Myths & Graduate Schools
A year from now I will cry once a month, every month for many many years. Not because of marriage or children or work, but it will be the time when I have to pay back my school loans. I have one more semester at Columbia before I get my Masters Degree and that’s another $8,000 I feel is stolen from me. I have spent considerable time and effort in school over the past two years and I have learned almost nothing of practical use. I am not paying over 30K to network, I could do that for free by hanging out in Wall Street bars. I am embarrassed by how little an Ivy League school has to offer someone with so little experience. I feel cheated, I feel the graduate school is a scam. I will get my degree and will use it to my advantage, but it is a lie, it means almost nothing. The only thing it means to me is that I was dedicated to something.
I was promised that my program, specifically made for people who are working full-time, would provide practical experience, and instead I find myself having to glaze over so many topics that none of them can be focused on. I think undergraduate school is about growing up and learning what you want to do, but I had hoped graduate school was about performing better in the workplace. I was wrong.
In the end I blame the Directors of my program who made me that promise. I wished they would have said, “Real skills can’t be learned in a classroom with 35 students or writing essays or organizations that you don’t know anything about. Real skills need to be applied and since we don’t do that, you won’t learn anything useful. However, the myth that graduates are better prepared still exists and you can use that to advance in your career.” At least that would be accurate, but instead I believed.
More than half the students in my class go for free (either because they work for Columbia or because their company pays for it), and I feel like a fool for giving them my hard earned money. But don’t tell anyone about this, I have to keep that myth of competency alive.
I was promised that my program, specifically made for people who are working full-time, would provide practical experience, and instead I find myself having to glaze over so many topics that none of them can be focused on. I think undergraduate school is about growing up and learning what you want to do, but I had hoped graduate school was about performing better in the workplace. I was wrong.
In the end I blame the Directors of my program who made me that promise. I wished they would have said, “Real skills can’t be learned in a classroom with 35 students or writing essays or organizations that you don’t know anything about. Real skills need to be applied and since we don’t do that, you won’t learn anything useful. However, the myth that graduates are better prepared still exists and you can use that to advance in your career.” At least that would be accurate, but instead I believed.
More than half the students in my class go for free (either because they work for Columbia or because their company pays for it), and I feel like a fool for giving them my hard earned money. But don’t tell anyone about this, I have to keep that myth of competency alive.
Comments
You want to impress people so you go out and buy a $15,000 gold Rolex watch with diamonds in it. After a few days of wearing the watch, it stops keeping time and than you find out the diamonds are fake. Nevertheless you keep wearing the watch and to your surprise, everyone who sees it is still very impresses. One day you see someone else with the same watch and you whisper, “I bought the same watch, but it’s broken and the diamonds were fake”, and the other person would say “My watch was broken and fake too, but everyone still likes it.”. The more people you talk to the more you find out that all Rolexes don’t keep time and have fake diamonds, but people who own the watch don’t like to talk about because everyone is still impressed and they don’t want to admit that they all paid $15,000 for a broken, fake watch.