Job Discussion Forums

[jm21]

[Jordean]

A law degree is sufficiently broadening, and will give you lots of perspective on many subjects. After three years of grinding away, take the bar, and put it away.
Don't bother with an MA or PhD, or even worry if you measure up to the unhappy saps who chased those degrees for some portion of their lives (personal experience here). You won't learn much in graduate school that will be of use to any employer, unless you have an MBA. A law degree comes close to that, as it requires you to train your mind to balance interests and consider cost benefit write offs in every human interaction.
The best thing you can do is just go out and apply your native talent and intelligence to some task an employer needs a body to fill. As you get life experience, your marketability will increase. More degrees appended to your name will not do that.
Life's a big pool, jump in the deep end and start swimming now.

[shuize]

[Jordean]

The Bar is more difficult than a PhD defense, let alone an MA. Non-law thesis defenses are largely social promotions. What department wants to acknowledge the student they have been training for the past X years is an unprepared bumbling moron? The state board of law examiners have no such qualms, and in fact probably want to suppress the in-state supply of lawyers.

[Leon Purvis]

Okay. Y100,000 for all JD Teachers of English. Though you fail to see the difference between a professional degree and an academic degree, I think that you deserve extra pay.

Why?

I lost all touch with reality, your honor. Everything turned orange.

[Tsuris]

It�s really impossible to compare differences across disciplines in terms of which is �harder� to pursue or which respective degree is academically superior, especially if you are not taking into account the ranking of the conferring institution or the educational demands of the national academic system in place. Which program is harder to get into and pursue: an MD degree from a state university or a PhD in biochemistry from Cambridge? One is a �practice� degree and the other is a research degree. Are all research degrees necessarily more academically rigid than and superior to all practice degrees? I guess it all depends on how you define �academic,� but I don�t think so. Which is academically superior and harder to pursue: a doctorate in nursing science (DNSc) from Yale or a PhD in education from the University of Sydney? Is passing the Bar Exam more or less academically demanding than defending a doctoral dissertation in anthropology? And what is the price of bananas today in Guatemala?

[roadwalker]

[Tsuris]

I agree with what roadwalker wrote. The problem is that there is no real place for genuine foreign faculty in the public university system in China because aside from institutionalised racism and xenophobia, no one but the Chinese English teachers can speak or understand English after all these years of mandatory English language training. Now they say they prefer foreign teachers with master�s degrees, but I still haven�t figured out why. If a foreign teacher shows up relatively sober and talks about his latest hobby or how much he enjoys Chinese food, the students and then everyone else will be happy.

The pervasive mentality across China is that the real teaching is to be done by the Chinese faculty only, which consists of droning on or reading out of a book for an hour and forty minutes while the students furiously take notes, and no one dares ask a question. Plagiarism on papers and blatant cheating on exams are openly tolerated and accepted. The presence of foreign teachers is little more than the need to meet a requirement and pass accreditation, and it�s a requirement that university administrators take about as seriously as the need to provide toilet paper, soap and a hand dryer in the bathrooms. If you try to maintain academic integrity by actually failing a student, either someone will quietly change the grade behind your back or you'll be asked to "retest" the student the following week.

If they have a need to assign a foreign teacher to a graduate course like American or English literature, then they�ll find an American or a Brit respectively with a master�s degree in anything and all will be well. You�ll earn an extra 400 yuan a month for that privilege. On the upside, they�ll tell you how excellent you are and you might even get an invitation to dinner.

In addition to �teaching� at most universities, you�ll have the pleasure of having to conduct English Corners. What this means is that you�ll have to stand in front of a bunch of bored Chinese kids and talk about Western movies or some other nonsense for one to two hours at a time. They have zero pedagogical value but the Chinese love them because they reinforce the image of the foreign teacher as a performing monkey. Usually, you end up just talking to yourself while the students chat to each other in Chinese.

[arioch36]

[The_Hanged_Man]

[Jordean]

[shuize]

[jm21]

Tsuris - Hmm...I've endured quite a few lecture classes, with the professor droning on self-importantly and the students wildly taking note of his eloquent lectures (or playing solitaire on their laptops). Seems to be the most prominent at the "better" schools.

arioch36- 3 years of school. You work at some sort of internship or clerkship during the summer and often the school year part time. There are some externships, clinics, and hands-on classes you can do at most schools in your 2nd or 3rd year, but a certain number of credit hours have to be graded (lecture classes basically).

The only graduate degree in America with some required hands on experience is an MD, from what I remember. 2 years academic, then 2 years hands-on...then a residency? Maybe veterinary school too?

[Leon Purvis]

<<<...But go ahead, someone tell me an M.A. thesis defense is anything like the bar exam. I could use a laugh this morning...>>>

Sorry, I can't tell you this to make you laugh because I have not taken a bar exam.

Defending a thesis is no piece of cake. A thesis is a work of argumentative discourse. If one writes a paper in linguistics (or any other area for that matter), he must not only present a thesis and a defense , but he must also present a defense of his thesis orally. During the oral defense, he may have to draw not only upon knowledge acquired in works cited but also bibliographic knowledge and knowledge which he has attained of his own initiative. With luck, he will have read the same book which any of his thesis committee members are reading.

Writing the thesis is no piece of cake either. Generally, one must submit his work-in-progress to a committee of PhDs whose expertise is in his field of study. The writer must respond to suggestions and questions posed by that committee. I promise you-- one's thesis committee is not always composed of people who want to do the job, and they tend to require the degree seeker to go off on tangents to which other committee members disagree. This experience can be phenomenally frustrating: one must present his original thesis, argue his thesis in written discourse and satisfy his committee members in the process. Upon submittal of his thesis, the committee will assign a grade to it. Sometimes it is the result of discussion among the committee members; other times, the committee members never even see each other during the whole thesis process. Each assigns a grade to the thesis. In my university, one may not receive a grade lower than a B for the thesis to be accepted.

Upon acceptance of the thesis by one's department, it is then submitted to the graduate school with a precis (separate from the one which appears at the beginning of the thesis) and comments by the thesis committee. (I did not see the comments). I met with the dean of the graduate school whose PhD was NOT remotely related to my masters endeavors. I spent an hour with this guy and explained to him what my thesis was about. He'd ask questions, and I answered them. A month later, one is notified whether his thesis has been accepted.

Keep this in mind: one is writing his thesis while he attends classes. He writes the thesis when he is not writing twenty-page mid term papers.

In addition, many MA students hold assistantships which require him to work twenty hours at very low pay in the department in which he is studying. Sometimes, they just grade papers for the first year. I worked in the writing center the first year, then taught writing for fifteen hours.

This is NOT a piece of cake by any stretch of the imagination.

AND THEN THERE IS THE TEST. Mine was an eight-hour test. It was composed of four questions. For my essays, I was expected to draw upon discourse from 125+ books which were on a reading list and never discussed in class, plus another fifty or so other books which WERE discussed in class. One has no idea of which questions will appear on the test.

My argument is this: it matters little whether your course of study was easy or difficult. That is determined by the individual's abilities and the school's curriculum. To say that a JD puts one in a better position to teach English in China than it does a holder of an MA in English is a pointless and groundless argument.

What are you going to do when you are called upon to give a lecture on the differences and similarities between Chinese and American semiotic communication--- two days from today? (I hold an MA and the local American PhD couldn't lecture on the topic, even though his area was sociology).

What are you going to do when you're teaching a writing class and you need to explain parallelism?

What are you going to do when you find yourself reading from one of those horrible Chinese books and it makes a reference to a metaphor, and the Chinese explanation of a metaphor confuses them. If you've read (on your own)"The Golden Bough" or Freud's treatise on universal symbols, then you have a fighting chance at getting through to them and relating to them in their own culture. If you have read as widely as your Chinese college English majors, you will do fairly well when they ask you about Greek tragedy and Aristotle's Poetics.

If, as you read my response, you can't think of any answers to these hypothetical situations, the D in your JD has not put you anywhere near the expertise of the holder of an MA OR PhD in English.

Sorry.

[shuize]