Grad School Will Not Save You

Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success
By Penelope Trunk

(Page 3 of 3)

Whether you're thinking of a top-tier MBA or a PhD in anthropology, there is a right way and a wrong way to approach graduate school. You need to understand your dreams and what is required to achieve them. Also, you need to understand the marketplace and what it values.

If you dream of climbing ladders in the Fortune 500, John Challenger, CEO of the placement firm Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, advises you to get an MBA. "In today's environment a graduate degree is as important as a college degree a generation ago." And get it in your twenties when the degree can get you a better starting job. "Where you start is very important for where you end up."

But think twice before cashing in your chips for a less-respected school. Challenger says, "Top business schools have a premium value. If you attend the third tier, do it at night because the financial loss and career stagnation while you're in school do not outweigh the benefit of the degree."

For some people, though, graduate school is not so much a way to fulfill a dream as a way to put off finding one. We spend eighteen years in school being told what to do and being rewarded for meeting other people's goals for us. The adult world requires us to set our own goals and this is something school does not teach.

Much of the flight to graduate school is a result of grade inflation and fragile egos, says Thomas Benton, a pseudonym for an assistant professor who writes a column for the Chronicle of Higher Learning: "Humanities majors are used to being praised by professors. Many recent grads return to school when they discover that not everyone thinks they are as great as their humanities teachers did. Humanities don't have the objective standards of business. Going back to grad school allows people to reestablish their ego. But it is short lived because they have to face the same market when they get out."

Keep in mind that instead of making you more creative, MFA programs make you more qualified to teach. And the academic job market is extremely competitive. Take, for example, English literature: only one out of five people who enter PhD programs will get a job in that field. The rest will find themselves back at square one, waiting tables, albeit with improved literary banter, and looking for a career.

Lost humanities students with an eye for cash and stability often enter law school because other professional schools require too much math or science. Yet the land of lost lawyers is full, too, which confirms that if you don't have a passion for what you are going to learn in graduate school, you shouldn't go.

Jane Sommer, interim director of the career development office at Smith College, has heard all the bad reasons for going to graduate school and has some advice:

1. Try other jobs first. The people who do best in graduate school are those who find decent alternatives first and still want to go back to school.

2. Determine if an advanced degree is necessary. Talk to people who are where you want to be in ten years. Ask them if they needed a diploma to get where they are. If they say, "I didn't get a diploma, these are the steps I took. . .," you can do those steps, too.

3. Don't bother using graduate school to wait out a bad economy. Chances are the one you're in right now is not particularly bad for job hunters.

4. If You're Stuck, Take An Adventure

If you're out of work, or if your job is so annoying that you wish you were out of work, then it's time to take an adventure. It's important to take adventures during the time when you have very little responsibility. With no one to take care of but yourself, an adventure is a way to bolster your skills and your resume without suffering through another dead-end job.

In your next job interview, you'll need a good answer when someone asks, "So, what have you been doing?" You don't want to sound like you are withering, uninteresting, or watching television at your mom and dad's house, even if you are. Travel is a fine answer to this interview question. It's true, and you seem worldly. Traveling does teach you a lot.

The older, very gainfully employed sector of society looks at these adventures as an expensive, childish way to avoid reality. This is partly true, but who cares? The reality of adulthood is hard. There are no teachers stroking your ego with As, and there are no parents making sure you're doing fun and challenging activities every afternoon. So it is no surprise that putting off adulthood is appealing. In fact, taking an adventure to see how other people live is a good first step into adulthood.

There are some great things you can accomplish while you're adventuring:

You can use an adventure as a way to hedge your bets. Robert Buckley was a health-care consultant and hated it. He decided to quit and try to get work as an actor. But he had no experience acting, and he was too scared to try it without having a plan B. So he decided that after six months, if he got no nibbles from agents, he'd go to Japan to teach English while he figured out what to do next. (Happy ending: he got acting jobs.)

You can sort out personal problems. A lot of career issues are actually personal issues. Do I really want to be a doctor or am I just doing it to please my parents? Do I want to move closer to my boyfriend or am I happy where I am? These are issues that dictate your career choices but that cannot be solved by changing jobs or rewriting your resume. Putting yourself in a new situation, away from the outside influences you are used to, will help you get a more clear perspective.

You can learn what you don't want. When I worked on the chicken farm, one day we spent three hours looking for mushrooms in the forest. I said, "Why do we have to keep looking? It's taking so long and it's only mushrooms. Let's go home." The father said, "But how will we have wild mushrooms for salad?" I couldn't believe it. I wanted to have my mom buy some at the grocery store and send them via airmail. This is when I knew that although I thought living and working close to the land would be appealing to me, it wasn't. To me, it actually felt monotonous and intellectually dissatisfying.

There are a few ways to get the money to travel. The most obvious is that you should alter your lifestyle. Prolific travel blogger Ali Watters has a few suggestions:

• Don't get a car or a mortgage unless you absolutely need one.

• Give up smoking or expensive trips to coffee shops - it wastes money each day.

• Stay away from material possessions. Before each purchase, ask yourself what you'll do with it while you're traveling.

Ali also recommends that you travel somewhere cheap; a month in Europe will cost you three times as much as a month in Southeast Asia.

If Ali's advice is too hard to swallow, you might try lining up a job that's an adventure. If you are under thirty years old, you can benefit from reciprocal work agreements that the United States has with the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

If you want to travel to other places, or if you're older than thirty, there's still hope for finding work. The creative, entrepreneurial spirit that is often squashed in a beginner can thrive in an adventure. For example, Sarah Baer founded a nonprofit with about $1,000 so she could get papers to spend a year helping natural disaster victims in Asia. Ann Armony quit her job as a nanny but she didn't have enough money for an adventure, so she got a job for the summer working at the South Pole. It's a barren town of about 300 people, and "summer," really, is no word for the place, but she loved the change of pace.

The bottom line about adventure is that there's little difference between a good entry-level job and an adventure. Both are about learning, trying new things, and making sure you don't starve. So when you are looking at your job choices, put travel right up there, on top with everything else. It's good for your resume and good for your life.

Copyright © 2007 by Penelope Trunk

About the Author

Penelope Trunk writes career advice for a new generation of workers. She explains why old advice - like pay your dues, climb the ladder, and don't have gaps in your resume - is outdated and irrelevant in today's workplace. She has a reputation for giving advice that is counterintuitive but effective, like take long lunches, ignore people who steal your ideas, and stop vying for a promotion.