Best alternative to grad school

Best alternative to grad school Ive spent three years writing about how graduate school is a waste of time and money (yes, business school and law school too). So now when radio and TV producers need someone to bitch about graduate school, they call me. Here I am on NPR today. I dont usually post my interviews, but this one is notable because I completely lost patience for people still defending grad school. Its so clear, even to defenders of grad school, that grad school is a bad financial decision, that this guy has resorted to saying that you need to go to grad school to be a good person. Of course, I went nuts on him. I think the thing that is pushing me over the edge with graduate school is that people who are thinking straight about schooling are not even considering graduate school. These people are debating if college is a rip off (heres a great discussion in New York magazine with James Altucher, a venture capitalist in NYC) And people are even debating if high school is useless (heres a great post by Lisa Nielsen who is with the NYC Department of Education). And anyway, Im losing interest in the debate about grad school because Im convinced that the future belongs to home schoolers because they are self-learners. Also, for those of you who keep telling me that there are some fields you absolutely have to have a degree for, check out the song 99 Problems by Jay-Z. The song includes great legal advice about Miranda rights, racial profiling and search warrants, even though he doesnt have a law degree or a creative writing certificate to prove his poetic talents. Click this link for an attorneys analysis of the advice in the song, but heres an excerpt, attorneys advice in italics: The year is ninety-four, in my trunk is raw In my rear-view mirror is the motherfuckin law Got two choices yall, pull over the car or (hmm) bounce on the Devil, put the pedal to the floor And I aint tryin to see no highway chase with Jake Plus I got a few dollars, I can fight the case (Not running from the police seems like excellent advice.) So I, pull over to the side of the road Son, do you know why Im stoppin you for? Cause Im young and Im black and my hats real low Or do I look like a mindreader, sir? I dont know Am I under arrest or should I guess some more? (In general, not volunteering information at a traffic stop is great advice.) In the comments section on the NPR site, people complain that Im bitter and angry and offer no alternative to graduate school. Heres the alternative: Admit that adult life is scary because there is no clear path to success. Grad school is not a quick fix for the fears of adulthood. Instead, be grateful for the chance to be lost it means youre living your own life, because no one can make choices in the exact same way you can, whether they are right or wrong. So all there is for adult life is you, following your nose, trying to figure out what brings you joy. Each time I see someone who has done that, in some little way, I feel relief and hope for myself. Image from Austin Kleon. Best alternative to grad school After yesterdays post, about how stupid grad school is, a lot of people asked, what is an alternative to grad school? This is a great question. I see this picture outside my window at least once a month. I have only a little idea of whats going on. Should I go to graduate school to figure it out? I could. I could get in. And its clear that the next stage in my life will involve some sort of work related to farming. A business. Or writing. Or marketing. But Im not going to graduate school to learn about agriculture because I have tried going to graduate school to get a jump on my job prospects and it doesnt work. When I graduated from college, I was supposedly going to graduate school in history. But I kept writing entrance essays about why I wanted to tell stories about people and history is a good way to do that. And finally, my professor who had stood by me for four years, getting undergraduate research grants for me to study mass movements in colonial America, said, Forget it. You dont want to be a historian. What she really meant was, Im not pulling strings to get you into Yale. And that was the only place I applied. Because she said shed get me in. Every job interview I went on seemed stupid: An incredible combination of not enough money to live on and a job description that was one step up from slave. So I played professional beach volleyball. I got as high as #17 in the US rankings. But when I went back down 32 I had no competitive urge to get back up. So I knew I needed to do something else. But I couldnt get a job. I mean, I could. Working for my boyfriend. But that had sucked before. So I knew it would suck again. I took the GRE and scored in the bottom 20th percentile in quantitative reasoning, which got me into an English masters program. It took me a year and a half and $15,000 in loans to realize this degree would never get me a job. I tried to date a few professors, but they were already adept at judging whether or not a grad student was too messed up. Now Im going to tell you what I did to make things come together in my career. First, I stopped doing work that wasnt going to lead to a job. I got a C in Victorian Literature, a D in Film and Literature, an A in modern literature only because I plagiarized from the New York Times Book Review. Meanwhile, I taught myself HTML before people knew what the Internet was. I presented a paper at the Dartmouth Technology Conference while my fellow English grad students were writing novels. I left grad school a month before it ended. I just left. Went back to Los Angles. I was the thinnest I have ever been in my life because I had no money for food. People worried about me and brought me leftovers. I ate them. This was happening when you had to send out resumes on thick, expensive white paper, and I used food money for postage. I got an interview 50 miles from where I lived. I borrowed a friends car and got the job. I was hired to run the whole Internet for a Fortune 500 company, Ingram Micro. My job was to enforce the AP Style guide even though Id never read it. I was in charge of the web development team even though I didnt know anything about development besides the HTML pages I wrote in grad school. I gave myself a graduate course in Internet. And a graduate course in copy writing. And a graduate course in management. I read books. I read magazines. I tried stuff out and took way too long and then tried it again. I worked 15 hour days, and I felt like I was a student. I was learning all the time. So its logical to me that this is what everyone should do. Find a foot in a door and then start learning everything you can to open that door wider. I got fired for having sixteen non-work projects on my work computer. At the time I was horrified. Now I think it was the inevitable result of me taking control over my own education. If you are thinking of going to graduate school, you need to understand that the process of discovering what value you bring to the adult world is a very hard process to endure. Because you are probably smart, and you like to learn, and most jobs are not about paying you to learn. You have to create that for yourself. The best thing I did is that I kept my learning curve very high even outside of school. I saw where the opportunities were, and I started learning in that area, trying to figure out where I fit. So look. Brazen Careerist has a Social Media Bootcamp. Everyone who is thinking of going to grad school should take the course. Its $245, which is nothingnothingcompared to grad school loans. And the course can show you a way out. The Bootcamp is about possibilities. A course cannot answer your big life questions for you. But it can show you that you have more options than you think you do. If you are thinking of going to grad school, its because you dont like the choices you see in front of you. Maybe nothing gets you excited. But you can use social media to bridge the type of learning you loved to do in school with the type of learning you can get paid to do. And you can use social media to see how to make jobs for yourself that get you excited. It might seem like a harder path to sign up for Social Media Bootcamp instead of getting a graduate degree. It seems harder because you wont have someones stamp of approval. But credentials dont get the job. Experience does. So, in fact, Social Media Bootcamp is the path of least resistance. Your safety net is not a degree, but practice learning new ideas on your own and implementing them. So you know you can do that again and again. Life should be a process of learning and doing, learning and doing. Grad school is all learning. Its an imbalance that is not fair to you, and not right for you. Create your own grad school. Open your own doors. Sign up right now. [Note: The bootcamp registration has passed. But so many people have asked me about signing up that I am offering a one-hour bootcamp alternative. Email me for details: penelope@penelopetrunk.com]