Can’t Keep Up With Your Bills? Try Grad School

If your present level of education and experience isn’t making a dent in your universe, it’s time to think up a new strategy.

So, if you want to quit struggling to pay your bills and offer your family a better life, you will need to make more money, and one way to do this is to go to grad school — because it will give you the opportunity to either move up in your industry or go to one that is flourishing.

Why Grad School?

Grad school will do a lot of great things for you. Here are five:

1.  It will help you connect with people who have a progressive attitude about life. Some of the best business opportunities come from fellow students. This is especially true if you go to a prestigious school like Stanford or Harvard.

2.  It will help you to think deeper about important things and develop powerful conceptual tools for research, analysis, and presentation.

3.  It will make you stand out wherever you apply for a job. In the current job market, an undergraduate degree is the new high school diploma. Many firms only hire people with a college education even for entry level jobs. This is because it’s an employer’s market, with more educated people available than jobs for them.

4.  It will change your social circle. Psychologists are confirming the old saw that “birds of a feather flock together.” Numerous studies in the field of social contagion have shown that your level of thinking, income, and success in life is the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Top executives rarely talk about the best way to remove rust from a car fender or where to shop for the lowest prices on clothes; instead, they prefer to talk about the best stocks to buy and emerging market trends that will influence the economy.

5.  It will make you much more competent. It’s not easy to begin and end a complex project, work on something consistently, or meet your end goals, but these are things that you will automatically learn to do as you go through your classes and turn in your assignments.

Pick a Good School

While, of course, any graduate school is better than none, the better your graduate school, the higher your chances of landing your dream job.

Whether you like it or not, mentioning that you went to an Ivy League School will impress future employers much more than if you talk about a school they never heard about before.

However, going to a good school does a lot more than offer prestige. There is a reason why good schools are admired more. They usually have been around longer, usually have better funding and more facilities, and usually attract the best and brightest teachers. They also tend to have a superior curriculum. Good schools have a reputation to keep.

Your approach when applying for grad schools should not be to aim for the tree tops but to shoot for the moon—so, even if you miss, you’ll land in the stars.

7 Steps to Apply for Top Schools

1. Be very clear on your purpose. The clearer your career goal, the more motivated you will be and this is something that the admissions staff will notice. Also make sure that it is a field that you will enjoy. Don’t become a chemical engineer if you don’t love chemistry. So, it’s important to choose your purpose based on an analysis of your own interests and strengths.

2. Research. Research the field you want to be in. Research the best schools for that field. And research ways to trim the bill and possibly even do it do it debt free through scholarships and grants. Sometimes you may think something is more interesting, glamorous, or exciting than it actually happens to be. Research will help you shed your illusions.

3. Really work hard on your Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) preparation. You need to be in the 600s to get into a good school, and if you want to get into an Ivy League school, aim to be in the 700s. Based on every person’s test taking ability and study habits its hard to figure out how long to study for GRE, but it’s hard to imagine that studying longer and harder won’t increase your ability to score high.

4. Get the best letters of recommendation that you can get your hands on. The best letters are from people who are at the top of your current field and the worst letters are from your church minister and your family members.

5. Write an excellent sample. Many graduate schools ask for a writing sample, and this is often used to make the first cut in the admission process.

Here are some things that a good sample should have:

·  It should have a good topic, a sound methodology, and a logical argument. It should show your readiness to take on graduate-level studies.

·  It should stick to the suggested length. Neither do more nor less. If you are asked for a 25-page paper, don’t turn in a 75-page paper, or, worse still, a 10-page paper. Either way, you will fail to impress.

6. Create a dynamic personal statement. Your personal statement should focus on the things you’d like to pursue in graduate school. It should show evidence that you have the necessary smarts to follow through on your projects. It should not be an intellectual strategy, an autobiography, an opinionated editorial, or a testimony of your commitment to excellence.

7. Be realistic. Grad school is a long process, requires consistent hard work, and is expensive. So make sure that it is something that you really, really want to do.

Conclusion

Graduate school has the power to transform your life. It will allow you to move up many rungs in your industry — or, if you’re in an industry that you accidentally wandered into many years ago, it will give you the opportunity to change tracks, earn much more, and enjoy a higher quality of life.