Got that urge to study the economic impact of the IMF on East Africa? Considering studying what makes women’s shelters work? Can’t get enough of stochastic computation for Bayesian inference?
If your answer is always a committed YES to any q’s about grad. school and you cannot see yourself without an M.Sc./M.A./M.B.A or Ph.D. after your name, take the biggest encyclopedia on your shelves and drop it directly on your big toe. Make sure it’s positioned just right to crush the digit. This is what grad. school feels like every moment if you do not like what you are researching and studying.
But that’s not the worst of it. Spending 2, 3 or 8 years in grad. school and coming out the other end without any real employment prospects wounds even deeper. I have seen people with PhDs in mathematics or biology applying for intern positions in management. And hardly ever chosen. In general, a combination of practicality, market need, education and luck govern how we do in the workplace.
I hated and loved graduate studies. Believe it or not but a certain regression after undergrad. happens when you’re working with the same group of people everyday. It gets campy and immature, not unlike high school. I hated that environment but I loved all the seminars I attended. I hated being a virtual slave for my supervisor’s work (and her partner’s work as well). You keep telling yourself that all will be finished soon once you defend your thesis but you spend too many nights plotting the mass murder of the people in the lab.
I abhorred rewriting my thesis endless times, especially when my supervisor was in a bad mood but I loved teaching freshman classes. What I gained most out of grad. school was the rigorous curricula and the push to be more critical in thinking and reasoning. It is probably the single most important skill (besides statistical training) that got me into business.
Could I have done things differently knowing what I know today? Certainly. Am I venturing into that world again? Probably not…
A few Do and Do Not tips soon……..
