Grad School Pros and Cons

Grad School Pros and Cons

As the academic year of our esteemed local colleges and universities is moving into summer sessions, and as many young adults (many of them who just graduated from college last month) contemplate their futures, many of them are looking to graduate or professional school as a way to further their education, enlighten their minds, heighten their career prospects, hide from the real world for a few more years, and keep open the possibility of nailing hot undergrads.

As someone who just finished a full year as a graduate student at one of the Stool’s favorite local institutions, Boston College, I decided to offer some pros and cons this week on the graduate school experience from my own perspective. I have to admit that I cannot speak for students who are in law school, medical school, or business school. Those institutions are designed for people smarter than me and with much higher aspirations. To paraphrase the Michael Bolton clone from “Good Will Hunting,” maybe I can give you more insight into their experience some day when I am serving their kids fries on their way to a ski trip. For the most part, my comments relate to people who decide to pursue (useless) graduate study as an extension of their (useless and pointless) liberal arts degree which will someday land them a solid $24,000 a year job as an assistant museum curator, but at least they will have studied the classics.

But I digress. Here are some pros and cons on attending graduate school:

PRO: FLEXIBLE SCHEDULE. After working in a job for the previous four years in which the day-to-day schedule was very controlled and fixed, it was a welcome change for me to have some flexibility in my daily schedule. The program I am in offers exclusively afternoon and night classes, which leaves my days free to work part-time and listen to ungodly amounts of talk radio. Because I am financing my degree partially with a graduate assistantship, I was able to make my own schedule during the day, as long as I got all the required hours by the end of the week.

CON: FLEXIBLE SCHEDULE. The downside of the flexible schedule is that I could never get my body to operate in a regular pattern. Because of my two-or-three day a week assistantship, some days I was up at 6 AM, other days I slept until 9. Sometimes I tried to maintain a regular schedule on my off days and make an early trip to the Y or something, but it’s hard to do that consistently when the previous night I had class from 4:00 to 9:30 and didn’t eat dinner until almost 11:00. You would have to have the discipline of an East German boxer to maintain regular body rhythms on a grad student schedule.

PRO: A SECOND CHANCE AT COLLEGE. What I mean by this is that with graduate school, you get a clean slate. You get another chance to pick a school and go live there for two or three years, or longer if you want a Ph.D. I will admit that this is one area in which I royally screwed up. If you are going to get a second chance at college after getting a Bachelor’s from a private, Catholic college in New England, why would anyone in their right mind go to another private, Catholic college in New England for a Master’s? This is where I should have chased after for the sunshine, the beaches, and the tail. UCLA, USC, Miami, Florida, Pepperdine, maybe Arizona State, UNLV, San Diego State, these should have all been on my radar screen. Instead I stayed close to home and ended up in the land of the Superfans in Chestnut Hill. Go figure.

CON - GRAD SCHOOL IS NOT COLLEGE. I think many college students might make this mistake of thinking that graduate school will be just like an extension of college. They probably expect a repeat of watching wrestling on a random Monday night followed by a 10-game beer pong grudge match and then a drunken run to IHOP at 3 AM. Though I don’t doubt that such binges exist somewhere, you have to make sure that the people in your immediate social circle are also in grad school. It might work if you are 22 and going to grad school right after college, but for a guy like me who is 26 with all of my roommates and friends holding down real jobs, such chicanery isn’t really possible. It is much harder in grad school to find people willing to take off for a few days and go on a 6 day, 6 game, 5 ballpark road trip up and down the East Coast (from which I will be returning when you read this article).

Also, if you’re hoping to be able to go to grad school and find “fresh meat,” be warned that a high number of girls in grad school have boyfriends, live-in fiances, or husbands. There seems to be a lot fewer examples of a phenomenon I observed on multiple occasions as an undergrad, the “girl who enrolled in school primarily to meet a husband who will be rich someday.” Young women in grad school are there for their own personal enrichment. Plus, a girl would have to be a really low-budget gold digger if she was looking for a husband among people in my program, who aspire to one day command a salary roughly equal to 1% of Manny Ramirez’s one-game paycheck.

PRO - MEET PEOPLE, MAKE NEW FRIENDS. This is probably more plausible if you are going to grad school right after college and/or in an unfamiliar city in which you don’t know a soul. If I had taken off and gone to UNLV, I would have been more inclined to make a few more social connections so that I could have someone to hit the Strip with and not end up as That Guy who’s always by himself at the Flamingo. But for me personally, since I stayed here in Boston, I already had a set group of friends from high school, college, and work that was already becoming too large. I would estimate that 98% of the numbers that I have stored in my cell phone never get dialed, nor do they ever dial me. I would delete most of them except that you never know when you might need to call the girl from college that you haven’t talked to in five years who moved to Philly to become a vet. I think I could delete every number except my parents’ house (which I should know anyway since I lived there for 20 years) and my girlfriend’s number, and my life would not be substantially inconvenienced.

CON - GUILT OF NOT HAVING A REAL JOB. I have to admit, this one has weighed on me the most the past year and has prevented me from fully enjoying the grad school experience. Maybe it’s my Catholic upbringing, but I have been obsessed this past year with the fact that I don’t have a real job and am not contributing to society in any way, shape, or form, beyond writing my twice-monthly column for the devoted readers of Barstool Sports. The whole year, I was getting up early two or three times a week while my roommates, friends, girlfriends, etc., all were schlepping out of bed five days a week, getting on the bus or the T, and going to work at real jobs, making real salaries and not “stipends” from a university fellowship. I am sure many readers would disagree and would love to have that schedule, but for me, I felt too much like a waste of life.

Meanwhile, I would feel embarrassed for my classmates who would complain about their “workload” or about having to write a 10-page paper or something. I feel like those people have been in grad school way too long. If writing a 10-page paper on a certain case study is causing you a lot of stress, you should probably go work a 40+ hour week in a cubicle and see how that treats you.

So there are some of my thoughts about attending graduate school. If you want to go for personal growth or as an avenue to future career advancement, then that’s fine. But don’t expect it to be an extension of college. If you want to continue to drink every night, forget the grad school idea and go get a real job in construction or something else blue-collar where you actually have to work for a living. I can guarantee the social life you’ll have as a construction worker will be far superior to that of a has-been quasi-Superfan graduate student. Who knows, you’ll probably work with better looking girls than I do. Go figure.