Hello,
So, my life plan (so far goes as follows):
-Finish up High School (junior now)
-Go to a University, major in Biology (and get certified to teach)
-Work as a teacher for a few years (High School)
-At some point, go to Graduate school for a Phd in biomedical research
My question to all of you is this: How long after your Bachelor’s did you wait to go to Grad school? Is my plan a good one? I have always dreamed of becoming a research oriented scientist (I want to study human aging, and ways to combat the diseases of aging as well as the process itself), but I have always admired teachers and also think that would be great job to have while a pursue a higher degree. Did you guys have a job alongside your Grad school studies?
Teaching sounds fun, but then you grow up and realize it sucks. Hopefully by then it’s not too late for you to switch to another career. Students don’t care about anything except staring at their phones. It’s a disease. They put no effort into their studies. (I was a TA in grad school.)
Just go to college, have fun, work hard, and see what happens. I went to college thinking I’d major in polisci, and I ended up doing a Math major.
To answer your question, I went to grad school 3 months after graduation. That sucked, I dropped out after 2 years, and I’ll be applying for CS grad school this summer to start next year.
That would be an unusual route to take but not out of the question. You might apply to Teach for America between college and grad school instead.
When you are in grad school you cannot hold a separate teaching job. Already your funding package may likely require a TA position where you will TA and possibly teach undergrads.Usually in the summer you are doing research and working on your dissertation or internship in related industry.
@mathandcs So how many years has it been since you first dropped out of grad school, and what year did you finish your Bachelor’s? I’m trying to figure out what would be a good amount of time to wait before going back to school between my bachelor’s and Doctorate. Also, is your current job related to your bachelor’s degree? And while I agree that most of my peers are indeed brain dead human phones, there are a rare few who are genuinely interested in what the teacher has to say. And if I really do hate it, that is why I plan on getting a degree in Biology while being certified to teach, or double majoring in bio and teaching (depending on the school) so that way I can opt out of teaching and go to another biology related field instead of being stuck with teaching until grad school.
And @BrownParent I don’t necessarily want to teach while in grad school, instead I want to teach in the time between my bachelor’s degree and when I finally decide to go back to school.
And to anyone else, what is an appropriate time to wait before going to grad school? Should you go straight into it a few months out of under grad, a few years, or longer?
Yes, I get what you were proposing. The thing is, those things are not preparing you to be a better grad school applicant. It seems you want two separate careers.
But what I am saying is that the way grad school is structured, you usually will need to be a TA or RA to fund your way through the program. Programs waive tuition and provide you with a stipend to live on in exchange for doing these duties. That is how it works and what you may have to do unless you are one of the few who get fellowship funding and do not have to TA or RA.
Again (I don’t know why I have to repeat everything I said) one way to teach between is to apply to Teach for America. That is usually for 2 years.
@BrownParent You didn’t need to repeat everything you typed, it was all in your previous post, and I don’t recall asking for you to reiterate, I only wanted to make my goals clear for you made it sound like I wanted to teach and go to school at the same time, which is not my goal. And I kind of do want 2 careers, I want to (again) start out teaching, then move up from there. Also, I realize that teach for America is an option. I have been aware of it for quite some time now.
I left 2 years ago. Finished my B.S. 4 years ago. Right now I’m sort of a part-time non-degree undergrad/grad student taking CS classes to prepare to apply to M.S. programs. Math is pretty close to CS I guess.
Like I said, don’t figure this out in high school now. You’re just going to change your plan a million times. You may end up majoring in petroleum engineering or holocaust studies. You may end up teaching, or becoming a bio professor, or becoming a lawyer, or working as a personal trainer, or living in your parents’ basement the rest of your life.
I’m not talking about getting stuck because you have no other skills. When you enter the job market as a teacher and do that for a few years, then say “oh this sucks, I want to get a real job,” you’ll get interviews and they’ll just say “why should we believe you want to work in research/industry when all your experience is in teaching?” And they’ll hire someone with actual experience over you. This is how people get stuck in their profession in life.
OP, you made it sound like you wanted to teach and do grad school at the same time:
but I have always admired teachers and also think that would be great job to have while a pursue a higher degree. Did you guys have a job alongside your Grad school studies?
I was originally going to address that in my own answer to your questions, because that’s what it sounds like. Glad you clarified, because this is not possible.
Anyway, I agree with @mathandcs that it is way too early for you to think about this stuff. You are trying to project the trajectory of the next basically 10 to 15 years of your life. This would be hard enough for a mid-career person to do - but as someone who is likely 16-17 and hasn’t even really begun to explore the vast number of careers out there, it’s nigh impossible. There’s nothing wrong with planning ahead, but try not to lay it all out like this - instead, for now focus on finishing high school and selecting a good list of colleges.
To answer your questions:
I personally went to graduate school right after college, and I finished my PhD in 6 years, when I was 28. That was about 6 months ago, and I'm now a postdoctoral fellow. There are pros and cons to both. The pro, I recently realized, is that at 28 I still have a lot of life ahead of me - mostly childbearing years. I'll be 30 or 31 when I finish my postdoc (depending on whether I decide to stay 2 or 3 years). I can wait to have kids on the tenure-track and not worry as much about my fertility (I'm a woman). Had I delayed by 3-4 years, I might have wanted to have kids during my dissertation or postdoc phase - nothing wrong with that, except that you don't have much money at the time. This may be less of a concern to you if you are a man. The cons are that you have less life experience and potentially less idea about the variety of careers and topics there are to study. You also don't get the opportunity to really, truly decide whether you need a PhD or whether you're content doing something else. Case in point - you might start teaching and 5 years later decide that this is what you really want, not a research career in biomedical science. Or you might decide that you don't want to be a teacher, but you don't want to do research in the biomedical sciences, either - you want to, I don't know, be an astronaut or a foreign service officer.
There's no one optimal time to wait. Some people go directly from college and some people wait 5 or more years. Some people go directly from college to one program, drop out, and then wait a few years before attending a different one (@mathandcs is one example; I have a postdoctoral colleague in my program who is another. She did a year or two in a statistics PhD program before dropping out, working for a year or two and then going into a PhD in mental health instead). There's more than one way to do this "right".
The main concern you have to have is convincing a graduate committee that you are committed to biomedical research and that you have the experience necessary to succeed. All PhD programs want to see evidence of research experience, which is usually gained by assisting a PhD-level scientist with their research. Getting this in college is relatively easy; you volunteer with a professor a couple hours a week (usually 10-15), doing progressively more important tasks in the lab, perhaps giving a presentation at a professional conference and/or co-authoring a publication (the co-authorship is less common, but growing).
Getting that experience after college is potentially more difficult, particularly if you are in a full-time job doing something else. Some people work as research coordinators or lab technicians for a few years after college to build that experience. Some people who can’t get those jobs instead get a full-time job (with minimal overtime) to pay the bills and then volunteer on the side. But if you are already working 50-60 hours a week as a teacher, when are you going to find the time to volunteer as an RA? At some programs, 2 years away from research teaching high school (particularly in a theoretically structured program like TfA) might be okay, but 5 years away might be too much. It depends on the individual program, of course, and the professor you want to work with.
I had several jobs "alongside" my studies. But they were all part-time, extremely flexible, and directly related to my graduate work.
I started my master’s 6 years after finishing my bachelor’s. And taught high school and middle school for 3 of those years.
If every smart, driven person who thinks they might enjoy teaching HS would go do that for 2-3 years before moving on with their primary career plans, it would make a huge difference in the quality of our secondary educational systems. Especially scientists and engineers.
The “alongside” part isn’t going to work, though. Both a PhD and teaching high school are all-consuming, if done well.