Ascending the Ivory Tower

Sam Freidman

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Coming from a family of academics, one of the earliest promises I made myself was never to follow in the dreary footsteps of my parents. Locked up in a darkened room for most of the day and wheeled out only for the occasional conference or lecture, most of the academics I met in my youth were socially awkward, patronising and violently uncool. It was therefore not much of a surprise that when I began looking around for career ideas it was the glamorous world of journalism that attracted most of my attention. For three undergraduate years I threw myself into all kinds of writing, rising up the ranks of the Edinburgh Student, running my own Fringe publication and gaining experience everywhere from The Guardian to The Big Issue. I was sure it was the life of a fast-paced, high-energy hack that I craved and with graduation approaching, things were going to plan.

However, one day in the summer before my final year, things suddenly changed. After an incredibly stressful shift running around with a Canadian TV journalist, I started to see a few cracks in my masterplan. Staring at this underpaid, undervalued and probably quite unwell 42-year old, I suddenly saw a terrible caricature of my chosen profession.

I was also beginning to feel increasingly frustrated with the temporal limitations of journalism, where I was usually expected to master a topic in a matter of hours and where the kind of substantial investigative work I loved was few and far between. It was also around this time that I began researching for my undergraduate dissertation, looking at the bizarre world of online gamers. I was struck by the time and freedom I had to breathe life into the project and slowly saw how outside reading enhanced the clarity of my thoughts. Put simply, over the following months I became a geek, a full-blown nerd, and my entire final year was spent in pursuit of that elusive first.

I'm not sure you strictly 'need' a first to go into academia but it certainly helps. A lot. Midway through my final year I decided to start looking for masters courses. I knew I wanted to follow the herd to London, but with my subject being sociology good post-grad options were scarce. I finally decided on London School of Economics, mainly due to reputation, but also stupidly because I was seduced by the fact they demanded a first.

Thankfully, I got my first and trotted down to The Big Smoke, full of enthusiasm and ambition. Eight months later the ambition remains but the enthusiasm has taken a bit of a battering. London is not the place to be an impoverished student and LSE not the best academic environment. Crammed full of the world's future elite, egos jostle for position throughout the tiny campus. And then there are the fees. LSE is a powerful international brand and somehow gets away with charging extortionate tuition fees. Thankfully, a combination of savings, grandparents and a very supportive father has helped me through. But it hasn't been easy. I currently live in "Britain's gun-crime capital" in South East London and I think our house is the only one in the borough which hasn't been burgled. Only last week our next door neighbour was broken into. The burglars were so enthusiastic they knocked the front door down so hard it completely came off its hinges. The poor old lady had no front door for the next week. A bit of a contrast from the tame utopias of Bruntsfield and Marchmont, anyway.

The other thing to remember about the 'academic route' is that a masters is less about indulging intellectual whims and more about learning the craft of research. In the case of sociology, this has meant courses and courses of statistics.

For those wishing to go further, a large part of a masters is also taken up agonising over a PhD proposal. And the big issue is funding. Again, you don't 'have to' get funding to do a PhD but from my experience it's not a pleasant affair otherwise. Over the last few months I've talked to a number of PhD students, some funded some not. Those with funding appear almost normal, bar the customary weirdness mentioned above. However, it's the unfunded students that you can't help but worry about. Usually trying to combine full-time study with 25 hour-a-week jobs, most wear permanent looks of wild-eyed desperation and report 4, 5 and 6 year PhD terms. As you might imagine, I was keen to avoid such a scenario so locked myself in the LSE library for months getting a funding proposal together.

Convincing yourself you can actually do a 100,000-word piece of research is pretty hard, but convincing a bunch of academics is even tougher. I advise staying on safe ground and picking something you already have some awareness or experience with. I have been lucky to be involved with the Edinburgh Fringe for the last four years, so picking my topic wasn't too difficult. Still, it still took reading about 40 books to feel I had a vaguely innovative angle and months of editing to cut my thoughts down to a three-page proposal. You also need to think about where you want to do your PhD, who is going to supervise the project and where you have the best chance of funding. In my case, my project and academic performance suggested Edinburgh as the only realistic choice.

Even then I had to contend with the reality that Edinburgh receives over 200 sociology PhD applications every year and there are only two fully funded ESRC places. Although the odds are better in the physical sciences, fierce competition is pretty consistent throughout academia. If you get the funding, however, the financial reality isn't bad at all. As well as paying £3,000 a year in fees, the ESRC will also give you about £13,000-a-year tax free, as well as about £1,000 for research expenses. Combine this with a couple of hours teaching a week and you're looking at the equivalent of a job worth well over £20,000 a year.

Suffice to say I probably wouldn't be writing this article if I hadn't been one of the lucky ones. Who knows, I might even have a real job by the time I'm 30.

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