It’s been three months and the quarter is basically over, so here are some entirely unsolicited thoughts on being back at school for the first time in several years! It’s definitely been an adjustment. But life is pretty good overall. I certainly can’t complain.
There’s so much more freedom in academic/school life than full-time working life in that I only have, at most, a couple classes a day and most of my time is my own. I guess I technically own all of my time at the moment, since no one is paying me to do anything (for better or worse). Everything is something that I signed up for and that I actually want to do (for the most part). That’s been really nice.
I’ve seen a couple videos on YouTube recently where some recent graduates talk about the emotional challenges of leaving school and joining the workforce outside academia. I don’t really remember exactly how I felt when I first graduated and started my job, but I don’t think I felt quite as bad initially. I do remember being very burnt out of school and generally pretty happy that I had a job that paid me real money. I was also back home in a place where a lot of my friends still were, so I didn’t necessarily feel all that lonely.
That said, I do generally relate quite a bit to those general feelings of aimlessness and lack of meaning in post-grad life. It’s weird—and I certainly don’t think that going back to school is the answer, almost ever—but school does sort of impose this sense of rhythm and direction to life that feels like an important part of being human. You’re always making forward progress in some way and your life is demarcated fairly rigidly (sometimes too rigidly) by that sense of progress and by the seasons: there’s an arc to every class, in the milestones you have to hit, and the breaks that come at regular intervals.
You also really do feel like part of a larger community. For most students, you spend lots of time with your peers, you have similar things to work on and similar struggles, and your vacations are, by default, perfectly aligned. You often live close to your friends and have common places to hang out.
A lot of that ends up being hard to find after graduation. Those kinds of things—having a rhythm and a certain structure to your life, feeling a sense of progress and forward movement, and being part of a community—are things that you have to end up finding or making for yourself.
For the most part though, being employed, especially outside academia, has a lot of upsides. You get a whole new degree of freedom from having your own income, which is usually higher than what you would get in the academic world. Depending on your profession and field, you often have more say in where you live and work. Generally, I think that most of post-grad malaise has nothing to do with school in particular; it’s more about being dropped (rather abruptly) into a new stage of life in which very little of the social and mental structure you’ve built up over the past 20-odd years of school apply anymore. It’s not school that you miss, but rather the routines, built-in sense of purpose, and social community that comes with being in school. Finding your way again has a lot to do with figuring out those things again in a non-school context.
But I don’t really know. I think I definitely did actually miss school itself, particularly the intellectual environment and also the ability to spend most of your time learning interesting things (more or less). For all the industry talk about how a software developer job is exciting because it’s all about continuous learning (!!!), I don’t think that’s actually true, or at least not any more than any other job. To the extent that it is true, the stuff you’re actually learning is usually not particularly interesting (in my view). It’s usually just whatever new thing that’s trendy or arbitrarily hyped up—it’s almost never something that is fundamentally meaningful.
Also, I am back at school so...take this all with a grain of salt.
In hindsight, there were some really, really positive things about taking some time to work in industry before going back to school.
Davis is extremely different from NYC (who would have thought!), but it’s still been quite nice in its own way. There’s so much open space, which I’ve definitely missed in the cities that I’ve lived in. And if I want to be around a bunch of people, downtown Davis is pretty lively most days. Is it as exciting as NYC? Definitely not. But it has its charm. It really does smell like animal poop (cow poop, I guess?) a lot though. People were not lying about that.