grad school! ... what is it good for? (absolutely something)
One night, a few months ago, I was out for drinks with friends and one of our classmates went around the table asking if we felt we got our money’s worth at school. In the moment, I paused, and I've been thinking about this question on and off ever since. First, thanks to scholarships and the college fund my mom has been saving forever, I was lucky enough to be here essentially for free, so on that account, it was certainly worth the money. But did I think that if that weren’t the case, would I still have sprung for graduate school?
When I finished my bachelors’ in December 2019, I didn’t really know what I was going to do with myself. I had cycled through so many ideas in undergrad---high school teacher, professor, some-kind-of-NGO work. I took Arabic and briefly entertained the idea of doing something with that, but then one of my professors told me pretty much the only jobs for non-native speakers are translating for the government, i.e. national security, i.e. becoming part of America’s surveillance-military industrial complex. For about a week, I looked into the foreign service (ha!). And then I thought about publishing---but an internship at a literary agency made me realize that as much as I loved books and writing, the industry was just not for me.
By the time I hit the summer before senior year, I began considering an MFA in fiction. My friends were all taking the GRE for something or another---most of them for MFAs. But that soon went out the window as well. I landed on policy school.
This April, in the frantic flurry of near-graduation job interviews, one interviewer asked me, “Why grad school?” The job I was applying for only required a bachelor's, and it would be copywriting, hardly something I studied in school. I told them how I came out of undergrad not really knowing what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to write. Yet I didn’t think I knew enough the world and the things I cared about. In undergrad, I studied writing and history, and while I appreciated my history courses, there were so many contemporary issues that I was interested in---social justice, climate change, politics---that I didn’t get enough of in school. I was fortunate enough that grad school was an option, so I went for it.
What I do now in my (new!) job also has very little to do with the things I studied in grad school. I write about environmental issues, unpacking things like legislation and corporate consolidation and pipelines for a general audience. But when I look back on my time in policy school, the classes that I found most valuable were not the ones that I use in my job.
A few weeks ago I saw a tweet from a professor along the lines of, “’School is supposed to prepare you for the workforce’---no, my course is going to teach you how to think about the world and engage thoughtfully with yourself and others.”
That’s a hot take, because I think most people think our education system is broken because it doesn’t prepare kids for jobs, which puts them at a disadvantage when they graduate and feel lost or can’t get work they need. Why pour thousands of dollars into an education if it doesn't get you nice, secure work upon graduation?
Personally, I do not think my education (especially when I was studying history and English) prepared me to work. It cost (not me, to be transparent, but the price tag was there) tens of thousands of dollars for me to be in a room with some folks and Think Deep Thoughts.
What actually prepared me for any kind of work were the internships and extracurriculars I had. That’s where I learned how to be professional, work with a team toward a common goal, write a good email, communicate with others, and manage my own time.
That work helped me become a better person, too, in some ways, but I don’t think in others. When you have an internship, you’re working toward a goal or a final product. You don’t get a lot of opportunity to question the systems and implications of that product, especially if you depend on that internship to pay your rent. And, at least in my internships, I was surrounded by likeminded people with the same hopes, dreams, and values. If our pasts were different, at least we had similar visions of the future.
But those internships didn't push me to think critically about myself and my place in the world in the way that school did. School, especially grad school, made me consider perspectives outside my own, especially the perspectives of those in power (economists, policymakers, elected officials, even nonprofit leaders to a certain degree). I've learned the lineage and rationale of ideas that shape our lives in big and small ways. I've come out of grad school strong in my belief that, whether the goal is to “know thine enemy” or “change things from the inside,” understanding how systems work is vital to making material change for folks who want and need it.
School also made me think about my actions in the context of history and systemic pressures. How does my positionality change the way I interact with others, the change I am able to make, and the change I want to make? Is there something that’s influencing me that I don’t realize? How did I get where I am, how do others get where they are, and what are the conditions for coming together in support of one another?
I’m fortunate I had the space and opportunity to go to graduate school, because I think it’s made me a more empathetic and careful person, especially when it comes to politics. That tweet I mentioned earlier represents my experience becoming a Master's in Public Administration, for better or for worse. I don't feel much prepared to be a “public administrator,” but I understand better the dynamics of our social and political systems and the role I want to play in them. I'll carry these lessons along with me for the rest of my life.
(Disclaimer: This isn’t a recommendation to go to school just to expand your brain. School is expensive and much of what I learned can just as easily be learned from books and the internet. Shout out to my mom, who made my school experience 100% less stressful with huge huge financial support and general motherly love & care)