OMG CONGRATS!!!!!!!!!!!! SO HAPPY 4 U 🎉🎉🎉💗
Hey! Thank you!! I'm gonna use this as an excuse to ramble and look back at the past year and eight months, so please be patient with me :)
Grad school wasn't really something that I wanted to do myself. My parents pushed me into doing a masters program immediately after undergrad and work started. Their rationale was "once you start earning money you won't want to go back to school again". I work in a field where a masters _really isn't_ necessary, but I was like "okay fine I'll do it".
Moving back home, starting my first full-time job, then starting grad school concurrently a month after that was definitely not easy. I am lucky that I was able to do both grad school and work from home, because otherwise, I would have wasted precious time on commute. It was not fun to be a noob at both work and school. Not to forget how expensive it was. The first few months, I was discouraged that my entire paycheck went to tuition. I fought with my parents and resented that they "heavily encouraged" me to do a masters because of the massive time commitment and cost. Unfortunately, I got no sympathy--just a "drop out then or quit your job". If I tried to vent to my parents about my workload, I got a "what do you want me to do about it. Scold your professor?" From there on, I stopped trying to seek validation or comfort from my parents. I'm not trying to demonize them, but I did have some tough pills to swallow about my relationship with them.
That isn't to say that the entirety of my grad school experience was horrible. I started romanticizing the shit out of my day to day experiences. I made some great friends along the way and really formed a close bond with my cohort. I learnt how to maximize my time, who my real friends are, how to mitigate stress, and how to recharge properly. I also learnt a lot about myself--my work habits, patterns, and motivations. As for the subject material itself, I'd say about 20-30% of my coursework is relevant for my day job, and I did get exposure to some topics. The program is geared towards mid-career folks, not early career folks--so I wish that my classes were more technical. But I'm still young and there are so many resources online, so hey! It's not like I've run out of time to learn the skills I actually want to learn.
Two weeks ago, as I was preparing my final presentation, I thought to myself--was grad school worth it? The answer I came to was a solid no. I think I could have enrolled in a less "prestigious" program, taken my time instead of being forced to fast-track the program, slept more, hung out more with friends, and not paid as much in order to get the same quality of education. Or I could have worked full-time for a bit, and taken a year off to do grad school full-time and enjoy being a student fully before rejoining the workforce. While I do regret committing to such a large, stressful endeavor without my heart being fully in it, I am so glad that it's behind me now, and that I can spend more of my time doing the things that I actually want to do. (Hopefully. I still live at home tho with strict conservative parents, so... I don't always have the freedom of choosing what to do with my free time. Working around that.)
If you've been reading, thanks for making it this far! And to my friends and family and coworkers, thank you all for supporting me in your own ways. Especially my close friends and coworkers! They all showed up for my presentation yesterday and I was so touched, I started crying. Funny story, one of them left class early and ran home to watch my presentation. <3
