To Ph.D. or not to Ph.D.?

As some of you may or may not know, I've recently been toying with the ridiculous idea that I might like to continue my career in academia by pursuing linguistics, perhaps even as a Ph.D. Crazy, maybe. This article in The New York Times certainly gave me something to think about. Among other caveats:

The average student takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D.; in education, that figure surpasses 13 years. Fifty percent of students drop out along the way, with dissertations the major stumbling block. At commencement, the typical doctoral holder is 33, an age when peers are well along in their professions, and 12 percent of graduates are saddled with more than $50,000 in debt.

I'm not exactly sure how appealing the idea of completing a Ph.D. sounds when the reality might be that I'd emerge a 33-year-old-burned-out-(most likely) single-poor person, with "Dr." in front of my name.

Let's be honest, why am I even thinking about this? Well, linguistics excites me. I took courses (which I loved) in linguistics, grammar, syntax and phonetics in college, but they were all in Spanish. Plus, the idea of prolonging school is extremely enticing. Who knows what will happen!

As for now, I'm brushing up. I'm reading The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar by Mark C. Baker, and next on my list is The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Stephen Pinker. These, of course, are in addition to the reading I am doing for school this semester -- a mere 26 books total.

I wasn't kidding when I said I'm a nerd.