Graduate school thread:

Graduate school thread:

Roll call? Anyone here in grad school? Just curious if anyone on Sup Forums was learnt or if its just lifeless shit-sticks here.

Bump to see who's smart.

Yes and working fulltime. I feel like a fucking moron.

Almost dome. Still can‘t finish this shit tho

I am too and it's fucking awful. Plus Sup Forums makes it harder to pretend I'm smart.

Also forgot to mention there's a good chance I'm going to be laid off soon which means I can finish my classes no problem next semester. I hate my job so it might not be a bad thing. In order to keep my job they want me to travel and I just told them no because of grad school. Anyone think I might have a harder time finding a job after being unemployed for a few months?

>2years
>passed all the hard papers
>spent the thesis year getting drunk so no masters for me

>Plus Sup Forums makes it harder to pretend I'm smart.
What do you mean by this exactly? To be honest I feel like you can learn a lot from arguing on Sup Forums.

Physics grad dropout here. Best of luck to all you who stick with it.

Has anyone here feel they might have been converted into an addictive consumer of educational products?

Everyone said "don't go into a masters program, all the grants for Ph.D's. Just drop out with a masters if that's what you want".
Everyone tricked me.
I just want to go into industry.
Get me off this wild ride

I think they'd understand that you're in grad school. it's not like you took a sabbatical to sit in your undies and eat cheezies all day.
If you're getting a job in your field and your undergrad degree is worth a damn, they wouldn't care.
If you're going from unskilled labor to unskilled labor they also wouldn't care I don't think.

I wrote a senior thesis that was a few hundred pages long. Does that count?

why on God's green earth did you do that?
Is that a thing in non-STEM?

Well...one thing led to another...and it just got long.

Oh, and it was a requirement to graduate.

Go die retard. Way to fall for the stupid trap.

I was going to go to grad school after I finished my undergrad but then I decided to get a job instead.

Cool that's what I'm hoping for. Doing my masters in communications engineering and if I do get laid off I want to spend some time to pick up skills in network security.

Starting grad school next September

>Be me
> 30
> Life sucks and I'm having a nervous breakdown plus a shit benzo habit
> Go back to community college and major in drug counseling
> Get straight A's and all the Pell grant money and scholarships I can find because I'm an independent student due to age and didn't use it when I was younger
> Get the AAS degree and go to a University on a full ride plus pell grant money plus scholarships and a easy ass work study job. I'm getting paid thousands of dollars to go to school full time.
> Major in Psychology
> Pretty fucking fun
> Straight A's again and cool people to chill with (though I feel like an old ass sometimes)
> Going to graduate school for Social Work/Counseling
> Already getting money offers to go
> Looking forward to not being a worthless piece of shit anymore

I graduated medical school 18 months ago. I guess that counts

never finished my dissertation, but started and it was damn ambitious.
You have to have a good rlsp with your Prof though

>Physics grad dropout here

What did you study before you dropped out? Was it advisor issues? You probably made the right choice. I did computational condensed matter and regret it. I finished my doctorate in last may and feel like I wasted 7 years of my life on this shit; it completely burned out any love I had for physics and fucked up my life. I should have just gone to industry after undergrad.

>working fulltime

Grad school should be your job. I was making ~30k/year on my grant (20k first year with department funding which was before I passed my qualifying exam) which was livable. wtf are you studying?

oldfag here
I thought once I'm past studies, eventually I'll have time to read all the books, in their entirety. Never happened. Back then, they sounded promising, recognition and shit, now they're just dusty books, broken dreams.

>Grad school should be your job. I was making ~30k/year on my grant (20k first year with department funding which was before I passed my qualifying exam) which was livable. wtf are you studying?
Communications engineering, also it's an engineering job that pays out about 85k salary. Recently I shifted focus because I realized it wasn't going to last.

Great, this profile is really rare in social work, you'll know what you're talking about.

...

Law student here. Finals are killing me. One more week of this shit and I go on break.

No it doesn't. Med school is "here take these classes and you're an MD!!" Grad school is "take these classes then/while you collect, analyze and interpret data." On top of having up to 4 different bosses (i.e. your committee) that you hope to christ agree with each other or else you may not finish along with teaching classes and dealing with undergrads. I get MD's work long hours and such but PhD's go through so much more shit for alot less pay than MD's.

Interesting and sounds cool. so it's a co-op type program where you have an industry job at the same time? I don't know how stuff works in the engineering field and I only worked with colleagues in computer engineering, and it seemed for them similar to physics.

Making proofs and grading.

>R.I.P. free time.

PhD was a complete waste of my life. Doing research at Vanderbilt, department chair in collaboration with "big name" who falsified methodology. All his results are bogus. Not whistle blower just suggest since doing replication of some of "big names" work we should do methodology as stated in articles rather than how it was actually done. Not tenured. Private cabal meets without me and fires my ass. "big names" foreign import flunky now has my lab. Can't get a job since only currently living references would be from private cabal. Could have kept grandpa's HVAC business and be sitting pretty but I had to be the first to go to college.

No I just found a job that was conveniently located about 10 minutes away from my school and immediately signed up for grad school. They do reimburse you up to 8k a year for classes. It's fucking miserable though.

Also forgot to mention to anyone looking into engineering. From what I can tell most people getting out of undergrad won't be working as actual engineers. They just sort of expect you to send out reports, data collect, or organize projects instead of actual design work. I did get lucky and pick up a couple of things but it seems like now you need higher education to become an actual engineer.

> for alot less pay than MD's

I don't think MD's get paid during school usually. If you're a STEM phd you are getting paid and tuition waived which was how it was for me. I still don't entirely understand how people afford med school.

>4 different bosses

My committee was 5 including the dean's rep, and they were pretty chill. My advisor pretty much had final say on whether I would graduate.

alright, but damn. Do you have to pay tuition?

thanx

I think that people who have been down in rough ass places can be wonderful healers with the right training

What tier law school? My school is a 3rd tier (I dont take law but they have a whole sub-school dedicated to it)

What PhD do you have? Can't you get into counseling or some shit with a doctorate?

8k was enough to cover up to three classes a year but I could only ever do two. I doubled up this semester because I want to get out. To be honest they cover all the cost. Even the stupid parking pass which is nice.

4th tier. But extremely affordable.

T25 law school here, dealing with first semester finals, fuck my life.

I wonder what's worse. Law school or a PhD.

PHD in terms of time/heart & soul invested, law school in terms of competition IMO

How much leftist bullshit did you guys have to endure?

I go to school in the south and it's pretty balanced, met equal numbers of people who want to keep their guns "in case Obama goes crazy" and people who think we should have no barriers to immigration.

And people say education in this country doesn't work.

PhD in Developmental Neuroscience

Counselling have to have clinical PhD

Looking to do grad school after undergrad. Mechanical engineering major. Any advice on if it’s worth it or not? I’m terrified of real adulthood and would rather stay in school for another 1.5-2 years

What's the difference between a scientist and a streetwalker?

The streetwalker is honest about being a whore for money.

PhD in sciences should be the same as a religious calling. The search for universal truths. But academia is the dumping ground of the 3rd sons of the wealthy. Everything is show me the money and get some numbers to "proof" the result I want. Can't tell you how many grad students I've run into in the sciences who as undergrads really wanted to be professional gamers or ski instructors.

I think it's a lot better if you land a job or long term internship between undergrad and grad. When I started my job there was about three other people with a masters in engineering while everyone else was fresh out of undergrad. Basically without experience you're sort of forced to take a starting position just like everyone else. On the other hand the sooner you do it the better since life will get in the way.

Finished my masters over the summer, had a great internship, graduated top of my class, and haven't found a single job in my field (environmental compliance/conservation) that will hire me - even with veterans preference. Starting to feel like I wasted the last 10 years of my life joining the military just so I could afford to go to college and get passed over for job after job after job.

I know 3 people with master's in environmental education. One is supported by his GF, One is a bartender and the 3rd drives a forklift. Environmental degrees are another field where there are 100x more people than there are jobs.

But what if I have experience before applying for jobs? I’m a junior this year so I’m looking to get a summer internship in 2018 and then hopefully another one after I graduate in 2019. Would that be enough experience to put me over the top when applying for jobs after Grad school? Note: grades aren’t stellar but I have a bunch of extracurriculars.

Yes, if you can pick up enough to say you have some more senior level of experience it'll look good. I think a lot of people straight out of school don't have much to talk about when it comes to past work so they end up resorting to some projects they did which may or may not fit the role. If you have insight on what the job is like it'll put you in a way better position when applying. You can pretty much cater your resume to fit exactly what the role demands. A ton of people lie on their resume and I can tell you stories. The bad part is most people know
a ton of companies just sort of play a matching game with the skills they need and what they see on the resume so if you have no clue what to expect it puts you in a major disadvantage.

I’m a lawyer. My wife is in lawschool...I couldn’t convince her not to go back to school. I say that to say this- my advice to her and you is to stop worrying about finals. Half the people in you class are retards, they just tested ok on standardized test, which isn’t what you’re getting now.

All you have to do is not be the slowest gazelle. Stop worrying and enjoy your time highschool part 2. Being likeable is way more important in the legal field then your professors will admit.

So then it seems that grad school would be the better choice in the long run. Like you said, I’d rather get it out of the way than wait and have life get in the way. If I started immediately in industry, I think there would be a very slim chance that I would be able to go back to school. Thanks for the insight

Doing my masters in computer science, I literally don't know half the shit they are teaching right now.

I have a job already so I got that going for me which is nice.

typical loser route

College. Math. Got a good job entirely outside of my education, although the math helps, my math is very specific to the employment and nothing like my college studies. I would've been just as good with accounting, or dropping out of engineering school. I don't hate the job, but its very repetitive.

Yeah, I really hope it pays off if you decide to do it. Another thing is if you end up in a class full of international students like me try not to sweat it if you can't keep up with them. Being an English speaker and not requiring a visa puts you way ahead of them.

Haha true. I do also have the edge of not being socially awkward. I can easily spark up a conversation and I’m good in pressure situations. Probably makes up for my mediocre GPA.