What to Know Before You Start a Postgraduate Degree: Honest Advice From a Teacher and Parent
My daughter had just finished her coffee, and I could see she was trying to find the right way to tell me something that had been on her mind for weeks. She cleared her throat, pushed the mug aside, and said, “I think I want to get a master’s degree.”
We were sitting at the kitchen table in the late afternoon, the same table where she’d done her calculus homework and I’d graded essays. She was twenty-two, six months out of undergrad, working at a small marketing firm that she didn’t love but didn’t hate either. And now she was about to ask a question she’d obviously already asked herself many times.
“Okay,” I said. “Tell me more.”
“I don’t know,” she said, and then the real words came out. “I just don’t feel like I’m going anywhere. A degree feels like the next thing. Everyone I graduated with is either getting one or applying for jobs they don’t want. I don’t want to look back in five years and wonder why I didn’t.”
I understood the feeling. I had it myself when I was her age, and I did what a lot of people do: I went to grad school because I was good at school and bad at knowing what else to do. That’s not always the wrong reason, but it’s also not a plan.
Instead of giving her a poison answer right away, I told her we should look at the actual questions before the application form. And over the next few weeks, we worked through them together. I want to share what came up, because a lot of the advice floating around about postgraduate degrees is either uselessly positive or needlessly scary. The truth sits somewhere in the middle.
First, I asked her to write down what she actually wanted her days to look like in five years. Not her job title, not her salary — her days. Did she want to sit alone at a desk and write reports? Work with people in a room? Be out of the building for half the day? Travel? She had no idea, and that was fine. But it meant she wasn’t ready to commit to a two-year program that would narrowly define what she could apply for.
That’s the first practical step: for most fields, a graduate degree doesn’t open every door. It opens a specific set of doors. If you don’t know which rooms you want to walk into, a degree can end up being an expensive way to delay the decision.
We talked about money, but not in the way ads talk about it. I didn’t just look at tuition. We looked at the full cost: the thousand-dollar application fees, the cost of moving to a city with a good program, the rent she’d have to pay, and the fact that she’d be giving up the salary from the marketing job. That last part is the quiet killer. A full-time master’s in her field could easily cost her forty or fifty thousand dollars in lost income alone, before any tuition. And that’s a conservative number for her particular situation.
I know people who have taken on massive debt for a degree that didn’t increase their earning potential. I also know one social worker who nearly didn’t get her license because her program didn’t offer enough supervised clinical hours. That’s the other thing so many people miss: some degrees are truly required for a profession, and others are just nice to have. If you want to be a therapist, a teacher, or a speech pathologist, you need the credential. If you want to manage a public relations team, nobody cares whether you have a master’s — they care about your portfolio and your ability to handle a crisis.
I asked her to spend an hour looking at real job postings in marketing, the field she thought she might be interested in. Not the postings from megacorporations, but the mid-size companies she’d plausibly work for. She came back looking surprised. Almost every posting said “Bachelor’s degree required.” Only one said “MBA preferred,” and it was a job that paid barely more than her current salary.
That was a turning point. We also looked at what happens if you work first and then go back to school later. A lot of programs are designed for working adults. There are evening cohorts, online options, and even employers who will pay for some or all of the tuition. I told her about a friend who spent two years working at a nonprofit, realized she actually wanted to do policy work, and then walked into a master’s program with a clear focus, work experience, and a scholarship. She got way more out of that degree than I ever did out of mine, because she wasn’t twenty-two and unsure. She was twenty-eight and angry at how the system treated people in her old neighborhood.
That’s not to say everyone should wait. Some people know early. A nineteen-year-old who wants to be a physicist usually needs to start the graduate path immediately because the sequence of advanced math and research doesn’t leave room for a gap year. But the humanities, social sciences, business, and many professional tracks reward a little time outside the classroom.
The most useful exercise we did was a simple interview. I told her to find three people who actually hold the degree she was considering — not professors, not admissions officers, but people who use it at work. She emailed a few acquaintances of friends, all of whom were surprisingly willing to talk. She asked them three questions: Do you use what you learned every day? Would you do it again if you knew then what you know now? And what’s the one thing you didn’t expect?
Every single person gave her the same unexpected answer to the first question: they don’t use most of the specifics from their program. They use the writing, the ability to manage long projects, and the network. One woman said, “I got a job because my classmates called me when they heard of openings.” Those things aren’t nothing, but they aren’t worth fifty grand if you can get them elsewhere.
The other thing I pushed her to think about was whether she was trying to solve a problem a degree couldn’t fix. She was lonely in her new city. She didn’t like her boss. She wasn’t sure if she was a “real adult” yet. I told her that a graduate degree would not make conferring with her supervisor more pleasant, and it wouldn’t magically produce a community of best friends. It would buy her structure and a schedule, which is nice, but it would also come with papers, stress, and the nagging voice that says you should be further along by now.
In the end, we made a list of conditions. She would only apply to programs that offered some form of funding. She would only apply to ones that had a clear professional outcome. And she would not submit an application until she had worked one full year at her current job, just to see if her feelings about it changed. We also agreed to revisit the conversation after she shadowed, for a day, a woman who did something she actually thought she might want to do. That shadowing day was more informative than any brochure. By three in the afternoon, she knew she didn’t want that particular job either, but at least she learned that in real time and not in a lecture hall.
She hasn’t applied anywhere yet. She’s still at the marketing firm, and she’s started asking her boss about the public relations team. Last week she told me she might take a class in data analytics at the local community college instead, just to see if that side of her brain liked being used.
I don’t know what will happen in a year. She might still decide to go for the master’s, and it might be the right move. Or she might decide to stay where she is, or change fields entirely. The honest truth is that I only have one clear piece of advice: don’t let a postgraduate degree be the default answer to an uncertain question. Make it a specific answer to a specific need. And know that it’s always okay to take a little longer before you decide — the degree will still be there in January.
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