Why I don't have a PhD

hi the hard part in doing a video like
this is just kind of introducing the subject and delimiting what I'm going to talk about because I do not want this to be a one-hour lecture reflecting on my extensive experience with not getting a PhD so we're going to do this Francis Bacon thing and start with one example I'm going to put up on screen here the text this is a very polite reply I got from a ph.d program within the last few months and so it opens by saying looking at your impressive CV I'm not sure what program we have here would be good for you IE what MA program ph.d program at that University go getting in MA that would lead to a PhD it says well on the one hand we have studies in ontology and tippet ology and for that you need to learn Sanskrit on the other hand we have a modern Asian Studies program but for this you have to learn Hindi so this is a totally polite totally constructive reply totally useful information but it explains why this particular graduate program excludes me um and why I would not up for it if you've seen the list of languages I've studied it is already painfully long I've studied too many languages for too many years and I've grown old without becoming an expert in any one of them I worked on the language called pally for more than 10 years I'd say and then I worked on all these Southeast Asian languages that are connected to poly low shouldn't I Cambodian minority languages from that area but then also to some extent working on Burmese cinelli's lot goes into that um and then I had to throw that aside and study Chinese I feel a certain point my life then I just stopped studying Chinese start learning Japanese I'm learning Japanese now i'm currently enrolled in a japanese program University of Victoria can so if you tell me that I'm welcome to come and get an MA in a page university but i would have to additionally learn sanskrit and tibetan i'm not interested if you say well you're welcome to come and work on political science of asia but you would have to learn hindi i'm not interested and this is a nice letter because it doesn't say vice versa it doesn't say they're not interested me it admits that I have an impressive cv that I'd be a good student for them but those are the program requirements that's what the program to an offer and that's it so for more than 10 years I mean probably like like 15 years by now I have been talking to different professors in different disciplines by now it is a long time ago it exceeded 100 professors now it might be over 200 professors if you wonder how that's possible while I didn't just start professors in Canada I'm talking to persons in Europe you can even tell from that example I just looked at the this guy English's in his first language I talked to professors in Asia over years and years going to universities in person talking people face to face and communicating by email what have you um and my experience doing that my experience being surrounded by having friends girlfriends wives and so on most of the people close to my life for themselves PhD students or professors or had PhDs or what have you I've known a lot of people in the game different stages in different ages last year I talked to a guy he was kind of working as an instructor and on a professor at University Victoria and he gave a lecture on how he selected his ph.d program and his whole process took place in about one month during what she didn't do much thinking or or research he didn't talk to any professors um you know he was very busy with his own studies at the end of his BA and he looked around at different ma programs and he sent out a couple of applications without a lot of thought he got answers back I think only two of the institutions offered him a scholarship he looked at the dollars and cents involved which one would cost more money or which one would pay him more money and so on and he made his choice I appreciate his honesty and in talking about that process now it relates to it uh but he did not do anything like the process I don't he didn't visit even one University he did an interview or speak to even one professor um and in my case I spoke to dozens and dozens of professors over again more than ten years and I actually traveled in person to universities and so on so my perspectives are different and the other thing is because I was in a position to say no very often these professors only talking to students you've already invested tens of thousands of dollars we've already invested a ton of money in getting a diploma so the professor is limited in what advice they can get if you've already spent forty thousand dollars the embarking on a certain career path the professor is not as likely to tell you look this is a bad option this is a bad institution and this degree can't lead to any employment for you in my position they were free to tell that to me and and and many of them did I premiere especially with so as in in London the School of Oriental and African Studies famous University within the University of London um a remarkable number of people professors former graduate students from there and so on took me aside and said look this is a bad university and this is a bad department and here are the problems don't do it don't come here and I completely appreciate their their honesty I mean you know and I took I take that advice seriously one of the things that's really underrated in the 21st century is learning from your elders that is definitely more of an 18th century value that's kind of style and how to learn from your elders I mean there's you know obviously there are tensions involved it's not as simple as just believing everything you hear but there's a kind of expectation I think mostly created by Hollywood movies that the young apprentice or the young aspiring sports hero will be faced with many challenges but will you know boldly ignore all of the good advice to the contrary risotto this is my dream and I believe in my dream and I want to do it no um you know the mature attitude to take especially towards advice about institutions from within institutions if someone risks their own job if someone risks their own professional reputation to tell you what's wrong with their employer so that's basically what they're doing they're basically ratting out their superiors the basically what's wrong with this institution they rely on to pay their rent you need to take that very seriously need to take that hard um even if that person maybe doesn't have your your best interests are you know they may be telling you that for all kinds of reasons they may be very self pitying come over one professor him so as who was definitely telling me how terrible the university was because he was self fitting I may be four kinds of reasons but anyway look this is a roundabout intro to say I have looked at getting a PhD of course beginning with an MA again and again over the years one of the main reasons why it hasn't happened what you see even in this first example is the crucial importance of language which is something i personally subjectively emotionally and intellectually feel or believe in the mean value of any advanced diploma in my opinion is going to be language acquisition now when i finished my BA a hundred years ago whenever that happened there was absolutely zero language education available to me in any of the languages i wanted to study so those languages included Burmese Cambodia and poly allow sin alize we're just Sri Lanka I was interested in a whole bunch of Southeast Asia now um to be clear I'm not saying that we were absolutely no universities anywhere in the world teaching or studying those languages there were just a few but none of the more options for me and most of them were quite problematic like again so so as I've mentioned as a bad you know something that people warned me about does so as really teach Burmese does so as really teach Cambodian as a language the answer that changes every couple of years and I don't even mean every every five or ten years they can change from one year to the next it's not it's not reliable or simple to answer and I know one girl who went to so as to get her ma in kamayan cambodian khmer what everyone say in the Cambodian language and after she had spent all this money because England is incredibly expensive for not a British citizen if you're an international student she spent all this money and went there and they just told her oh you know the the Cambodian classes were not making enough money so we cancelled the Cambodian class and now you're gonna have to learn Vietnamese instead Vietnamese is a completely different language with Cambodian and politically that's there's a huge war sorry there's a huge wall between the two countries politically there's also been a huge war between the two countries both are true but in terms of the effect it would have on your own career aspirations just your own life to be suddenly forced into learning Vietnamese instead of Cambodian like honestly in the whole world it's not like the difference between spanish and portuguese they're both profoundly different languages linguistically in terms of the vocabulary you're going to memorize but the still today the degree of hatred between those two countries it's very volatile so putting yourself in a really terrible situation this is very far from the worst story i could tell you about bad things that happen to nice people in PhD programs but in case the number one consideration for me has been language and then also the work I've done in languages has excluded me from many university programs as you've just seen in one example there are a million other examples and that's cool as long as everyone is honest and open about it I have no problem with that if you want to tell me hey our program requires you learn Hindi I say okay not for me um you know the disappointing thing is that when i sold out when i said okay fine i'll learn chinese the mainstream language instead of working on the language like lao or poly something more obscure i still had no options so that that is sad for me it's a real source of sorrow in my life and then when I couldn't study Chinese anymore and I was forced to study Japanese by circumstances that have already been described in this YouTube channel again a great source of sorrow and a lot of things to to reconsider um there's a really interesting historical background to each of these departments and disciplines the Southeast Asian Studies the part of Southeast Asia I'm interesting because I worked on Buddhist Southeast Asia right I did not work on Indonesia or Malaysia those are Muslim countries I worked on countries like Burma Cambodia Thailand Laos etc and for a long time I would have very much appreciated finding any academic program that allowed me to further develop expertise in that area generally speaking there was kind of a very short blip of academic interest and research in that part of Asia during and after the Vietnam War and then all those departments collapsed and crumbled and disappeared and even their publications even the journals disappeared but unlike chinese studies that has grown and grown mostly because people have the delusion that they can get rich by learning how to speak chinese studies in other parts of Southeast Asia have collapsed now and the exceptions that will don't interest me the Dutch in general still make a big deal out of studying Indonesia because they have a colonial history there this is this link between the Netherlands and Indonesia then nothing to do with me so it's still called Southeast Asia but it's not my area of studies so that type of historical background you know there's a lot more to say about it again fits into the puzzle I'm not even mentioning here the terrible history of what's called Buddhist studies and tear of Adam Buddhism and pally with the in Buddhist studies I think there have been some reflections on that in this channel some of my blog and rating and so on but as I've said bluntly on this channel the situation that our studies is just that there was absolutely nobody in the field I could respect or want to become the student of or work with whole field was just in a terrible state when it mattered for me for someone in my generation aspiring to be a scholar in that field the other problem the number two problem I am encountering still today is the definition of the discipline itself what is asian studies I receive much less polite letters of projection from universities that just right in to tell me forget it we just do poetry so we don't want this example this guy's is my CD is well my CV leans more towards political reality Social Sciences etc if you define Asian Studies is the study of literature and you only do say Japanese poetry and medieval Chinese novels romances books like the dream of the red chamber that sort of thing um then you don't want me as a PhD student and I don't want you as my professor I don't want to be a PhD student I do not want to just write my opinions about literature and that is the way maybe departments of Asian Studies to find what they do so then you get into the problem of other disciplines well the discipline is not asian studies what is the discipline is it politics is it history where are the social sciences would someone like myself fit and this is why I've spoken to so many professors because I can go up to someone who's professor of anthropology and say well this is the research I've done in the past of research i was inspired in the future can I fit into your department of anthropology one professor of sociology have talked to at some length too and he said yeah maybe um but each of those this one's have different questions of how they define the discipline in many cases the definition discipline excludes someone like me and again that's okay I don't feel bad about that emotionally as long as everyone is honest and open and but what the requirements are it's okay but yeah the result is we have a system both nationally and globally that leaves huge provinces of human knowledge untouched if you think about the meaning of the word University this is supposed to be universal they'll give you an example within my own province in canada i believe the original plan for our province was that the university of the street in UBC in Vancouver that that university would specialize in Japan and China and that my university in victoria wood instead specialize in southeast asia and for that reason we still have at least one professor who does indonesia plan didn't work and instead both universities to universities were cannibalizing each other competing to do exactly the same thing to specialize in japan and china and just down the street literally down the street within the City of Victoria there are two universities very close together camosun was competing with Victoria camosun college and university ed teaching Chinese so universities in Canada and Canada some was typical they're tricky because they're not free market but they're also not part of a planned economy or any kind of top-down systematic approach to anything different universities are trying to organize their budgets in different ways and the results are nearly random and the results are largely determined by the personalities of the professors how good they are fundraising how could they are convincing other professors to follow their lead university of toronto the university i formally studied that when i was a kid they had at one time the largest department of sanskrit and indian studies so basically department of indians studies of india but including Sanford they had the largest department of that kind anywhere in the world outside of India and some like 30 professors was ridiculous headed by AK order now that word headed was part of the problem what did it mean to be the head of the department and it tore itself apart and collapsed and when I was there they had just two professors doing anything in that field and Sanskrit was not taught at all at the University of Toronto it was there so there was this ghost of a king orders great accomplishment now I show her an article way back then dealing with a history of what happened at academic department but one full year is nobody in the Canadian government nobody in the department of education and nobody even working as a bureaucrat for the University sat down and planned that out nobody said okay so Canada it's a medium-sized country we're going to have one University that specializes in India and one the specializes in Southeast Asia were not all going to do the same thing with Chinese no randomly you know just to the conflict of personalities and struggles were fundraising and petty squabbles one University in Canada built up enormous potential in the study of India and then that collapsed and it was never replaced by it's not as if another University in Canada took of the slack so if you wanted to be a serious in dalla Jess if you want to study study India Canada is not the place it could have been in a parallel universe it could have been there is now one professor at University of Toronto who is trying to build a basis for Burmese studies study of Myanmar I wish him luck maybe he'll be greatly successful that's really just its beginnings and if it wasn't an option for me in the last 10 years my whole life would be very different if that program had gotten rolling say 10 years earlier or even just five years earlier then it started rolling but now this institution building process is happening but again nobody planned that and on the other hand you can have a situation such as I've described where it seems like every University of Canada is competing to teach Chinese and to attract students from China and to be Canada's gateway to China and they are getting mediocre at best results in many cases really terrible results offering exactly the same services offering exactly the same courses on Chinese as a language and the same incredibly limited opportunities to do ma work and PhD work on say Chinese literature maybe if you're lucky Chinese politics and again I can say in a value neutral way as that has worked out for me for the time I was alive there have been no opportunities for me to get an MA or PhD many people when they first mean II don't believe that but then as they get to know me yesterday I was talking to a professor of Chinese Studies from Heidelberg professor of classical Chinese and Chinese language some of that and when he started the conversation he get he just didn't quite believe that i really had no opportunity to get an MA and PhD but after talking before about an hour he got the point he really appreciated that actually this was something I had researched very thoroughly researched thoroughly again and again over time and again again on different continents so that Professor he can relate to a lot of things I was saying because he his own education experience it a lot of experience in Taiwan so when I was talking about the difficulty and I eventually gave up trying to get a PhD in Taiwan he knew exactly what I was talking about so when he could relate to that and then we talked a little bit about Europe which is he's a professor here in Europe talked about the situation Canada so right away you could see the parallelism and then click and he really realize okay that I was being genuine and I wasn't wildly exaggerated I was really speaking from experience and saying I've done the research and I've looked at all the options and there were no options for me you