Reason #12: An Excuse to not go to Grad School
April 30, 2009
Today I decided I love the Recession because its giving me a new excuse to not attend graduate school.
an example of clever wordplay you will learn in graduate school.
Tomorrow is my last day of college. A lot of my friends are going to graduate school, or will swiftly apply whence their undergraduate clock ceases to tick. Some part of me believes they are afraid of the world, as many of them have expressed to me.
In this brave editorial by Mark Taylor, which ran in the NYT, Taylor observed that graduate schools were too specialized, expensive, and impractical for today’s economy. If graduate school is to continue, it needs massive reconstruction.
I have been reading The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. Lessing dropped out of school before she was 15, read a lot of Marx, and then won the Nobel Prize. In a moving introduction, Lessing implores people to avoid education. She saw it as systematic indoctrination, strange system in which you are “taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors.” Her sentiments echo Taylor’s. She said:
“Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find new ways of educating yourself–educating your own judgment.”
As the cost of student loans become increasingly higher (graduate schools sometime set individuals back between $50-100,000 dollars), perhaps we should reconsider if we must have those two to three years of radically specialized thought. Thoughts, like Taylor said, are increasingly useless for real-world problems.We should maybe just use what we learned in undergrad and teach ourselves to think critically about books and listen to people smarter than us.
So I wanted to do German comparative Literature. But I’ll just read in Germany instead. I bet, I’ll learn more, save more, give more, there.
Save $100,000 and not worry whether or not I’m “smart” yet?
I Love the recession!
