Take a walk around campus. In the space between the bus loop and North Hall, see the red, brown, and yellow leaves in piles on the green grass, on the concrete walkways. Some leaves are barely hanging onto their branch.
Feel a breeze, hold your compost cup of coffee, or tea, or hot cocoa, a little tighter in your hands. Adjust the sleeves of your sweater, hear the crunch of the leaves beneath your brown Ugg boots (or black leather loafers). Take in a deep breath. Think about all the work you need to complete. All the studying you’ll do. It’s truly so fall, isn’t it?
In the Winter months, people tend to romanticize their lives a little more. I understand why. The cold and the holiday season are not the only things that accompany the winter, but finals as well. So, do what you need to do to get through finals season. However, please do not confuse your love of the winter season, which happens to fall in line with finals season, with a love for academia. An accurate portrayal of academia is not at all what you have in mind.
Academia is not at all like what is described in The Secret History or The Dead Poets Society. Sure, the cobblestones, gothic architecture, long trench coats, community, and a thirst for knowledge are great, but ink-stained pages and hands, libraries, and secret rendezvous are not the entirety of academia. In fact, the only commonalities between academia in media and academia in real life are that they’re both tragic.
Earlier in the semester, I attended two workshops part of the Graduate School Demystified Series. Dr Carlos Nash, the head of the Graduate Student Life Officer in UCSB’s Graduate Division, hosted the series. These workshops shattered the rose-colored lens I viewed graduate school and replaced it with a more critical one.
Grad school is ridiculously expensive. The cost of grad school falls within the range of $45,000-$70,000. The average cost of UCSB grad school, for students who plan to live in student housing, is roughly $50,000 for California residents and $65,000 for non-California residents. If students plan to live off campus, in private housing, they should expect to pay about $4,000 more than the prices mentioned in the previous sentence (at UCSB).
Additionally, if you want a PhD and hope to teach, good luck! A full-time teaching position is incredibly difficult to find. We were essentially told that universities don’t want to hire full-time professors and instead hire many part-time professors, because it’s less expensive to do so.
We were not told these things to scare us away from grad school. Instead, we were told these things because they give us a complete picture of what grad school entails before we jump in. They gave us the necessary knowledge, and it’s up to us to find ways to best plan our path to grad school.
Poking fun at graduate school is an ongoing trend. On TikTok, videos along the lines of “When you are in your early twenties, you’ll have a chance to apply to grad school. It is imperative that you do not,” or “I have no idea what I want to do after graduation. Grad school here I come.” The resurgence of the topic of grad school is also known as a “recession indicator.”
#1 New York Times bestselling author R.F. Kuang released a 560-page satirical novel about academia. In Katabasis, two characters, Alice and Peter, journey to hell to save their thesis advisor, so he can write them letters of recommendation. Kuang writes, “Hell is a campus,” and discusses the stuffy and constricting nature of academia, of its politics.
Kuang also talks about the vampiric nature of academia. It is soul-sucking, life-draining, and all around painful. It makes masochists out of a person, or maybe those who choose grad school are already masochists.
So, what’s the point of graduate school? Why do many people want a graduate education? Well, I don’t have an answer that everyone will agree with. Everyone has their own reasons, some valid, some not.
A good reason to apply to and attend grad school is that you value the pursuit of knowledge. Not because of the upper echelon aesthetics of higher education, as portrayed in the media, and especially not because you don’t know what they want to do in life. You need to be passionate about your field of study, so passionate that you can not imagine a life without knowing. Otherwise, what is the point?
Grad school should not be something you do on a whim. We are much too privileged to realize this—that we can choose getting an education to hide away from real life, from the responsibilities of adult life, or the “real world.” An education is worth too much for people to consider it so little.