Chasing Change Until We Don't

Another lesson from growing up

My boss and I have a quasi-friendship work relationship. During our weekly check-ins, we code-switch between life updates, work updates, jokes, and assignments. She shows me TikToks (I don’t have an account), and we message each other using emojis and acronyms. Every couple of months, I’ll tell her that I’ve been feeling unsure about what I should do with my life and wondering if I should apply to grad school. She’ll say that when she was my age (only a couple years ago), she thought about grad school constantly and job-hopped every year. One day, she realized that at some point, she had stopped musing longingly about grad school and wanted to stay at this job. She’ll say that, while it sounds depressing, she has come to accept that this is life: an administrative nonprofit job, a husband, a house, a dog, a cat, and family nearby. Hearing this will soothe me, somewhat, as I remind myself I don’t need or want to go to grad school—until several months pass again.

I usually know I don’t want to do grad school, but many people in my life have gone, are going, or will go, and I can be easily tempted. In the moments when I am most dissatisfied with the 9-5, back and wrist pain, five-day workweek, and when I most romanticize becoming a journalist, lawyer, or writer, grad school appears to be the only way out. The only way to grab life by the shoulders and pivot it around.

I spent my life up until recently in school, completing lessons and assignments, meeting midterm and finals deadlines, and moving up a grade every year. I experienced consistent change as I worked towards a clear end goal. Graduating and leaving the education system triggers an experience ranging from disorienting to devastating. (My partner says (jokes?) that it makes no sense for college graduation to be called Commencement as it is actually the end of everything.) Most full-time jobs provide a monotony in tasks, daily routine, body posture, and colleague interactions that can prove bewildering in contrast to the self-determined, varied, and break-filled schedule of a college student. To accept this new monotonous lifestyle is akin to surrender.

School taught us to work hard for rewards both immediate (good grades, adult praise, peer admiration / envy) and long-term (valedictorian status, college admission, high-paid job). Once we get the high-paid (or medium- or low-paid) job, we exist largely outside of the rewards system that molded us. Perhaps your boss frequently and sincerely praises you, or perhaps you get an annual performance review that includes positive feedback and maybe even a salary increase. Perhaps not. It doesn’t matter because most likely, you need a job. From here on out, the new goal is retirement, and you have just begun.

To do grad school is to not accept your current life. It is striving for something else, something new. But it is also a delay of the inevitable. Once returned to the goals of good grades, professor praise, and besting peers, we are simply pushing off the future we know awaits us—working a job until we can stop.

This doesn’t mean grad school is meaningless or a mistake. It means grad school is materially unnecessary for people with similar questions, desires, and trains of thought as me. But it may be emotionally necessary.

Grad school will not magically improve my life by turning me into the journalist, lawyer, or writer I fantasized about. I would certainly encounter new body pains, dissatisfactions, and periodic crises about the ethics of reporting, the constraints of the legal system, and the practical impossibility of writing what and how much I want to write as a full-time job. I would have bad bosses (certainly worse than my current boss), bad days, and boring assignments. My life would largely be similar to now.

However, grad school may be emotionally necessary because it is possible that the dullness of work-life is unbearable right now. It is possible you are young, energetic, not yet ready to accept this life, and in need of change. Excitement is crucial for our souls. We need to sometimes plan trips, change jobs, move cities, move overseas, get a cat, raise a child, eat at the new restaurant, see the current exhibit, and hell, go to grad school to feel alive. Until you’re ready to accept that your next commencement is retirement, feel free to go back to school.