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Going to grad school to postpone job hunting
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Pretty much the army will only take people with a BS. The Airforce pretty much only commisions officers with a Graduate degree in engineering and the navy is just as hard. I guess you could go to Marine OCS, but seriously, who decides to become a Marine Officer on a whim?
Granted I never looked into becoming an Officer, these are just things i've heard thrown around, and by and large I agree it wouldnt be a bad idea to think outside of the box.
If I had a BS in anything I'd look into going into the peace corps. Always wanted to do it but could never get that degree squared away.
In most cases, the degrees you've earned become irrelevant to your resume after 10~20 years of working in the field. If the extra money you made by starting out at a higher salary isn't high enough to cover the costs of grad school itself, then you come out at a loss.
Of course, this is applicable only when these degrees are optional for the job requirements. And I think in most cases you do come out ahead. Nowadays every schmuck has an undergrad degree. Graduate degrees are a great way to show that you're more dedicated to your field.
I'd say that if this thread was about PhD programs instead of grad schools, I'd agree with the OP. PhDs seem like a waste of time unless you want to teach.
I just got into Air Force OTS with a BS in engineering to do engineering-like things. Many other people got in with random BS/BAs to do many other things like communications, public affairs, contracting, etc. Unfortunately, the selection rate was about 10% on the most recent selection board for non-flyers. Most of these people did have technical degrees. A graduate degree is not required, and in fact will not really help you because you're considered against a constant for everyone (which is the undergraduate degree.)
Grad school is great, and will probably help get you selected, but not as much as you'd think. It's common that the Air Force will even pay for a(nother?) graduate degree when you're a 1Lt/Capt (about 4-8 years in).
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
Well there ya go, straight from a horses mouth.
The bigger problem, I think, is that shit like this takes seats away from people who actually are interested in a particular field and seek to pursue it at a graduate level. It also decreases the funds available to genuine graduate students. Given that academia is not in the best shape anyway, leeching off the system seems to be the height of assholeishness to me.
You seem to be failing to consider assistantships, fellowships, and other sources of funding. In the hard sciences, at least, it is very rare to see a grad student paying for school either with loans or out of pocket, because doing so would be a terrible financial decision.
Usually the funds graduate students receive do not generate a profit for the student, but rather allow the student to just get by.
And also schools usually find a way to sneak fees onto students anyway. So they can get a tuition waiver but have to pay "other fees" out of pocket.
No, I'm considering them. That's why I said "and such" at the end. TA jobs, scholarships and the dozens of other ways that people give you money to go to school. Although, if one wants to be serious, they all boil down to either a loan, a grant or a job.
The important point being though, all of these sources of revenue are tied to GOING TO GRAD SCHOOL.
If you aren't going to Grad School, you aren't making that money, and we come back to "Well, how the fuck are you eating?" question.
?
Don't you pay to go to grad school? Doesn't more students mean more funding? And in respect to the future, increases the number of alumni to increase endowment?
Maybe it makes it more competitive, sure, but that's only a problem for the kids that get left out. In fact, more competition for limited seats helps the reputation of the school and gives them a higher caliber of student. Look at any of the Ivy League schools, they basically built their reputation on their exclusivity.
Yes, it means less students who are focused on the specific field, but that's not really a problem, it's just a situation. As others have said, the focus of your degree doesn't really have to define what jobs you pursue.
No, actually, my graduate school pays me to attend. Which is how I eat and live and such without accruing any debt. I ostensibly pay them back by: 1) being awesome and 2) taking teaching duties in addition to my studies.
Programs vary in their funding support for students as well as in their teaching requirements.
Some programs ruthlessly exploit their students--giving them little or no support, and simultaneously requiring them to teach massive course loads. This is a way of converting a student's hopes and dreams into dirt-cheap academic labor, and it's pretty skeezy. Fortunately, I am not at such a program.
I don't see why these people aren't "real" students, though. Just because if they had a choice, they'd prefer to be in the workforce?
do you lack faith, brother?
or do you believe?
Well, you still pay them back with your own labor. And the financial implication of grants is that by basically giving money to exceptional students you give them a chance to go out and make money, after which they donate money back to the school. A lot of grants are, in fact, named after the alumni that fund them.
The only real point I wanted to make is that there's no way you could call what grad students do "leeching"
Indeed, I think the converse is more common--that graduate students are used as cheap labor for 6+ years and then given a worthless degree and told to leave.
As for if you need to be a grad to be an architect, yes you do. Not only that you have to have graduated from an "accredited school" to even be allowed to sign up for an internship. Otherwise you are just a employee forever.
Not really, no. Usually departments get X funds to spread among the graduate students. Over time these can increase to compensate for increased enrollment, but in the short-term an increase in enrollment ends up fucking over the other graduate students.
Also, given the economy, most departments are losing funds rather than gaining funds.
That's me, sort of. I graduated in Comp Sci in 2002 from a rather mediocre school and wasn't prepared to get a job, if any had actually existed. But I got to continue my scholarship so I got a second bachelors in Political Science with the intent of getting a Masters - which I moved away from home and finished. But I wanted to do it, I enjoyed it, and I did better at that than I had my Comp Sci degree.
Then I end up doing tech support and am heading into networking. Go figure.
I would go further and argue that you don't even really need a relevant undergraduate degree to get into OCS. I got my commission from Navy OCS with a BA in English. English! That's probably the most useless major in the world.
But yes, selection rates are very competitive and it's gotten even worse with the economy. It's pretty much like applying for a job except you also need to demonstrate some physical fitness and have a relatively clean background (I hear for the Army you don't even need that
I do agree that there are so many options out there that a lot of recent graduates probably aren't even considering. Teach for America, State Department Foreign Service Officer, Peace Corp, etc.
Teach for America is actually very competitive and high-status, as of late.
But, keep in mind, law school lasts 3 years. We're starting to see signs of life in legal hiring now, and I'm fairly confident that it's going to get better as time goes by. Furthermore, the hits we've seen have been concentrated in certain practice areas, such as real estate and M&A. Litigation departments are still hiring, as are bankruptcy, family practice, criminal defense etc.
I also read an article that pointed out the average age of lawyers is the highest it's ever been. We're going to see a lot of lawyers retiring in the next decade or so.
That being said, should you go to law school just as a way to hide from the recession? Probably not. But, even if the economy was hot right now, I'd be saying pretty much the same thing- don't go to law school just because you're not sure what else to do.
Rigorous Scholarship
While I'm sure it's taken a hit like everything else, I can't see IP law ever being a barren job field. As long as you don't slack off classes you'll probably be in pretty good shape.
I didn't mean to imply that Teach for America is something anyone can do. Becoming a Foreign Service Officer is also very competitive and high-status (I'm not sure but you might even need a graduate degree for that). These are simply options that, for some reason, a lot of people don't know about.
From talking with a lot of my friends, they seemed to have this mindset that their only choices after college were to get a regular corporate/consulting job or go to grad school. And since they couldn't get a job, the only choice left was grad school.
Also, too many people have been getting degrees that don't correspond to real world employment for years. It's just really now starting to become a problem when about a decade ago having any college diploma could get you a job and now, surprise surprise, employers are demanding that college students learn things that are relevant to the workplace.
I saw the writing on the wall about 3 years ago and switched from being a senior level history major and went back down to a freshman accounting major. Yeah it meant a lot more school but the job market just isn't as flexible as it used to be.
Fortunately there are accounting jobs everywhere since it's kind of a soulless profession that doesn't exactly appeal to 18/19 year olds. I like it though!
Strangely, nursing is a pretty rewarding career that pays well and appeals to the type of person who wants to make a difference. Yet, around here anyway, there's a frothing demand for nursing grads and not enough people enrolled in the nursing program.
Well, they aren't your friends, that's for sure.
Are you fucking kidding me?
So you're saying that you can work to pay your way through college, and/or get money from your parents, but these sources of income become suddenly unavailable the moment you graduate and you therefore have no choice but to go to grad school?
What the FUCK? If your parents are cutting their financial support after you get your diploma then you have some shitty ass parents.
That's funny, it's almost like you haven't read a single fucking thing I wrote. You know, about how a massive increase in the amount of grad students will lead to a massive decrease in the salary advantage they would have over undergrads, when they graduate? It happened in MBA and Law. It will happen in other fields in a few years, regardless of the state of the economy.
This just shows how absolutely little you know about this topic.
Undergrad is different because 98% percent of jobs out there won't even look at your resume if you don't have an undergrad degree, so if you don't have one then you're almost for certain doomed to a life of retail or some other shitty career that pays minimum wage.
This is unlike grad school, which is NOT a requirement for the VAST MAJORITY of professions out there. It is an absolute luxury that most people don't even need. As a financial investment it makes stupidly little sense.
No, I am comparing grad school to other things that you can do to improve yourself, your skillset, and your resume - volunteering is only one of them and no one in this thread says "do nothing but volunteer." You're just a retard who keep throwing that strawman around because that's how you debate apparently.
What we are saying is that grad school isn't the only way to improve your job prospects. So chill the fuck down and learn to read.
Ahh, but all YOUR buddies, of course, are sitting on a hundred grand to spend on education.
Naturally.
Ahh, so that's how it works. All this volunteering is done while mooching off your parents.
Ahh insults. How childish.
Yeah, welcome to my ignore list.
do you lack faith, brother?
or do you believe?
Explicitly against the forum rules btw.
Regardless, your argument still sucks since any volunteering you do is cutting into time you could be making money to pay back student loans and/or not live in crappy conditions and so on. Especially since some of your suggestions include volunteering for 20 hours a week!
Any sort of non-school based "improving your resume" time is gonna need to make alot of room for "not starving to death in a cardboard box" time. Because while people will pay you money to keep you alive while you go to school, there's very few people who will pay you money to keep you alive while you wander about volunteering.
Really, there's just your parents. So we come back to being a mooch.
It's just a suggestion. I never said you must volunteer 20 hours a week, and I never said it's the only thing you should do.
I don't know why not working or going to grad school automatically equates to starving in a cardboard box. It's stupid exaggerations like this that are preventing this debate from moving forward.
I know plenty of people who moved in with their parents after they graduated. Their arrangement still isn't free - they have to do stuff like repairing/painting the house, taking their brothers/sisters to school in the mornings and picking them up, etc. etc. and guess what: they still have plenty of time to do things like volunteer, learn another language, whatever.
The bottom line is that your ridiculous hyperboles apply to only a small number of people. I mean, how many people live in a cardboard box after college?
But no one said "just volunteer until you get paid work."
That's just a strawman that shryke made up.
FYI, your ignore list doesn't work.
Interestingly you can still apply for jobs while actively volunteering with several groups. Getting EI payments (which you paid for while you worked) does not make you anyone's bitch.
If the market sucks, you'll get more people that land on the grad school side of the fence. It happened here, I worked for a year before coming back to grad school (I left my job, didn't get laid off). My class graduated into one of the strongest job markets of recent memory, the class I applied to grad school with graduated into one of the worst. As a result, some huge percentage of the people cornell admitted accepted, and my incoming class was absurdly huge for the school.
It's not a bad thing, it's just how it is. None of my classmates suck at being a grad student because they aren't here all cow-eyed about academia. And if anyone missed a chance to come here because the competition was higher than usual, they were edged out by more qualified students, which again isn't a bad thing, it's just how this works.
I think that's a cultural thing, that you either do corporate stuff or you go to grad school. Its a silly cultural thing, but whatever.
And they say you don't NEED a graduate degree, or any degree at all, but man, good luck getting on the Register w/o either one. Of course, there are plenty of other positions that the State Department needs filled as well that you can do just fine without a degree.
Why you gotta throw the army under the bus like that? Thread derailing, immenent.
Ssshh, don't tell him that he can actually do more than one thing at a time!
I mean, even after I explained that one doesn't have to "mooch off" of anyone, he still throws that around. Unbelievable.
Well, living off of your parents money is actually mooching off of your parents. Its the definition of the fucking word. Maybe I only say this because I chose not to do that and instead enlisted in the Navy.
Also, picking your siblings up from school / cleaning the garage / doing your chores is not a living and should not be considered a fair trade for the amount of money it takes just to feed you.
They are your parents. It's not about fairness, for fuck's sake. And even if it is, when they get old you'll probably look after them the way they looked after you for 20-25 years.
If you are that concerned about monetary affairs with your family - if you're one of those families - then after you get a job you can send them monthly checks. As stupid as that sounds, at least it will be "fair".
I mean, I don't know dude, my parents would be totally fine if I told them I'm moving in with them and will be teaching myself a spoken language or programming and building my resume in other ways, while applying to jobs. But that's probably because they want me to do well in life. Sheesh.