Why I don't have a PhD [Pt. 2 of 2]

hi guys i have my usual disclaimer today
that i'm extremely jet-lagged and tired i hope this disclaimer is not a permanent feature of this channel i just slept from ten o'clock in the evening until two o'clock in the morning and there's absolutely no way to get back to sleep now so i'm going to put together a video here that i had been planning to do my first video on why I do not have a PhD was sort of subtitled part 1 of 2 that was stated on my blog and so on and I had plans to do a follow-up well it's interesting to know that the full immunity today is very different from what I might have reported even just yesterday I received an email today that i did find offensive and i wrote back to the guy telling him openly look I find what you have to say here it offends me uh but the fact that he misinterpreted what I've already said about getting a PhD and not getting a PhD I feel that he sort of he can't be the only one there's probably there are probably other people who have responded this information in the same way so I'm going to start by clearing up his misconceptions even though he's just one person who sent me an email so i'm posting up on screen here another example of Correspondence i had with professors about an MA program leading to a PhD program and again these replies to me if you pause and read it they are fundamentally quite flattering this professor says that my CV is the best CV he can remember seeing from a student who doesn't already have an MA now I haven't given any indication of that in my first video and again here this is an example of the kind of correspondence of had with professors so I don't know why he has the sort of fundamentally unsure double interpretation of what I would have said about the process except that really I do have an idea I think that many students grad students and PhD students wants to believe that the process they're a part of is faultless and therefore anyone who is disadvantaged by that process who has a negative experience or doesn't fit into the boxes they must be blamed for it one point here is it's very appealing for some people who are themselves aspiring to get PhDs become professors to try to blame me and say that it must somehow be my fault that i'm not getting a PhD given my background because it can't possibly be that there's something wrong with the system that they themselves would like to believe in as foulness because it increases their own status it increases their own employability they imagine to think that they come from an extremely prestigious and powerful academic system now my point here responding to this criticism is not just to clear up that I don't write bulk emails my problem is not that I'm bad at write an email on the contrary I think I have extraordinary amount of experience at least with writing emails to professor's about this stuff as even should have been clear from my first video but also i am not writing bulk in personal email i am really engaging in meaningful discussions of many of these professors uh you know to give an extreme example that is nevertheless illustrative you know there was a professor in quebec who i will not name i'm blanking out the names in this this email too um before I met him I read his PhD thesis I looked up his other articles his other published work I became familiar with his work and has been quite a lot of money flying to Quebec staying in a hotel going to the University and meeting him face-to-face so this is the situation that and I did not apply to enter that program for various reasons now I just do not know in my former video I repeatedly referred to visiting universities and person is speaking University a space so I don't know how someone would watch that and come to this as I say very uncharitable conclusion that my problem is that I'm writing in personable impersonal and thoughtless emails sent in bulk to huge numbers of professors and not really engaging with them of their work he also accuses me of not even having the due diligence to look at the profiles of professors that are listed on the Internet of not looking at their resumes and not evaluating what their research interests are and so on and on the contrary I've spent a huge number of hours doing that and as I just gave in that example it sometimes leads to some kind of fake face to face meeting or some kind of meaningful engagement now there's another professor who again i'm going to leave anonymous but there's a professor in alberta here in canada who I have not that face-to-face but we've had quite a lot of email and that discussion began with some of his work that i read i read an article of his out of sincere interest and not because he was a potential supervisor for me to get an MA or PhD so in that case I was really interested in his work I wrote to him commenting on his work he wrote back to me we had a conversation Ivan said look I've been looking for a graduate studies program this is my background I sent him my CV and examples of articles I've written team red or at least briefly looked at several my articles he was impressed and interested and he then sent me a copy of an article he had written years earlier that was directly sailing it to my research it was closer to the sort of thing I'm really interested in and I received that I said Wow and thank you and that article he sent me if he didn't send me a copy i would have never found that article in terms of where it was published or where it was hidden and i read that article and we had a meaningful conversation about it and again that was completely sincere i was a fan of that guy's work and i'm still a fan of him in some sense now again for various reasons i have not applied to that ph.d program i'm not a student there buddy but it's just not the case though my interactions with academia have been bulk email or impersonal or unprofessional or anything else and nor that i'm lacking the the very basic first step of looking at a professor cv or the the online profiles that the department provides before talking to them on the contrary I do start with that and I've moved far beyond that in many many of these interactions now the two examples that his game worth in Canada and the visit to Quebec was really extremely expensive it was much cheaper as much less expensive for me example when I was in Taiwan to go to from one University to the next I mean I guess it adds up to some money but if you're in Taiwan anyway which I was I visited a huge number of universities there and i met this both professors face-to-face and of course there were other cases where I look at a professor's profile publications and they're of no interest to me that naturally that changes the process to you find out of it a professor at department you read a little bit you say I right away you say this is not for me or this professor so very human process and again I don't appreciate the sort of implicit dehumanization of me and really a kind of blaming the victim that goes on that I got this email that i'm just now responded to okay so that's the response to that particular email a god that may be of a widespread misconception definitely i mean that's that's funny because that type of misconception I have only encountered with PhD students and not with professors definitely not with experienced professors and again I still I have meaningful correspondences professors all the time apartment fazendo face-to-face here at uvic just a couple of days ago I had some very friendly and useful corresponds to the professor at university of british columbia ubc which is a university where i do not believe i have any option to get Numair PhD but still there are professors there who are interested in my work and just interested in me as a human being and a totally professional polite and positive what have you some people are jerks sometimes they get emails professors who are rude or dismissive but that's okay sometimes face-to-face people are really dismissive and you get one of the good things about YouTube is that you have some sense that I'm not freaking out about this I mean some people in academia do not have experience with other lines of work but these types of issues exist in every line of work if you're a salesman selling silk scarves these are human issues you encounter if you work behind the counter at a Starbucks these are issues in real life that we all have to deal with so I don't you know I don't expect professors to be angels and I definitely don't perceive them as demons either but anyway this business of saying you know the problem must be you the problem can't possibly be what I've already described the first video which is just a lack of academic options that match up to my particular expertise and aspirations and all the other factors that I tried to lay out that the problem must be must be a measured it must be this gaudy or my personality or running that is really a very dark and insulting and fundamentally stupid approach to the facts that have already taken the time to lay out very clearly and then some overlaps way now look I want to hit on three factors I've done replying to that email that we're not covered in my first video now factor number one is simply that I do not want to become a university professor and in the first email the only male to get a post in this video the email in this video i just posted if you pause to read at all you may notice that Professor refers to me in the future tense as aspiring to become professor and he actually says some funny things to reassure me that although it is difficult become a professor look at in terms of the job market in terms the percentage of PhD students but I should become professors few issues and he's confident that he thinks I can do it that I can be part of the successful minority to become a professor now for various reasons I both do not want to become a professor and I do not believe I could become a professor many of the professor's I speak to including professors here face to face they are just flabbergasted when you say that you want an MA or that you want a PhD but you do not want to become a professor yourself but this is not the career path you're looking for many professors with absolutely no ill intentions that is the only career path they know and understand that is the only course of action they can recommend for you to follow and they really have very little to say as soon as the conversation turns to any other type of career any type of direction in life now I can sympathize there are people who have their their whole careers in the publishing industry and if you want to talk to them about any other type of career they can't tell you that's it their whole life is in the publishing degree so it makes sense it's not surprised me at all that that some professors at least feel this way I react this way and you know for some professors there's a bit of hostility were in some cases I've seen people who are really interested in having me as an enemy or PhD student but then as soon as I say look I am aware that once i finish this degree i will not be pursuing a conventional academic career i won't be going on to become a professor then at that point they sort of switch tracks and say well i'm not sure i want to work with you because for them the only path they're comfortable with would be preparing someone like me to become a lecturing university professor so the other huge issue that i'm not talking at length about here simply because i already made enough youtube videos on it i forgot in a sense how good my earlier videos are dealing with first nations languages i went back and watched my video explaining why i am currently learning japanese and why I'm not learning a jib way and the basic I mean the short story is I got asked just the other day by a student not by Professor this time what I would be doing if i won the lottery if I money and unlimited choices and I still said just the other day no question I would work on first nations languages first nations politics and the overlap between languages and politics which of course includes questions of education policy language endangerment language extinction what's going to happen in the next hundred years of these languages I still care passionately about First Nations politics and I would again if there were unlimited money on unlimited choices that be filled by looking into the situation today in that discipline is a product of the last 50 years of history that's generally true of all academic disciplines perhaps all fields of human endeavor very generally uh obviously the Canadian government was not capable of reversing a history of incredible racism and basically pro genocide Pro assimilation policies overnight it was not possible to create robust University departments studying and teaching these languages where formerly the whole establishment existed to try to drive these languages into extinction now whether or not the Kenyan government has really tried how whether or not the Canadian government has been more successful than other governments around the world it could be compared to those are interesting questions and I think overall Canada would get a pretty bad grade we have done very poorly within the last 50 years in reversing basically a genocidal policy to a policy of preservation and promulgation of you know trying to really promote the new use and extended use of these languages but I guess this brings me to my final 48 I have a daughter if you've looked through the YouTube videos on this channel you can see what she looks like I have a two-year-old daughter and there is pressure on me of course to earn a living so the situation for first nations languages and academia within Canada and my options to get an MA language now ultimately I just do not have time to sit around and wait for Canadian academia to get its act together you and sorry the one thing I omitted to say earlier is what's unique about first nations languages is the isolation of Canadian academia in every other field Canadian universities rely on universities from other countries to provide them with talent to provide them with resources you know like naturally if I tell you what something like Sanskrit in Canada a country the size of candidate doesn't presume to produce all of its own talent or to produce all of its own textbooks there's no need for Canada to be independent in that obviously Canada can recruit talent from India from Europe and from the United States now in Canada almost every field of expertise almost every discipline you can imagine is in this sense globalized and you know you can say critically some fields more than others really live belong in total dependence on maybe institutions the United States maybe institutions in England what Canada hasn't developed enough of a capacity internally to do what it needs to do um well guess what with a subject like Cree or a jib way with languages that exists primarily within Canada I mean the case of Cree there is one talent in the united states that speaks create a jib way there is so much of a presence the United States but did these are canada's problem academically speaking how we're going to teach and study these languages it isn't Francis problem it is a Germany's problem and it isn't really a problem for the United States to solve and I can remember talking with that with a professor from University of Minnesota and he wrote back to me and said look here at University of Minnesota we have some resources for this stuff but ultimately it's all up to you guys in Canada we can't take this on we can't tackle this we can't solve these problems beyond a certain very limited ability I appreciate him for his honesty but this is one of the very few fields where you got to say no it's all Candice responsibility and I mentioned just because of my interest in ecology I'm aware you know actually with the the far north with the Arctic Canada is not alone in the same way because it is a very robust academic tradition in England the British have an amazing academic tradition of Polar Circle studies from environmental groups like the Arctic method emergency group of fascinating youtube channel by the way to anthropology of the Arctic of course exploration in the architect of British were very proud of the rest you're there so south of the Arctic Circle that's an especially bad situation now look those of you who know me personally and even those you don't might have expected this video to have more emotional agonizing over the situation with my daughter and the pressure on me to earn a living and that kind of family dynamic or psychological dynamic um I have to say again a good thing about the YouTube channel is that you get to see the look at my eyes even though my eyes now are extremely exhausted due to jetlag hear the tone of my voice I really think that you know in relation to one's children and one's emotions the strongest feelings are exactly instinctual feelings I do feel a very strong sense of love for my daughter and I felt that when I was in the room with her even though I hadn't seen her at such a long time when we were reunited in France just now um I do on an instinctual level also feel concern for my daughter which is really a fancy word for fear um you know that your your concern for her well-being and on a really deep instinctual level you feel that as fear but I've got to say I think in general you're you're deluding yourself as a human being if you think these types of deeply rooted instinctual behaviors and feelings really translate directly into an intellectually complex form in things such as examining your PhD options that kind of takes place on another level and you know although I am making decisions that are guided by my concern that I want to spend time with my daughter I want to live in the same country that my daughter lives in and I want to have a career that provides me with the money I need to visit her and provide for her and so on again those things are intellectual they are not instinctual they are not the sort of thing that makes you suddenly break down crying on YouTube although there are plenty of other YouTube channels where you can watch single parents break down crying over their agonies in this respect day to day and week to week I just met up with and chatted with a bunch of my professors at the University of at the start of the new term and of course they have these same questions on their mind themselves and these are the same things they want to talk about with me and again um the great thing about YouTube is that you can hear the tone of my voice I i am not seething with resentment over this in many ways i can sympathize with all the different players in the game including some of the people who have kind of snubbed me or slammed the door in my face on the other hand what I don't sympathize with our people who are choosing to misrepresent what my position is and has been people who are kind of trying to cast blame and responsibility onto me for things that ultimately are other people's decisions you have to be honest with yourself politically and socially about the existence of hierarchy in this world a professor who is the head of a department makes decisions and a student follows orders and lives with those decisions it's like a chain of command in the military you have to be comfortable with this fundamental inequality and then not blame the people who are lower down in the order for decisions that are made higher up in the order whether those decisions are going to bed and I've been in the position of talking to many many professors and saying well it's your decision here's what I have to offer and as you've seen even in the letter i posted in this video many professors right back saying very flattering things and in each case it has not worked out or proven to be impossible for different reasons