What Is The Most Important Question About Graduate School?
The most important question about graduate school isn’t about graduate school at all.
I’ve been wondering whether or not I should go to graduate school for years.
Historically, I would think about this graduate school question… then go back to trying to ignore it.
Because I had no idea where to begin trying to answer it.
Then, something changed. In the pre-COVID fall of 2019, I found myself with a few days solo in London before meeting up with a friend in Ireland. London is one of my favorite cities in the world, and with all the possibilities available, what I decided to do with two of my evenings there was go to London School of Economics to listen to talks about inequality and capitalism.
Apparently my inner economics nerd is still there, even after 7 years of full-time work.
Sitting there happily jotting down notes in a lecture hall at LSE, I realized that despite my best efforts to bury it, this nagging graduate school question isn’t going away on its own.
True to form, I returned to the U.S., went back to work, and promptly continued putting off the grad school question.
But something about the combination of quarantine social isolation and my 30th birthday in the year 2020 made me realize that I’ve left this particular question unanswered long enough.
So this year, I committed to figuring out my graduate school problem once and for all.
But… how?
Start a Medium publication, of course.
I was drawn to the idea of writing through the process of figuring out graduate school here on Medium for several reasons.
For starters, writing through things helps me understand them. Since I tend to avoid this graduate school question, I hoped that writing about it would hold me accountable to make progress toward answering it. I’ve also noticed through my own research that part of the information about graduate school and academia seems to be missing online. A lot of what I read about academic pathways and careers assumes I already know things that I don’t know. I’m not sure if I don’t know these things because I’m a first generation university graduate, my school didn’t offer a Careers in Academia 101 class and other schools did, or if I simply wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have been. Whatever the reason, I don’t know much about graduate school or academia… so I’d like to fill that content gap for others as I learn more, if I can. Medium is also a great way to connect with people who already have this graduate school problem figured out.
Although I had a fair number of supporting reasons for starting this publication about figuring out graduate school, I still wanted to make sure I’d have enough material to justify creating a publication.
So I began brainstorming and writing down questions I have about graduate school, like:
Where should I go? What should I study? How do I pay for it? What could I do after? What do the job prospects look like for that role? Do graduate schools have scholarships? Do I have to take the GRE? How would I get a good score on the GRE? Am I too old to get back into academia? Do I need to go to graduate school to do what I want to do, or is there a better way?
Wait, what do I want to do?
The good news from my question brainstorming exercise is that I don’t think we’ll run out of material for this publication anytime soon. The bad news is that I immediately buried myself under 75 questions and had no idea where to begin trying to answer them. After all, this is exactly why I’ve historically avoided the question of graduate school.
Knowing where to begin is often the hardest part.
Don’t know where to start? Just start.
After a fair number of years working, reading, and writing online, I’m familiar with the importance of a bias toward action. I’ve also seen this described as piloting (try stuff to see if it works). Although there are some differences between these concepts, if we applied this general idea to our problem of answering a pile of 75 questions about graduate school, we would just start answering questions.
So that’s exactly what I did.
I drafted a grand total of 12 posts and shared 4 here on Medium before realizing that I had a prioritization problem.
Put simply, it may not matter what order we answer our questions about graduate school in if we just want to help someone answer one specific question.
But it does matter what order we approach these questions in if we are trying to figure out graduate school from scratch.
From the very beginning.
Because there is a logical beginning.
There is an inherent hierarchy to this pile of graduate school questions.
You really can’t answer a question like whether or not graduate school offers scholarships if you don’t know what you want to study or where you want to go. And that’s when I realized…
The most important question about graduate school isn’t about graduate school at all.
We can divide every question I’ve written about graduate school into two general categories: why and how.
Figuring out why I want to go to graduate school would logically come before figuring out how I get there (or get in, or pay for it).
But why I want to go to graduate school isn’t really a question about graduate school at all.
Graduate school is, at its core, a way to pivot: from one career to another, from one field of study to another, from one set of job prospects to another. Generally, if you can’t get hired doing what you want to do with your bachelor’s degree, then you may need to go to graduate school so you can do what you want to do. Which leads us to the most important question:
What do you want to do?
To be honest, I’ve tried to avoid this question in previous attempts to figure out whether or not I want to go to graduate school. Because while I’m sure that answering 75 questions about technical and practical aspects of graduate school won’t be easy, those questions have nothing on the difficulty level involved in figuring out what I want to do with my life.
Unfortunately, this is the most important question… and as much as I’d like to start somewhere easier, this is also the question that logically comes first.
If you don’t have even a working knowledge of what you want to do with your life, you can’t determine what you should study, where you should go to school, or if you even need a graduate degree to do what you want to do.
To be clear, you technically could go to graduate school without knowing what you want to do after: people wing it all the time.
But if we are trying to establish a logical approach to figuring out graduate school, I think we have to start with this big question first.
First things first: establish a working knowledge of what you want to do with your life.
Starting with a working knowledge is critical.
I don’t think it is possible to know exactly what post-grad job you will get before you’ve even gone to grad school. But it is possible to think generally about what type of work you want to do, the type of company, organization, or entity where you want to do that work, and the type of educational credentials you’ll need. I also think having multiple potential paths at this early stage is essential: the more viable career options that are supported by one potential graduate school degree, the better. You may have to narrow things down later, and you can. In the beginning, you just need to make sure you’re moving in the right direction for you: a direction that aligns with your values and the goals you have for your life.
If you don’t know enough to answer questions about potential post-grad job roles yet, then you and I are on the same page. Luckily, we can zoom out a bit.
One way to ask the question, “What do you want to do with your life?” is, “What type of work do you want to do?”
But another way to ask that question is, “What problem (or problems) facing the world do you want to spend your life trying to solve?”
First, you can figure out what you want to work on.
Later, you can figure out who you want to work for.
Let’s state the obvious: establishing a working knowledge of what you want to do with your life is a huge task that can take years.
While I sometimes worry that the 7 years I’ve worked full-time since graduating with my bachelor’s degree may hurt my chances of being accepted to graduate school if I ever decide to go, these past 7 years haven’t been a complete waste of time.
It took time to read, research, travel, talk to people, and test out different job roles and types of organizations where I could work. I needed to see the different approaches that the private sector, public sector, and nonprofits have to the world’s most important problems. I also needed to see what happens when incentives don’t work as expected or are misunderstood.
Ultimately, my experience has allowed me to establish a short list of problems facing the world that I want to pivot toward trying to solve in the next chapter of my own career. I still have an intimidating amount of work ahead of me to narrow down this list of things I might want to do, but I know more about what I want to do with my life at this point than I did straight out of undergrad.
If you are completely unsure where to begin establishing a working knowledge of what you want to do with your life, I think the importance of experience can’t be overstated. Read this book, research, and talk to people, but also just try a variety of different things.
Firsthand knowledge of what you do and do not like is always preferable when trying to figure out what to do with your own life.
If you don’t know where to start, start trying things.
Then, come back here and we’ll both work on narrowing things down.
Summary: How to approach the graduate school question
Step One: Establish a working knowledge of what you want to do with your life.
Step Two: Figure out if graduate school is the best way to get to that life.
Step Three: If grad school is the best way, figure out how to sneak into the Ivory Tower window while no one is looking.
(And please leave the window open so I can sneak in too.)
