Graduate School Guide

Graduate School Introduction

Back in the day if you got a graduate degree in almost anything, you could get a decent job. Companies and organizations hired people with social science master’s degrees because they assumed they could think deep thoughts and express themselves clearly but the mystique of a person with a graduate degree is gone in modern-day society. The internet has made knowledge easily available.

The illusion that people with graduate degrees are wise and intelligent is gone because so many people got doctorates who look, talk and act like flakes. I don’t respect graduate degrees anymore unless it’s in a highly technical field. If you got a Phd in sociology, I’m thinking another bullcrapper thinking they know something when if they really did, they’d know their degree and all that stuff they learned about that fake field called sociology is modern-day crap.

Anyway, my warning is be wary about going to grad school unless you know there’s a job at the end because I personally know a handful of guys with MBAs doing blue collar work and it’s not because they don’t want to be white collar guys. They can’t find MBA jobs.

Chapter 1. Graduate School Basics

Grad School Warning

Loads of people went to grad school, got some advanced degrees, can't get a job in their field so now they're stuck with burgeoning student loans that never go away. Student loans can't be discharged, not even by bankruptcy.

I'm warning you. Do not go to grad school in any humanities subject. Only go if it's a hardcore skill like engineering or computer science. You don't need a graduate degree for journalism. You either got the ability or you don't.

College is a closed society. It's not the real world. It's fun to be there with all the other naïve kids who think it will be easy to find a job once they get an academic degree or two but it's only like that for a few skills like medicine and law. Everything else is as competitive as hell. Before you ever go to college, go to bls.gov/oco and read up on the job forecasts for different occupations.

You were brainwashed in grade school to think that the winners of life go to college and the ones who stay there the longest are the real winners. The real winners are the ones who figure out what they like to do and a way to earn a living at it not the clones who go to college then get some dull job.

I presume you love to learn but you love to learn subjects that interest you not necessarily the stuff they're teaching you. It's a big letdown if you get a Phd in physics then end up working in some obscure lab or become a professor for low wages.

The college uses grad students for cheap labor. You could be earning a steady pay check working rather than spending x number of years at grad school that might or might not get you a good job later.

Grad school is very expensive. Try to get loans, scholarships and teaching and research assistantships from your department.

Grad School Info 1

First of all, colleges and universities, even the "non-profit" ones are businesses, selling the commodity of education and you're buying either because you think it will net you a good job in the real world or you have some sense of ego-status left over from your indoctrination during childhood thinking that academic degrees somehow make a superior being in the world.

Secondly, universities are huge marketing grounds for the corporate world where they have a captive audience of young students so the goal is to get you hooked on their products and services so you become loyal for life.

They often pay the university big bucks to set up their promo tables, sell through the university stores on campus, advertise in the college newspaper, give grants in return for honorable mention, etc.

Why do you think they're going around giving credit cards out like nothing or selling computers at the campus store cheaper than anywhere else. It's because they want to get you hooked on their brand for life.

My point is that the bottom line in life is money not some illusory sense of status and automatic entry into a high society job you think you might get from going to grad school.

OK, so you don't care that graduate school is a load of bull, at least for the artsy-fartsy liberal arts stuff. The most intelligent people in these areas are the people who learn the stuff on their own because they love it but that's beside the point.

The people who earn the most money aren't the ones with the graduate degrees. They're the ones who believe in themselves, get some ideas and develop them on their own which takes guts which is not the same as having a few letters after your name.

You want those graduate degrees to show the world that you're a somebody even though they might not help you get a job because the real world is made up of iron, coke, chromium, steel and besides, as things move into the realm of distance education with computers, they'll need less teachers as they package entire courses into canned software programs so for all aspiring college professors out there, you're in a very tough field.

Before you blindly jump into grad school, ask yourself if the degree you're going for is marketable in the real world. What kind of job can a doctorate in sociology get you, if anything, or a Master's in biology? A friend of mine with a master's in biology couldn't get any jobs in his field beyond a lowly lab tech.

Do your research before you spend several years getting some degree then realize there are no jobs in that field out there. If you were really cool and advanced, you'd say screw that stuff and go off on your own to find a need in the world and fill it.

Is academia starting to be the white elephant of the business realm except for a few very highly specialized tech fields?

Are universities being replaced by private tech schools like Devry and ITT who focus on the skill you're learning without bothering with so-called soft liberal arts electives.

Anybody that knows anything knows that most learning is done alone. In many professions, certification doesn't automatically come from getting a few degrees. It comes from passing a certification test given by the trade or professional organization. It doesn't matter if you have any degrees if you can't pass the tests.

As a matter of fact, a lot of wise people are starting to realize that for many people, the degrees represent artificial, short-term, temporary knowledge that is quickly forgotten after you take the final exam and if you don't have an intuitive grasp of the knowledge nor do it for the love of it, you're sunk.

This is why a lot of employers would rather hire the guy who does it because he loves it and has real work experience in the real world rather than the guy who has his degrees from college but doesn't know much about reality.

In the old days, all the brainy kids in grade school naturally assumed they would go to college, get a Master's or doctorate, then get a good, high status job. After bachelor degrees became useless about 20 years ago because everybody had one, a large cut of these average students with bachelor degrees realized they couldn't find a high paying job so they went back to school to get graduate degrees which again flooded the market to where it is today, a bunch of people with advanced degrees who can't find a good job in their fields.

The facts in the modern world are that the wealthiest people are those who do their own thing, start their own businesses, many of whom don't have graduate degrees.

They might go to college to get a degree because they've been brainwashed like everybody else to think that college is the path to the American Dream but they get tired of the bull, see through it and go off to create their own lives in the real world.

The truth is that most learning in most fields except for the few highly specialized one is done in the real world on the job which is why most degrees are useless, even MBAs.

You write one major business plan. Big deal, you can learn how to do that from a book on your own.

Advanced degrees in soft subjects might get your foot in the door but then you do all your learning on the job. All those years at college seem like a waste of time.

The professional image of being a graduate sounds nice but you have to find out if it will net you a good job in the real world. Is it worth it or should you simply go out into the workforce, learn whatever craft you're interested in starting at the bottom somewhere then maybe going off on your own to start a business?

If you want to live an interesting life, this beats anything you'll do in school, that is, if you've got the guts to break from college as the standard version of the American Dream.

The road to a doctorate is a long, tedious climb where you're poor most of the time while your contemporaries are making money working a job.

About half of the people drop out. It's a game of politics, you might not even like the field after you get the degree and might not even find a good job there.

Grad School Info 2

Some grad schools are hard to get into. Some aren't. With the advent of online learning, lots of colleges are advertising heavily to get people to take their graduate programs online so is one college rejects your application, there are hundreds more.

The best way to find a list of graduate programs in your field is to go to the professional trade organization website for that field and look for either a list of approved graduate programs or look for a book they sell that gives you this information.

Don't pick a soft major. Just because you get a Phd in something doesn't automatically mean there's a job waiting for you. I knew a guy with a Phd in History who did not find a history teaching job at a college.

Master's degrees take 1-3 years.

Ph.D. programs take approximately 3-7 years after obtaining the Master's degree.

Professional degrees take approximately 2-5 years depending on the area of study.

Medical school usually takes 4 years after undergraduate, then 1-3 years of residency/intern and could involve 2-6 more years based on the area of specialization.

Existing school loans can be deferred while you are in graduate school.

Many graduate catalogs are online.

If you can't get a scholarship, apply for an assistantship. You teach or do research to get a tuition fee waiver and a paycheck.

Some colleges/universities will require you to apply to The Graduate School and your

chosen program of study. Sometimes you will have to be admitted to both The Graduate and your department/discipline.

Some graduate programs will require you to take some type of standardized exam. There are different exams based on different areas of study. After the GMAT, GRE (general) and LSAT, the GRE also has tests for specific majors. Some other ones are:

LSAT, Law School Admission Test

GMAT, Graduate Management Admission Test

MCAT, Medical College Admission Test

OAT (Optometry Assessment Test)

DAT (Dental Admission Test)

PCAT (Pharmacy College Admission Test) MAT (Miller Analogies Test), milleranalogies.com

You'll have to contact your undergrad college and get them to send the grad school a copy of your transcripts.

Letters of recommendation are generally written by faculty or other professionals within the University.

Some colleges/universities may have a form that your references must fill out and return. These forms involve rank ordering the candidate in a variety of categories.

Some disciplines require a portfolio of your work (i.e. architecture, art, graphic design, photography, visual communication, journalism, teaching, etc.).

Other disciplines require a performance or audition piece(s) performed live or submitted on tape, CD or DVD (i.e. dance, music, film, theatre, broadcast journalism,

telecommunications, etc.).

A graduate program may require you to travel for an interview, portfolio review or a live audition.

A graduate program may provide a list of questions to address or explain the type of information you need to include in a personal statement. Statements are generally two to three pages typed.

Apply early to take the standardized tests and send in your applications.

Most graduate programs want:

a decent GPA.

minimum acceptable score on the required entrance exam (GRE, MCAT, LSAT, etc.).

Letters of Recommendation

Personal Statement

Portfolio, Audition Pieces, or Interview

Make sure you do not have inappropriate information accessible in Facebook, My Space, other online blogs, etc.

Grad School Info 3

There was a guy on a Canadian debt show with a wife and kid who quit his job, moved into his parents' basement, spent three years to get a master's degree then got a job making less money than the job he quit three years earlier with a lot more debt including student loan debt.

I am all for graduate school in a hard science or hardcore practical skill but I urge you to check the employment prospects in the field you are going to graduate school for first to make sure there is a good chance you will find a job in this field when you finish.

I'm against getting an MBA nowadays because so many people got them from online universities.

Employers are looking for the man or woman who can do a good job. The degrees you have in most fields except for science, engineering and medicine are minor stuff in the real world.

If you're alreaduy working in your field or can get a job in your field with a bachelor's degree, work for awhile. You can always take a few graduate courses on the side.

Certain careers require an advanced degree but many offer plenty of job opportunities with just an undergraduate degree.

In some situations, having an advanced degree can hurt you because you're a guy with college knowledge but no real-world experience. After a year or two without finding a job in your field, you're pretty close to being unemployable in that field.

If you get a job in any field, your employer might eventually pay your way through grad school or at least part of it.

After a bachelor's degree, there is a Master's degree followed by a doctorate degree.

There are also graduate diploma and certificate programs in some fields.

Master's degrees can be professional or academic. Professional degrees are designed for employment within a given field.

Academic degrees like an MA or MSc are general and usually lead to doctoral studies.

There are professional degrees like the MBA, the Doctor of Medicine (MD) and the Juris Doctor (JD), doctor of law.

The Doctor of Philosophy Degree (Ph.D.) or doctorate is the highest level of academic degree.

Because of a glut of students wanting to get into grad school, it could be competitive to get into particular ones at some universities.

It doesn't really matter if you get all your degrees from the same university but the conventional wisdom is that you go to a grad school that is different from the school you got your bachelor's degree from because presumably you are exposed to different intellectuals with different ideas but the truth is that you are you. You have the same mind, the same ideas and thinking style regardless of where you go.

Most professors in any field are generic people. There is no great depth of originality regardless of what university you go to. Great thinkers are not professors at college. They are either by themselves doing their own thing or running their own business or organization.

Colleges are all the same because of accreditation standards. Besides that, there are very few intellectual giants there. Professors are basically generic teachers following the textbooks.

The costs of graduate programs vary widely. Compare prices with the mix of financial aid you can get. Talk with a financial aid adviser at the different graduate schools that interest you.

Most graduate programs offer fellowships where they pay you to be a teaching assistant and teach undergraduates while attending grad school.

If you have a job right now, check to see if your employer has a program to pay for some of your school costs.

Grad School Info 4

Colleges want you as a graduate student to both pay them money for tuition and to be cheap labor to teach a lot of their classes for them.

Beyond that, many colleges have substandard services in mentoring a grad student properly to do his research for a good dissertation and pass qualifying exams.

Some colleges and fields have these qualifying exams which are exams you take after you do all your coursework in your particular field which supposedly test your overall, general knowledge of the field but since most of the questions are essay-type in the liberal arts field, if your faculty advisor or someone else doesn't like you, they can fail you and say your knowledge isn't competent while the next guy could correct your exam and conclude you're a genuis.

This comes back to that politics bit. You have to brown-nose the right professors in order to get the favor you want. If you're a genius loner, they generally won't like you and try to get rid of you because in their small minds, you don't meet the standard of a good academic in that field.

If you're too creative, have too many original ideas, they might interpret that as lack of knowledge so you have to simply feed them back the conventional knowledge of the field.

Some colleges don't have qualifying exams. You just do the coursework and your dissertation and that's it.

If you want to be a college teacher, firstly, jobs are hard to come by, pay is low even for tenured positions and many colleges are now hiring teachers on a temporary contract basis which means they give you a contract for one semester or a year or two to pay a flat fee disbursed over 16 weeks while you teach the course with no tenure track or other benefits. You're an independent contractor doing a service for them and once the contract is over, they don't owe you anything.

When you study for a Master's or a doctorate, you have to get a thesis/ dissertation advisor (chair of your board) by going around to the faculty members to see if someone is willing to take you on as their student then you have to find from two to four other professors who are willing to sit on your board, help you with research and ask you a few questions when you do your final presentation.

They already have several other students they're chairing so you'll just be another pain in the butt to the work they're already doing for low wages.

If a professor thinks he can use you to do some of his research for him that he will publish as his own (he might put your name on the authorship too if you do enough work), this is probably your most hassle-free way to do your thesis and get your degree because if you come up with your own topic, chances are he's not really interested and he'll hem, haw and stall while you work hard at it and in the end, he can easily reject it for any of a number of reasons.

Professors can also die, quit or get a new job elsewhere which could render all the work you've done on your thesis so far void and you'll have to start all over again.

Also, keep at least three back-up copies of your thesis on computer disks because I've heard of several people losing several years of work because they only had one copy on a hard drive that crashed or somebody stole their computer or discs and they were screwed.

This dissertation process is a people-political thing as much as it is an academic thing. You have to hang around your department, socialize, be pleasant in a corny way, go to department functions, volunteer to do research, etc. in order to attract a nice professor who's willing to take you on and actually teach you something but the problem is that many professors are horrible human beings with big, fragile egos, underpaid and living in this sheltered fantasyland as opposed to the real world so if you end up with one who doesn't particularly like you (if you can't find an advisor on your own, they'll assign one to you), he might decide to fail you simply because he wants to, make you squirm for his own pleasure or reject your original ideas which are perfectly valid as speculative knowledge but doesn't fit into his little box of knowledge.

For master's theses, they don't expect a new, original idea. They expect you to look through academic journals in your field until you find a study you like then replicate it varying one minor variable.

For Phd dissertations they say they want something original but if you're too original, they reject it. If your advisor pushes his research onto you or even if he doesn't, ask him if he's got any research you can help him out with which could serve as your thesis because it makes things so much simpler.

Forget about all this crap about doing your own thing to prove you're an independent thinker. If you were truly an independent thinker, you wouldn't be there in the first place. You'd be off doing your own thing.

You're there to get the degree so play the game their way. If you're truly smart and original, you can do your own thing after you get the doctorate, get a job then get some funding for research but until then, do what you have to do to go through their hoops of what it takes to get the degree.

The oral defense is no big deal. Assuming you've been working on this dissertation for two years or so, it should come easy. You do a little presentation from 20 minutes to maybe 45 minutes long. Nothing is that complicated that it should take longer than 45 minutes to explain then your chair starts off asking you a few questions and every other member of the board usually asks you one or two questions.

They're not really trying to trick you unless they're mean-spirited. They just want to see that you have the ability to think on your feet a bit.

Dissertation presentations are usually open to anyone who wants to go but you probably won't get anyone there but your board and one or two other brown-noser grad students who want to be seen.

If you're interested in what you did, it should be easy. If you're not, your superficial knowledge of the area could show through.

Before you even go to grad school, you have to pick a couple to apply to. Most of them charge money to apply. There's a pecking order in every field as to which are the most prestigious. It's pretty competitive.

Chances are you'll have to take some standardized aptitude tests like the GMAT, LSAT, GRE, MAT, etc.

The general standard is:

Good undergrad marks.

Good score in the standardized test.

Good references.

Autobiographical personal essay/ statement saying why you're so interested in that field and that you want to help the world through working in this area.

Because so many people apply to grad school, there's a good chance you won't get in to at least a few schools so apply to several and go from there.

The best way to learn about grad schools is to find the professional organization in your field, like the American Physical Therapy Assn. or the American Psychological Assn., ask them for their book or pamphlet about grad programs in the field (chances are it will cost a few dollars), study it then pick the colleges you want to apply to.

If you get in, unless you're rich, you have to find money to support yourself. If they offer you a teaching assistantship, you get a tuition waiver where you don't pay any tuition except for the student administration fee and you get a pay cheque for teaching one or two courses.

If you don't get an assistantship, you'll have to try for scholarships, grants, student loans or a regular job. The campus has some jobs for grad students like a dorm manager who lives with and manages the undergrad students who live in one of the dorms owned by the college. There are several college money books around. Try:

ed.gov/money, 800-433-3243

petersons.com, book grants for graduate students.

In order to increase your chances to get into grad school and graduate from it, try to get an article published in an academic journal. Submissions are open to anyone. These journals are located at academic or science libraries not at general public libraries. The submission guidelines are in every issue.

If you're a woman and/ or a minority, chances are it will be easier to get into grad school than a white guy with equal qualifications because of affirmative action.

There's also more scholarship money out there for you but the downside is that unless you're beautiful and/ or cool, you'll get some discrimination from the mostly all-white, male faculty except in a few fields where women dominate like education or nursing.

In the final analysis, my advice is to get a skill in the real world, either selling real estate, taking x-rays, fixing toilets or something functional and do it part-time while you go to grad school or work your functional job fulltime while you take grad courses through distance education.

As you go along, you'll see that the real world and academic world are two different entities and maybe you'll realize a graduate degree does not necessarily equate to a high paying job nor is it as important as earning money, of which there are many ways to do without going to grad school. To top it off, most jobs that result from graduate school are dull.

In any case, read my book A Free Spirit's Search for Enlightenment to see what life is really all about away from all the illusions of the world.

Try #378.24 or LB2371.4 at the library. Books about writing and public speaking are at #400-410 and #808 at the library.

Some Grad Schools do not Accept Online Undergrad Degrees From Accredited Universities

Bachelor degrees from some online colleges may not be accepted for grad school even if they have accreditation from one of the few legitimate accreditation organizations.

If you plan to pursue a graduate degree, make sure the grad schools you apply to will accept your undergrad degree.

Choosing the wrong online university could mean having to go back and get a second bachelor's degree before getting into grad school.