The best part of school is not going to school. Or so you thought, back in the days of recess, friendship bracelets and raising your hand to use the bathroom. The stray feigned sick day was enough to hold you over until you hit the real jackpot: summer vacation. Even in high school, when summer meant staying up late to finish that last beer instead of finishing the latest Goosebumps book, June welcomed a much-needed freedom from responsibility.

Come college, however, the best times usually happen during the semesters, not between them. You’ve heard it before — especially if you’re a regular CollegeCandy reader – high school friends tend to drift apart, hometowns suddenly become boring and living with your parents…ick, don’t even get me started. The idea of a blue popsicle and a trip to the local pool sounds borderline painful when you could potentially be at Dollar Beer Night with your campus besties.

And so the concept of summer quickly loses its luster. Facebook newsfeeds are clogged with “Get me back to football season,” “Miss my [insert school name] girls!” and “Counting down to move- in!” sentiments. Because seriously, who wants to be stuck at home with nothing to do but get their nails done and shop and maybe stop by a part-time job a couple times a week and then go back to shopping and free lunches with mom and…. Read More »

Life lesson #43298: What you think you should do is sometimes completely different than what you want to do – If only I could jump back to last summer to tell myself!

For what seems like forever, I have told everyone from friends, random people at parties, teachers, and family members that upon graduating undergrad, I would head off to graduate school to a M.A. or Ph.D. program in English literature. In fact, during my first year of college while my classmates were mostly concerned with figuring out their major requirements, I obsessed over taking the right classes designed for graduate school track students, finding the right internships, and doing everything the right way towards getting to graduate school – ruling everything out that did not fit in the perfect English grad school box I put myself in.

As you can imagine, it’s a rather rude awakening when everything doesn’t fall into place like you planned for it to.  Looking back, the moment I realized that my plans were not something I really 100% wanted to do anymore was during a conference meeting with my thesis advisor. She asked me why I wanted to attend graduate school. I was silent. I had no answer. I sputtered off some generic – the “I’d like to advance my studies in literature” excuse. But it felt so fake, so fabricated, and hearing myself say it bothered me. I didn’t like the way it rolled off the tip of my tongue. I didn’t like the way it made me feel about where I wanted to go in my future.

There is a huge problem when you don’t really have an answer as to why you are doing something major like applying to graduate programs, and this started the downward spiral of my graduate school plans. Another red flag was my honors thesis project. Like many seniors, I was completing a sixty-page thesis project (I was working in the area of girls’ fiction in children’s literature). I picked the topic myself, but not even a month or two into the project, I hated it. I wanted nothing to do with what I was writing and saying and researching. There I was working on something very similar to what I would be doing in graduate school, completely unhappy. Not good, right? Read More »

As a little girl, I always knew I would go to college. It was the way I would make myself in the world. Throughout college, I had endless internship opportunities. In fact, I had to turn down many of them because I couldn’t work them all at once. I had the chance to live in New York City for a summer and for a month of January. I studied abroad in London. I was asked by the English department at my school to complete an Honors Thesis – something only a few students are asked to do every year. I thought I did everything right, and figured my post-graduation experience would be equally as exciting as my college prospects.

Surprise! I haven’t even graduated yet, and nothing has gone the way I thought it would or how I want it to, and with graduation next weekend – it’s time to come up with a game plan for the ominous future.

Originally, I thought I wanted to attend graduate school and work towards a higher degree in English literature. I spent the entire fall semester working on taking the GRE exam, filling out graduate applications (and spending major money on sending them out!), and writing the most intense essay of my undergraduate career to send along to my program choices. In the midst of all this, I spoke with my academic advisor who told me “Charlsie, don’t worry about it – I think you’ll get in wherever you want, you’ll have the option to choose where you want to go. You’ll do great.” Despite the stress and pressure I felt from all this, her reassurance told me to expect the best and relax about my future. Read More »

Grad school or no grad school - that is the question.

[It's pretty obvious that the average CollegeCandy reader has some very strong opinions. Opinions that she likes to share with everyone on the site. We love a strong woman (unless she happens to be charging at us with her fists raised), so we thought we'd give her a real forum to discuss her thoughts, feelings, and perspectives. Every Friday I'll be featuring a hot topic (like taking him home for the holidays!) and leaving it up to you, the readers, to duke it out. So, read it and get your debate on in the comments section below!]

The New Year is here, and for those of you graduating in May, it’s time to start thinking about the future (insert groan here). Probably the biggest question you face down as graduation approaches is, what next? You could go out and get a job, bum around your parents’ place for a while, or you could keep the education train rolling with grad school. Applications to Masters programs have gone way up in the last few years (and they’re starting soon) - should you be joining them?

On the “pro” side of the argument, there are a lot of reasons it could be worth it to go to grad. There’s a lot more freedom in graduate study than in undergrad, which means that you get to make your own rules a bit more and you can really immerse yourself in one area of interest instead of taking all those required classes you’re never going to use again. Also, the job market still pretty much sucks (depending on your field, of course) and studies have shown that people who start jobs now (at lower pay) will continue to be paid lower even 10 years down the road – WTF? So in that respect, grad school is a really good way to buy yourself a little time and maybe a better pay check in the future. And ultimately, the truth is that a Masters degree is going to become increasingly the standard for our generation and the ones following us. For our grandparents it was a high school diploma, for our parents, a college degree and for our generation, where soooo many go to college, standing out is going to mean a Masters at least. Consider it an investment in your future.

But there are some distinct “cons” here too. To start with, you finally managed to graduate, the day you’ve been working toward since you were five, and now you’ve got to go in for at least 2 more years?! And while many grad schools are less expensive than undergrad, it’s still not exactly cheap. If you already have student loans or debt piling up, grad school may not be such a helping hand, particularly since there aren’t nearly as many scholarships or grants for grad. And while you don’t have to take those crappy required classes, grad school doesn’t allow for a lot of blow off courses either, which means an awful lot of stress. Speaking of stress, let’s not forget that most grad programs require you to take the GREs - yep, it’s like the SATs all over again. Joy! Oh, and BTW, when I mentioned up there that applications to grad school were way up, some schools have seen jumps of over 30%, so just getting in could be an issue.

Do you see yourself in grad school? Or would you rather eat your backpack than add on more school years? Will you be applying? Have you? Or do you think the whole idea of a Masters degree is just silly? Duke it out!

The University Experience sure has changed. It’s now normal to take longer than four years to complete your degree; students are known to switch majors repeatedly (and often at the last minute); and transfer admissions offices are swamped with applicants who realize that the college they chose senior year of high school just isn’t making the grade.

I know all about the stress of transferring and adjusting to a new school. When I began my undergraduate career, I wasn’t content with attending the state university that 83% of my classmates were enrolling in. Oh, no – I had to get away. So I enrolled in a small private school in London, England.

My freshman year was a blast– I was in a major city, surrounded by hot men with hotter accents, and I didn’t even need a fake ID. But eventually, reality sank in, and I opted to transfer back to the same state school that I’d once adamantly rejected in order to prevent graduating with student loans up the wazoo.

My first semester at the state university was miserable. I’d missed out on all of the freshman year bonding, got stuck with a lame random roommate, and when I did go out, it was because one of my high school friends was kind enough to let me tag along with her group. It was so bad that I took a semester off to figure out if I wanted to go through the transfer process again. I ended up going back to the state school, and – thankfully – things got better. In fact, college kicked some major ass.

So, having been on the Maybe-I-Should-Transfer fence and a member of the Transfer Students Association, I thought I’d share some pro’s and cons with anyone who isn’t quite sure that they are attending the right school. Read More »