Here’s your chance to really push the envelope. Ask the REAL QUESTIONS. Get to know your colleagues! LEAN IN to the discomfort. Here are some suggested questions to get you started:
Would you rather… leave the field and work as a consultant making $$$, OR traipse around the country for the rest of your career making pennies as an adjunct and never being able to settle down?
Would you rather… find out the day before your prospectus defense that someone just published a book on the same topic you’re proposing, OR not find out until you’ve already written the dissertation?
Would you rather… have your academic role model hire you as a research assistant and give you 40+ hours of tedious bibliographical work per week for an entire summer before realizing that their research budget had already run out, so you don’t get paid for any of it, OR realize that your academic role model is actually not cool at all in real life?
Would you rather… work your butt off in grad school and have no personal relationships but you have two publications, a Rome prize, a handful of reviews, lots of teaching, and stellar recommendations, only to not get a single interview, OR do what’s required of you in grad school but still have a decent quality of life, friends, relationships with your family, and a cat, but you STILL get zero interviews?
Would you rather… get asked to leave your Ph.D. program after failing your Greek translation exam three times, OR decide to preemptively quit and have to justify your decision to your parents, family, and friends?
Would you rather… get completely destroyed by a senior scholar during the Q&A of your job talk, OR realize right after your SCS interview that you pronounced “Wilamowitz” wrong the whole time?
Would you rather… go to a top-five grad program in an expensive city where you can barely afford rent and have to eat only ramen for six years, wear the same clothes, save no money, and go into credit card debt to pay for public transit to your dumpy apartment, OR go to a top-20 program in a smaller-but-still-cute-and-liberal city where your stipend goes a long way and you can afford a place with a washer-dryer in unit, a decent enough used car, the occasional craft beer, and an actual savings account?
Would you rather… get your first article published, but realize a year later that it’s terrible and embarrassing and there are typos galore and you’ve gone and criticized someone who’s now on the hiring committee at your dream school, OR get your article rejected from five journals in a row and waste three years waiting for the rejections?
Would you rather… have unlimited chocolate, OR unlimited puppies?
I know, puppies aren’t part of classical academia, but we had to end on a positive note somehow.