Get What You Pay For

It never fails that you finish school, whether it’s high school, college, or grad school, and feel like you missed out on some key pieces of the education puzzle. You arrive at your first job after graduating only to find that the boss is asking you to do something you never learned in school. You start to feel cheated because some fundamentals of doing journalism were left out of your education. How could this have happened?! This article from the Atlantic gets a survey from Journalism professionals about things that were left out of their grad school education, but would have been very useful.

While the article focuses specifically on Journalism school, I think it can help any grad school student to think about the things they aren’t seeing in the courses they are taking, but that they are seeing in the professional world of their field of study. If you don’t see those things in your courses it may be time to speak up in class or schedule more office hours with your professor,  so that you can talk about what you think you should be learning in addition to what is being studied. If there is one thing I am realizing about grad school it’s that a lot of it is self-directed. As much as I like my hand to be held, I am realizing this isn’t going to happen in graduate school. So if you don’t see something, say something.