Do I really, REALLY Need To Do My Masters?
Every day I get convinced that I don’t need to
A year ago I applied to three universities.
I wanted to do my masters in the UK. I had my sights set on one and only one university — The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).
I applied while still doing my internship; attended all LSHTM webinars at the time; and even reached out to the alumni of the school.
I was heavily invested in joining this school.
A few years back, I just wanted to do my masters as fast and as soon as possible, but I didn’t know which subject to pick. After falling in love with microbes, I knew it had to be Microbiology.
Franklin Harold’s book, The Way of the Cell, convinced me that I would be picking the right field. Another book on metamorphosis pushed me to consider the London School with renewed vigour.
So I applied.
There was the Chevening Scholarship, which I have heard so much about. I applied for that as well. They needed applicants to have offers from at least three universities.
Dang!
I had to apply to two other universities.
I did.
I got offers from all three. But the one from the London School came later.
I had a dream I could buy my way to Heaven
Offer letters can be very detailed.
Especially about the fee structure. When I read the figures it was another reminder of the mountain I had to climb just so I could pursue this degree. It was huge!
For someone who struggled to secure his fees straight from high school, this was a quick reminder that grounded me back to reality. What’s more, you had to pay a deposit to secure your spot.
I had just started my paid internship, with responsibilities back home, black tax, and still the deposit was massive. Luckily they gave us the offer to postpone this early payment if one was applying for a scholarship.
I told the school about it. They accepted my request. Now, I only had to wait for the scholarship.
I had high hopes.
How naïve of me.
In short, I did not get it. It was puzzling. My friend had reached out a few weeks ago telling me how he got the rejection letter.
I felt my case was different as I had not yet received any email from them. Soon enough, I also got my dose of the same decision.
I applied for several other scholarships. But I had started late. Most were already closed by then. So I had a few options to pick from, largely from the university itself. The GSK and the ones offered by LSHTM.
Rejection, rejection, rejection.
When I told my editor this story, he laughed.
He told me:
Young man, the world you’re in is not fashioned for you to thrive. In particular, a young man of your origin, with such unique ideas, will find it hard to succeed in this country.
If you’re planning to get a scholarship based on merit, you’d need to apply for at least 100 of them, to get at least two or three successful ones.
I couldn’t believe it.
All my life, I knew I could buy my way to heaven with my wit. I have been doing that ever since I started going to school.
But this type of heaven had large cedar doors and a password I could hardly crack.
I began reaching out to those who tried their luck applying for the same scholarships. These were smart individuals, some even boasting several international accolades to their name. I got the same response as I did from my editor.
It was like we were knocking on heaven’s door, but the party going on inside muffled our cries.
Man, it’s so hard not to act reckless
Still, I was still determined to go to LSHTM.
The more I read about evolution, the more I started considering an alternative option. Evolutionary biology.
In her book, How to Decide, Annie Duke opines that if there were two decisions where you cannot decide, pick any of the two. Slim differences should not paralyze decision-making.
But was already I was on a mission to raise the money. Sunk costs yoo! The cash raised would be my fallback plan in case the world decided to do the same thing it did for, according to my book editor, ‘this young man’ from this corner of Africa.
But the more I continued reading, the more I started questioning the need for doing a masters.
I felt the pressure, under more scrutiny
The pressure was coming from outside as well.
I was done with my internship so I had no formal employment. I was applying to positions but getting rejections. Most of my applications were to corporate institutions since the public and private healthcare sector was plagued with many problems.
Over 4000 doctors were unemployed, yet the doctor-to-patient ratio was and is always on the rise. Despite the desperate need for doctors all over the country, somehow, few if any ever get employed.
It got to a point where I could just do just about anything to get money. I had spent so many years on campus, with a promise of buying our way to heaven through medicine and surgery, but reality had other plans for us.
Picture this.
You have always been succeeding all your life, which has mostly been school life. After school, life teaches you that there’s more to it than academia.
If this reality does not dawn on you fast enough, you can hardly make life-changing decisions. With so much pressure and scrutiny, as Kanye said, it won’t be hard not to act recklessly.
I then made another decision:
If they were not going to take me, I’d make my own way.
Still, I had my sights on Oxford or LSHTM. No other university would sate my interests.
This is my life, homie, you decide yours
After making what can become a massive shift in your life plans, you always have questions.
I started asking questions and reflecting.
I have developed what I consider to be an alternative theory of evolution. I did what while I was still on campus. As far as that goes, I am the only one in the world who knows so much about this theory than any other person.
I did this without any funding, no prior majors, or accreditation from any field in evolution and got published. I even had a successful book launch.
Every day I wrote snippets about it on Medium and Substack and shared my pieces on social media platforms. People started asking questions, seeking clarifications and some getting surprised by my interpretations, which somehow, made a tonne of sense.
Yet, I did not have a masters or a Ph.D.
My editor is a senior lecturer, and he has supervised many PhD students. His comment about my work was that it was enough to grant anyone with a Ph.D., one of the highest compliments I have received about my book.
I then came across two online pieces — one by Naval and another by Paul Graham. These two intellectual giants were persuasive in their arguments about schools.
When asked about the current state of our education system, this was his response:
I think there’s no question, it’s completely obsolete. The education system is a path-dependent outcome from the need for daycare. From the need for prisons for college-aged males who would otherwise overrun society and cause a lot of havoc. The original medieval universities had guard towers that faced inward, for example. You had to put a curfew, and you have to lock up the young 18-year-old males before they go out with swords and daggers and create trouble.
College and schools and the way we think about them come from a time when books were rare. Knowledge was rare. Babysitting was rare. Crime was common. Violence was prevalent. I think schools are just byproducts of these kinds of institutions.
What schools matter for is wanting to keep the kids out of the parents’ hair while the parents go to work.
The Internet flipped the game. The best teachers, the best schools, and the best content are found on the Internet. Schools largely equipped individuals with accreditation, Graham argues.
Initially, these stamps were a recognition of your wealth status. Only those with money could pass the tests which required expensive education. Our current system is an expensive one. It’s worse for international students seeking overseas education, competing for smaller spots but with higher fee structures.
With wealth comes legacy. Thus the initial goal of having certified credentials was maintaining family legacies. Some schools even have legacy admissions.
Credentials are also a yardstick. They measure one’s ability to do hard work. But surely, is a school the only scale we should use for that?
Schools are indicative that you can show up to a place, consistently for long enough and still succeed. It would convince the employer that you can do the same once you’re hired.
Are these the only measures we have for credibility?
My twenties were spent on campus. I am lucky I did not fall so much into debt. I am also lucky I graduated before the prices skyrocketed.
Presently, almost everything is steered towards minimizing school-based education even for those who want to get it.
Throughout my daily reading, a habit my mother nurtured in me since I was in lower primary, I was not getting a good reason why I should pursue graduate studies. Broadly speaking.
My life homie, decide yours
What I did not like about university systems is their factory-like settings.
I mean exactly that.
They advertise how prestigious the facility can be, and indeed, some foster amazing environments for intellectual pursuits. Once you graduate, they hardly remain accountable for their products.
In fact, this makes them worse than factories, sadly. If an Apple product, say an iPhone, bends or blows up on several users, the company takes responsibility and finds ways of making up for such damage to its users. For educational institutions, once you are out…adios.
C’est la vie.
You have the accreditation, but no means of sustaining yourself. Your achievements should be your gatepass to heaven. The kind of heaven you imagined you’d have, but more often than not, you don’t start from zero.
You start from negatives.
You have loans. These loans don’t go away as fast as you might hope, and employment gets elusive by the day. Why? More universities are being started, more students are graduating, competition is getting stiffer and inflation is here to stay.
It’s more than double negatives, and they are not giving you the positive results we learned from high school math.
It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under.
Treasure, what’s yo’ pleasure?
What makes it even more interesting?
These schools have amazing stories of people who built their own projects, distant from what they learnt from school. Some didn’t even go to school.
Darwin pursued a goal different from what his parents wanted. His parents wanted him to pursue medicine. Newton and Leibnitz developed a new branch of mathematics. Faraday didn’t even know math yet there are many laws named after him.
If we’re to go to the field I love, microbiology, the father of the field, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was a lens maker. A lens maker!!!!
Mendel just made observations from his garden. Einstein had a lot to distill as a patent maker. For him to develop the theory of general relativity, he was just taught by an expert in geometry. These teachers are now easily accessible over the Internet.
Socrates just asked questions. He asked everyone questions. Those who went to school and those who didn’t. Even Plato asked questions.
The people who we praise had something they loved doing. They followed their pleasure and found their treasure. Nowadays, students who have pursued masters, PhDs, and professorships are given titles based on them.
Carl Zimmer, an author whose works I love, has written over 14 books on evolution. Yet, he only has an undergraduate degree. He’s an associate professor in the same field.
Funny, huh?
One other thing I almost forgot is the drive to learn. Pursuing your masters, PhD or postdoc is not the only metric for a drive for learning.
Oliver Heaviside will go down in history as a self-taught mathematician and physicist whose contributions will outlast most of our pursuits.
What I also don’t like is how completion of a degree course leaves you helplessly open to seeking employment as your lean-to option. Maybe you could get tagged to a company or a mentor, who will hook you up.
However, continuing with the drive to learn changes once you get a job. At work, somebody else tells you the objectives they desire from you. The company has its goals, and sometimes, your honest opinions get stifled.
On the other hand, someone who does not have a job but has several revenue-earning projects on the side can create time to pursue their interests without an institution’s stamp of approval. Self-drive does not take a back seat in these cases.
I don’t want such a future — one of only seeking employment. I want to pursue my interest.
If I could add another bit before I forget, it’s the replaceability universities give their students. A university teaches you to be employable, but firms, businesses, and companies want a committed employee, one who is passionate about what that particular business is after. Not one who will jump at the next best train.
It means you can easily be replaced because the university is in the business of churning your replacement. Higher-level institutions, thus, don’t give you specific knowledge. It gives you general knowledge, well packaged in classes and graded through tests.
Specific knowledge, on the other hand, is acquired through experience. Experience is hardly built in schools.
When you gain specific knowledge, you are irreplaceable. Imagine working for hours, going into debt, and just when you have found a job, run the risk of being replaced for many unaired reasons.
I know I wouldn’t like that fate for anybody.
Regardless, pick your poison. Either side has its hustles. But I’d rather work towards getting specific knowledge and being the only one with that specific edge.
Heck, you can even do both and have a sharper, mightier edge than the rest of us!
Finally, let me know if it’s a problem man
I don’t think I’d want to pursue my masters.
Knowledge is best seen in the application. I have not read what I read for me to simply ignore it.
It’s important to note that there are some professions where a masters is essential. I would not want anyone doing surgery on my busted knee if they were not well-trained. Or getting into an airplane not designed by a qualified professional. Fields such as medicine and engineering warrant a masters for you to be good at your craft.
But if it’s a topic I can teach myself, I will do it in the most efficient way possible. Fewer costs, greater returns.
If schools can exist with minimal costs to students, I’d be happy to enroll. I’d also want to be taught by someone who is passionate about the subject, not someone who just wants to get the class over with and get paid at the end of the month.
If you have a better argument, I’ll be willing to listen. Until then:
Let me know if it’s a problem man,
A’ight man, holla then
In the meantime, I continue to build what I’m building. Just so you know, it’s a school. But one different from what we’re used to.
No tests, no grades, no diplomas.
If you want to be informed once I have launched it, you can submit your email address in the comments section. I promise that will be the only email I will send you — about the launch.
You’d have to decide about the rest.
