Continue Job Market vs Masters vs Certification (and in what!?)

juillet
Tue, 30 Dec 2014 00:09:15 +0000

At a certain point you have to make a decision, and you have to choose based upon whatever factors are most important to you.

Two things:

One, yes, graduate school is about specialization. But that doesn’t mean that you can never change careers after that, and indeed, many people do. Physicians go into management; professors leave academia and become consultants; art historians move into finance. While I do think that you need to narrow yourself down to a subset of careers that you want before you go to grad school, that doesn’t mean that you have to decide what you absolutely 100% want to do for the rest of your life. It’s just what you may want to do for the next 5-10 years. You can use the skills you learn in an MS in statistics program to move laterally into hydrology in the future, for example. What you want is a graduate degree that does help you enter a specific field but also makes you broadly qualified for a variety of things in different industries.

Two is that you can’t have everything, and you will have to decide. Sometimes, job security is mutually exclusive with what’s interesting to you to a certain extent, so you have to choose whether you want to do something that is simply interesting but for which there are lots of job prospects OR something for which the job market is maybe less certain, but which you really love. There’s nothing wrong with making the second choice! I see a lot of people on CC choosing to major in fields traditionally thought of as lucrative simply because they are lucrative, but just because the market may be tighter in hydrology (or because you know less about it) doesn’t mean that you won’t have a very successful career if you choose that. For example…the academic job market is in the tank right now, but that doesn’t mean that nobody is getting hired, and some people have very successful careers as professors.

You also might have to redefine what you see as success. It doesn’t always mean making a lot of money! It very often means a job that you wake up looking forward to every day.