And Then There Was Grad School

Hey guys! So this week I’m going to talk about something that I don’t know very much about: Grad school!

“But Izzy”, you might ask, “why write about something you don’t know about?” This would be a reasonable question. And the answer is that I have veeeeery recently decided that I want to go to grad school. However, prior to when I decided that, as recently as moments before I was entirely sold on that decision, I very much did not want to go to grad school. Undergrad has been a lot, and I was ready to hang up my hat once and for all. But then I realized, I can put on a different hat! Ultimately, I enjoy a lot of parts of school, and grad school is at the very least still an opportunity to do something different. So although I don’t know very much, I feel that I have a potentially informative lack of knowledge, which I’m going to share by talking through the experience of me deciding to go to grad school and figuring out how all of this works!

I decided I wanted to go to grad school at a conference. My dream job is to make games, as part of a small company, where I’ll have the freedom to wear many hats. I’m going to school for computer science, but I love to write, draw, and design as well. At the time, I was feeling a lot of pressure in relation to do. I felt, and still feel, that the work that I needed to do, not just for my own gratification, but in the world, would involve me pulling all of those things together. I had an emotional disconnect between what I deep down felt I needed to do and what I felt like someone with my degree did right out of college.

I was attending a workshop by a technical art director at EA, Gracie Arenas Strittmatter. The topic was “Leveling Up Your Career!”, and it dealt with being a woman or minority in the field of computing, as well as techniques to succeed and build professional skills and relationships. There was an exercise where everyone wrote down a fear or bad feeling they had in relation to school, or their potential career. I wrote that, even though I did well in school, I didn’t feel I had the skills to succeed in interview, or in the field. After the workshop, I talked to the presenter about my concerns, and mentioned that I did well in school, and felt I had a strong theoretical background. “Have you considered going to grad school? That could be a good way to focus in what you want to do.” It was… An odd moment. People, parents and teachers alike, had brought up grad school before. They thought I should teach, or that I’d do well in a graduate program. However, I don’t think it had ever come up before in the context of gaining focus. And in just an instant, I went from being very ready to be done with school to being very excited to go to grad school. I… appreciated Ms. Strittmatter’s brief advice profoundly. It just made sense.

I walked right out of the talk and directly into the conference’s career fair. Knowing, for a moment, what I wanted, and a few steps I could take to get it, was freeing. I went and talked to a few schools that I knew had grad programs in what I was interested. USC and Carnegie Mellon were both there, and I knew from research into undergrad that they both had supported, well funded game development programs. UCI also flagged me down from USC to discuss their Informatics program. I talked to a couple companies about jobs, but I no longer felt I was being crushed under the pressure of needing a job, and believing that there was nothing truly for me.

Some of us together at the conference.

I happened to run into my CS advisor at the conference later that day. She asked me how the day was going, and I… struggled to find the words to tell her that I now felt very strongly about going to grad school. It felt a bit embarrassing, like… I suppose like admitting to a friend that you have a crush, when you’d denied it to the same friend before. Emotionally that’s what it felt like. But the rest of the conference, and even when I got back, I was talking to anyone who would listen about grad school, and how excited I was about grad school, and preparing for grad school. Fairly early on, someone asked me if I’d taken the GRE. I barely knew anything about the GRE. I more or less just knew that it was a test related to grad school. Although I remained positive overall, I was momentarily daunted by this daunting examination, and the preparation that I’d have to put into it. I stayed up that night, researching the test, how it broke down, what scores were good or bad, and how to prepare. The next day, still at the conference, I sat down and took a 3 hour practice test in preparation. After that, I scheduled a test for two weeks from then, to get it over with and give myself the time afterwards to research and apply to schools, knowing my score.

Every single adult with a graduate stem degree I’ve talked to has told me it’s no biggy, though. It felt a little odd, especially after having put a lot of emotionally energy into it (I put a lot of emotional energy into the SAT as well, in high school, and the GRE is basically that for adults), but I was told that my grades, my letters of recommendation, and my application essays were more important than my GRE scores. That is to say, they were all confident that I would score well enough that they shouldn’t matter. This gave me a second reason to be glad that I scheduled my test to be so soon: It would just get it out of the way.

The first, and so far only person to question my decision to go to grad school was my Uber drive back to school after the conference. Particularly, he was uncertain about my decision to go to grad school right out of undergrad, as opposed to after some time in the industry. This was a very difficult conversation, due primarily to the fact that my Uber driver had a master’s degree whereas I had, at best, a vague sense of what grad school was and what it meant, in spite of a new and strong desire to go. I had to justify why I thought that the decision was right for me, even if it may not have been right for everyone, even if it wasn’t what grad school was usually about. Eventually, the driver conceded, and said he may just be old fashioned in regards to this (also, his major was in business, which is a bit different). However, I thought that it was a good conversation to have, because it made me realize that I didn’t necessarily know what grad school was for for other people, and what might be expected of me. It gave me questions to ask people who knew more, when I had conversations in the future.

Even though the conference was a few weeks ago, the only other important steps on the journey happened just in the last few days. I was so busy and absorbed in school and extracurricular obligations that I never ended up having time to do more practice for the GRE, like I had planned. But I had a meeting with a CS prof for some grad school advising and they, again, told me not to worry too much. He and I talked a bit about what to look for in a grad school, particularly making sure that there are enough professors working in the fields or programs that I’m interested in. Thinking about a statement of purpose, and who I could get to write letters of recommendations. He recommended looking at schools with PhD programs: I could get on the PhD track for the sake of the stipend, and then if I want to step off part way through with just a master’s instead of a PhD, that’s acceptable. Part of me inside felt that pressure, fear again about applying for a PhD, but I said heck, I didn’t think I wanted to go to grad school at all a few weeks ago, maybe a year from now I’ll realize that I really want a PhD.

Then, yesterday morning, I got up at 6:30am, took a shower, got dressed, and went to take the GRE. The test is long, and I have class in both the evenings and afternoon, so it had to be early. I was tired. And honestly, other than that, there’s not much to say. I took the test. You get your primary results back immediately. I felt good about it. I did as well as I needed to, like everyone I talked to thought I would. And then, last night, I slept. I slept because the week was long, I slept because the GRE was over, I slept because it all felt good.

And now I’m back to not knowing what I don’t know. There are still probably things I need to know about grad school. People I should talk to, about their experiences, their lows and their highs. Some more conversations that I should have which are critical of my decision. I think I have a few better answers now. There’s still a lot of fear. Fear of change, of the unknown. But I think more than afraid, I’m excited. Excited that, besides the unknown, there’s more that I now know, and more than that, excited that I’ve got some real control over something, that I’m in the position, to some degree, to choose rather than be chosen.

But I still need to research schools, haha. Goodbye until next time.