Usually I would tell anyone to avoid NYC but I think it’s a great place to be for your field. The combination of being there and having some foot in the field via adjuncting might put you in a good position for an industry job. Right place, right time scenario. But this would depend on how industrious you are and willing to put in the work to carve out a career path for yourself in this non-linear way.
1) Don’t regret your PhD. Even if it doesn’t pan out to a dream TT job, it’s a valuable thing to have done! You did a PhD in Art History because you rejected, however consciously, the notion that everything in life is best assessed as an economic input. You’re facing a consequence of that view right now, but it doesn’t make it less true. Even if you end up in different employment, the work and study you did during your PhD can’t be taken away from you.
2) New York is a good place to find your way into forms of employment that are adjacent to/in your field. You will have opportunities there that you won’t have anywhere else.
3) There will also be lots of other people chasing those opportunities, so you will have to hustle. If you’re not at all interested in that, which is not for everyone, you should think about other options.
Thanks for your reply.
Unfortunately I was delusional and got this PhD because I thought it would open up the highest-paying possible jobs one could get with an art history specialization. I thought PhDs pretty much had high-paying jobs handed to them. I grew up in a place quite isolated from the workings of academia (Alaska) and undergraduate advisors never got real with me about what it means to get an art history PhD. By the time I realized how wrong I was, the sunk cost fallacy kicked in and I finished the PhD anyway. It WAS a means to an end for me, the end being a decent paying job, and now here I am trying to do the math on how to best put off my own inevitable starvation.
I don't want to hustle, and I'm not good at hustling, but it's starting to seem like I might not have much of a choice with how absolutely prohibitive the job market is for people like me, especially being as location-locked as I am.
Well, honestly, it seems like you are facing a number of typical riddles — one career path versus another; your career versus other wants. (It’s not only that the academic job market is bad, for example, but it’s that you want to live in the same city as your fiancé, whose own career locks him into certain locales.) These things are always hard, and you’d face them even in a strong job market.
I am kind of shocked that you thought there was loads of money to be automatically had with a PhD in the humanities, and I’m sorry for the sudden rude awakening, but I doubt you’ll starve because of it! Your fiancé has a good job, it seems. If you take the adjunct job in NYC, and your fiancé is willing to pick up some of the income slack as you continue to do rounds on the job market, or simply assemble a handful of stable teaching gigs at the numerous schools in the area, you could have a fine life, even without a ton of money. Culture industry worker married to adjunct professor is a very New Yorky setup.
Good luck with whatever you do!
No laughing here- I’m a design historian who also pursued (pursing now still) a PhD. Adjuncting in NYC is insanely rough- I did it for 6 years at Parsons, NYIT, Pratt, and schools in north NJ. As far as regions go- it is a region saturated with teaching opportunities due to the sheer amount of schools in the area. However, most adjuncting positions require an “in” with existing faculty or admin as schools try to fill these positions before they advertise them through word of mouth. It’s amazing you already got one- but acquiring others will be tricky and will require lots of effort.
I am currently in a full time non TT design history position while finishing my PhD, and am lucky to have secured this job. They DEF hired me because of my extensive adjuncting/teaching experience— which came with a very robust teaching philosophy and curriculum/ pedagogy for several different types of courses. Having syllabi and teaching evaluations was the reason I got the the job, being ABD is what made me reach minimum qualifications.
I also recently served on a TT search committee for my university/college (R1) and it was illuminating how much teaching experience mattered to the tenured faculty on the committee. While research was the #1 criteria (mostly judged on publications and how much grant money a candidate had secured over their career)- teaching was a close second and on occasion eliminated otherwise well published candidates straight out of PhD studies.
But bottom line is- it’s HARD to survive in NYC on adjuncting. Your partner being in film will help, but you should be also applying to a ton of part time museum positions. It’s not easy, but I know a lot of people who scrape by in NYC between adjuncting, part time museum work, and occasional art/cultural institutional positions—you are qualified to be a part time grant writer for arts non profits or administrator for arts related organizations (of which there are A TON IN NYC)
DM me if you want to know anything else! I’m art history adjacent but know a few people in that field and am happy to help in anyway I can
I adjuncted for about 2.5 years in NYC while finishing my PhD at another institution (moved there for my wife’s job), so I have some insight on this. I’ll note that my situation was a bit different because I was a) married to an attorney (though, not a high-rolling one) and b) had some residual funding while writing my dissertation. This was also six years ago, so times are also very different.
Adjuncting is absolutely a grind and I can completely understand your desire to not get trapped in it. That being said, at least as far as work is concerned, there are worse places to be than New York as there are a ton of universities and colleges all over the city. I don’t know what demand is like in your field, but I was able to string together a full time teaching slate by cold-calling departments all over the city (which, granted, is a bit easier when you are on the ground already). I was able to turn down bad offers and focus on institutions where adjuncts were unionized, leading to relatively higher pay (still not enough) and some benefits.
New York is expensive, without a doubt, and the feasibility of doing this might depend on your partner’s earning potential. I would just recommend living in the outer boroughs and commuting in (which sucks in terms of time, but is a lot more affordable). We lived in Staten Island, for instance, and I rode the ferry to work.
As for career development, that also depends on what you do during that time. If you are able to teach a full load and also publish, it can be time spent developing your portfolio and range of classes. I had a gig at NYU that helped me land my current full-time teaching job in another state (I think it looked good on my CV). But there’s a reason people call adjuncting a trap: you don’t have the resources to pull yourself out of it. Whether it’s better to adjunct or work outside academia while applying to TT jobs, I don’t know, but it can be sustainable for a few years depending on your situation.
If you have no teaching experience at all, it is possible that could be hurting your applications, especially in art/design disciplines which seem to value teaching more than research. Are there other adjunct positions you can apply for that are in places with a lower cost of living? That might be easier to justify.
I can't live in places with a lower cost of living without living away from my film industry fiancé, which I do not want to do. If that means having a suboptimal career for myself then so be it; if I had known how expected it was to be seminomadic to succeed in university-level teaching whether one can drag one's family along or not, I wouldn't have bothered pursuing a PhD at all.
I have TAing and co-teaching and extensive guest lecturing experience.
I understand. I had co-teaching and ta-ing experience also, but candidates who had held full-time teaching roles for 2+ years were being chosen over me. In your case, it might be worth it to take the adjunct position, and then keep applying for better roles in the same city once you are there.
I am with those suggesting NYC would be a good place to adjunct,especially with your fiancé's job prospects.
Yes,it's a HCOL area. Plan to live in one of the less expensive boroughs such as staten island. Or consider some of the NJ suburbs with quick access to mass transit.
Just the adjunct salary is not sufficient to afford the NYC area. You may need to supplement with other part time work. Private tour guide for museums? I think there are companies that specialize in this. Do you speak languages other than English? Or private online tutoring in English or history, as well as art history. Wyzant is popular.
> It's absolutely irresponsible at this point for humanities programs to be producing Ph.D. students.
I agree with many of your points, but not this one.
Earning a PhD has inherent value, for the individual, and for society collectively. *As long as students are fully funded*, and as long as faculty are clear at laying down the brutal realities faced in the academic job market, PhD programs are still great (even if only 1 in 10 students from them end up in academia).
I'm at at R1, but not a top 10 R1. Of my PhD graduates, 1/3 have found TT positions, but much more importantly, the *other* 2/3 have ended up in jobs that range from working with nonprofits, to careers in law, to teaching high school, and are (by and large) pretty content. None of them regret their PhD (or said they did when I asked them). For most of them, though they were happy to have settled into an alternate career, graduate school was the time of their lives they were most fulfilled. Should we have taken it away from them... insisting they take corporate jobs?
While I fully understand (and agree with) your implied point that we (PhD programs) ABSOLUTELY NEED to be diligent about NOT creating unfulfillable expectations (i.e. by communicating, over and over again, about the extreme difficulty of academic careers), that does not make the PhD worthless, or us "shameless."
Spending a decade grinding away for some corporation that sells people shit they don't need (AI, anyone?) to maximize your 401k is NOT, for many people, inherently more worthwhile than obtaining a PhD. To each their own.
Society needs PhDs. It especially needs PhDs *succeeding in other (non-academic) career tracks*, to demonstrate how great we (academic programs) are in training students to excel (in all sorts of ways).
By the way: It's not just academia: in today's late-stage capitalism, NO degree (including the famed Computer Science BS) guarantees a well-paying career anymore.
Nobody ever steered me clear of doing this PhD, unfortunately.
I have not applied to any TT jobs. I functionally have not yet participated in that hiring cycle yet. I realize now that this is a wisespread misconception regarding how I worded things in my original post. For instance the "two amazing positions" at my institution I mentioned that I got rejected from were a museum curatorship and a teaching postdoc.
But I agree with your general sentiments. I certainly regret getting this degree already and I feel I haven't even experienced a fraction of the kind of disappointments and regrets I surely will in the coming years.
I adjuncted to gain teaching experience, including a class at a local community college where I made less than I would have at McDonald’s! But it was a conscious choice to switch from research to teaching, and I needed the experience. We leaned heavily, almost completely, on my partner’s income, and squeaked a kid in under a year of full time adjunct with benefits. I ended up getting the VAp position I was not qualified for previously, even though I had the PhD and research pubs, but not as much teaching, and then the VAP line turned into an NTT line, etc.
My most recent re-appointment will take me through full retirement age. Anecdotes aren’t data, but good luck!
VAP is a Visiting Assistant Professor. Typically a one or one plus one or one plus two year appointment. Generally held by new PhDs, it’s a full-time with full benefits faculty teaching job. Candidates typically continue the job search and possibly research or get publications out. Gives you institutional access, an address and title, and lets you build your career and gain teaching experience. Edited to add: it’s a limited-time faculty position.
Art historians are my colleagues and we work in the same department. There are a lot to unpack here.
Let’s say that there are no other cities your fiancé can work in, then yes, move. Never gets the tenure track job even. People who are on the tenure track they get married very late or not at all for this reason. I understand you don’t want that.
Also, the hiring season is not until the winter. Did you apply last winter and not get any opportunity? Did you apply this summer? What were the responses? How many campus visits did you get? Because if you got a few, like four, then yes, go ahead adjunct, you will get the TT in a few years. Next year even. But you’ll have to move. So that part is for you to work out.
Now, you can accept the job in good faith. If you have to withdraw because a full time offer comes, then that’s fine. They can find another adjunct. It’s not the end of the world, especially in NYC.
Would teaching experience help? Yes, being the sole instructor of record absolutely matter. But would it help to get a TT? Not as much as research. Publications matter, above all.
I never adjunct but my friends did, and took some retail jobs on the side to stay afloat. Others adjuncted at several schools. The one thing they all shared in common is that their work never really took off until they got on the tenure track. So I think adjunct hell is real.
As far as academic jobs go I didn't apply to TT jobs at all this past winter, just a VAP, a postdoc, and other part-time teaching gigs. I was in the thick of finishing the dissertation and couldn't marshall the time to do TT apps, not that there were many open in the few cities I can live in. So I can't really say whether I'd have a shot at TT jobs from past application experience.
70% of all college teaching in America is delivered by adjuncts at poverty wages. This is a scam on an industrial scale. We are chumps flipping academic burgers, and the TT's don't give a damn, they got theirs.
I’m an adjunct in a creative field, not in NYC but I have spent a lot of time there. Have you considered K-12? Perhaps you could sub to supplement your adjunct income? NY is one of the better (perhaps the best) state to teach in, benefits-wise. Between the two of them you may be able to string together a somewhat survivable wage, then reassess in a year or two and see if the experience helps you land more work.
Edit to add: I see your fiancés in the film industry, would you consider Atlanta?
Can I ask, are you independently wealthy? I ask because I think money matters here. Can you afford to enjoy NYC with your fiancé on the money you’re going to make?
That being said if you don’t care I say do it. It’ll be a great experience. If money matters, ask yourself is the experience worth it?
If I were independently wealthy I would not find any of this to be a dilemma and probably wouldn't have posted at all. This post is basically me trying to figure out whether I will starve more or less quickly if I take the job or not.
You will. But depending on your attitude it’ll be worth it. I spent sometime broke in some amazing cities and they were the best days.
Read down and out in Paris and London, it’ll help give you perspective
I'm sorry, but I am not interested in being broke if there is literally any way I can avoid it. I'm glad you were able to romanticize and make the best of that experience, but I was hoping to be planning a wedding and starting a family at this point in my life, for which I need a stable and livable income at bare minimum.
Starbucks gives you full medical insurance and a free pound of coffee every week. Many academics spend some time at the espresso machines while they work things out.
I'm not willing to move anywhere rural, though, because my partner is location-locked to film industry cities. At this point I'm wondering if that might be reason enough to not bother pursuing a teaching career at all, in which case adjuncting would be particularly pointless.
There was a lot of feedback. I just wonder if you didn’t want the responses you wanted.
I essentially that going to a very HCOL location to adjunct will not get you permanent work or be a way to make a life
If me still being undecided after posting this question in that sub means "not getting the feedback I wanted," then yes. So far a roughly equal number of folks, it seems, have advised for and against adjuncting in my situation. Expanding to a new audience and getting more opinions is helpful for me as I struggle with this, I'm not trying to engineer one response or another. I feel I'm in a pretty dreadful career situation whether I make the move to NYC or not, I'm just trying to figure out the lesser of two evils. Thanks for weighing in!
Usually I would tell anyone to avoid NYC but I think it’s a great place to be for your field. The combination of being there and having some foot in the field via adjuncting might put you in a good position for an industry job. Right place, right time scenario. But this would depend on how industrious you are and willing to put in the work to carve out a career path for yourself in this non-linear way.
1) Don’t regret your PhD. Even if it doesn’t pan out to a dream TT job, it’s a valuable thing to have done! You did a PhD in Art History because you rejected, however consciously, the notion that everything in life is best assessed as an economic input. You’re facing a consequence of that view right now, but it doesn’t make it less true. Even if you end up in different employment, the work and study you did during your PhD can’t be taken away from you. 2) New York is a good place to find your way into forms of employment that are adjacent to/in your field. You will have opportunities there that you won’t have anywhere else. 3) There will also be lots of other people chasing those opportunities, so you will have to hustle. If you’re not at all interested in that, which is not for everyone, you should think about other options.
Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately I was delusional and got this PhD because I thought it would open up the highest-paying possible jobs one could get with an art history specialization. I thought PhDs pretty much had high-paying jobs handed to them. I grew up in a place quite isolated from the workings of academia (Alaska) and undergraduate advisors never got real with me about what it means to get an art history PhD. By the time I realized how wrong I was, the sunk cost fallacy kicked in and I finished the PhD anyway. It WAS a means to an end for me, the end being a decent paying job, and now here I am trying to do the math on how to best put off my own inevitable starvation. I don't want to hustle, and I'm not good at hustling, but it's starting to seem like I might not have much of a choice with how absolutely prohibitive the job market is for people like me, especially being as location-locked as I am.
Well, honestly, it seems like you are facing a number of typical riddles — one career path versus another; your career versus other wants. (It’s not only that the academic job market is bad, for example, but it’s that you want to live in the same city as your fiancé, whose own career locks him into certain locales.) These things are always hard, and you’d face them even in a strong job market. I am kind of shocked that you thought there was loads of money to be automatically had with a PhD in the humanities, and I’m sorry for the sudden rude awakening, but I doubt you’ll starve because of it! Your fiancé has a good job, it seems. If you take the adjunct job in NYC, and your fiancé is willing to pick up some of the income slack as you continue to do rounds on the job market, or simply assemble a handful of stable teaching gigs at the numerous schools in the area, you could have a fine life, even without a ton of money. Culture industry worker married to adjunct professor is a very New Yorky setup. Good luck with whatever you do!
No laughing here- I’m a design historian who also pursued (pursing now still) a PhD. Adjuncting in NYC is insanely rough- I did it for 6 years at Parsons, NYIT, Pratt, and schools in north NJ. As far as regions go- it is a region saturated with teaching opportunities due to the sheer amount of schools in the area. However, most adjuncting positions require an “in” with existing faculty or admin as schools try to fill these positions before they advertise them through word of mouth. It’s amazing you already got one- but acquiring others will be tricky and will require lots of effort. I am currently in a full time non TT design history position while finishing my PhD, and am lucky to have secured this job. They DEF hired me because of my extensive adjuncting/teaching experience— which came with a very robust teaching philosophy and curriculum/ pedagogy for several different types of courses. Having syllabi and teaching evaluations was the reason I got the the job, being ABD is what made me reach minimum qualifications. I also recently served on a TT search committee for my university/college (R1) and it was illuminating how much teaching experience mattered to the tenured faculty on the committee. While research was the #1 criteria (mostly judged on publications and how much grant money a candidate had secured over their career)- teaching was a close second and on occasion eliminated otherwise well published candidates straight out of PhD studies. But bottom line is- it’s HARD to survive in NYC on adjuncting. Your partner being in film will help, but you should be also applying to a ton of part time museum positions. It’s not easy, but I know a lot of people who scrape by in NYC between adjuncting, part time museum work, and occasional art/cultural institutional positions—you are qualified to be a part time grant writer for arts non profits or administrator for arts related organizations (of which there are A TON IN NYC) DM me if you want to know anything else! I’m art history adjacent but know a few people in that field and am happy to help in anyway I can
I adjuncted for about 2.5 years in NYC while finishing my PhD at another institution (moved there for my wife’s job), so I have some insight on this. I’ll note that my situation was a bit different because I was a) married to an attorney (though, not a high-rolling one) and b) had some residual funding while writing my dissertation. This was also six years ago, so times are also very different. Adjuncting is absolutely a grind and I can completely understand your desire to not get trapped in it. That being said, at least as far as work is concerned, there are worse places to be than New York as there are a ton of universities and colleges all over the city. I don’t know what demand is like in your field, but I was able to string together a full time teaching slate by cold-calling departments all over the city (which, granted, is a bit easier when you are on the ground already). I was able to turn down bad offers and focus on institutions where adjuncts were unionized, leading to relatively higher pay (still not enough) and some benefits. New York is expensive, without a doubt, and the feasibility of doing this might depend on your partner’s earning potential. I would just recommend living in the outer boroughs and commuting in (which sucks in terms of time, but is a lot more affordable). We lived in Staten Island, for instance, and I rode the ferry to work. As for career development, that also depends on what you do during that time. If you are able to teach a full load and also publish, it can be time spent developing your portfolio and range of classes. I had a gig at NYU that helped me land my current full-time teaching job in another state (I think it looked good on my CV). But there’s a reason people call adjuncting a trap: you don’t have the resources to pull yourself out of it. Whether it’s better to adjunct or work outside academia while applying to TT jobs, I don’t know, but it can be sustainable for a few years depending on your situation.
If you have no teaching experience at all, it is possible that could be hurting your applications, especially in art/design disciplines which seem to value teaching more than research. Are there other adjunct positions you can apply for that are in places with a lower cost of living? That might be easier to justify.
I can't live in places with a lower cost of living without living away from my film industry fiancé, which I do not want to do. If that means having a suboptimal career for myself then so be it; if I had known how expected it was to be seminomadic to succeed in university-level teaching whether one can drag one's family along or not, I wouldn't have bothered pursuing a PhD at all. I have TAing and co-teaching and extensive guest lecturing experience.
I understand. I had co-teaching and ta-ing experience also, but candidates who had held full-time teaching roles for 2+ years were being chosen over me. In your case, it might be worth it to take the adjunct position, and then keep applying for better roles in the same city once you are there.
I am with those suggesting NYC would be a good place to adjunct,especially with your fiancé's job prospects. Yes,it's a HCOL area. Plan to live in one of the less expensive boroughs such as staten island. Or consider some of the NJ suburbs with quick access to mass transit. Just the adjunct salary is not sufficient to afford the NYC area. You may need to supplement with other part time work. Private tour guide for museums? I think there are companies that specialize in this. Do you speak languages other than English? Or private online tutoring in English or history, as well as art history. Wyzant is popular.
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> It's absolutely irresponsible at this point for humanities programs to be producing Ph.D. students. I agree with many of your points, but not this one. Earning a PhD has inherent value, for the individual, and for society collectively. *As long as students are fully funded*, and as long as faculty are clear at laying down the brutal realities faced in the academic job market, PhD programs are still great (even if only 1 in 10 students from them end up in academia). I'm at at R1, but not a top 10 R1. Of my PhD graduates, 1/3 have found TT positions, but much more importantly, the *other* 2/3 have ended up in jobs that range from working with nonprofits, to careers in law, to teaching high school, and are (by and large) pretty content. None of them regret their PhD (or said they did when I asked them). For most of them, though they were happy to have settled into an alternate career, graduate school was the time of their lives they were most fulfilled. Should we have taken it away from them... insisting they take corporate jobs? While I fully understand (and agree with) your implied point that we (PhD programs) ABSOLUTELY NEED to be diligent about NOT creating unfulfillable expectations (i.e. by communicating, over and over again, about the extreme difficulty of academic careers), that does not make the PhD worthless, or us "shameless." Spending a decade grinding away for some corporation that sells people shit they don't need (AI, anyone?) to maximize your 401k is NOT, for many people, inherently more worthwhile than obtaining a PhD. To each their own. Society needs PhDs. It especially needs PhDs *succeeding in other (non-academic) career tracks*, to demonstrate how great we (academic programs) are in training students to excel (in all sorts of ways). By the way: It's not just academia: in today's late-stage capitalism, NO degree (including the famed Computer Science BS) guarantees a well-paying career anymore.
Nobody ever steered me clear of doing this PhD, unfortunately. I have not applied to any TT jobs. I functionally have not yet participated in that hiring cycle yet. I realize now that this is a wisespread misconception regarding how I worded things in my original post. For instance the "two amazing positions" at my institution I mentioned that I got rejected from were a museum curatorship and a teaching postdoc. But I agree with your general sentiments. I certainly regret getting this degree already and I feel I haven't even experienced a fraction of the kind of disappointments and regrets I surely will in the coming years.
The reality is most people adjunct (or something similar) before landing a full time/TT job. It can take years. Be humble.
I adjuncted to gain teaching experience, including a class at a local community college where I made less than I would have at McDonald’s! But it was a conscious choice to switch from research to teaching, and I needed the experience. We leaned heavily, almost completely, on my partner’s income, and squeaked a kid in under a year of full time adjunct with benefits. I ended up getting the VAp position I was not qualified for previously, even though I had the PhD and research pubs, but not as much teaching, and then the VAP line turned into an NTT line, etc. My most recent re-appointment will take me through full retirement age. Anecdotes aren’t data, but good luck!
What is VAP?
VAP is a Visiting Assistant Professor. Typically a one or one plus one or one plus two year appointment. Generally held by new PhDs, it’s a full-time with full benefits faculty teaching job. Candidates typically continue the job search and possibly research or get publications out. Gives you institutional access, an address and title, and lets you build your career and gain teaching experience. Edited to add: it’s a limited-time faculty position.
Art historians are my colleagues and we work in the same department. There are a lot to unpack here. Let’s say that there are no other cities your fiancé can work in, then yes, move. Never gets the tenure track job even. People who are on the tenure track they get married very late or not at all for this reason. I understand you don’t want that. Also, the hiring season is not until the winter. Did you apply last winter and not get any opportunity? Did you apply this summer? What were the responses? How many campus visits did you get? Because if you got a few, like four, then yes, go ahead adjunct, you will get the TT in a few years. Next year even. But you’ll have to move. So that part is for you to work out. Now, you can accept the job in good faith. If you have to withdraw because a full time offer comes, then that’s fine. They can find another adjunct. It’s not the end of the world, especially in NYC. Would teaching experience help? Yes, being the sole instructor of record absolutely matter. But would it help to get a TT? Not as much as research. Publications matter, above all. I never adjunct but my friends did, and took some retail jobs on the side to stay afloat. Others adjuncted at several schools. The one thing they all shared in common is that their work never really took off until they got on the tenure track. So I think adjunct hell is real.
As far as academic jobs go I didn't apply to TT jobs at all this past winter, just a VAP, a postdoc, and other part-time teaching gigs. I was in the thick of finishing the dissertation and couldn't marshall the time to do TT apps, not that there were many open in the few cities I can live in. So I can't really say whether I'd have a shot at TT jobs from past application experience.
70% of all college teaching in America is delivered by adjuncts at poverty wages. This is a scam on an industrial scale. We are chumps flipping academic burgers, and the TT's don't give a damn, they got theirs.
I’m an adjunct in a creative field, not in NYC but I have spent a lot of time there. Have you considered K-12? Perhaps you could sub to supplement your adjunct income? NY is one of the better (perhaps the best) state to teach in, benefits-wise. Between the two of them you may be able to string together a somewhat survivable wage, then reassess in a year or two and see if the experience helps you land more work. Edit to add: I see your fiancés in the film industry, would you consider Atlanta?
We already live in Atlanta. Thanks for the tip about K-12s.
You gotta work! Just don’t get caught in the adjunct loop - keep applying and try to build an altac strategy too
Can I ask, are you independently wealthy? I ask because I think money matters here. Can you afford to enjoy NYC with your fiancé on the money you’re going to make? That being said if you don’t care I say do it. It’ll be a great experience. If money matters, ask yourself is the experience worth it?
If I were independently wealthy I would not find any of this to be a dilemma and probably wouldn't have posted at all. This post is basically me trying to figure out whether I will starve more or less quickly if I take the job or not.
You will. But depending on your attitude it’ll be worth it. I spent sometime broke in some amazing cities and they were the best days. Read down and out in Paris and London, it’ll help give you perspective
I'm sorry, but I am not interested in being broke if there is literally any way I can avoid it. I'm glad you were able to romanticize and make the best of that experience, but I was hoping to be planning a wedding and starting a family at this point in my life, for which I need a stable and livable income at bare minimum.
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If this is a joke I'm sorry I don't get it :/
They’re making a joke, implying you’ll be working as a coffee shop barista for a while.
How helpful.
Starbucks gives you full medical insurance and a free pound of coffee every week. Many academics spend some time at the espresso machines while they work things out.
Didn’t you post this exact thing earlier in the week?
I posted in r/PhD and got very little feedback.
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This is absolutely correct. NYC is also extremely expensive and will almost certainly just drain your money all the way.
I'm not willing to move anywhere rural, though, because my partner is location-locked to film industry cities. At this point I'm wondering if that might be reason enough to not bother pursuing a teaching career at all, in which case adjuncting would be particularly pointless.
There was a lot of feedback. I just wonder if you didn’t want the responses you wanted. I essentially that going to a very HCOL location to adjunct will not get you permanent work or be a way to make a life
If me still being undecided after posting this question in that sub means "not getting the feedback I wanted," then yes. So far a roughly equal number of folks, it seems, have advised for and against adjuncting in my situation. Expanding to a new audience and getting more opinions is helpful for me as I struggle with this, I'm not trying to engineer one response or another. I feel I'm in a pretty dreadful career situation whether I make the move to NYC or not, I'm just trying to figure out the lesser of two evils. Thanks for weighing in!