Browsing Category: "Delay the Real World"
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One of the classic debates that many soon-to-be college graduates face is the decision to either continue with their education by moving directly on to graduate school, or to immediately join the workforce and worry about professional degrees after gaining some experience. It is a question, not unlike many other important choices we face, that doesn’t have one right answer and what’s good for one person may not be for another.
Recently, I was sent an article posted on FastWeb.com that discusses both sides of this issue, and thought I would share some of the advice with all of you as well as my own experience.
The article was written by Peter Vogt of Monster.com (where it originally appeared) and it chronicles the choices of two different women, Laurie Duffy and Carolyn Kaufman, who each made different decisions after graduation. Duffy decided to go straight to graduate school, while Kaufman spent some time in the workforce getting experience before she pursued a graduate degree.
“Graduate school is difficult and very much not the traditional college experience,” says Duffy, now an assistant account executive for the Winston-Salem, North Carolina, office of PR firm Mullen. The workload alone leaves little time for relationships or a career, she says. “So I chose to get my master’s right away, before I had a job I loved and couldn’t leave, or before I had a family to take care of.”
Duffy’s experience illustrates one of the most common arguments for pursuing graduate school sooner versus later. Other commitments can get into the way of furthering your education. And particularly once you start a family, it can be difficult to fit grad school into your life, says Nancy Stamp, dean of the graduate school at Binghamton University.
As you can see, there are some solid arguments for heading straight into graduate school so work or family obligations don’t sidetrack you. Additionally you are able to relocate easier if the school you want to attend doesn’t happen to be nearby to where you went to undergrad. However, there are numerous reasons why many people head straight into the workforce, like I did, and Ms. Kaufman outlines some of them in the article.
[Kaufman] intended to go to graduate school immediately after finishing her undergraduate degree in English and psychology in 1995 but put it off, because she couldn’t decide where to go.
“That was the best thing that could have happened,” says Kaufman, who teaches psychology full-time at Columbus State Community College and part-time at Otterbein College. “Developing my confidence and sense of competence, learning new skills and contemplating whether I really wanted to go back or continue what I was doing…was priceless and has helped me make better decisions after graduate school.”
My main reason for not going straight into graduate school was similar, in that I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career so it didn’t make sense to me to spend more time and money on a degree I may not even use. I wanted to get some experience, try some different things out and see what interested me enough to pursue further. As career expert Anna Ivey, author of The Ivey Guide to Law School Admissions, says: “Grad school isn’t going anywhere. Take some time to figure out who you are outside of school.”
No matter which way you decide to go, make sure you are doing it for the right reasons and that you will be happy with your decision a few years down the road. If you are likely to have trouble getting back into the swing of things academically after a hiatus, maybe you should plow right on through to grad school. If you are unsure of what you want to do, or need more experience to fully flesh out your interests then perhaps getting your feet wet in the workforce is the right move for you. Either way, good luck to you all.
Popularity: 23% [?]
This is a guest post by Wren Schultz of BlogduWren
For anyone over 18 years old, there is a stigma associated with living with your parents—much to the chagrin of those of us who choose to do so(for reasons outlined later). Supposedly it is an indication that you can’t make it on your own or that your life is at rock bottom, not to mention what effect it allegedly has on your dating prospects. If you shed these stereotypes and preconceived notions, however, you may realize moving back home after college makes more sense than you thought.
Historically speaking, family dwellings used to really contain the whole family. Grandparents, aunts, uncles–everyone lived together under the same roof. If a child went away to war, university, or business, he or she always had a home when they returned, which many did. That trend continues today in many countries outside of the United States. Households in such places as China, Ecuador, and Italy are frequently composed not only of parents and their adult children, but also often included are their children’s spouses. It is a living situation that has persisted through the years and has only become passe in the United States in the last 75 years or so.
If historical precedent won’t get you to reconsider those prejudices, let’s have a look at the practical aspect. Living at home for a time after college is a great way to start paying down those college loans or start a rainy day fund. When you don’t have the hassles of a home of your own to deal with, you have more time to look for just the right job, try out different jobs to see how you like them, or build valuable experience with low to non-paying internships that would be next to impossible to take on while living on your own. Even aside from the financial and employment benefits you stand to gain, the list of benefits continues: higher occupancy homes are much better for the environment, living together leads to good family relationships (for you to get know your parents as people rather than just parents and them to get to know you as the adult you’ve become), not being tied to a living situation (with the house plants, bills, mail, and pets) allows you the freedom to travel, whether it is a well-planned trip around the world or an impromptu week-long trip to Omaha.
Hollywood has had its go at adult children who live at home. Sometimes it is the main focus like in Failure to Launch and
other times it is a minor reference like Will Ferrell’s pathetic character in Wedding Crashers. Whether large or small, the
references are rarely positive. But when was the last time your life imitated Hollywood. Are all Russians really evil? Will a pinto automatically explode if you accidentally tap its back bumper? No. And just as all of those Hollywood images are mis-represented exaggerations, so it goes with living at home.
You may not be the only person who will need to adapt your thinking to this retro concept. While almost all parents claim that their love for their children knows no bounds, some find those bounds really quickly when the topic of moving home for a spell is breached. Or maybe it is after the new arrangement is tried out for a while that your parents will start to reconsider. As a friend who has gone through it all recently pointed out to me, it wasn’t his parents so much that had the problems, but it was pressure from their friends that made the situation tense. It is important to take into account that it won’t only be you who is adapting to a new living parameters; they will be too. It will [necessarily] be a different arrangement from those days of high school when the laundry went into the hamper dirty and magically showed up clean and folded on your bed the next day. Let your parents know that you understand this and that you will be a great roommate. There you go–now you’ve even got a great start on that communication we were talking about.
The moral of this story is: as you think about what your next step is, DON’T discount returning to that twin-bedded room with sports posters covering the walls. You may just find that by allowing yourself a little breathing room between you and the real world, your pockets will become fuller (or at least less empty), your options will become more plentiful, and you will develop a whole new relationship with your parents–I mean roomies.
Wren Schultz is a graduate of Bates College in Lewiston, ME. He is now a freelance web developer and author of BlogduWren; he happily lives with his parents in Anacortes, Washington.
Technorati Tags: moving, moving home, graduation, college, living with your parents
Popularity: 30% [?]
If you feel like you need to delay the inevitable transition to the “Real World” a little while longer, WWOOFing might be the perfect alternative. World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (also known as Willing Workers on Organic Farms) (WWOOF) is an organization which facilitates the placement of volunteer workers on organic farms around the world. There are WWOOF groups in dozens of countries and across the U.S. each maintaining similar standards and working together to promote the aims of the WWOOF idea.
WWOOF volunteers (’WWOOFers’) do not receive any financial payment for their work; instead the host farm provides volunteers with food, accommodation and opportunities to learn, in exchange for assistance with farming or gardening activities.
The only expenses for the WWOOFer are the transpiration fees to get to their host farm, and a small annual membership fee to join the organization in the country they wish to work in order to access the database of participating farms in that country.
The advantages of WWOOFing:
There are many obvious advantages of taking time to WWOOF after graduation. For starters, you can WWOOF anywhere from a couple of weeks to a few months. However, you’re essentially free to begin and stop whenever you’d like - unlike popular programs like Ameri*Corps or the Peace Corps, where you’re committed to the program for a number of years. With WWOOFing, you can treat it more like a summer vacation of doing-good before you begin your “Real World” job search.
The additional benefits are that you would be doing a great service to the world - promoting organic farming; you would meet a fantastic new group of people, providing you with a fabulous networking opportunity; it’s a much less expensive alternative to popular “work camps” or “volunteer vacations”; and lastly, any long-term, world-wide volunteer experience like this looks great on a resume.
The Disadvantages:
WWOOFing can be a lot more disorganized than a more established program (like the “work camps” and “volunteer vacations” mentioned above) and most volunteers are left largely on their own to find and facilitate their placement and arrange for their travel. Not all farms are held to the same standards, either. And while it’s generally pretty easy to find out from fellow WWOOFers which farms are the best and which to stay away from, sometimes choosing a farm to work for can be very hit-or-miss. And lastly, one of the large premises of RealWorldReally.com - while volunteering for an organization like WWOOF is a fantastic opportunity — for both personal enrichment and resume building — you’re still only delaying the inevitable.
For More Information:
[image by yancs]
Technorati Tags: WWOOF, WWOOFing, college, graduation, gap year, organic, farming, volunteer, green
Popularity: 24% [?]
