“It’s like applying to undergrad again, but with even more uncertainty.”
Recently, I’ve had the honor(?) to begin searching for where to apply for graduate school. I know what you’re thinking (or at least what part of my brain in thinking): “You’ve been going to school for like 16 years now, why not just graduate with a bachelor’s degree and get it over with?” And to that I say, well, you’re right. I very much want it to be done. Not because I want to stop learning, no; no one should ever stop learning. But because I’m exhausted and tired of school and I just want to live in a shack in the woods. But COVID has introduced tons of complications, and grad school is one of them.
Let me state something up front; this is probably one of the most privileged things I could be worrying about right now. I try to recognize privilege in my life, and this is certainly one of them. I’m sitting pretty, primed to graduate debt-free from a top-of-the-line four-year university, and now I’m complaining about having to write a bunch of essays and throw my resume at four or five different graduate programs so I can get my Masters degree in maps. The number of people who would do nearly anything to be in my position is mind-boggling. Never should I take for granted the things that I have tenuously earned or the things that I have had thrust upon me. I could be sick with COVID. I could be homeless because I couldn’t pay rent and got evicted. I could have lost my job and can’t afford to buy dinner. But no. I’m applying to grad school. I’m one of the luckiest people alive, and I mean that unironically.
I have my parents to thank for much of this. So, as I’ve said before, thank you. You are the reason that I’m able to live without worrying about if I can pay for school or not. And even if I have to take out loans for grad school, you are the reason that I’m able to go to grad school. Because the fact that higher education is prohibitively expensive and the fact that most student loans require a parent cosigner is absurd. So thank you for helping me go to college and learn more about how to write a book and how to figure out exactly where all the mosquitoes are. So thank you. But, as Biggie Smalls says, mo money, mo problems. So here I am. And my problems are grad school.
Now that that’s out of the way, why do I even feel the need to go to grad school? I didn’t before, so what’s happened? Simply put: COVID happened. As most everyone has experiences by now, COVID sprung up suddenly and cancelled a great many of my plans for the next couple of years. For example, I was supposed to be in Greece with my brother this past fall for study abroad, but that didn’t happen. And with that cancelled, I suddenly had an extra semester of school available to me, so I decided to get a minor with my double majors. And then I started looking to post-graduation. But with everything up in the air, and travel largely out of the question for probably the next six months, what do I even do after graduation? Well, I’ve been stuck with online school for this long; might as well go to Zoom Graduate School, too.
I mean, what else could I do? I have/had other plans for post-graduation, including a summer-long road trip, backpacking across Europe with my brother, moving to a random city and finding a job, applying for the Fulbright scholarship, taking a gap year, and a few others. And I’m still pursuing some of them; specifically, I applied for the Fulbright so I can go to India and study climate change adaptation, and I applied for a fancy scholarship funded by Bill Gates to go to Cambridge University in the UK, but now, everything’s kind of on hold. Even if I get accepted to those programs, who knows if they’ll even go through? The only thing, at this point, that I’m actually guaranteed (assuming I can afford it) is graduate school. Because even COVID can’t stop online degree programs. Until this stuff clears up and we can all safely travel again, my realistic options are either “grad school,” “take a gap year,” or “find a real job.” Well, might as well put off the real world for a little bit longer while still preparing to be a productive member of society. Grad school it is.
Not that taking a gap year would be a bad thing, or that taking a gap year inherently means you aren’t preparing to be a productive member of society. It’s something that I’m still considering, too. Living at home with my parents and getting some temporary job nearby and working on my creative projects (ahem, Spectral Crown) is a really appealing option because I would have almost zero responsibility (besides, you know, that temp job). But I can also work on my creative projects in the space between classes at graduate school, so why not do both? Especially since I’m planning on going for a professional master’s degree instead of a research one, I’ll come out of grad school with a sharpened suite of technical skills that should, hopefully, net me some sort of higher-end job eventually. Assuming that I can get in.
This is the problem that I run into, then; I don’t really know what I want to do. I know that I want to do something with geography and geographic information sciences (you know, the GIS), but I don’t want to do research. So most geography programs are right out, since they’re research-focused. I want to learn skills that I could apply at any job even remotely-related to GIS, so I do want to learn coding, some of which I already know. But I don’t have the foundation for a traditional computer science masters, so that’s not an option. But I also really want to work in some sort of environmental science field, preferably being able to split my time between being in an office working on software and collecting data out in the field and/or planting trees. What kind of program do I even apply for, then? Well, there are some environmental science and resource management programs that focus on GIS, so I am looking into those, but I’m also afraid that I don’t have the natural sciences background I need for, say, forestry or ecology. I feel like I’m in this weird liminal space where I’m most suited, or at least positioned now to be most suited, for a straight-up office job, but I don’t know if that’s actually what I want. And then there’s the cost.
Graduate school is expensive. Not as expensive as undergrad, of course, but I got really lucky in that my parents had built up a college fund for me and I got great scholarships from the University of Illinois. But most graduate schools offer less funding than undergrad, even with teaching positions, and the ones that I’m looking at, for professional science programs, don’t even offer any sort of funding at all. $40,000 is a lot of money to spend on something that I’m not super sure I could use, especially since, on the other hand, I really want to be an author or movie writer or game designer. Did I mention that I won the grand prize for my university’s environmental writing contest? I don’t think I have, and I don’t want to go to grad school for writing, because as every MFA student and my English teacher grandfather have told me, it’s a waste of time. Oof.
And there’s so many damn schools, anyway. I had a really easy time picking my undergrad school since both my parents went to UIUC and UIUC, you know, offered me a ton of money. But I don’t have a damn clue where to apply for graduate school. I mean, I do, because the deadline for most schools is in three weeks and I’ve applied to three or four already, namely UIUC, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, University of Washington Seattle, and University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Why did I choose these schools? I don’t really know. UIUC because I already go there, SIUC because it has the last remaining forestry program in Illinois (or so I’m told), Washington because I really want to go to the west coast for an environmental science program, and Michigan because… uh… fuck if I know. It sounds cool and would piss my parents off? Muck Fichigan and all that.
I think that cost ends up being the biggest prohibiting factor for anybody who wants to get into higher education. I got really lucky once, but I don’t know if I can get that lucky a second time. But there’s also the barrier of straight-up confusion; the path to higher education isn’t always clear for anybody, regardless of your program. A friend of mine said that for a graduate program in wildlife ecology, you have to basically get an existing professor or PhD student to hire you, but nothing on any graduate school page says anything about that. What’s up with that? And with COVID, a lot of schools are dropping the GRE requirement for application, which is great, but none of them have an easily-explored website detailing the requirements for admissions, it seems. Do I or do I not? Who can tell? And what about scholarships? Are they a separate application, are you automatically in the running for applying, are there TA positions, or do you just have to pay out of pocket? And right now, do you bother even applying for in-person programs with the risk that they won’t happen at all, or just play it safe and opt for the online ones? Does it even make a difference anymore? And, most importantly, is it even worth it?
I don’t know. This is mostly over-dramatic and exaggerated. Like I said before, there are a lot of worse situations that I could be in. I could have COVID, for crying out loud. And if I can get a discount or pull up some scholarships, grad school probably will end up being worth it, especially since the professional science ones are a bit more salable to businesses than, say, a masters of arts in geography. But again, I don’t know. Does anybody know? I mean, if I get the Fulbright, this might be a moot point anyway. But that’s a good problem to have, ultimately. I do have a lot of opportunities available, in the long run, and I suppose that I can’t really go wrong. The only wrong outcome is the financial one, and I can probably weather that. Hopefully. I guess I’ll just have to see where the future takes me, and where I end up, because I have no fucking clue. I’ll keep you posted.
Oh, and also, happy early Thanksgiving! Or, as my professor for my Native American literature class calls it, Thankstaking. Which is probably a more apt description, anyway. Thanksgiving whitewashes genocide. Just keep that in mind. And be really, really careful about seeing friends and family this year. Stay safe out there. Wear a mask. Good luck. And happy holidays.
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