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My Grad Degree Didn’t Help My Career or Salary

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I didn’t really mind working evenings, weekends, and almost every holiday when I was single, but once I met my future husband, I began to hate it. He worked normal hours and so we never had any time together. Instead of feeling an adrenalin rush when I heard details of a homicide or a police chase on the scanner in the newsroom, I felt dread at the prospect of working a few more hours past my shift and another cancelled date.

I tried to imagine how my life as a TV reporter would lend itself to marriage or maybe motherhood some day—working weird hours and moving to a new city every few years—and I just couldn’t see it. Entering my late twenties, I realized that those were things I wanted in the future.

I also realized that I missed doing stories that required more than a few hours worth of reporting and I had grown tired of covering complex issues in the required “one minute and thirty seconds” for snappy TV stories.

Eventually, I went back to work in print media. And, yes, I’ve asked myself many times whether grad school was a waste of time and money. But it wasn’t. I learned a lot, I gained a much broader perspective on journalism and I became a much more versatile reporter. Plus, I figure it can’t hurt to have a preeminent school on my resume.

Whenever I talk to someone considering graduate school, I urge them to research their post-graduation job prospects and learn as much about those jobs as possible. Are the jobs something they are certain they would enjoy? Is there a way to test the water by shadowing someone or doing an internship? And, do those jobs require a graduate degree, or are there alternate routes to those professions? In retrospect, I believe that this type of self-examination and practical research is far more important than studying the schools themselves and checking their rankings.

I was passionate about journalism and I couldn’t imagine ever wanting to do anything else. But I did want to do more. I wanted to work for bigger news outlets and I wanted to know how to do more than simply write newspaper stories. I had never taken a journalism class in college, so I liked the idea of learning more about the craft of reporting and writing. I was also intrigued by television news and thought I might like to move into that industry some day.

A few months into the program, I decided that I wanted to focus on television, so I learned to shoot video, write for television, produce TV news stories, and even do on-camera reporting and anchoring. It was challenging and interesting, and I imagined an exciting career after graduation.