2 upvotes, 0 direct replies (showing 0)
View submission: MA alternatives for non-career anthropologists
So, first things first, I'd echo what u/CommodoreCoco said in that post:
If you are in a financial situation in which you are able to spend over $15,000 to be trained for a job you're not interested in, that's awesome, and you can ignore everything else I'm about to say.
That said, let me try and highlight the more important point. The reason we reacted so strongly to OP's post was that they seem to have a view of grad school as "learning about humans and culture". This is a really common view of grad school. People, particularly those without a lot of background in anthropology, think that the titles of courses are things like "Sub Saharan Foraging Groups" or "Matriarchal Social Organization". But, as both u/CommodoreCoco and I tried to explain, this isn't really the case.
As I put it:
**graduate education in anthropology is usually more about learning how to be a researcher than learning about different cultures.**
Or, as u/CommodoreCoco explains
The expectation at every level is that you have a specific research project, and you are taking classes to help you complete it or become a better job candidate. **You are** ***not*** **there to learn things.**
Instead of "things", you could say "you are not there to learn about ethnographic or archaeological case studies". That is what your independent reading is for. To elaborate on this from my own experience: Out of 28 graduate courses I've taken, exactly one has been about "The Archaeology of Andean South America" - despite the fact that that's one of my specialties. Anthropology courses are usually instead about either method or theory. In my case, that's things like:
If those sound interesting, then by all means apply to graduate school. Just do it with a clear understanding of what you will (and more importantly, *what you will not*) learn.
There's nothing here!