

Ask HN: Would graduate school make you more employable or less? - shadesandcolour

I'm coming up on the time in my college career where it's either time to start looking at grad schools to apply to or looking around for jobs. What are your thoughts on the two options?
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carterschonwald
A masters degree in a topic lets you say (in principle) that your knowledge an
a topic area is par with state of the art. A phd lets you say your are able to
(after some time interval of effort) extend the state of the art.

Ultimately it really depends on what you're looking to do. do you have enough
of a preexisting corpus of projects / experience in the what ever you want to
do such that you'll have no difficulty securing work in your area of interest?
Would graduate course work and or research either be an intrinsically valuable
experience for you with respect to your interests or not?

Tldr: only do a graduate degree if you will enjoy the relatively focused work
jointly with how it'll impact your career choices.

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mchannon
You've seen the jobs picture; probably better to roll the device in a year or
two, all else being equal.

That said, we don't know what kind of career or kind of degree you've been
preparing for. Going for an M.A. in oh, say, History, probably you should seek
the job only because you will not see much of a return on the degree. If it's
an M.S./Ph.D in a STEM discipline, you open some doors and you shut a couple
(I know of a few instances where a Ph.D. will not get you hired but a
B.S./M.S. will).

Might as well apply for both until you figure things out. You may get a sweet
deal with only one, and you're no worse off if you have options with both.

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glimcat
It's less about reducing the barrier to jobs than it is about targeting
different jobs.

The two years for an MS is also typically considered to have a great payoff
ratio in terms of both personal and career development, although that's no
guarantee that it's 100% always the best use of the time and resources.

~~~
shadesandcolour
What are the differences in the types of jobs that you can get. Are there more
privileges involved or working on higher level projects?

