Is graduate school right for me?

juillet
Tue, 23 Apr 2013 17:59:13 +0000

You’re skipping ahead of a crucial question, which is whether or not you actually need a graduate degree to do what you want to and need to do. If you don’t know what you want to go to graduate school for yet, then you aren’t ready to go. Graduate school is a focused course of study into one particular topic in order to earn a degree that you need to do a job you can’t do without it.

Your advisors are both right and wrong. Your entire PhD is not spent solving one micro-problem; that’s just your dissertation. Depending on the kind of program you attend, you will investigate a small area or agenda of the research within your field. For example, I am interested in HIV prevention in black Americans and secondary prevention for black Americans and LGBT people already infected with HIV. I’ve done a number of projects within that area, working with two different populations at different times (adolescent girls and black gay men). Yes, my dissertation is one small area of that, but I see it as part of a larger research agenda, not my life’s work. It’s basically 3 or 4 scientific papers written at once. Research in general is like that, too. For several years at a time, you may work on a specific problem, but it won’t be a micro-problem. The individual papers you write will be, but you should be able to get 4-10 research papers out of every research project/grant you write.

Your problem is interest in too many broad areas. You can’t do both quantum mechanics and biopsychology (unless you find a way to do research at the intersection of both). The vast majority of researchers are not Renaissance men - in fact, it’s impossible to be a Renaissance man today. Human knowledge was much less vast in the Renaissance, so then it was possible to know a lot about a lot of different areas because the “lot” they had then wasn’t actually anything like the “lot” we know now.

I agree - take a break. Take a few years. Do stuff you like to do. You don’t necessarily need to plan out the next 5 years of your life - just find something to do for the future. Join the Peace Corps, if you want, or do Americorps or a Fulbright or JET or EPIK or something. Or get a regular job that allows you to write and read. Get a library card and read widely, and write down your thoughts and explore your interests. And while you’re on the job, take note of what you like to do and what you don’t like to do. Becoming more aware of your interests, strengths, and skills will help you shape what you want to do in the future.