How to Know If a Postgrad Is Actually Worth It (From Someone Who’s Been Through the Application Process)
The last parent-teacher conference of the evening had already run over by fifteen minutes. I was packing up my laptop when Marcus’s mom slipped into the chair across from me, not quite ready to leave. She had that tired look I recognized from my own kitchen table. “I have a totally different question,” she said, half apologetic. “Marcus is fine. He’s doing great. But I’ve been thinking about going back to school myself—a master’s in public health. And I keep going back and forth. Any advice on getting a postgrad?”
I laughed, because it was the same question I had asked myself six years ago, sitting in my car in a parking lot after dropping my daughter off at preschool. I had spent the morning looking up online courses while eating a cold piece of toast. I knew exactly how she felt.
So I told her the truth, which is that the application advice is easy to find—the letters of recommendation, the personal statements, the GRE if you’re unlucky enough to need it—but that’s not the part most people struggle with. The hard part is deciding whether it’s a real need or just a way of delaying something. Or convincing yourself you need it because everyone else is doing it.
I didn’t have a neat answer for her that evening, but we talked long enough that the janitor started vacuuming around us. I told her the practical things first, because those are the things nobody mentions when you’re Googling “how to get a master’s degree.”
Most people assume you need to start by looking at programs. I learned that you actually need to start by looking at three years ahead of your life. Not the ideal version—the real one. Who’s making dinner during finals week? What happens if your supervisor at work decides they need you to travel more? Is there a health issue in your family that flares up without warning? A postgrad is going to take up the space that something else currently occupies. It’s not about finding the time; it’s about choosing what to give up. For me, it was Saturday mornings. That’s where all my studying went. For the first two semesters, I didn’t sleep in once. But I knew that going in, and that made it easier.
The second thing I told her was to talk to someone who actually did the program, not the program’s brochure. I had a spreadsheet back then with ten potential universities. On paper, they all looked similar. What changed everything was a phone call with a woman I found through a friend of a friend who had graduated from one of them two years earlier. She told me which courses were genuinely useful and which ones were taught by professors who just read their own textbook aloud. She told me about the cohort dynamics, how some people were there to network and others were there to hide. That conversation saved me from a lot of tuition money. Most departments will happily connect you with an alum or current student. If they won’t, treat that as a red flag.
Then we got to the money part, because it’s always the money part. I told her about a colleague of mine who took out a loan for a degree in museum studies and ended up working in a call center for three years. Not because the degree was useless, but because she didn’t check the job market in her region first. The advice I gave her was simple: write down the monthly payment for the loan, then write down the average starting salary for the jobs you’re actually likely to get, then subtract the first from the second. If you get a negative number, you need a different plan. That doesn’t mean don’t do it—it means make peace with the fact that you’re doing it for reasons other than money. That can be valid. But it has to be a choice, not an accident.
I also told her about the quiet phase. That’s what I call the first two months of a postgrad, when you’re not sure if you made a terrible mistake. You don’t know anyone. The reading is dense. Your friends are posting photos of weekend trips while you’re annotating PDFs at the kitchen counter. I remember sitting in my living room one Thursday night, surrounded by highlighted articles, feeling genuinely stupid. My neighbor came over to borrow a measuring cup and saw the state of me, and she said, “Give it till November.” That was good advice. The turn doesn’t happen because the work gets easier—it gets easier because you get used to feeling behind. You learn that everyone is faking it just as much as you are.
Marcus’s mom told me she was worried about starting late. She was forty-two. I told her that the average age in my cohort was thirty-five, and the best student in my study group was a woman in her fifties who had raised four kids and was doing the degree because she wanted to change careers after a divorce. Nobody looked at her as old. If anything, she had the odd advantage of knowing exactly what she didn’t want anymore. That’s a kind of clarity you don’t have at twenty-two.
I gave her one more piece of advice, and I think it’s the one that actually matters. Before you apply to anything, write a paragraph about why you’re doing this. Not for anyone else—just for yourself. Then put it in a drawer and check it six months later, after you’ve gotten into a program and the excitement has worn off. I did that. I wrote about wanting to move from teaching into educational policy, about wanting to be taken more seriously in meetings. When I read it again in December, I found that some of those reasons had faded and others had grown. The paragraph wasn’t a contract. It was just a way to check in with myself.
We finally stood up because the janitor was circling our chairs. I told her she didn’t need to have a perfect answer. She just needed to talk to a few more people, run the numbers honestly, and give herself a few weeks to sit with the decision. “If the thought of applying feels exciting and heavy at the same time,” I said, “that’s probably a good sign.” She nodded, thanked me, and headed out into the dark parking lot.
I don’t know if she ended up doing it. I hope she did, but I also know that a lot of good decisions never make it past the kitchen table, and that’s okay. A postgrad isn’t a door that opens you into a better life. It’s a hallway—sometimes narrow, sometimes poorly lit, and occasionally filled with people you’re glad to meet. The trick is deciding whether you actually want to walk down it, not just whether the door looks nice from the outside.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » How to Know If a Postgrad Is Actually Worth It (From Someone Who’s Been Through the Application Process)