Pomp and Circumstance

Today is graduation day at the University of Mississippi. It's the first time I've been in town for it (I usually leave for the beach right after grades are turned in in May), and it's got me thinking about the whole thing. Technically, my wife is graduating today, making her MA official. She decided not to walk, and I don't blame her. MAs are strange degrees. I understand why they would be useful for someone like a public school teacher--an advanced degree in the area of your specialization would be useful for your own information, not to mention the pay bump most public school teachers get when they have an MA. And they're also useful for disciplines that don't have a PhD, like Creative Writing. But other than that, why even have it?

I think the answer to that question is that it gets you ready for the PhD. Honestly, there's no way I could have done this PhD thing straight out of undergrad. I went to a great college, majored in a field that the university has a top-notch graduate program for, and I would have been completely lost in a PhD program if I started it straight from a BA. I needed the MA to learn how to think like a literary scholar, and I think that's the usefulness of an MA. At a liberal-arts university, you learn a lot of different things. Your major is supposed to give you a specialization, but it really doesn't. If you don't think so, consider how many people who major in biology or poli-sci and still don't get through the first year of med school or law school. It's because it's a completely different world (in my field's jargon, a different discourse). So the MA gets you ready for that. Getting the degree is a way of saying, "OK, you've got your feet wet. You should be cool with the next level." Now whether you WANT to go on to that level is up to you, and I think that's another service the MA provides. It gives you two years to decide if you want to spend four more, even more intense years, doing the same thing. If you get the MA and decide you don't want to subject yourself to the mind-numbing insanity that is academia, well, you got lucky. But if you can't imagine doing anything other than reading books, writing about books, talking about books, and dealing with students who you sometimes think couldn't read a third-grade level book, let alone MOBY-DICK, then welcome to the PhD, my friend. Enjoy the ride.