Will Is My Friend

If any of you are considering grad school,
this here site is a must read. It's the blog of a history professor at Swarthmore.

Much of what is posted is common knowledge: grad school is usually hell (and worth it only if you're absolutely sure that this is what you want to do; if it's not, you're fucked in many ways) and requires a really insane kind and amount of commitment.

Some particularly good pieces on this website are
"Should I Go to Grad School" and a little bit more hardcore, From ABD to the Job Market. An amuse bouche from the latter:

..[T]here are a very small but irritating coterie of academics who collect vast numbers of papers from Ph.D candidates engaged in their write-up who then artfully (so that it's not an overt instance of plagiarism) rip-off aspects of the doctoral students’ research or arguments, knowing that it's hard to prove when it's from a dissertation that hasn't yet appeared in any kind of published form.

There are other sites by current grad students, singing the same tune (graduate programs and hiring practices need reform etc.), but this blog offers the perspective of someone in a cushy tenure track job, with summers off, and job security for life -- but still knows the horrible rules of the games that are played. (Although at Swarthmore, a liberal-arts and exclusively undergraduate institution, he doesn't speak too much about the intricacies and problems related to advising graduate students at an advanced level etc.)

For a wonderful introduction to, and contextualization of this problem, I recommend a Village Voice piece that helps to explain, among other things, why blogs like this exist in the first place. It is here.

And if this is totally boring and inapplicable to you, you can check out the site I go to at work, risking my job to do so and yours too if you decide to go too.

I just posted, like, ten links, fully aware that this is probably a really irritating post, sending you to far flung corners of the web (a blog about an academic's gripes!)...apologies in advance.