The Value of Grad School
I've been trying, over the last day, to figure out why I am having such difficulty "thinking positive" as Kevin Walzer suggests.
I think partly it is because I do, deep down, feel that any career outside academia does, indeed, represent a waste of the seven years I spent in graduate school. This is not because I did not come out of grad school with skills that an employer may or will value. It is because the quality of that appreciation is quite likely to be different from my own, and because what such an employer is likely to value are things I did not need to attend grad school to obtain. When I look at my new resume, I see a long list of practical skills, like "Used PowerPoint to enhance public presentations" or "Developed a database using Excel to track student performance" or even "Produced analytical summaries of others' performance and writing," that really have very little relation to grad school beyond context. I never took a class in PowerPoint while in grad school -- did you? I figured out how to make an Excel spreadsheet for tracking my students' assignment and participation grades on my own. I do not remember more than the most informal instruction in how to contact an archivist, arrange an interview and begin working through the documents; most of this I figured out on my own, albeit in response to the impetus created by classes and professors' assignments. I am presuming that these are the sorts of things that make me valuable to future employers -- my skill set and my ability to add to it on my own initiative -- but did I need to go to grad school to obtain them?
What I did learn in grad school -- as a matter of formal training -- covered the writing of historiographic essays, learning how to parse arguments quickly and accurately, how to identify a school of thought, and more specific information about trends in ideas. My minor field exams required knowledge of a general topic area and of scholars' arguments about it. So too for the orals, with the added ingredient of knowing where to situate myself and my work within that larger body of knowledge. These things, to me, were the real essence of grad school, the knowledge that I could not obtain working alone. Will a future employer find these abilities as valuable?
When I hear these arguments about the value of my degree to employers, the analogy that comes first to mind is that of a person wearing an antique pin that belonged to a much loved relative from the time she was a girl, and which was given to the person when she was thirteen and scared about entering high school. She meets someone in an elevator while wearing the pin, and that person says, "Hey, nice pin. How much is it worth?" Both would agree that the pin is valuable -- but do they share the same sense of value?
{edit} Kevin's post is actually helpful; I don't want to give the impression that I'm including it among the mindlessly chirpy optimists. (Indeed, Kevin takes care to distance himself from that kind of fluff.) I'm not in a space where I can fully appreciate it yet, but other folks might be.
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