Do not pay $200
Time for a good sinus-clearing rrrrrrrrrrrrRANT. Haven’t done one of those in a while.
Got an email today from another peep on the way out of graduate school. He had two questions for me. The second one was how he’d explain “wasting” a year in grad school to the professional schools he now means to apply to. Yes, well, they mostly won’t care, and I told him so.
The first question, ver-fricking-batim, was “How can I leave graduate school, if I have no real career skills?”
Gah. Some people would go lie down with a fit of the vapors. I don’t have the vapors right now. I have whatever it’s called when you want to go wring some handy necks.
You. Out there. Yes, you. You 22-year-old kid scared of the workforce, not sure what you’re going to do in it. If I catch your little shrinking-violet butt going to grad school (especially in the humanities) just so you don’t have to try for a job, I swear unto whatever $DEITY heedeth my oath that I will come out there and kick said butt with my copper-toed hobnailed stompy boot. You hear me?
You don’t acquire career skills in graduate school. (What graduate school teaches is not career skills, even for the career they’re nominally apprenticing you to. Honest. I do not kid.) You certainly don’t acquire work experience there. You acquire useful things such as work skills and work experience by, you know, W-O-R-K-I-N-G.
I actually don’t much care what you work at, youngster. Chances are, it’ll be low-paid, high-stress, and not what you want to do for the rest of your life. That’s cool. You won’t be doing it for the rest of your life. You’ll be doing it until you find something better, or until revelation comes down from on high about what you do want to do for the rest of your life, at which point I magnanimously concede that grad school (especially professional school) in the desired area is a reasonable decision.
Just, please, dammit, don’t end up like a certain new librarian I know, okay? She ducked into grad school right after undergrad. When she got out, she didn’t find work, partly because she had all the job-seeking sense of a spavined tree-sloth, and partly because People Who Should Have Known Better told her to hold out for more than the entry-level jobs in her field that she could have landed and should have been chasing.
So what did she do? After a couple years of, um, farting around (sorry, there is no more polite way to put it), she ducked back into grad school, this time in librarianship. She graduated same time I did. I’m employed. She’s not, in some part because she clearly expected to land the first job she applied to and dropped out of the market with a bruised ego when she didn’t. (Free clue: I sent out somewhere in the ballpark of fifty résumés to land the job I’m in.) Also in part because her résumé was middling at best and her cover letters were atrocious, bad enough to knock her out of contention at any library I can think of.
Actually, I shouldn’t say she’s not employed. She’s working. At a big-box retailer, and—shall we say—not in management. Seven and change an hour. She’s 28. With no real work experience, and no clue how to get any. Employers aren’t impressed by that, and I’m frankly hard-pressed to say they should be.
I’m doing my best for her, but I’m under no illusions; this will be a long haul.
Do not be her. Do not pass “go to grad school,” and do not pay $200 to apply, hear me? She is deeply unhappy and bitter. Grad school did not help. Grad school hurt, because the kind of knockabout entry-level life that’s only expected at 22 is both less attractive and less feasible at 28. (Heck, it wasn’t fun at 26 when I did it. Though of the five jobs plus temping stints I’ve had since age 22, there’s only one I really wish I hadn’t taken. The entry-level life frequently isn’t as bad as it’s painted.)
Haul your butt out of school and into the job market before I have to haul out my stompy boot. Thus endeth the serm—I mean rant.