Know Your Own Bone

My graduate school application process is over. The tests are long since taken, applications long since sent out, my program selected, and my financial aid secured. I’ve relocated to my new city and I begin student orientation next week.

It’s no surprise that applying to graduate school is a long process, and it involves a lot of big decisions. Should I go back to school? When? What kind of degree should I pursue? Location, costs, funding, rankings, requirements, curriculum– these are all important things to consider when applying to and choosing a graduate school. For a self-starting individual with a keen sense of her professional needs, though, these should be easy questions to answer, right? Well, no. They weren’t.

Here’s insight into the road I traveled during my graduate school application process–the decisions and ideas that stopped me dead in my tracks, challenged my personal and professional goals, and paved the way into a new chapter in my life.

I’ll begin with possibly the most important decision of all:

1) Decide if you want to go to graduate school or not.

Because I’d long since realized that I’d like to go back to school– and for good reasons– this decision didn’t cause me much strife during the application process. My words of wisdom? Just make sure you aren’t thinking about going back to school for the wrong reasons.

The initial kicker for me, aside from wanting to soak up resourceful ideas and be immersed in this specialized community, was the fact that every single higher-level position opening of interest to me required a masters degree or above. I work in nonprofit organizations– museums, mostly– and these environments value education (though I wouldn’t go as far as to argue that one absolutely needs an advanced degree to be a leader in this industry). Whether or not you decide to pursue an advanced degree is entirely up to you. There are several reasons to go back to school, to wait, or not go back at all.

2) Pick a degree.

The fact that this is a staggeringly obvious step in the application process did not make this decision easier for me. Why wasn’t it easy? Because success doesn’t have only one concrete path (and in my opinion, it’s a good thing it doesn’t or we’d have very several similar and rather boring leaders). I knew what I wanted to do long term, I just wasn’t sure how to get there in terms of a graduate degree.

I picked my degree very shortly after deciding that I wanted to go back to school. I strongly considered degrees in public affairs, museum studies, art administration, or even pursuing an MBA.  Though, admittedly, museum studies and art administration were initially sexier areas of study for me, I picked public affairs for a few (in my opinion) very good reasons which relate to my own professional goals (which I will significantly over-simplify here). First, I know much more about museums and art administration than I do about public affairs, and public affairs– providing specializations in nonprofit management– would provide me with the skills and government knowledge required to lead public institutions- regardless of if they are science museums or art centers. Second, a Master of Public Administration is considered an advanced professional degree rather than an academic masters degree. And according to this article, the type of degree really does make a difference in compensation over a lifetime. It states that an individual earning a professional degree can expect an average of 4.4 million dollars in his or her lifetime, more than any other type of degree (more than a doctorate)! Could an M.P.A. recipient–with that “P” standing for Public (as in, the public sector) really be comparable in income to the degree’s private sector counterpart– the M.B.A recipient (which is considered a similar type of professional degree)?  No. It’s not as comparable as the article suggests. In fact, the average for-profit CEO makes 27 times more money than the average nonprofit CEO.  All the same, the more research I did, the more I realized which program was right for my interest in public institutions.

3) Choose programs that fit your needs and apply.

Understandably, the first step in going about this is deciding what your practical needs are and what interests you most about your general degree program. For some people, location is very important because they don’t want to relocate. For others, the ability to have part-time status is important because they’ll be maintaining a full-time job. As a potential full-time student, I cared most about two things: quality of the program and proximity to several high-quality cultural centers.

Identifying these two priorities helped me through the program-weeding and decision-making process, but with so many other factors to consider, they certainly didn’t make the process easy. Remaining true to my desire to attend a high quality program, I studied up on and applied to seven of the top schools on the first page of this list that matched my interests, met my needs, and would be ideal programs for me. I don’t think that rankings are by any means the only important factor in choosing a graduate school. What I mean to say, rather, is that I knew what was important to me and this list provided the framework for who to contact and where to look in order to find an institution that fit my needs. There were several things that contributed to my final decision, but this more specialized list ended up playing a role in the end because I found that after I had narrowed my options to my four favorites, only one of the four was on this list. I choose that school. Lesson: in the end, I reverted back to my initial needs/priorities to make the big decision.

4) Consider location.

Where’s the mecca for your industry, and are you considering relocating to a school in this area? By far the hardest decision that I had to make was choosing between going to graduate school in Washington D.C. or Los Angeles. I was considering L.A. because the programs at USC and UCLA matched my interests and background more closely than similar programs in D.C. So what was the problem? D.C. is a hot-spot of nonprofit activity, and some of my favorite young nonprofit leaders live in this city. Moreover, six of America’s 25 most visited museums– including the top three most visited museums in the country– are in DC.  What’s a concerned applicant to do? Do I choose the higher-ranked program with the connections or the city with the connections? Because the museums in L.A. are simply one-of-a-kind, and there’s no denying that there are several kick-butt institutions in D.C, it was a tough choice.

5) Now think about location again.

I had to think about location twice. Once in the decision-making process and again while preparing to take action on my decision. Regardless of where you choose to go, you’ll have to think about how it’s different than the city in which you currently live. I spent the last two years as an advocate of green practices (read: walking)  in the not-as-diverse-as-L.A. city of Seattle. I didn’t need a car, and my five years of Spanish speaking skills were slipping away. Embarrassingly, it was not until I moved to Los Angeles that I realized the full extent to which I need a mode of transportation and how much more beneficial I can be to the community if I brush up on my Spanish (seeing as I’m interested in community engagement and would like to participate in a hands-on capacity). Though I wouldn’t have done anything differently, these realizations provided interesting, “Oh yeah, that’s right…” moments in my first few weeks in my new city.

6) Understand that your position within the industry will be different when you’re in school.

Even without having started school, I’ve already learned that my position within the industry is different than it was before I left my full-time job. I was scared of losing my career title, too. Perhaps it was just natural human loss aversion at play. All of my networks now read “student” and it’s a strange adjustment. But to be honest, it’s nice to have a time period in my adult career where I can reflect upon the workings of the industry as a whole. I feel like I’ve gone from artist to art critic. Even in this simple mind-adjustment, I’ve learned quite a bit.

7) Decide how you’ll stay involved in your industry while enrolled in your program.

This makes the list because, as an applicant and now a new student, this is always on my mind. Experience is one of the most important things in a job applicant.  Here are ten ways to become a better nonprofit leader, and most of these items can be done by a full-time student in order to remain involved in the industry at large while in school. This is not to mention all of the great communities and organizations that graduate school offers.  I haven’t begun school yet and already I’ve been contacted by several university-run organizations within my field of interest. As a full-time student, I may only have about 30 hours a week to work or volunteer. I refuse to let this fact hinder my involvement with the museum community within Los Angeles. I’ll keep you posted on these developments. Also, I’d love to learn your methods for staying on top of your game while in school.

There are a lot of other interesting things to learn from applying to grad school and in preparing for classes. Relearning math for the GREs, tracking several programs at once, talking to recent program graduates, weighing financial aid packages (heck, just applying for financial aid packages) leaving an incredible full-time job, and moving out of a great city were all formative experiences for me.

I’m curious to know if your experiences are/were similar and what advice you would share with individuals currently taking part in the application process. Despite being hammered into the minds of potential applicants, I think this complicated process of life choices must be different for everyone.