To Be or Not to Be a Graduate Student
 
It's funny how when I was in school, less than a year ago, I would stay up all night doing work and wake up early and go to work and then class and do it all again. I read so many books and wrote so many papers,  completed an 80 page thesis on women and bicycles that was part historical research, part personal narrative, and part anthropological ethnography. I wrote newspaper articles and stayed at closings well into the night. Now, I find it hard to complete anything.

It's a lot harder to find motivation without concrete deadlines and without the real promise of constructive criticism by a professor. A recent article in The Chronicle, "Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go," by Thomas Benton, enumerates a lot of recent college grad's reasons for wanting to return to school. Mine mirror most of what Benton lists, and I have some others.

School provides qualitative (and often quantitative) assessments of work and effort. If a student can clearly understand the goals of an assignment or the wants of a particular professor, they can receive a good score. Each assignment or class is a system with a clear objective. Once a student figures out the constraints, there is a logical plan of action. If it is executed correctly, the student receives an A. It mirrors the idea of games applied to life that Ken Wark addresses in his work. Often, as has been the case with all of my various jobs, the workplace does not offer this logic.



This lack is especially true for those of us who would like to write. Not only will my work not be graded, but most likely it will not even be read. In college, professional writers not only read, but often lauded my work or offered constructive criticism of it. When I wrote for the newspaper, my peers read my work and often talked to me about it. Now, I write things and send them into the void.

School provided some sort of purpose. I was doing something to further myself. Now, I work to live and see little opportunity for advancement in my current field. At the end of all of my assignments while in college, graduation gleamed ahead of me. Now, forty plus years of work loom ahead.

What should weigh most heavily on my mind is the loan debt I accumulated in school. Because I work at a university, grad school would be free and my loans would be automatically deferred. But without clear direction, I feel like going to grad school would be a waste of time and energy--and also opportunity. While I did always feel like I was working towards something while in school, between course work and other work, I hardly found the time to envision a future. I feel like grad school would fill a void, but I would come out just as confused and directionless.  Benton talks about the declining amount of jobs in a market already defined by desperation. I see this first hand when I skim through 173 applications for a single part-time teaching position. Finally, I can't see myself doing this job 10-6 every day for as long as it would take me to finish a degree, so I would inevitably incur even more debt to finance it. School doesn't seem like the answer today. Maybe it will when I wake up tomorrow, because I can't seem to decide on anything.

But what I can perceive clearly is that school at one point provided me with some sort of meaning and now I have to find it elsewhere. And the question is, just as it was in May, where do I go from here?