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Originally Posted by lucifer_sam
I am, however, heavily interested in my field of choice and I'm not using this as a cop-out to stay in school (which is why I want to go somewhere west).
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lucifer_sam
It's a solid piece of advice, but my advisor told me that relatively few people who get work experience following college ever go back for their masters. And its definitely believable; once you get entrenched in work habits and lifestyles it becomes difficult to separate yourself from that and make the transition back to school. It took my dad ten years to get his masters after he left school for a while and his was an integrated BS/MS program.
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Janszoon makes good points about how in the field of engineering, industry work before graduate school may be the norm and not having an M.S. may prevent you from being considered "overqualified," but after reading everything you wrote I would, if I were in your situation, go to grad school now while you can. Reasons:
(1) You are heavily interested in your field, so you would probably love graduate school.
(2) It sounds like your graduate programs of choice would actually pay you. Since I've seen the volatile funding climate first hand, when I see money available for a student, I say go for it while it is there. You could see if the program allows you to apply, get accepted, and defer for one year to do an internship in industry before beginning grad school.
(3) Like you say, you are in a life position right now to handle the time commitment of graduate school (contrasted with your dad's situation). If engineering is anything like molecular biology, while I was getting my masters the work ruled my life: experiments sometimes get done at odd hours, for example. I have many memories of 3 a.m. experiments because there was no way to time them into daylight hours. As I get older, staying up later and sacrificing my life and time for something that is uncomfortable for me to do becomes much harder.
Plus, if you get married and have a child, going back to school becomes *very* difficult.
(4) Are industry jobs that would consider someone who has an M.S. overqualified actually jobs you'd want to do for your career, anyway? (I know when it comes to getting a job, getting *any* job can be the main priority, but still, it is nice to find work you actually like.)
A good Masters program should give you hands-on experience as well as theoretical knowledge, so hopefully industry appreciates people with an M.S...though industry probably just tries to get workers for as little of money as possible, and plans to teach them what they need to know on the job.
(5) Even if you do your M.S. and find you don't want to do engineering for a living, at least you'll have the M.S. and will have enjoyed yourself getting it. If you work for 3 years instead, and find out you don't like engineering as a career, then you'll be back to square one, facing grad school decisions...or perhaps being in a situation where going back to grad school would be difficult.