like Patreon, Youtube, etc. Some of my favorite Youtube videos are historians like you giving commentary on popular films, etc. I’ve noticed some of the creators I follow moving to sending newsletters or having private Discords, etc to have a more privacy (and hopefully screening from AI training?) while still being able to share their work with the public.
I’m very sorry to learn about the probable absence of funding for your PhD studies, and your (understandable) feelings of disappointment and uncertainty.
As for your personal sense of inadequacy, I cannot see why it would be warranted. My own opinion is hardly more than that of a (however avid) amateur, but your work has been praised by Bret Devereaux and no doubt other genuine scholars, and you are recognised for your expertise on AskHistorians as well. As you note yourself, getting an academic position is mostly a matter of luck at this point, so there is no reason to beat oneself about it. And if one may be a bit crass about it, can any of us really expect to be a world-class expert in a subject? I think anyone should be proud of possessing your brilliance and vast knowledge, even if others are yet more accomplished. I can say that you are much more qualified than the great majority who discuss the ancient world online.
Which brings me to a suggestion. Since you mention your lack of income, your worries about writing on controversial topics, and your discomfort with your writing being used for AI training, have you considered making some posts available via subscription? Though for selfish reasons I prefer things to be publicly available, it seems to me that many writers have a successful business model on places like Substack with some of their texts freely readable and others behind a paywall. If you feel like you lack skills in video-editing, and confidence in appearing in a more personal format, I would maybe not recommend trying to make Youtube into a career. You also appear to me as the kind of person who best expresses themselves in writing.
In short, I think you are badly underrating yourself and your accomplishments!
Don’t worry.
Life is not designed only by our own desires.
It takes unexpected turns.
Dear Spencer,
No reason to feel ashamed or embarrassed.
Reason only to be proud of your work and your accomplishments.
I think of my Classics Professor at Oberlin College in 1954, Charles Theophilus Murphy. He graded papers according to the number of quotes from the works we read in translation. If I recall correctly, Professor Murphy favored Gilbert Murray’s translations—I suspect that yours would be better.
One day, seeking to improve my grades, given an assignment to comment on Antigone, I included this parody:
“Shall Zeus, the gatherer of clouds above,
Approve the legal edict of the state
When it becomes the rule of hate?
Or shall he bless instead the nobler law of love?”
Professor Murphy did not detect the authorship.
Oh yes, I remember now. We were assigned poetry, and it was Theognis who wrote a poem, “Be Versatile, My Kyrnos.”
That called for another parody:
“Be unctuous, my Oliver, make friends
Of fools and philistines to suit your ends.
Study the bold chameleon where he crawls
In false humility, and truth appalls.
Grasp every greasing, copy every ooze;
Where folly flowers, wisdom weeds need use.”
Maybe it would sound better if translated into ancient Greek. I’ll bet you could do go a good job. Get some parchment, take it to a chemist who can age it, inscribe your translation, and present it as your discovery. If confronted, I’ll knit my brow, disclaim authorship and say, “It’s all Greek to me.”
I wish I were rich enough or influential enough to help you thrive in a world that is less than welcoming.
Consider this a recommendation for any job or appointment you seek.
Yours,
Danny