I really enjoy Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist blog for a lot of reasons: her bluntness about office politics and job hunting, the occasional bit of titillating blogosphere gossip, her references to her work-life balance, her divorce, her kids. It’s nice to see a career advice columnist who puts it all in context. It’s also nice to see a feminist espousing a way of living in line with her ideology that doesn’t also shoot her in the foot professionally. I don’t always agree with what she says, but normally she’s convincing enough to at least make me consider her point of view.
Her post today (okay, a while back, I kind of forgot to post this while it was sitting in my drafts folder) is Don’t try to dodge the recession with grad school. She makes a lot of assumptions geared more toward social science and humanities MAs than a professional degree like an MLIS (which was, unshockingly, one of the few professions she didn’t mention in the post). But I still went through her list of reasons not to go to grad school, trying to save myself from some kind of temporary, externally-mandated regret, I guess.
Regret is not a big risk at this point: I’m three months away from the end of class and I just landed my first career job, so I pretty much have nothing to regret at this point, whether Penelope tells me I made a mistake or not. (Lucky me, this is as close to a recession-proof career and position as I could hope for.)
And an MLIS is not a mistake, recession or no. Basically she just tries to convince readers that med school is expensive, lawyers hate their jobs, MBAs are unemployable, the armed forces are a dead end and, baha, no one should ever bother studying English Literature, ever. I guess her quibble with librarianship, if she’d deigned to mention it - as one commenter did - would be that it doesn’t have enough social status as a profession, so it’s not a good return on investment. Or that it’s feminized, maybe, like teaching, which she also neglected to mention.
I don’t buy it. I decided to go to grad school before the Great Recession, but it was still during a slowdown. Alberta was going through a lull in upstream oil and gas functions. My company was laying off and I was responsible for paying the bills and sweet-talking the creditors, so although they probably would’ve liked to nix my position, it was essentially recession-proof until we got out of the hole. Still, I was doing a four-day, and then three-day furlough for the last five months, and when I gave my three months’ notice, they replaced me with someone who worked for half of what I was offered.
But it wasn’t the economic conditions that made me want to go to grad school. I could’ve switched industries and found work: like I said, this was a teeny downswing after a period of ridiculous growth. And I even broke a number of the economic rules one commenter mentions as well: I didn’t get paid to go to school, and I hadn’t waited five years between degrees.
My long and meandering point, here? Yes. Library school. Yes. Whatever it is to me - feminized, recession-proof, professional status or just a list of acronyms and an apartment across the country - it was the right choice at the time, and I’m even happier with it now. So thanks, Penelope.
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