Steer Clear of Grad-School Escapism

Just to be clear, killing time in grad school is not a good idea. Yet it is the most seductive false idyll around. A lot of really smart people, upon finding themselves mentally understimulated or frustrated by the confines of the plebeian working world, go back to school for 3, 6, or 19 years to get an advanced degree in something. This can be a very rewarding life if you are a super-moneyed count or duchess of some sort. But it’s a crummy idea for the rest of us. Indeed, if you scratch the surface, you might find that many academics are surprisingly frustrated. (If you’re interested, you can read their totally titillating, anonymous, first-person columns about catty office politics and the like in the Chronicle of Higher Education.) Their cattiness, though, might just be a by-product of their breathtakingly competitive job market. Getting tenure (or tenure-track positions) can be as aspirational as making a living as a rock star.

• Did you go to grad school? How did it help--or hurt--your creative career? Start a discussion!
  

If you just want to learn something or you miss having really good discourse (and your current book club meetings invariably degenerate into an argument over what to read next), sign yourself up for a class or two and see how it goes before committing yourself full-time. You might, for instance, regret pursuing a law degree if you discover you actually prefer to have nothing to do with lawyers.

If you absolutely do not have enough time to enroll in a continuing-education course, there is another way to evaluate the viability of enrolling in grad school. Get your hands on a copy of the syllabus for one of the courses you’d be taking in pursuit of your advanced degree. Read everything listed, as well as books you think are related. If you feel energized, you might be on to something with this whole grad-school concept. Otherwise, hold off as long as you don’t really know what you want to study (modern poetry could be fun!) and regard grad school only as an option for the truly hard core. Trust me, there are many more delicious ways to go into debt than running up a tab with the U.S. Department of Education.