do you know what you're doing after grad school?

spectastic
Mon, 11 Jun 2012 21:16:25 +0000

It’s a waste of your time if you don’t what you want to do when you enter graduate school.



I’ve gotten that message quite a lot in this section of the forum. It’s kind of an ambiguous question. I was talking about whether people know exactly where they want to be when they graduate. (eg. professor, scientist, postdoc, process engineer, manufacturing engineer, project manager, etc) This is in addition to the field of study. I think it’s completely reasonable for a person to understand what type of workplace he/she belongs to before figuring out the area of interest. I mean as a chem e, there’s so much you can do it’s mind boggling. My main motivation right now is to make contributions to science, with applications to society - plain and simple. Again, there are so many ways I can do that in chem e. However, a BS in chem e wouldn’t really grant me sufficient credibility to really make a difference.

I would say that I at least have some clue what I want to do. There are people, PhD’s included, I talk to that tell me something along the lines of…

“I just want a job…”
` “any job in particular?”
“nah, I just want a job”