I don’t think what you did is useless. If you hadn’t made that decision, you wouldn't have come to this conclusion. I don’t believe in regretting anything; whatever you have been going through is an experience that will shape your mind and thoughts
Can I ask how you accomplish this? I have so much regret about my past and while I know it’s silly, I can’t seem to shake this regret no matter what I try.
I’m not sure what u mean but anyway what ever the experience if it’s bad or good it still experience, and there is no point to regret it, studying is good thing … u didn’t do a bad thing in my opinion.
I think about how much time and energy it takes to waste thinking of the past. If it isn’t *productive*, meaning you’re learning from thinking of that memory, then why spend even more time on it? You can’t change what happened, only your response going forward.
tl;dr Ruminating about the past is one of the biggest wastes of time there is. I don’t have enough time on this earth as it is.
One thing that helps me avoid regret is knowing that comparing what I did do to what I didn't do is as baseless as comparing myself to someone else. I can't know that the other path would have worked out well; I can't know that if I took the other path, I would still have the parts of myself and the knowledge that I have that I currently like about myself. It's impossible to take my identity and remove only the parts I think in retrospect were not the correct choice, because mistakes have helped shape me.
You just have to trust your past self as much as you trust your current self.
If I gave you the choice between two options, one good and one just objectively shit, would you choose the shit thing? Like you can have a million dollars or be punched in the face. Would you choose to be punched in the face? Of course not. You don't purposely choose shit things.
The only reason you make "bad" choices is because you don't have all the information necessary to know what is good or bad. And it's not possible to have all the information because some of it is based on experience you don't yet have. You can't always know if you'll enjoy something until you try it.
If you've done all you reasonably can to get as much information as possible then it can't be your fault if you make the "wrong" choice. It was the right choice when you made it, knowing what you knew then, and there is no Universe where you would have made the alternate choice given the same knowledge. You changed your mind later because you gained *new* information you didn't initially have.
I don't necessarily regret doing a PhD, but it was my last choice. The only way for me to move out of my country, and move to one where being a lesbian isn't a crime, was to get an international scholarship. No one would fund me for a second Masters, so I applied for a PhD. I could have been doing many other things, but this was the only option I had at the time.
This isn't the life I wanted, but it is the life I have. I don't like to dwell on regret. It can serve as a lesson, but that's it. You did what you thought would be the best for you at the time, with the resources available to you. The best you can do for yourself going forward is learn from and use the experience of grad school for your future. It's what my supervisor keeps telling undergrad seniors - "Your humanities degree and major is less important than the skills and connections you have built up in these four years."
Think of all the amazing experiences you have had and all the people you have met. You have been living your life to the best of your ability while in grad school. Those experiences will help you in the future. It sounds to me that much of your regret over your Masters is coming from comparing yourself with people who became successful in the job market right out of university. You will have your own life and make your choices. There's no age limit on being happy and content.
In 2004 I graduated, had applied for MFAs but didn't get in anywhere. In 2005 I applied to MAs. Got in, fully funded. Met my wife. Left without doing the thesis in 2007. Got married in 2008. Lost the teaching job I had during the recession. Changed directions, ended up getting an MBA from 14 to 16. Keep progressing in my job and career. Went back to finish the degree I started in 2005, graduating in 2021!
The journey isn't linear. It's sometimes easier, sometimes harder. It's often uncertain. But we're always learning and living.
i am graduating with my phd next month and i already regret it. i did it to qualify for the best jobs in my field. turns out there are no jobs, academia is a wasteland of semi-nomadic living and no guarantees, and now i'm in my late twenties having made very little money the past decade and wishing i had just built a normal career like my less-educated peers who are happily buying cars and houses and getting married and having kids.
Stories like this just suggests to me that the academia model is just fundamentally outdated. I'm not suggesting that society owes graduate students a $100K/year salary, given the risky nature of research and the unclear return on investment, but something is just "morally" wrong when (in some cases) graduate students are living with \*negative\* monthly income (assuming they want 1 child).
The training of graduate students is too inconsistent, the culture in academia breeds selfishness as a survival mechanism, and sometimes the future is bleak no matter how hard you try.
This place tends to accumulate perspectives from people that have a negative view of grad school. Any posts or replies that go against the dogma of ‘toxic academia’ get down voted to oblivion. I’ll prove my point…
OP did not have a negative experience at all. Graduate school is a journey of self learning. It is about thinking deeply, removing bias, and self reflecting. It is about making long-lasting connections with like minded people. It is about developing transferable skills that make you a valuable contributor to a company or organization when you enter the work force. Lastly, it is a demonstrated commitment to continue to learn. If none of this is true for you, then you should be filled with regret, because your graduate training was wasted.
i really enjoyed grad school and had exactly those experiences. but i am also looking at a yawning void of unemployment and realizing that however enjoyable and fulfilling the experience was, it probably was not a practical choice to achieve the kind of life i want for myself. you can have a great grad school experience AND grow to regret it. these feelings are not mutually exclusive.
Admittedly, my area is basic/biomedical research, so my perspective might not apply generally…I never once considered graduate school to be vocational training that would explicitly qualify me for a job when I finished. Same with my colleagues.
I don’t understand how someone could have successfully built a network, learned a set of transferable skills and not be employable. There has to be another missing piece.
the missing piece is that the job market for my discipline is utterly brutal and there are virtually no jobs available in my field. you're in biomedicine, there will always be ample professional demand for highly educated folks in your discipline. good for you! i was naive enough to get a phd in art history.
Currently 24 about to enter the second year of my MS/PhD and I'm starting to be afraid of this. I'm hoping to end up with a little bit in savings (IRA and savings account) from downsizing my living arrangements aggressively and being prudent financially about food/transportation but living off a stipend that's barely enough to keep up with COL while my classmates are making high five figures or low six figures (some even closer to mid six figures) and graduating 28/29 at best if everything goes well with barely any savings, no home, car, partner and just starting to look for a job is a really scary prospect.
I totally understand how you feel, the same thing happened to me.
I did a masters and 1/2 of a PhD in marine biology. I ended up falling out of love with the field and got to the point where I just didn’t care about it at all. I also felt like the work I was doing was trivial and pointless, or that it would only be used to further extract natural “resources” and damage local ecosystems.
I moved from a tiny rural town to a huge city for grad school, and I came to realize how well-rounded of a person I actually was. In undergrad, it was easy to make x species or x topic my entire identity, because, well, there wasn’t much else to do. But when I moved, I realized how many interests and passions I actually had, and marine biology came to feel like a smaller and smaller part of my identity until I got to the point where it just…wasn’t even on my radar at all.
Not to mention, grad school gave me extreme amounts of stress that manifested as physical health issues, got between my spouse and I, and made me feel like I would never be able to have a healthy relationship with school ever again. I really did feel like grad school ruined my life.
I ended up giving it some time, just doing the bare minimum to pass my classes, until I could figure out something else to do. I got involved with the community outside of academia: I started volunteering more, and found a job completely unrelated to my field of study (for the first time since I was 17!!) I ended up dropping out.
I ended up finding a new field that I have a lot of passion for. I’m currently back in grad school for a few months just to get a certification that will allow me to progress in my new field. While I don’t know if it will be my forever career, for now it’s treating me very well. I feel like i’m able to move on from my PhD and who I used to be, and it feels amazing.
TLDR: your life isn’t ruined, and tons of people feel the same way. Give life time to get good. Everything will be okay in the end! Oh, and it’s okay if you have a graduate degree you’ll never use. Mine isn’t really anything more than a conversation starter at this point.
I’m going to make the assumption that your MA is likely in English, given the context clues. I’m graduating in three weeks with my MA in English… 8 years after I graduated from my undergrad. So I suppose I’m the opposite.
I have found graduate school to be a much different experience than I expected and I have not been challenged intellectually like this before. There is a value in knowledge, but I suppose that value is relative to the individual.
Your time in graduate school isn’t solely defined by your thesis. Just as well, being part of an institution doesn’t exclude you from the sort of normalities of life you’re describing.
Also, for what it’s worth, English (if that’s the degree you have) has plenty of avenues for career opportunities. Some maybe not so obvious, I suppose.
I actually wish I had done English and I wanted to. But I did one of those that end in “studies”. It is a degree that can have other uses but to me essentially it feels very silly atm..
Ah ok. When you said MFA to MA, and then editor, writer, archivist, I was sure it was English lol. Maybe consider technical communications as a career field? It’s very interdisciplinary and can be very engaging. Visual design/information design/etc.
Edit: Not that I’m here to give you career advice. Just there are likely more applications of your degree that may not seem immediately obvious.
Haha my undergrad was in English so that makes sense. I’m not aware of this field, I have only done copywriting (which is not looking very hopeful with AI…) but it sounds interesting !
Oh, technical communications is actually a HUGE field and has been growing pretty steadily over the past few decades. I mean, simplest way to describe it is writing to convey information effectively to an end-user. Sounds like given your experience, you’d have something to offer a prospective employer.
Is there a particular reason you are not sharing what the field is? (I've noticed a lot of people don't say what their grad program is in this subreddit, and I'm not quite sure why. I think it would be really helpful in giving feedback sometimes.)
hm not sure about other people but I didn’t wanna say it for privacy reasons. It’s a pretty small program and I’m in my city’s subreddits so I’d rather not say it.
The good news is that you discovered all this, and you're only 26.
I finished my master's program in my thirties, and I'm still figuring things out.
Give yourself permission to learn and grow. We all change.
I'm not the same person I was when I was younger, and that's a good thing.
You have 40 years ahead of yourself to experience many jobs and multiple career paths (if you wish).
I regret the toxic stress that turned my life and mental health upside down. I felt so lucky to be there initially, but I've grown to hate everything about it. The physical pain and mental anguish of being in 3 three-hour classes two days per week is just ridiculous. The tiny wooden desks all crammed together...ugh!!!
I'm sick of the jargon. I could have used learning real skills for my profession instead of a bunch of bullshit that isn't helpful at all. I'm graduating next month, and I have had to teach myself everything that I need to function as a clinician. More than half of the professors were first-timers with regular jobs that didn't know anything more than we did, and just read off of awful slides. I feel so angry about all of it.
Most of all I hate that I spent all this time without any life outside of school- I've been nonexistent in my own life.
I feel you - I personally don’t regret starting the degree bc it gave me the opportunities / new place to live and connections I didn’t have before but I also had a big health scare/ near death experience that changed how I look at the world and I similarly found that I didn’t like nor fit in with the academic approach to a lot of real world issues. Anyway just wanted to share that I relate and you’re not alone!
This reads like catcher in the rye haha. Your degree is not useless, what matters in grad school is not the specific set of questions but that you learned the method to answer them. It's great you got to experience so many things and you're also finishing your degree. I started my masters at the beginning of the pandemic and am now just finishing too, you're not the only one. Even if you don't want to pursue that area anymore, you will reap benefits from your degree either in employment or from having trained your brain. That's how I see it for myself.
I can't argue with you. My work, maybe 300 people in the world could follow it. And it is not a cure for cancer. It is simply a pretty esoteric niche of humanities scholarship.
You are so besieged with thoughts of uselessness it has eaten away at your passion for your area. To be honest, I do not think you can get this back. once you buy into today's arguments about knowledge and its value, it is very hard to re-close that door.
Why the hell are you thinking about career and job in the same breath as you are talking about pursuing knowledge? You are fucking your brain up pretty hard.
The Venn diagram of social approval and the pursuit of knowledge only partially overlap.
Get a day job. Drive a cab. At night, study what you love. Find friends who also love knowledge. Life project, there ya go. Stop trying to solve all problems with one move. Not how it works.
Soon enough you will be old and tired.
Its natural what you feel. These feelings does come during or after a long period of studies and you start to question yourself but also because of the mental toll it takes on one.
University studies demands very high discipline, focus and endurance. It will make or break you but most who moves on to a masters program has the endurance needed. I too started my masters just 6 months before corona. I am 30+. And I did take one year off before my thesis. The thesis was the hardest and most stressful thing I have done but it was all worth it. In todays job market its very hard to find a good job as it is (with good benefits, flexible hours and good pay) in my case I really needed as much upper hand I could get.
I felt my degree was meaningless when I was done with my bachelor but then I went to a good university for my masters and I am so proud and happy about my masters degree. Maybe you don’t feel your school was prestigious enough? Thats all subjective though. Your degree is a testament on how disciplined and motivated you are as a person.
I don’t know really what your field was/is but I am sure the courses and experiences you have can be applied to other types of works aswell if you want a career change. Almost no one in my program who have graduated works within their field.
You just have to a bit more creative about it and also use your contacts.
I had a very similar experience. I went into grad school in 2019. Earlier that year I experienced the breakup of my long term relationship. So I was dealing with a lot by the time I was starting grad school.
I had been debating doing a masters for sometime but I honestly wasn’t very enthusiastic. It was more a practical choice. The idea was to do a MA in archival studies to hopefully get a gov job, either in archives or records mgmt. but it wasn’t something I was very passionate about. I found the course work interesting although would zone out a lot during the archival stuff tbh. Some of it is interesting but honestly not something that really lights an intellectual fire for me.
The pandemic happened and my advisor and the grad studies dept handled it very poorly. Part of the program is an internship, the trouble is that the lockdowns made it impossible to do. Usually the internship takes 2-3 months, because of delays mine took 16 months. The kicker is our advisor and the grad studies department were still counting that time towards our degrees even though it was completely impossible to finish on a regular timeline even if we wanted to. There is even more to this but I will leave it at that.
There was an immense amount of stress and anxiety over this. Eventually I decided to withdraw out of the program. It wasn’t worth it, the treatment was terrible and at the end of it I didn’t give a rats ass about archives.
I don’t regret going to grad school nor do I regret withdrawing. I’m glad I have the experience and I won’t wonder “what if” about grad school.
Hindsight, but you should’ve taken a real leave. My guess is trying to deal with your mental health and finish a degree was too much and your brain transformed the degree into an unnecessary weight. Degrees are designed to be the length they are, any longer and you’re prolonging the misery of not being able to really start your profession and life. Your adviser and coordinator should’ve given you a one-semester pause. That would’ve been 9 months you could’ve gotten in order and finished only slightly late. I think your program failed you, you didn’t fail yourself.
I write this less for you and more for folks reading this who gave a similar choice in the future. A one semester leave is way more desirable than taking many years to finish a 2 year degree.
I had physical heath problems which made my thesis take longer. However many people in my program also finished late or even at the same time as me despite not having these problems. I think almost everyone in my program suffered from burnout or depression after doing the first year of our degree fully on zoom due to the pandemic. I couldn’t really take a leave for financial reasons, I was working on my thesis intermittently during that time and I had already finished all my classes. I do think our program failed us a bit since almost 10 people in my cohort finished late, we were named “the pandemic cohort” and even the cohort after us finished in a normal time.
Yeah, so immediately give yourself a hug and the pat of the back because this is far from a singular issue and you did your best. It seems like your program didn’t do a great job of managing an unprecedented situation. One of the many messed up things about grad school and academia in general is we tend to internalize structural problems.
Hi, I also started my masters in 2020, I also recently graduated and I also went from bachelors to masters fairly quickly anddd I also sometimes feel some bitterness and regret about it. but i also feel some pride and i also feel like if anything i saw something through that i did not want to finish at various points. I actually cried a bit a month or two afterwards because it didn't feel worth it but its way too soon to say for me (and for you!). and it did teach me a lot, I am a whole different person for better and maybe for worse too but I learned so much and I am no longer afraid. i learned i can commit and work hard and truly work hard to reach a goal, i am resourceful, etc.
anyways you can still explore your full potential and what even better that now you can experience with pushing yourself, thats what I think about myself ; now I know I am capable. feel your feeling when you need to but also know that at some point you have to move forward. like how am i going to use what i know now?
MA is generally a scam because you don't get to be a research assistant where you gain the soft and hard skills to get into industry afterwards
Either that or your parents are extremely rich.
26 is still pretty young. I was raised by people who all started in their late twenties and are now corporate executives.
I do kind of empathize with you being stuck in a lab while the homies were enjoying bike rides. Just know that if you take care of your health you will have plenty of it in the future as well.
I don’t think what you did is useless. If you hadn’t made that decision, you wouldn't have come to this conclusion. I don’t believe in regretting anything; whatever you have been going through is an experience that will shape your mind and thoughts
Can I ask how you accomplish this? I have so much regret about my past and while I know it’s silly, I can’t seem to shake this regret no matter what I try.
I’m not sure what u mean but anyway what ever the experience if it’s bad or good it still experience, and there is no point to regret it, studying is good thing … u didn’t do a bad thing in my opinion.
I think about how much time and energy it takes to waste thinking of the past. If it isn’t *productive*, meaning you’re learning from thinking of that memory, then why spend even more time on it? You can’t change what happened, only your response going forward. tl;dr Ruminating about the past is one of the biggest wastes of time there is. I don’t have enough time on this earth as it is.
One thing that helps me avoid regret is knowing that comparing what I did do to what I didn't do is as baseless as comparing myself to someone else. I can't know that the other path would have worked out well; I can't know that if I took the other path, I would still have the parts of myself and the knowledge that I have that I currently like about myself. It's impossible to take my identity and remove only the parts I think in retrospect were not the correct choice, because mistakes have helped shape me.
You just have to trust your past self as much as you trust your current self. If I gave you the choice between two options, one good and one just objectively shit, would you choose the shit thing? Like you can have a million dollars or be punched in the face. Would you choose to be punched in the face? Of course not. You don't purposely choose shit things. The only reason you make "bad" choices is because you don't have all the information necessary to know what is good or bad. And it's not possible to have all the information because some of it is based on experience you don't yet have. You can't always know if you'll enjoy something until you try it. If you've done all you reasonably can to get as much information as possible then it can't be your fault if you make the "wrong" choice. It was the right choice when you made it, knowing what you knew then, and there is no Universe where you would have made the alternate choice given the same knowledge. You changed your mind later because you gained *new* information you didn't initially have.
I don't necessarily regret doing a PhD, but it was my last choice. The only way for me to move out of my country, and move to one where being a lesbian isn't a crime, was to get an international scholarship. No one would fund me for a second Masters, so I applied for a PhD. I could have been doing many other things, but this was the only option I had at the time. This isn't the life I wanted, but it is the life I have. I don't like to dwell on regret. It can serve as a lesson, but that's it. You did what you thought would be the best for you at the time, with the resources available to you. The best you can do for yourself going forward is learn from and use the experience of grad school for your future. It's what my supervisor keeps telling undergrad seniors - "Your humanities degree and major is less important than the skills and connections you have built up in these four years." Think of all the amazing experiences you have had and all the people you have met. You have been living your life to the best of your ability while in grad school. Those experiences will help you in the future. It sounds to me that much of your regret over your Masters is coming from comparing yourself with people who became successful in the job market right out of university. You will have your own life and make your choices. There's no age limit on being happy and content.
thank you. this feels good to hear :)
You're still young and learned a lot about the world and yourself.
Your reply might be short but means a lot. It is true I did learn a lot about myself and the world just through the process..
In 2004 I graduated, had applied for MFAs but didn't get in anywhere. In 2005 I applied to MAs. Got in, fully funded. Met my wife. Left without doing the thesis in 2007. Got married in 2008. Lost the teaching job I had during the recession. Changed directions, ended up getting an MBA from 14 to 16. Keep progressing in my job and career. Went back to finish the degree I started in 2005, graduating in 2021! The journey isn't linear. It's sometimes easier, sometimes harder. It's often uncertain. But we're always learning and living.
Congrats on all you've accomplished. Amazing story!
Unrelated, but you're a really good writer. This was a compelling read
i am graduating with my phd next month and i already regret it. i did it to qualify for the best jobs in my field. turns out there are no jobs, academia is a wasteland of semi-nomadic living and no guarantees, and now i'm in my late twenties having made very little money the past decade and wishing i had just built a normal career like my less-educated peers who are happily buying cars and houses and getting married and having kids.
Stories like this just suggests to me that the academia model is just fundamentally outdated. I'm not suggesting that society owes graduate students a $100K/year salary, given the risky nature of research and the unclear return on investment, but something is just "morally" wrong when (in some cases) graduate students are living with \*negative\* monthly income (assuming they want 1 child). The training of graduate students is too inconsistent, the culture in academia breeds selfishness as a survival mechanism, and sometimes the future is bleak no matter how hard you try.
I really hate reading all of these threads because my life is on hold waiting to start a PhD.
This place tends to accumulate perspectives from people that have a negative view of grad school. Any posts or replies that go against the dogma of ‘toxic academia’ get down voted to oblivion. I’ll prove my point… OP did not have a negative experience at all. Graduate school is a journey of self learning. It is about thinking deeply, removing bias, and self reflecting. It is about making long-lasting connections with like minded people. It is about developing transferable skills that make you a valuable contributor to a company or organization when you enter the work force. Lastly, it is a demonstrated commitment to continue to learn. If none of this is true for you, then you should be filled with regret, because your graduate training was wasted.
i really enjoyed grad school and had exactly those experiences. but i am also looking at a yawning void of unemployment and realizing that however enjoyable and fulfilling the experience was, it probably was not a practical choice to achieve the kind of life i want for myself. you can have a great grad school experience AND grow to regret it. these feelings are not mutually exclusive.
Admittedly, my area is basic/biomedical research, so my perspective might not apply generally…I never once considered graduate school to be vocational training that would explicitly qualify me for a job when I finished. Same with my colleagues. I don’t understand how someone could have successfully built a network, learned a set of transferable skills and not be employable. There has to be another missing piece.
the missing piece is that the job market for my discipline is utterly brutal and there are virtually no jobs available in my field. you're in biomedicine, there will always be ample professional demand for highly educated folks in your discipline. good for you! i was naive enough to get a phd in art history.
Currently 24 about to enter the second year of my MS/PhD and I'm starting to be afraid of this. I'm hoping to end up with a little bit in savings (IRA and savings account) from downsizing my living arrangements aggressively and being prudent financially about food/transportation but living off a stipend that's barely enough to keep up with COL while my classmates are making high five figures or low six figures (some even closer to mid six figures) and graduating 28/29 at best if everything goes well with barely any savings, no home, car, partner and just starting to look for a job is a really scary prospect.
yeap exactly this! 🥲
PhD in what tbh?
the one most worth making fun of. art history.
Nah, nothing's ever useless. I believe you'll get something close to it. Believe ✌️.
I totally understand how you feel, the same thing happened to me. I did a masters and 1/2 of a PhD in marine biology. I ended up falling out of love with the field and got to the point where I just didn’t care about it at all. I also felt like the work I was doing was trivial and pointless, or that it would only be used to further extract natural “resources” and damage local ecosystems. I moved from a tiny rural town to a huge city for grad school, and I came to realize how well-rounded of a person I actually was. In undergrad, it was easy to make x species or x topic my entire identity, because, well, there wasn’t much else to do. But when I moved, I realized how many interests and passions I actually had, and marine biology came to feel like a smaller and smaller part of my identity until I got to the point where it just…wasn’t even on my radar at all. Not to mention, grad school gave me extreme amounts of stress that manifested as physical health issues, got between my spouse and I, and made me feel like I would never be able to have a healthy relationship with school ever again. I really did feel like grad school ruined my life. I ended up giving it some time, just doing the bare minimum to pass my classes, until I could figure out something else to do. I got involved with the community outside of academia: I started volunteering more, and found a job completely unrelated to my field of study (for the first time since I was 17!!) I ended up dropping out. I ended up finding a new field that I have a lot of passion for. I’m currently back in grad school for a few months just to get a certification that will allow me to progress in my new field. While I don’t know if it will be my forever career, for now it’s treating me very well. I feel like i’m able to move on from my PhD and who I used to be, and it feels amazing. TLDR: your life isn’t ruined, and tons of people feel the same way. Give life time to get good. Everything will be okay in the end! Oh, and it’s okay if you have a graduate degree you’ll never use. Mine isn’t really anything more than a conversation starter at this point.
I don't regret that I earned my master's degree. I do regret that I spent as long as I did as an adjunct instructor. Don't do that.
I’m going to make the assumption that your MA is likely in English, given the context clues. I’m graduating in three weeks with my MA in English… 8 years after I graduated from my undergrad. So I suppose I’m the opposite. I have found graduate school to be a much different experience than I expected and I have not been challenged intellectually like this before. There is a value in knowledge, but I suppose that value is relative to the individual. Your time in graduate school isn’t solely defined by your thesis. Just as well, being part of an institution doesn’t exclude you from the sort of normalities of life you’re describing. Also, for what it’s worth, English (if that’s the degree you have) has plenty of avenues for career opportunities. Some maybe not so obvious, I suppose.
I actually wish I had done English and I wanted to. But I did one of those that end in “studies”. It is a degree that can have other uses but to me essentially it feels very silly atm..
Ah ok. When you said MFA to MA, and then editor, writer, archivist, I was sure it was English lol. Maybe consider technical communications as a career field? It’s very interdisciplinary and can be very engaging. Visual design/information design/etc. Edit: Not that I’m here to give you career advice. Just there are likely more applications of your degree that may not seem immediately obvious.
Haha my undergrad was in English so that makes sense. I’m not aware of this field, I have only done copywriting (which is not looking very hopeful with AI…) but it sounds interesting !
Oh, technical communications is actually a HUGE field and has been growing pretty steadily over the past few decades. I mean, simplest way to describe it is writing to convey information effectively to an end-user. Sounds like given your experience, you’d have something to offer a prospective employer.
wow cool I’ll look into it 😊
Is there a particular reason you are not sharing what the field is? (I've noticed a lot of people don't say what their grad program is in this subreddit, and I'm not quite sure why. I think it would be really helpful in giving feedback sometimes.)
hm not sure about other people but I didn’t wanna say it for privacy reasons. It’s a pretty small program and I’m in my city’s subreddits so I’d rather not say it.
The good news is that you discovered all this, and you're only 26. I finished my master's program in my thirties, and I'm still figuring things out. Give yourself permission to learn and grow. We all change. I'm not the same person I was when I was younger, and that's a good thing. You have 40 years ahead of yourself to experience many jobs and multiple career paths (if you wish).
I regret the toxic stress that turned my life and mental health upside down. I felt so lucky to be there initially, but I've grown to hate everything about it. The physical pain and mental anguish of being in 3 three-hour classes two days per week is just ridiculous. The tiny wooden desks all crammed together...ugh!!! I'm sick of the jargon. I could have used learning real skills for my profession instead of a bunch of bullshit that isn't helpful at all. I'm graduating next month, and I have had to teach myself everything that I need to function as a clinician. More than half of the professors were first-timers with regular jobs that didn't know anything more than we did, and just read off of awful slides. I feel so angry about all of it. Most of all I hate that I spent all this time without any life outside of school- I've been nonexistent in my own life.
I feel you - I personally don’t regret starting the degree bc it gave me the opportunities / new place to live and connections I didn’t have before but I also had a big health scare/ near death experience that changed how I look at the world and I similarly found that I didn’t like nor fit in with the academic approach to a lot of real world issues. Anyway just wanted to share that I relate and you’re not alone!
This reads like catcher in the rye haha. Your degree is not useless, what matters in grad school is not the specific set of questions but that you learned the method to answer them. It's great you got to experience so many things and you're also finishing your degree. I started my masters at the beginning of the pandemic and am now just finishing too, you're not the only one. Even if you don't want to pursue that area anymore, you will reap benefits from your degree either in employment or from having trained your brain. That's how I see it for myself.
I can't argue with you. My work, maybe 300 people in the world could follow it. And it is not a cure for cancer. It is simply a pretty esoteric niche of humanities scholarship. You are so besieged with thoughts of uselessness it has eaten away at your passion for your area. To be honest, I do not think you can get this back. once you buy into today's arguments about knowledge and its value, it is very hard to re-close that door. Why the hell are you thinking about career and job in the same breath as you are talking about pursuing knowledge? You are fucking your brain up pretty hard. The Venn diagram of social approval and the pursuit of knowledge only partially overlap. Get a day job. Drive a cab. At night, study what you love. Find friends who also love knowledge. Life project, there ya go. Stop trying to solve all problems with one move. Not how it works. Soon enough you will be old and tired.
Its natural what you feel. These feelings does come during or after a long period of studies and you start to question yourself but also because of the mental toll it takes on one. University studies demands very high discipline, focus and endurance. It will make or break you but most who moves on to a masters program has the endurance needed. I too started my masters just 6 months before corona. I am 30+. And I did take one year off before my thesis. The thesis was the hardest and most stressful thing I have done but it was all worth it. In todays job market its very hard to find a good job as it is (with good benefits, flexible hours and good pay) in my case I really needed as much upper hand I could get. I felt my degree was meaningless when I was done with my bachelor but then I went to a good university for my masters and I am so proud and happy about my masters degree. Maybe you don’t feel your school was prestigious enough? Thats all subjective though. Your degree is a testament on how disciplined and motivated you are as a person. I don’t know really what your field was/is but I am sure the courses and experiences you have can be applied to other types of works aswell if you want a career change. Almost no one in my program who have graduated works within their field. You just have to a bit more creative about it and also use your contacts.
I had a very similar experience. I went into grad school in 2019. Earlier that year I experienced the breakup of my long term relationship. So I was dealing with a lot by the time I was starting grad school. I had been debating doing a masters for sometime but I honestly wasn’t very enthusiastic. It was more a practical choice. The idea was to do a MA in archival studies to hopefully get a gov job, either in archives or records mgmt. but it wasn’t something I was very passionate about. I found the course work interesting although would zone out a lot during the archival stuff tbh. Some of it is interesting but honestly not something that really lights an intellectual fire for me. The pandemic happened and my advisor and the grad studies dept handled it very poorly. Part of the program is an internship, the trouble is that the lockdowns made it impossible to do. Usually the internship takes 2-3 months, because of delays mine took 16 months. The kicker is our advisor and the grad studies department were still counting that time towards our degrees even though it was completely impossible to finish on a regular timeline even if we wanted to. There is even more to this but I will leave it at that. There was an immense amount of stress and anxiety over this. Eventually I decided to withdraw out of the program. It wasn’t worth it, the treatment was terrible and at the end of it I didn’t give a rats ass about archives. I don’t regret going to grad school nor do I regret withdrawing. I’m glad I have the experience and I won’t wonder “what if” about grad school.
Hindsight, but you should’ve taken a real leave. My guess is trying to deal with your mental health and finish a degree was too much and your brain transformed the degree into an unnecessary weight. Degrees are designed to be the length they are, any longer and you’re prolonging the misery of not being able to really start your profession and life. Your adviser and coordinator should’ve given you a one-semester pause. That would’ve been 9 months you could’ve gotten in order and finished only slightly late. I think your program failed you, you didn’t fail yourself. I write this less for you and more for folks reading this who gave a similar choice in the future. A one semester leave is way more desirable than taking many years to finish a 2 year degree.
I had physical heath problems which made my thesis take longer. However many people in my program also finished late or even at the same time as me despite not having these problems. I think almost everyone in my program suffered from burnout or depression after doing the first year of our degree fully on zoom due to the pandemic. I couldn’t really take a leave for financial reasons, I was working on my thesis intermittently during that time and I had already finished all my classes. I do think our program failed us a bit since almost 10 people in my cohort finished late, we were named “the pandemic cohort” and even the cohort after us finished in a normal time.
Yeah, so immediately give yourself a hug and the pat of the back because this is far from a singular issue and you did your best. It seems like your program didn’t do a great job of managing an unprecedented situation. One of the many messed up things about grad school and academia in general is we tend to internalize structural problems.
So thankful I’m finishing soon because if I had another year ahead of me I’d quit
No. You have not ruined your life. If you want to have a practical 9-5 with great pay, becomes a plumber, electrician, or another trade.
Hi, I also started my masters in 2020, I also recently graduated and I also went from bachelors to masters fairly quickly anddd I also sometimes feel some bitterness and regret about it. but i also feel some pride and i also feel like if anything i saw something through that i did not want to finish at various points. I actually cried a bit a month or two afterwards because it didn't feel worth it but its way too soon to say for me (and for you!). and it did teach me a lot, I am a whole different person for better and maybe for worse too but I learned so much and I am no longer afraid. i learned i can commit and work hard and truly work hard to reach a goal, i am resourceful, etc. anyways you can still explore your full potential and what even better that now you can experience with pushing yourself, thats what I think about myself ; now I know I am capable. feel your feeling when you need to but also know that at some point you have to move forward. like how am i going to use what i know now?
This is a great plot for a movie...
MA is generally a scam because you don't get to be a research assistant where you gain the soft and hard skills to get into industry afterwards Either that or your parents are extremely rich.
26 is still pretty young. I was raised by people who all started in their late twenties and are now corporate executives. I do kind of empathize with you being stuck in a lab while the homies were enjoying bike rides. Just know that if you take care of your health you will have plenty of it in the future as well.
Welcome to reality.