Category: meta

Hello everyone! I am about to begin my third week of law school classes. I have been gradually acclimating myself to this new field of study. So far, my classes are going well, and I’ve found that I’m actually kind of enjoying the material. My knowledge of Latin and premodern history have even proven useful on a few occasions! For instance, in my torts class last week, we read and discussed I de S et ux. v. W de S, a 1348 English Court of Assizes case that is preserved in the Liber Assisarum et Placitorum Corone (Book of Assizes and Appeals to the Crown). I had a lot of fun in class explaining the Year Books, late medieval English scribal practices, how to interpret medieval Latin shorthand, and the common law doctrine of coverture and how it limited married women’s ability to sue in court. (I also covered the facts, procedural history, reasoning, and holding of the case.)

I have been continuing to read and study history, literature, and philosophy for my own edification in the available time I have, and I do plan to continue making posts on this blog when I am able to do so. That being said, my available time for writing is limited because I have a lot of reading, studying, and writing for class to do and, inevitably, my schoolwork must take priority over this blog. I am hoping to make at least one post about actual historical content per month going forward, but we will see how well I hold to that.

In the meantime, I am also continuing to work on my novel in progress, Mother of the Gods. Progress on the novel has been slow recently due to my limited available time, but I do not intend to abandon it, and I did spend a few hours working on it just last week.

Hello everyone, I’m sorry that I haven’t written much the past few months. I have been seriously rethinking my career plans ever since I did not get into a PhD program last year and have been doing so even more since I learned that I will not be admitted to a classics PhD program with funding this year either. For at least a decade now, I’ve known that it was extraordinarily unlikely that I would ever land a tenure-track professorship in ancient history, but I was just so stubbornly, stupidly committed to it that I was unwilling to give it up and pursue an actually realistically viable career path.

At this point, though, my thinking has changed. I’ve realized that I can’t keep wasting my life on something that has virtually no chance of ever turning into a stable living. The odds of landing long-term employment as an academic ancient historian are so low and so random that pursuing a PhD with that goal is like betting one’s future prospects of employability on rolling sixes on a die six times in a row. Under normal circumstances, we wouldn’t call that a career plan; we’d call it a gambling addiction.

Instead of going into a PhD program, I’ve decided to go to law school and become a lawyer. This was not an easy decision to make. Before I made it, I spoke to a professional career counselor, I reached out to three different practicing attorneys who work in different areas of law and a current law student at IU Bloomington, all of whom very generously agreed to speak to me, and had long conservations with them about what law school and legal practice are like. I did a lot of reading and research on my own, I had many conversations with my parents, and I spent many weeks thinking it over.

The truth is that I’ve been interested in the law for a long time and it is a career that is well suited to my skills and interests. Even back when I was in high school, my father and several of my teachers encouraged me to become a lawyer, but, at the time, I just couldn’t see myself as one, mostly because I was already certain that I wanted to be an ancient history professor.

I made the decision to apply to law school in April of this year. By that time, the deadlines for this year for most programs were already passed and the next offering of the LSAT was not until June 7th (after even the latest of all the deadlines), but I managed to find a way around this, since the IU Bloomington Maurer School of Law has recently started accepting the GRE as a substitute for the LSAT and had a late application deadline this year of June 1st. As it happens, I took the GRE one time without studying four years ago when I was preparing to apply to PhD programs the first time and got a perfect score (170 out of 170, 99th percentile) on the verbal reasoning section. My scores are still valid, so I sent them in and submitted my application to Maurer in May. On Thursday of last week, I received official notice that I have been admitted and that I have also received a merit-based scholarship covering part of the tuition for the program. I have now accepted my offer of admission and signed a lease for an apartment in Bloomington. Orientation is on August 13th.

Continue reading “Well, I’m Going to Law School”

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.

Continue reading “Update (February 28th, 2025)”

Hello everyone! Amid all the awful and distressing events that continue to batter our world each day, I do have some tentative good news pertaining to my personal future, which is that—after four years, three rounds of applying, and a total of eighteen applications—I have finally received my very first real, official offer of admission into a PhD program. Last week, I received an email informing me that I have been admitted to the PhD program in classics at the University of Washington in Seattle. This is a good sign, but I am not celebrating too much this early because I do not yet know whether this offer will be funded, since the department is still in the process of discussing funding. If the offer is not funded, then I will most likely not be able to accept it. The University of Washington is one of the eight total programs that I have applied to for the current application cycle; so far, I have not received any official decision from any of the seven other programs.

In the meantime, I am still working very hard on the novel I am writing. At this point, I think that the first half or so of the book is generally well polished. The current draft is 80,000 words and, as I’ve said before, I am expecting the final draft to be somewhere between 100,000 to 110,000 words. I still have a significant amount of material left to write (around 30,000 to 40,000 words concentrated in the later part of the book) and I still have quite a bit of polishing to do on what I have written of the later chapters, but I am making progress.

Continue reading “Update (February 5th, 2025)”

Hello everyone and happy New Year! I am still working very hard on my novel and making progress on it, although progress in recent months has been slower than I had hoped. Despite being focused on writing my novel, I have also been working on a few drafts of posts for this blog, which I will hopefully post in the not-too-distant future.

I am also now waiting to hear back from the PhD programs that I applied to. Although it is still very early, the Graduate Group in Ancient History at Penn has already asked to interview me for their program. This is an encouraging sign, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that I will get into that program (or any other program), since they have invited me for an interview both previous times I’ve applied and I have not received an offer of admission either time. So far, I have not heard anything from any of the other programs.

Hello folks! I am about to apply to PhD programs again for a third and final time this year, so I am currently working on my applications. In the meantime, I am also continuing to work on the historical fiction novel that I already announced that I am writing, which is still progressing, although it is going slower than I hoped it would be at this point.

I had intended to write posts this fall discussing the reception of classical antiquity in the Netflix series Kaos and the movies Megalopolis and Gladiator II. I wrote the majority of a post about Kaos, but I never finished it and, by this point, the series has already been cancelled and I think that the public has already moved on from it, so I doubt anyone would care about my thoughts on the series at this point. Meanwhile, Megalopolis and Gladiator II both mainly involve reception of Roman history, rather than Greek, and, from what I’ve seen, both have received mostly negative reviews, so I haven’t worked up the motivation to see either of them yet, let alone write about them. If any readers are still interested in my thoughts about these pieces of reception in media, let me know in the comments below.

I am, however, very excited about seeing The Return, which is a film set for theatrical release tomorrow that is based on the second half of the Odyssey (the half after Odysseus has arrived back on Ithaka that modern adaptations rarely devote much attention to). I promise that I will post something about it after I’ve seen it, but I may not get it posted until after December 15th, which is when the first round of PhD applications are due.

Hello everyone! I apologize again for my lack of recent posts. I am still devoting most of my available writing time to working on my novel, which is slowly, but surely, progressing. I am no longer confident that I will have a complete draft by the end of 2024 due to the amount of revising I have been doing, but I am still expecting to have a complete draft by sometime in early 2025. Regarding this blog, I have had a post about Netflix’s Kaos saved as a draft for months now, but I still haven’t finished it. I am also hoping to make posts about Gladiator II and The Return, which are both coming out in the next few weeks. I have also been seriously considering the idea of trying to start a YouTube channel for a while now, but I know very little about video editing, I’ve been focused on my novel, and I haven’t gotten around to it.

Like many Americans and others around the world, I am filled with despair over the results of the 2024 U.S. elections. I thought about writing posts about the election both before and after it happened, but I feel so burned out over modern politics right now that I couldn’t bring myself to write them. Even so, I want to let all my readers know that I am currently safe and, although I expect that the situation in the United States will become much worse over next four years, I believe that I will be personally relatively insulated from the worst of it.

Related to this, I would like to announce that I am planning to delete my Twitter account in the near future, partly because I don’t like Elon Musk making money off of me and partly because the site itself has become so toxic and completely overrun with pro-Trump ads, right-wing extremist and Neo-Nazi accounts, and AI and cryptocurrency grifters that it is virtually unusable. The vast majority of the people whose content I was actually interested in have already left. The good news for those who want to follow me on social media, though, is that I already have an account of BlueSky. My handle on that site is @spencermcdaniel.bsky.social. If you want to follow me on social media, you can follow me there.

In the meantime, I am still planning to apply to PhD programs for the third time next month. This time, I am going to apply to more programs than I did the first two times and hope that I will have better luck.

I apologize again for my dearth of recent posts. I am hoping to get at least one real post published before the end of this month and eventually to get back to posting more regularly. There are various reasons why I haven’t been posting as much lately as I used to, but a major part of the reason is because over the past few months, I have been doing an enormous amount of reading and I have been devoting nearly all my writing time toward working intensely on the historical fiction novel I have in progress.

As of the time I am writing this update, I currently have over 36,500 words (110 pages) of the novel written. I previously had even more written, but, as I discuss below, I decided to cut the entire second part of the novel, which made my current draft much shorter than the previous one. My target length for the first complete draft is between 75,000 and 90,000 words, so I am a little less than halfway finished. Although the book has been through a few different titles in the time I’ve been working on it and the title may end up changing before it is finally published, the current working title is Mother of the Gods.

Continue reading “An Update on My Novel in Progress (June 25th, 2024)”