Should i go directly to grad school

For more information about graduate admissions exams as well as how to prepare for them, make sure to read our article, Taking the GRE and Other Grad School Admission Tests. However, by taking a few years after college to pay down student loan debt, and potentially start saving for your graduate degree or other financial goals, you can put yourself in a more comfortable financial position during grad school and beyond.

For further reading about assessing your finances for graduate school, take a look at our article, Are You Financially Ready for Grad School? Going straight from college on to grad school is a choice you should consider carefully.

We hope these considerations and questions to ask yourself help you make an informed decision about your next steps. Find something to do. Grad Schools. Mutual Aid Groups.

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October 18, Share this post Copy link. What are my career goals? Will grad school help me achieve them? So, if you know you want a career in one of these fields, the choice is pretty straightforward.

Most viewed this week. Emotional Intelligence Empathetic responses. Universities can actually help you here. Increasingly, formal study qualifications are being indexed according to the foundational, or soft skills, they require.

This means that more graduate programs are starting to teach soft skills , in addition to knowledge, and prepare students for an uncertain labor market rather than for specific jobs. To follow your passion. This leads to low levels of engagement, performance, and productivity, and high levels of burnout, stress, and alienation. Pursuing your passion, therefore, is not a bad criterion for deciding to go to grad school. After all, people perform better and learn more when their studies align with their values.

If you can nurture your curiosity and interests by pursuing rigorous learning, your expertise will be more likely to set you apart from other candidates, and increase the chances of ending up in a job you love. You can learn for free or for much less money. There is a plethora of content — books, videos, podcasts, and more — that are now widely available, at no cost, to the general public. Arguably, much of this free content mirrors or actually is the material students are studying in grad school programs.

Consider all the things you can learn just by watching YouTube , assuming you have the discipline and self-control to focus: coding, digital drawing, UX design, video editing, and more.

Other platforms, such as Udemy and Coursera can be used to upskill at a more affordable cost than attending a degree program. Essentially, if your goal is to acquire a new skill, and that skill can be taught, it is hard to compete with platforms where experts can crowdsource, teach, and share content. You may be wasting your time. Go to office hours, go to events, ask questions, and build a relationship so you can ask them to write you a letter. There is a lot to fill in and the essays are a key factor in the decision process.

Make sure to proof read and have someone else look at your application to make sure everything is okay. Taking a year off also allows you to get more experience and develop your CV. Waiting a year also means that you have more time to study for your GRE and can have more chances to get the score that you need , and you have more time to get letters from your professors.

Waiting a year also gives you time to go visit the grad schools and start connections with potential future professors. This can really help you on your applications since some grad schools ask you to list which professor you want to work under and who you have already reached out to.

These connections are key for getting in and getting scholarships! Might as well go for free, right?