Grad Programs Considered, Then Re-Considered

Do you know anyone who’s truly happy with their job? I sure don’t. It’s so strange because, as a kid, everyone asks you, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” as if there are some really great opportunities out there – just use your imagination and you can do it! But it's not so easy, is it. As Jarvis Cocker put it, “Oh we were brought up on the Space Race, and now they expect you to clean toilets.”

I started a new job recently, so I’ve been giving a lot of thought to jobs and careers, hats to wear and ladders to climb. I’ve spent most of my time the past few weeks cutting and pasting different things into different Word documents, occasionally typing a few letters and numbers here and there. It’s about as exciting as it sounds. But overall it’s an improvement over my last job, in that I’m getting paid more to do less work, which, after all, is one of my major goals in life (although perhaps I’m just starting to come to grips with how much my old job overworked and underpaid me).

Still, I’m dogged by delusions that there is a perfect job out there for me somewhere, a delusion made even more ungraspable by the fact that I’m a twenty-something stuck in the Midwest. So it’s no surprise that I’ve given a lot of thought over the years to grad school, the purest form of escapism. The following is a list of graduate programs I have at one point or another seriously considered, and then later decided against (in alphabetical order):

American Studies – What a perfect waste of time. This degree had to have been created by folks who realized that a general “Liberal Arts” degree was a criminally useless waste of money, but who wanted to remain in school even though they still couldn’t decide what they wanted to study, so they just took courses in everything ranging from political history to pop culture (books, movies, music) and called it a specialization as long as it all dealt somehow with America. I’m sure I would love taking courses in this sort of program, but I’m also sure I would be pretty upset when I realized I was deeply in debt after paying for an unmarketable “degree.”

Communication – What the hell is a Communication degree good for anyway, and why did I want to get one for so long? I’ve never met anyone who’s benefitted from having a Master’s in Communication, just folks a few years older and starting out in the same positions as me.

English Literature – Getting a graduate degree in English Lit was one of my primary ambitions as an undergrad, until I realized a few things: (1) Spending two years of my life in a Master’s program wouldn’t help me get any further along than just spending two years working in a career field I was interested in; if anything, it would set me back two years. And (2) I didn’t want to spend seven-plus years in a Ph.D. program that more than likely wouldn’t provide much financial support (shockingly, literature doesn’t fare as well against the sciences when it comes to university grants), and then spending most of my adult life waiting for old, cardigan-ed professors in prestigious universities to die while I wasted away pining for tenure at some podunk school in the middle of nowhere.

History/Archival Studies – Same as above. Plus, I didn’t major in History. I’d be better off reading Jeff Shaara on my lunch break.

Law – If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years since graduating from college, it’s this: Any ol’ chump can get into law school; they just have to be willing to pay. Seriously, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been left speechless after learning that someone is a lawyer or law student. If that person can do it, I think incredulously, I know I could kick some major law school ass. But when I hear how most law school grads are unhappy, buried in mountains of debt, and tied to an 80 hour a week job that drains them of their soul, I tend to think twice of this as an option. Still, the fighter in me refuses to rule this out.

MBA – Stop laughing. I have honest-to-goodness thought about joining an MBA program. When you work in large international, multi-billion dollar companies like I do, you quickly realize that having advanced business training can put you ahead of the curve. While I tend to instinctively gag when I click on MBA program’s student profiles and see hundreds of similarly navy suit-clad drones smiling back at me, if my employer was willing to pay for me to go to a part-time MBA program (if they thought I was valuable enough) I would totally consider it a possibility.

MFA in Writing – Would be great, except that I don’t write.

Molecular Microbiology and Microbial Pathogenesis – Still a strong contender for this one.

Psychology (Clinical) – For some reason I am particularly choosy when it comes to Clinical Psych programs. I blame my heavily Freudian psych professor in college for biasing me against most traditional programs. Plus, as my good friend Josh once pointed out when I told him I was going to major in Psychology in college, “Why? You hate people.” The words stuck (and are true on most days).

Psychology (Industrial/Organizational) – I know, I’ll parlay my psych education with my business background! Brilliant! Oh wait, I/O Psych is basically an elaborate HR position. It’s like the worst of both worlds. Pass.

Psychology (School) – Refer to the notes on Clinical, and add to that the fact that I can’t stand to be around children.

Psychology (Social) – God, I’m just grasping at straws here, aren’t I?

While this is a cynical list, dreams die hard with the Well Respected Blogger and chances are good that I’ll be recycling the pros and cons of this list as 2008 progresses. In the meantime, it’s back to the working week for me. To paraphrase Elvis, I gotta do it till I’m through it so I better get to it.