Let’s start with the defense: I passed my master’s defense exam 2 days ago (yay!). However, unlike undergraduate exams where you finish the paper and immediately forget everything you crammed the night before, graduate exams require corrections to your dissertation.
It’s like “Congratulations, you passed!”, but you didn’t get every question right, so you get to spend the next few days (sometimes weeks?) rewriting the parts you got wrong so that your thesis will become an irrefutable body of academic work that will withstand the scrutiny of time. Or dust.
And believe me, it’s the absolutely last thing you want to do after being grilled for about 2 hours by a panel of 4-6 professors (in my case, it was 4).
So since that fateful day, I’ve been making corrections to a 24,000-word document that no one may ever read again. Maybe one. But that person will realize from the abstract that it has nothing to do with what they were looking for.
Which brings me to the attack on graduate education in an op-ed by a religion professor at Columbia. He calls for an overhaul of the system, some of which I agree with. Like how graduate degrees train students for jobs that largely don’t exist. It’s true; how many jobs out there require an intimate knowledge of some molecule’s mechanistic pathway in the environment? However, I can’t imagine myself getting a degree in “Water” or “Space” as he suggests. I think it wouldn’t work for undergraduates at all.
As a coda, I find that I generally get 2 types of questions when people find out I’m done my M.Sc. — 1) What’s next? PhD?, or 2) You must be happy to be done! Back to the real world, right?
1) Maybe. I admit, I like learning. Working a job where something is the same everyday scares the living daylights out of me.
2) Is school not part of the real world? I mean.. we ARE trying to do research and figure out what’s going on with the world..right?
