How Grad School Can Help You Find Challenging Work
And what it will not help you with
After graduating from college, I was excited for the real world. I was eager to apply my knowledge to real problems, and while doing so, continue to learn and develop. As a field engineer in an oil field services firm, I was told I will have plenty of opportunities to develop technical as well as soft skills. My team was made up of a diverse set of outstanding individuals who, like me, were attracted to the high responsibility job of designing and executing technological solutions for oil exploration. Some would call the travel and comfort afforded to me by my job as glamorous. It all seemed great on the outside, except that I wasn’t happy.
My happiness was centered around solving challenging problems, but I hardly faced any. Although my job came with high situational-responsibility (for e.g., when should I decide against measuring borehole cross-section for fear of borehole collapse), it did not require much analytical thinking. Due to enormous risk to human safety, 90% of my job was based on standard operating procedures which was a fancy way of saying shut your mind, and do what’s written in the book. While this process-driven approach is undoubtedly beneficial for reducing human error, it also meant that the work simply wasn’t mentally challenging. That triggered my journey to look for other jobs and finally decide to pursue grad school.
In this article, we will see how grad school can help in finding challenging work by understanding:
- What kind of people actually hold challenging jobs?
- At what point in career does grad school make sense?
- What are the benefits (and limitations) of a post-graduate degree?
What is challenging work?
I view challenging work as work that involves frequent intellectual challenges associated with problem solving as opposed to repeated banal work requiring nothing more than common sense. For example, designing a water distribution system for a city is challenging work while repetitively sizing different pipes for a water distribution system based on pressure curves and relevant standards is not.
Challenging work can be related to both — the engineering side of a project (for e.g., how do I design a product based on user needs) or its business side (for e.g., how do I monetize a product to increase return on investment). Both kinds of work require active thinking and problem solving abilities. Since my business-related work experience is nil, throughout the article I will provide examples from the engineering side. Nevertheless, I expect the arguments related to how grad school can help in finding challenging jobs to translate to business jobs as well.
Limited opportunities with a college degree
Before I thought of grad school, I first considered switching jobs. So, I connected with my college friends working in other profiles like product development, operations, data analytics, project engineering, engineering consulting and so on. I loved hearing about their descriptions of what their daily work seemed like. However, when I asked them to describe challenges in their jobs, I received half-baked responses of challenges associated with work environment, chasing deadlines, making catchy reports, etc., but hardly any that was associated with thoughtful problem solving. I found that the real problem solving work was done by two kinds of people-
- People with more qualifications- People with either more work experience or those who had gone to grad school (MS, MBA, PhD, etc.) often held positions that involved problem solving.
- People who ran their own start-ups: Sick of banal work in industry, some of my friends had gone to solve problems on their own.
With the need for challenging work in mind, but without having a concrete idea for a startup, I thus pursued my MS. This was despite vowing to never return to school again. Over the years, I have now obtained a more nuanced understanding of how grad school can help in finding challenging work and what it will not help with. For starters, grad school is not a shortcut to career growth. Having a more valuable degree doesn’t let you bypass the introductory and low-skill work. Rather, it helps you move on from that work to more challenging roles.
Is grad school really for me?
Whether grad school is a good fit for you depends on what you seek from it. Since I was dissatisfied with my job, and it was clear that I did not possess the skills needed to find meaningful work, I went to grad school. If (opportunity) cost of attaining more education is too high, then one may consider online courses to up-skill before switching jobs. MOOC platforms such as Coursera are genuinely useful to obtain a new skill. And if you think online courses don’t count towards credentials, think again- some companies like Tesla don’t even care if you graduated high school.
If the (opportunity) cost of attaining more education is too high, then one may consider online courses.
Grad school undoubtedly helps in personal growth. Being thrown back into a learning environment from a work environment helped me develop quicker ways of learning by relating concepts taught in school to my experiences from work. It also helped me to grow as an individual as I interacted with my classmates and learned about their experiences in industry. Finally, hearing about new engineering ideas and success stories from my peers and professors instilled a new-found vigor in me. These interactions have been so valuable that I have now pivoted from working on oil exploration to quantifying climate change impacts on forests.
Beyond personal growth, grad school does have direct relevance to job opportunities. Plenty of evidence already exists comparing pre-grad school and post-grad school salaries and I will not go into that further. My interest in grad school, however, stemmed from the need for greater skills by developing depth in a niche.
Breadth vs. depth
Most of us who hold an undergraduate degree are well aware of how fast-paced our education was. Even before we grasped a concept or developed a feel for a subject, the semester ended, and with that, our exposure to that subject, too. Part of the reason why undergraduate education feels like a sampler in a buffet is that it is designed to cover breadth of a field. While this may be useful to develop general skills in a field, it comes at the cost of lack of depth in any particular topic.
People holding advanced degrees were more suited for tackling tough problems
For example, in my undergraduate degree of civil engineering, I learned about various different disciplines inside civil engineering such as structural engineering, water engineering, soil engineering, construction engineering, materials engineering, etc. Even though my analytical ability was sharpened through those courses, I did not amass enough knowledge to, say, design a dam, or model the hydrology of a watershed. This lack of depth meant that the opportunities available to me were limited to those requiring general analytical ability as opposed to specialized knowledge or skills. Thus, people holding advanced degrees were more suited to tackling tough problems.
At grad school, I found that the courses were heavily centered on lengthy problem sets of actual projects/case studies which helped in developing an aptitude for real world problems. As a result, there were very few time-bound final examinations. The design of my coursework also facilitated peer learning through group projects and assignments, further preparing me for industry where team work is ubiquitous. Having said that, grad school is not the answer to learning every skill that one may possibly need at workplace. It is also important to know when to stop.
Knowing when to stop
No amount of education is ever going to be sufficient to face all the challenges our jobs can throw at us. After all, learning must be part of our everyday work too. On the flip side, not every skill we learn at school is going to be directly applicable at our jobs. The more specialized we become, the less likely it is that the added skills would be directly valued by an employer. For instance, even though I learned a lot about water-related processes during my masters, I only applied a subset of that knowledge related to storm water management during my most recent internship.
Although graduate education comes with huge benefits of personal and professional growth, it can also come with skills not directly relevant to a future employer.
Review
In this article, we learned how grad school can increase your chances of finding challenging work by helping you develop knowledge and skills in a relatively niche subject. We also learned that grad school may not be suitable for all. Depending on the cost of grad school and the level of skills required, online courses are a perfectly viable option too.
Further, we saw how more education may not proportionately translate to improved skill value due to the increased specificity of those skills. Finally, grad school or no grad school, what’s important is that our jobs provide an environment for us to continue to learn and grow every day.
