the case for grad school

My latest article should be arriving in the mail shortly if you are a lucky subscriber. Or you can view it on the website. You may notice that I'm not posting a "this should have looked like this" version of it. Progress? Maybe.

You also may have noticed that I've been MIA. The winter is long, I have nothing to talk about besides the crazy and cruel weather (which no one wants to hear about anymore) and once I get out of the habit of posting often I forget to look for things to say and compose them in my head.

I have also become increasingly political in my talking, reading, and thinking, and I do not want this to become a political blog. There are far too many good ones (here, here, and here, just to name a few) and I am not qualified to be a good political blogger or a good compiler of political stories. I did enjoy writing my endorsement, but that's as political as I get here.

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I have never been a proponent of grad school. In fact, I have long been convinced that I would never go and have wondered why everyone thought it was the obvious next step after college. Why spend thousands on another degree that might not even lead anywhere? Why head immediately into more and more years of school when one has just graduated from 17?

Now, eight months out of college I am still not a proponent of beginning grad school immediately after undergrad (except for those who are on a specific path... to become a doctor or a lawyer or a scientist or psychologist or whatever). But I can see the argument now for going a couple years after college, or even long after college, after one has entered the work force and decided she either doesn't have enough training to do what she wants to do, or decided she doesn't really like the work force and wants to retreat back into her academia hole. I fit into both categories, hence the "she" pronoun and this post. I have many career and future aspirations that change weekly depending on my mood and the weather, but this particular aspiration to maybe someday go to grad school has not changed weekly, so I'm planning accordingly. Campus visits, reading online, talking to people, buying GRE prep books and taking practice tests, making friends again with people who could write recommendations for me... It might happen. I might apply if I still feel this way next winter, but for now I'm excited at the prospect of learning how to do math again for the GREs, preparing myself without spending much money, someday returning to my academia hole, perhaps going abroad again, and being, after it all, thousands of dollars in debt. But there's something admirable and serious about putting oneself through school. So maybe I'll learn to save a bit while I'm still working. Probably I'll still have to be a very hard-working student if I decide to do this. Maybe I'll finally cash in my bonds for the occasion.

The bottom line is, with the face of journalism changing so rapidly, I no longer think that journalism grad school is a waste of time. In fact, for people like me who made it through the first round of school and learning journalism just before and while the web was becoming so prevalent, it might be necessary to get that web edge. I'm still a proponent of paper newspapers... but I don't get any myself (this Slate article seems like a good excuse) and I'm beginning appreciate online that much more now that I spend basically all day reading the news.