Don't do it, Tantalus! It's not worth it, man...
Conclusion: Graduate school is pointless. But let’s step back a bit.
I went to college for finance and economics. Kicking and screaming. As an angsty nonconformist teen drowning in darkness and pain I was set on studying foreign affairs, looking for a bigger world out there, one that fucking rocked the pants off the insane social vacuousness that was bucolic cowtown NJ. And I did earn admission to a leading undergraduate program for foreign service, my first choice. However, I also got a scholarship to a business program, and as my mother was unwilling to chip in even words of encouragement for my education, to make it easier on my father I swallowed the acrid bile that remained of my dreams and went the scholarship route. But I tasted the bitterness for years afterwards.
You see, if you put a monkey in a cage, with a banana, and tell him he can’t have it, he’ll want it more. He’ll fixate on it. He’ll get fucking pissed. He’ll curse you, your brother, and your brother's donkey, and if you let enough time elapse, and maybe give him a typewriter, he might recreate for you the collected works of Shakespeare, in addition to some pretty wicked verse about how your cock is the size of a bacterium and how your brains are wholly contained in your one misshapen testicle. And all because you didn’t let him have the banana. You get my drift?
In school, I didn’t enjoy finance. I enjoyed economics only marginally more. But what I did enjoy was New York. And vodka tonics. And where might a penchant for vodka tonics land an angry Asian girl in New York?
That’s right. Investment banking.
I was recruited in 2000. Started in 2001. Then 9/11 happened, the market bottomed out, and shit really hit the fan. Lots of firings. Not so much money.
God, life fucking sucked. 10th circle of hell, the one Dante never found. Granted, I would choose banking over NJ any day, but coming home every morning at 3am nursing your most recently acquired asshole really drains the life out of you. Fuck this, I thought. I coulda gone to [insert foreign service school here]. I coulda studied what I really liked. I coulda been happy. I coulda been a contender.
And so the seeds of misguidance were sown. I’d finish my analyst years, then take whatever paltry sum I managed to collect in the post 9/11 fallout and plant it into graduate school. Water it, nurture it, watch it grow. Yeah, I thought. Then all of this will become just a nasty detour, fading into nothing more than a fuzzy, distant nightmare.
So after 3 years of monkey business I leave the Street to wander the World. I quit. I keep it real. So real that I didn’t have a safety net. Regardless, the day I left was honestly the happiest day of my life. The banana was within reach. Fast forward through GMATs/GREs, applications, travel, and contract work, and I get to school. And it’s…so…so…well...just so-so.
What a complete fucking disappointment.
Fuck, dude! This is what I’ve always wanted, right?
Or not.
In Greek mythology, Tantalus, both thirsty and hungry, is condemned to stand in a lake in Hades with fruit dangling above him. When he bends to drink, the water recedes. When he reaches for fruit, the branch pulls away. Well, for a year and a half now I’ve been lapping the water and chewing the fruit, and let me tell you, they both taste like ass.
Did I hype it up too much? Romanticize it beyond realistic recognition? Expectations will screw you every time, you know. Or maybe, over the years, I got used to banking, to walking fast, talking fast, buying short-term happiness, being able to bark orders and have them followed to the tee at least 51% of the time. Ultimately, it is probably all of the above.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
What a realization. I chose to keep it “real,” and it’s gone horribly wrong. Here I am, dropping my own dime, almost all my dimes, on a five-dollar-sign prestigious university, and I skip classes (when I’m not falling asleep in them). I procrastinate. I bitch and whine. I don’t socialize (no real sense of community anyway, so I’m not sure I’m missing out on much). As a friend of mine said, to have interest in a subject is one thing. To really study it is to elevate it to an infinitely higher plane.
I like reading the news. I like watching the news. But I’m not a huge fan of sitting through hours of six-ways dissection of abstract political and/or economic theory and then trying to fit it all into a graph on an exam or a paper.
Moreover, the pretense is so thick it’s fucking asphyxiating. This is academia is it not? I had expected to find intellectual openness in my peers but instead I find that many carry whatever prejudices they nurtured in their home countries (including the US), and just share them here, as if they were valid cultural learnings to make benefit for glorious nation of America. Is making another Bush quip, #7,638 by my count, truly insightful, or just superficial and trendy? Are you trying to be so nonconformist that you end up being conformist? Everyone trying to be something else. Everyone in my program thinking they are better than everyone else, and everyone in the bschool thinking they are better than everyone else, especially everyone in my program. I’ve really fucking had it.
And really, does grad school help you find a better job? So far, my answer would be no…there are too many grad students (including MBAs, okay) who can’t find a paying summer internship (in New York of all places!), let alone gainful full-time employment. And sometimes, sacked with new debt, they can't land any job that pays higher than their pre-grad school position. Pretty fucked up, I’d say.
I think MBA is useful if you are coming from left field and want to get into finance or consulting (just be aware that you are paying up for the letters M-B-A, and are unlikely to learn more than how to kiss ass during a steady descent into alcoholism). I think med school is useful if you want to be a doctor, likewise law school for lawyers and other more specialized fields. Where you absolutely need the degree to practice. But for everything else, it’s experience that counts. If you are going to stay in your job, for fuck’s sake get your degree paid or at least subsidized. If you are going to stay in your field, rely on your connections first. If you are going to career-switch, as in change to a completely unrelated field, make fucking sure you absolutely need this degree to do it. Because let me tell you, it’s not all happiness and sunshine and ivy-scaled walls. The idea that you can come to grad school and totally revolutionize your life, find yourself for the first time or again, or have the undergraduate experience you never had, is a complete and total myth.
These are the things that I did not recognize before I started grad school, or even applied for it. Now, the question becomes, if I had gone to the foreign service school for undergrad, would I have learned this there? Or is this disillusionment just by-product from growing up putting out trials by fire? Did I really need to decimate my savings to figure this out? Who the fuck knows. The only thing I know is I need to graduate ASAP.
I found an associate position back in banking, same group but different bank. And honestly, I like the people. They’re honest. There’s less bullshit to weed through than in other industries I’ve seen. I can curse and be obscene and make jokes about white people. And that’s okay to them. And that’s fantastic to me. Because really, all I’m looking for now is a place where I can work with funny and smart people, where I can make money to buy an apartment (and pay off my fucking school loans), and be my colorful badass self.
In short, my grad school experience to date has been a rather serpentine, arduous, and costly trek through a desert of ivy in search of the grass on the other side. And I found it. It’s not greener. It’s brown. Just like the fucking grass I had before. Another friend of mine said, “I’m happy with my brown grass,” but from the perspective that yes, there must be greener grass somewhere. My lesson learned here is that grass is brown on every fucking side. So I need to just deal with it. That’s how to properly keep it real.
So thanks, but no thanks. Keep your fucking bananas to yourself.
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