I was in a meeting the other day with some teachers from around the country, and one of them mentioned that her niece was on her way to begin graduate study in English. I mentioned that it’s a tough choice, but she countered that the school she will attend recruited her with a trip to campus, nice dinners and lunches, tours of the grounds, and a nice display of resources.
That sure is a far cry from my experience, and it’s impossible not to slide into a “when I was a kid, things sure were a lot harder” riff. It was true, though, at least at state universities back then.
I started at UCLA in the early 80s, being admitted to the master’s program without any support. I just had to manage “registration fees” of around $1,000 a year. Books were expensive, but I could find most of them in the library. I had a 1967 Dodge Dart in decent condition, and L.A. had lots of cheap tenements if you got away from Westwood, Brentwood, and Beverly Hills. (Santa Monica had rent control, and it was well-nigh impossible to find a place.)
Still, it was a struggle to get by. I was so into the work — and frightened of the written qualifying exams, which had a high “fail” rate — that I treated any other work as a danger. It was a zero-sum game. I needed money to pay the rent, but felt that every hour working at this job or that took an hour away from Romantic poetry and Italian 101 and critical theory.
But rent was due, and paychecks had to come from somewhere.
As an undergrad, I spent two summers selling the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner racing sheet at the Del Mar Racetrack, trying to save for the next year and keep away from the betting windows.
The summer before strarting the program, I worked as a group leader at a summer camp for kids that alternated between Malibu, Marina del Rey, and Paradise Cove (which you can see in the credits to the old show with James Garber, “The Rockford Files,” but whose pier was, I think, taken out by storms a few years later). It helped that I lived for free in the empty A-E-Phi house across the street from campus, serving as caretaker and doing errands for the house mother. It sounds lovely, but handling 12-year-olds from Bel Air and Beverly Hills when they acted up and regarded you as the hired help wore thin by Friday.
I helped a young architect in Venice Beach market his business for a few weeks. I stopped when I realized he didn’t have any money to pay me.
I served one professor as research assistant, and learned a lot about doing your homework right.
I did a short stint as an assistant to a “first-call man,” a job perhaps few people here may recognize. Suffice it to say that when we entered a hospital we wore dark suits and evoked uncomfortable glances from the staff.
After a few years, the odd jobs ended as third- and fourth-year students could make out by teaching freshman comp classes. They paid around $900 a month, which on the quarter system worked out to around $3K per class. No travel funds, no research funds. Certainly nobody was expected to give papers at conferences. If you went to the faculty and said, “May I have some help with travel to deliver a paper at the American Studies Association annual meeting?” they would have replied, “You? You’re a graduate student. C’mon.”
Can you imagine saying that today?
2 Responses to Trudging 10 Miles Through Snow to School …
zizzer - August 25, 2009 at 9:28 am
I had a very similar grad school experience. My field at that time was art. I applied to four schools. I rejected one becuase they accepted me without seeing a portfolio. I knew that I would not get a quality education there. The other were more competitive, and certainly wasn’t “courted” by anyone. I too had to pay the bills and worked a mish-mash of assistanships and part time jobs. At one time my wife, who was also a grad student in art, and I had nine jobs between us just to make ends meet and fund our schooling. The only “guarantee” we were given about jobs was that, if we went the teaching route, it would be a lot of hard work to secure one and more hard work to keep it. If we had tried to make a living as artists it guaranteed hard work and irregular income all the time. I am in library science now.
22235928 - August 26, 2009 at 9:46 am
Since we are telling our tales, I’ll throw mine in. I am a later-in-the-game, relatively recent recipient of a masters in history. I went back to school at age 32, walking to and from for four years, and really did walk uphill both ways (I had to cross a viaduct). Finished the BA and started grad school, 113 miles from home and commuted to and from each day. It took nine years to get everything done, because I was married, bought a house, a puppy, served as the pastor of a church, worked numerous jobs, adopted two newborns in separate and completely unrelated adoptions, served in several offices in our church organization and slept a little. If something is worth doing – it’s hard. But the effort put in increased the value of the result.