Forget About The Graduate Jobs, Postgraduate Study Is Best
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Getting a job and going out into the “real world” is all very well, but people should really consider the alternatives. For one thing, the real world is a scary place that’s full of taxes, mortgages, bills, jobs, bosses, and responsibilities. For another, postgraduate study is an opportunity to really make a mark on a discipline. Of course, this line of reasoning isn’t for everyone. Some people, simply, won’t understand. Fortunately, that means there’s more space with the clever people who are continuing their studies.
So, without further ado, here is why postgraduate study is without doubt the best choice.
More Opportunity
Postgraduate study is favourable for a number of reasons, the first one, put simply, being: you can get a better job after postgraduate study. It tends to be much harder to go the other way around. Once you’ve snapped up a graduate level job, settled down and started working, you’re going to be like that for the rest of your life. If you were to go onto postgraduate work, however, there’s much more academic opportunity available to you and you can still go and get the same (or possibly an even better) job when you’re finished. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work that one out. Though most rocket scientists would agree with me – it takes more than a standard degree to get into the really exciting fields.
Additionally, a postgraduate qualification quite simply looks better. Admittedly it’s won’t be required for many jobs but with this kind of thing there’s not too much risk of overkill – all it means is that you’ll have the opportunity to apply for an even better job. Put simply, do you want to be working as part of a team (graduate) or do you want to be the person managing the team (guess who)? It’s an oversimplification, but it’s not as far from the truth as you might think, and with just one extra year of study to get a Master’s degree, what’s stopping you?
The Exciting Stuff
All of the fun – and we mean the really fun – stuff in any field is almost always right at the edge of research. A degree programme tends to take students right up to that edge, but doesn’t allow anyone to go any further. Postgraduate study, by contrast, allows exactly that: for students to start looking at the really exciting, interesting, and important stuff that hasn’t been invented or discovered yet. A graduate job is all very well, but postgraduate study offers the opportunity to become part of something much bigger and better – the progress of your discipline.
Postgraduate work generally means that something you’ve worked on will be published as a paper and your name will go down in the metaphorical history books. Admittedly not many people read every single paper that’s published out of every university, but the point is that that paper will always exist and you will always be a published part of academia – a member in the same club as Einstein and Tesla and Popper and Gross and many, many, many more influential and well-remembered people who made progress in their field. That isn’t something that should be taken lightly and it’s something to be proud of for the rest of your life. Imagine: “what’s that, mum/dad?” “Oh, it’s just my published work from years ago”. You will have contributed to a field in a way that very few people ever get the opportunity to.
On top of that, you’ll have a fair amount of choice and freedom as to how you go about that. Many universities will let postgraduates get on with it, in many ways, and will simply assign a faculty member to keep an eye on you. What research you actually decide to move into will be your decision – there are still, of course, lectures to go to and exams to pass, but they are a small sacrifice for managing to achieve a level of excellence in a certain field. Which leads us, rather nicely, to the next section.
Becoming An Expert
Few people can honestly say that they are an expert in a specific field. After finishing a postgraduate course, you will be one of those special people who are, in fact, experts in their respective areas. Which, when you think about it, is quite a cool thing. Of course, this also ties back into opportunity – the situation often arises when a company or organisation needs an expert, and there’s every chance it could be you. Experts are highly paid – nobody else can do their job and so they have to be paid well so they do their job right.
Becoming an expert in any field isn’t just good for the self-fulfilment side of things; it makes financial and logical sense too – to spend (just) another year at university in order to get an even better qualification and then use that to get a better job is just an extension of the same logical thinking that got you into university in the first place, probably. Why stop there? The more you study now, the more desirable you will be to employers later. It’s a lovely thought.
The Stranger Side Of Things
There is something to be said about the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, if you’re romantically inclined like that. We, as people, should always be looking to expand on what we know and develop new opinions and ways of seeing the world. We’re very lucky to be alive in the information age, and it seems like an insult to the people who came before us – who could only get their information from dogged library books, or, before that, religious texts – to hunker down and be satisfied with a degree when you could take your quest for information and knowledge further.
This last argument, we know, is a bit of an odd one; but think about it, there is so much out there that you will never ever know, but it shouldn’t by any means stop people from trying. Quite the opposite. Stay in school; it’s much more fun.