| by Howard and Matthew Greene Graduate school? Can't I just worry about college, first? Yes. And no. These days, as the number of students earning undergraduate degrees increases, a graduate degree is becoming ever more important as a professional calling card and career foundation. Especially for students pursuing a broad-based liberal arts degree (a Bachelor of Arts, typically), a capstone graduate degree provides the specialization and skills necessary to enter or advance through a higher-level career track. For some careers, such as law, medicine, or tenured teaching at the university level, a graduate degree is a necessity. It is essential for careers in technology and the sciences. For others, such as those in the catchall field of business, a graduate degree like the Masters in Business Administration (MBA) may be helpful for future promotions, but not necessary for hiring or success. Thinking about college as a foundation for graduate school can be more or less specific, but it behooves you to consider your long-term educational and career goals when choosing a college. Many students gain great satisfaction from pursuing a particular interest in depth at the graduate level. Fundamentally, your college transcript will be the most important part of your graduate school applications. Just as colleges are most interested in your high school transcript and what it can tell them about your particular strengths and interests and your preparation for the program offered at their institution, graduate schools are especially interested in your college transcript and what it says about your ability to take advantage of their higher level, more specialized degree. Think about graduate school as sitting at the top of an educational pyramid. In your early school years you learned basic skills, such as reading, writing, and arithmetic. In high school you advanced to higher level analytic writing and speaking skills, and added some significant content to your understanding of history, literature, language, and mathematics. Yet you still studied at a fairly broad level of focus. In college, you often don't declare a major until the end of sophomore year. By then you have fulfilled a fair number of a college's distribution requirements (if they have any!) and are beginning to tailor your curriculum to fill major requirements in one or more areas. You are building content knowledge in a few key areas, making your understanding deeper, and not just broader. You are meanwhile continuing to improve your writing, speaking, and analytic skills, and are realizing the multi-faceted nature of most problems, be they historical, political, literary, or scientific. Graduate school is the culmination of your formal educational preparation (independent lifelong learning goes on afterwards), and will ask you to focus even more on special areas of knowledge. You do this while simultaneously broadening and deepening your understanding of the fields of knowledge important in the discipline you are mastering. Thus, the first year of law or business or medical school, and the first few years of an academic Master's or Doctoral program, will often demand that you take seminars or experience exposure to a variety of fields. Later, you will specialize further in cardiology, or international relations, or tax law, or 19th century British literature, or virtually any field of serious interest. Very few people know as early as high school, or even as early as senior year of college, where they will eventually specialize for graduate school or a career. Some may have developed notions about being strong in science, or wanting to work in business, or hoping to teach, or wishing to become a veterinary doctor. Often these aspirations change or sharpen, as they should if you are being exposed to challenges and opportunities in your undergraduate education. Given that likelihood, what should you plan to do in college, to be ready for graduate school and a career, whatever shape that may take? First, try to go to a college where you will fit in, be happy, take a demanding academic program in your potential areas of interest, and succeed. That means you will earn a Grade Point Average (GPA) upwards of 3.5 (mostly B+, A-, and A grades), learn with talented faculty, take advantage of internships, research opportunities, and other chances to deepen your knowledge and explore new fields, and develop your critical thinking, writing, and personal communications skills. If you do that, you will be prepared for almost any graduate program. Second, you will want to enter a college with a good record of graduate school placement. Most colleges publish or make available their graduate school entrance record, and many strong colleges send half or more of their graduates to further education. Usually these figures are provided for those five years out from graduation, which is a more meaningful figure for than those entering graduate school right after graduation. Many of the more competitive graduate business schools, for example, look for several years of work experience, or more, after college. More and more students are also putting off law or medical school to gain work experience, teach, or serve their communities. If you are interested in a specific field, then you should look at the graduate placement record in that area, as well as counseling for students headed in that direction. You might also meet with faculty in that department, evaluate the number of courses and students majoring in that department each year, and see how many faculty are available to you on a full-time basis. How are they about writing recommendations? Is there a formal process for this? Third, you will want to consider the cost of your college program. If finances will be an issue for you, and they are for most students, then you should consider the cost of your undergraduate education in the context of your overall education. What will be your loan burden upon graduation? Will that impact your choices for a graduate degree? Unless you obtain a research or teaching assistantship in a doctoral (Ph.D.) program, you are unlikely to get much in the way of scholarships and grants for graduate school. You are likely looking at additional, significant loans to pay for business, law, or medical school, for example. Sometimes, saving money at the undergraduate level, by choosing a less expensive college, or a college that requires you to take out fewer loans, may help you conserve your resources for the graduate level. You must make sure, however, that you are not sacrificing too much academically by making such a choice. Don't be penny-wise and pound-foolish by picking a cheaper undergraduate college that will not help you prepare for your chosen profession or which may limit your options and opportunities. Finally, as you choose your college environment, be open to the myriad graduate fields available today, and understand that you do not need to major in a specifically related undergraduate field to be qualified for a specific graduate program. Half of all graduate medical college entrants today, for example, were not undergraduate science majors. These philosophy, English, and psychology majors fulfilled pre-med course requirements while pursuing something else in which they were interested. Or, in a lesson about it never being too late to switch fields and open up new avenues, they may have joined the growing ranks of students pursuing post-baccalaureate pre-medical programs. But that's another story... © 2003 by Howard R. Greene and Matthew W. Greene. All rights reserved. This article can be found online at http://www.pbs.org/tenstepstocollege/focus_main.html Copies of the Greenes' Kit is available by visiting shop.pbs.com or by calling (800) 344-3337. Close Window |