Graduate School (don’t be a deluded sheep)

This is what I look like when I dance.

Today I listened in on a panel about selecting and applying to graduate schools. It induced two very conflicting feelings. But before I get to that, I’ll share the main take-aways:

Selecting grad schools:

• You need to know what it is that you want—how you want to spend your 9-5’s. The worst reason to go to grad school is because you think it’s something you *should* do.
• Do you prefer to have your hands in the research or do you prefer to be conceptually leading the ideas? Master’s if the former, PhD if the latter.
• Financial aid is more important than getting accepted to a program. Research in advance which departments have more money/scholarships available.
• Top-tier schools do have a reputational advantage that affects employment opportunities. But it can be just as good to go to a lower-ranked school if there is a well-respected professor you can work with.
• Online degrees are pretty lame. The biggest benefit of grad school is the people you get to know. Learning is secondary.

Applying to grad schools:

• Grad schools just want you to be “good enough,” and after that it is mainly a matter of goodness-of-fit—how well your interests map to what the department does.
• You want a goldilocks level of focus: Specific but not too specific. You probably have the right level of focus if there are 2-6 faculty members in the department whose research areas map to your interests.
• If you have any blemishes (GRE scores or bombed courses), then you should address them.
• Keep your Personal Statement short and treat it as a writing sample to display how clearly and succinctly you can present your ideas.
• No cheesy quotes, and no emotional stories about how your grandmother died.
• Use a professional and straightforward tone.
• The kiss of death for a letter of recommendation is “he was my best student.” Instead, you want them to comment on the specifics of your interests and abilities. It’s got to be someone who knows you well.
• The Writing Sample is truly just about how well you can write—they don’t care about the content.

I think I can summarize the last 8 bullets in two words: BE NORMAL (and stop blogging about vaginas for chrissake)

The overwhelming sense I got – and when I think about it, it makes perfect sense – is that grad schools mainly just want to screen out weirdos and deluded sheep.

By “deluded sheep” I mean people who think that life is a series of hoops that you jump through, where you move from one thing to the next because that’s what you are supposed to do.

How do you stand out from a crowd of hundreds of people trying to stand out? By looking normal. It’s like online dating in that sense—there are so many profiles of so many people trying to look smart and clever that it’s refreshing to find someone who’s giving it to you straight, who is applying to graduate school for seemingly the right reasons, who is applying to this particular department for the right reasons, who seems grounded and flexible and relatively low on narcissism quotient.

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Skip this section if you don’t care how I feel about grad school.

On the one hand, listening to this panel got me a little excited to apply for grad schools. I felt like I understood “the game” and I’d be able to play it to not only get admitted to some highly-ranked grad schools but also to get a pretty fat financial aid package. An enticing challenge. It fired up my masculine “I Can Do This” drive. But then I remembered that that’s exactly the wrong reason to apply for grad school, and that the admissions counselors are only a Google away from discovering that I blog about vaginas.

The excitement was counteracted by a bottom of the stomach sickening feeling that may or may not have had anything to do with breakfast. (Scrambled egg x3 + cheddar.)

At first I thought it might’ve had something to do with the BE NORMAL part. Those institutional bastards are trying to make us normal! Mm, no, not really. For good reason, the admissions people are biased to look for more normality, but that doesn’t mean that they want you to be normal and average once you get there. They’d probably prefer that you be interesting and different so that you can do some interesting and different things that will make them proud to associate with you. They just don’t want you to be deluded and sheep-y, on a mission to climb ladders without any concern for where those ladders lead.

I suspect the sickening feeling was mostly the feeling of confusion. This is not a new feeling for me, but I think it was heightened when I all of the sudden felt excited about applying to grad schools. The next four paragraphs are a sample of that confusion.

I’ve worked in research for long enough that the romantic notion of sitting in a professorial sweater and playing with ideas all day has been thoroughly debunked—I know that the playing with ideas part is dwarfed by the “business” side of proposals and analysis plans and internal review boards and conference calls. I’m not excited about research. I’m not excited about teaching. I’m not sure whether excitement should be a criterion for career-selection.

I’m not sure that Higher Ed won’t totally collapse while I’m in there, and I’m not sure that a degree will still be worth a damn even if it didn’t. I’m not thrilled about my livelihood being based almost exclusively on the federal government.

I like the idea of hanging out with a tight circle of smart and interesting people, but I’m not sure that the type of people you find in Higher Ed are necessarily any more “interesting” than average, and I’m not sure the investment would be worth it even if they were.

I have a nagging *should* feeling that I should get a graduate degree because I’m youngish and relatively free of obligations and perfectly capable, but at the same time there’s not a research question or a department or even a damn field of human knowledge that is calling to me. Probably this isn’t for me, but then I’m not sure what is.

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You had to know this was coming. It’s time to get existential on your ass.

What’s the point?

No panelist offered any answers, but I think I can infer it from various things they said:

The point is to (a) earn some barriers to entry and (b) establish some professional contacts

so that you can (a) get more money/status and cozier working conditions, and (b) with your contacts, have an easier time finding those high-paying/status, cozy jobs

so that you can feel successful and sophisticated and very much not like a primate

so that you can feel something like “pleased” or probably more accurately “not-uncomfortable” with your life

so that your nucleic acids can get on with the business of attracting a similarly demonstrably high-quality set of nucleic acids

so that they can you-know-what

so that the species can continue

for no reason at all.

As usual, that’s said in half-jest. But only half.