Think Twice: The Case for Foregoing Graduate School

Academia was the first place I ever felt at home; I was 20, living in the dorms, critically-thinking for a living, and imbibing sugary liquor drinks on the weekends. Everyone I knew was planning to go to grad school after undergrad — maybe that’s a liberal arts school thing or maybe it’s a privileged-white kid thing to say, but if grad school was anything like my 4 majestic years at a small liberal arts college in rural Pennsylvania, I was all in.

Five years after undergrad, I’m nearly finished with my master’s degree (and I still don’t know where the apostrophe belongs or if the word “masters” needs to be capitalized). I can only say this… I wish I hadn’t been so naive.

I wish I hadn’t spent the last 3 years in graduate school.

Sure, I know more now and I’m seemingly well-equipped to enter the world at the mid-level rather than the “entry-level” position that I had lacked experience to land after undergrad. But something funny happened. I went to grad school for the last 3 years and worked some really shitty internships and almost-full-time jobs to “have experience in my field” after graduating. And you know what, it didn’t matter.

Who will get hired before me? Every single person that chose to gain “real life experience” in the 40-hour (60-hour) weekly grind. Who has more experience and depth to their resumes? Every single one of my friends and peers who chose to work for the last three years instead of attending classes in between meetings. It doesn’t only matter “who you know,” it also matters “what you’ve done” too. And I’m not talking about your unpaid practicum and capstone projects where you’ve been researching and working for your favorite nonprofits that do the amazing community work that you hope to do one day.

Those experiences… they don’t count in the real world.

Here’s the truth, when you’re 22 or even 24, spending hours in a classroom studying theories of behavior change, the history of landscape architecture, and the economics of local food systems seems enlightening and applicable to the world around you. It feels so rich after spending 2 years in the working world scanning documents for your boss or mailing informed consents to potential research participants. But at 27, you know what’s more rich? Having a (more robust)savings account, having money to invest in a house rather than spending a quarter of your mediocre paycheck on student loans, having money to spend on the middle-shelf wine without feeling guilty or enough money (and vacation time) to spend on a few weeks experiencing another culture in a different country.

When you’re nearly done with grad school with a full-time job in tow you come to realize and accept that you just delayed the inevitable: you’re still scanning documents for your boss, mailing informed consents to potential participants, and mostly bored at your entry-to-mid-level job that you definitely didn’t need to spend the last 3 years in graduate school for.