Starting Graduate School today, anyone...

[Archie Goodwin]

Classic, I'm new here, but I've done graduate school twice. I have an MBA and a Masters of Accounting. My undergraduate degree was in economics, so I had to take all of the undergrad classes in accounting as prereqs for the graduate stuff. I also had a couple of years of real world under my belt before going back. I learned a new respect and disrespect for Phds. First, they were experts in their respective fields. Second, they were experts only in those fields. I got my masters in accounting in order to go into public accounting. I learned more about accounting in my first year with PwC than I did in all of my classes.

 

[Pilgrim]

I started my Master's 4 years after finishing my bachelor's - no sweat. With maturity on your side, you are well armed to pursue a graduate degree. You know what work is, and how to apply yourself. That's really all that's needed. Do the work, spend the time, and you'll do well.

And I began my Ph.D. work at age 37. I knew I had to take a couple of doctoral level statistics courses, and I DO NOT enjoy math. I chose an undergrad major that required no math courses after high school.

So there I was, and I decided to take a 400-level Stats class as a warm-up. The reason I took an undergrad course was that its grade would not count as part of my graduate record - so it was penalty-free if I didn't do well.

I walked into that classroom on day one, and saw that many of the students hadn't been born when I took my last math class! Man, they looked young. But I passed the course, and made it through the doctoral program as well.

You gonna be fine.

 

[JohnTheGreek]

My Best Advice....

When I was in my doctoral program, the chair of the department once told me this...

"Look John, what one fool can do another can do as well. There are plenty of idiots with Ph.D.s...so even in the worst case scenario that you're an idiot too, there is no reason to think you won't finish the degree".

You should print this in bold font and tack it onto you wall along with a very important quote from Woody Allen mentioned below.

My Chair was right of course and, while it turns out I wasn't an idiot (perhaps surprisingly), his advice made the degree seem just a bit less intimidating in spite of the work we were doing. Woody Allen was also right.....80% of life is just showing up. That includes grad school and that means to the end. No backsliding allowed. For example, my dissertation advisor (amazingly helpful guy and with killer contacts for jobs) had another grad student in my year who was finished with everything (including about 3/4 of her dissertation). Quite frankly, she just stopped showing up and here we are, four years after I finished my degree, and I hear she is not even a fixture in the department anymore. She will never finish I'm sad to predict as the department has forgotten her and her advisor is very near retirement. To adapt a phrase from Yogi....You ain't done 'til you're done. I don't care if you're scheduled to defend your thesis tomorrow, you'd better stay up working on the powerpoint presentation for that extra hour just to be sure that all goes as planned.

I have another example illustrating the importance of showing up. When I was in the darkest depths of qualifying examinations and failing grades on the preceeding midterms in my first year of grad school.....I KEPT GOING. It would have been easy to walk out and find a really good job with my MBA but I actually decided at the beginning of my first year that, even if they kicked me out of the program, I was going to keep showing up....Re-apply if necessary but keep showing up. I had actually planned, if it had come to flunking out, applying for readmission and being denied, that I was going to keep showing up to these classes, taking exams and writing papers until they finally either called security to have me forcibly removed from the campus or let me back into the program. Maybe it's just my personality and others may have had a different approach, but I obviously came to view that year as very adversarial in nature. I wasn't going to let ANYONE, even the faculty, tell me I was incapable of doing something I wanted to do. In some ways I think a lot of Ph.D programs are designed to foster this in the first year students.

Now, this all sounds scary but, fortunately, you are in a little different position. No offense intended, but an MA degree will generally NOT be as bad as I'm describing above. Not that it won't take work and an attitude similar to that described above, but most faculty reserve their worst tortures for Doctoral candidates.

Sorry for the length of this reply but this is important stuff here. Hope it helps.

Best of luck,

John

 

[Pilgrim]

Zohar summed it up nicely at the top of this page.

The fact is, graduate school really isn't siginficantly harder then undergraduate school. Why?

• You are more mature.
• You understand working at your studies.
• Adults are goal-oriented; you have a reason for doing this.

The other reason takes more explanation. Undergraduate courses are generally oriented to dealing with, and retaining, facts. If you can retain information and apply it consistently and accurately at a fairly basic, operational level, you are doing undergraduate work.

You see, graduate work isn't that much different in terms of the content; the difference is that grad students are required to apply the information at a higher level. You need to do research, read about disparate topics and find the commonalities. You need to find relationships between things. You're operating with similar content, but applying it at a higher cognitive level than an undergrad student. The good news is that this is generally easy for adults who have more life experience and maturity than young people.

Also consider that the average college campus is very different in terms of student ages than it was 20 years ago. There are many, many more adult students in programs of all types. I'm sure you'll fit right in.

The real secret of graduate school is PERSISTENCE. Don't get side-tracked, don't decide to put off your thesis for a month, or two months, or three months. Show up for class, do the work in a businesslike fashion, and BE READY when thesis time comes around, and plunge into it. You will assure yourself of completing the degree.

When I had finished my PhD classwork, my dad did me a favor: every time I spoke with him on the phone, the first words out of his mouth were: 'How's that dissertation coming?" I tell all the grad students I work with that when they get to the end of their classwork, they should tell every friend of theirs that when they see them, they want the first words they say to be "How's that thesis coming?" The constant prompts help to motivate you and avoid the dread A.B.D. degree.