From what i’ve seen many graduate students think they are idiots. They are easily the smartest 10% of the public, they study their asses off and when it comes test time they only know how to do 20-50% of the problems. In some classes its not unnatural for most of the class to get 0-20% correct on a test or for a person to not know how to do a single problem despite all the effort they put into studying. So does graduate school ruin peoples self esteem from what you’ve seen, turning otherwise confident people into shells or do the students just accept that even with all their effort the best they can sometimes hope for is a 40%?
I’ll assume your evidence has no cites right? I was in Grad School in the early 90’s and don’t remember any such instance as you describe. I found my fellow grad students at Arizona State to be quite mature and studious…There were the partiers who tried to scoot by, and the ones who flunked out because the couldn’t handle the pressure, however by in large most of my classmates - at least in the college of psychology - were fairly consistent…
No, from what I have seen it augments one’s self esteem not the other way around. There are of course exceptions to the rule…Especially in this day and age when getting one’s masters could mean difficulty finding a job…I know quite a few bartenders with with thier masters…
I don’t know what you mean by grad students thinking they’re idiots, either. I sure as hell do feel like an idiot, sometimes, but I realize that it’s because I’m in a field where I’m surrounded by incredibly smart people. To be an idiot among them isn’t really such a shameful thing.
At some point along the line, pretty much everybody who goes into graduate school in physics (and probably a lot of other fields) has to adjust to the idea that the tests, and sometimes even the homework, are not written in such a way that a perfect score is expected or attainable. For me this happened 'way back in freshman physics. I got my first exam back, saw that the score was around 50%, and was momentarily sent into shock. Who the hell was I kidding? What made me think that I could be a astronomer? How quickly could I slink out of the classroom, call my mom, and ask her to come take me home? Then the professor put the curve up on the overhead and I saw that I had the second highest score in the class.
You just recalibrate your idea of “success” from getting 100% to just doing fairly well in the class as compared to your peers. After all, if your grade is 23/100, and that’s an A, why would you be unhappy with it?
Another factor is that graduate school is a lot less competitive than when you’re an undergrade, at least in my esperience. Everybody in grad school has been the smartest kid in the class, their whole lives, m’kay? You have to realize early on that it’s not about duking out for the highest score, it’s about learning the material so that you’re prepared for the next course, so you’re ready for your degree exams (where you’re not competing with anyone), and you’re able to do your job when/if you finally get out.
Don’t get me wrong: graduate school can grind your soul down to a nub and make you feel worthless as a human being, but the different grading scale has little to do with it.
PhD in physics here, and 2 years post-doc. My self-confidence is pretty much shot. I feel like I’ve gotten stupider each year. I’m pretty nervous about finding a new job.
And quite a few who can’t spell to save THEIR lives 
:rolleyes:
I went to graduate school at Dartmouth in neuroscience but I dropped out after a massive fight with my adviser that was of epical proportions. I never got the feeling that I wasn’t smart. It was just that my advisor was an emotionally and verbally abusive bitch like I have never encountered before. That shot my self-esteem to hell for a few years much like abusive parents can destroy their children.
(Slight hijack)
Phlosphr, I just wanted to get a clarification:
Are you saying that stopping one’s education at a master’s (as opposed to going on to earn a doctorate) results in fewer job prospects?
Or that proceeding beyond a bachelor’s does so?
I remember a few years ago, people were claiming that their master’s degrees were making them overqualified for some bachelor’s-level jobs. These were mostly engineers and scientists. But I hadn’t heard tell of this in a while, and was wondering if it still exists.
Thanks,
Graduate school has done exactly the opposite for my self esteem and my fellow students. Graduate school has been a gift to me. I’ve been able to bolster my previously shaky confidence, meet great people, and work towards my future. . In my experience, graduate school rewards students who work and study hard so the fairness of the system creates a support network. Maybe the students with diminished confidence in Wesley Clark’s experience are in the wrong grad program?
Well, essentially the answer is yes and no. It is my experience that some people who graduate with masters alone - in some job markets, especially here in New England - have a difficult time finding work right away. Some employers who are hiring new grads would rather pay somone with a bachelors 30k before they would pay someone with a masters 45k for the same position. The fallacy is that having a masters can equate to one wanting more pay for a given position. Where this is true sometimes, othertimes new masters grads are just as happy to have ANY position, let alone one that may pay 45 k to start…Job pool, and increase in grad school recent graduates and geographic location all play a role…
Grad school (in my case, Ph.D. in engineering) expanded my self-esteem to astronomical proportions. Looking for, getting, and working at a nonacademic job brought it back to earth. In academia, you can be dull, repetitive and picayune, but as long as you adhere to the outward trappings of scholarship, you will do just fine. In my experience it does not work that way outside academia.
I doubt the veracity of the numbers used in the OP, but I do think graduate school can be a humbling experience. Because you become more focused on one area of scholarship, you learn how much you really don’t know.
I’d figure grad school doesn’t really have an effect on someone’s self-esteem one way or the other.
Mainly, you need to compare it to the alternative. There are some people who go to grad school and realize they don’t have the horses for even a masters degree. But, they’d probably recognize their limitations through some other outlet anyway so you can’t really say that grad school did it to them.
Even then, that assumes that their self-esteem is tied to their intellect or their degree.
My experience has shown a certain lack of self-esteem in many people who pursue a Ph.D. They might be doing it because a parent or sibling had one, so they have to get one, and they do somehow tie their education to their self-worth. They couldn’t be the guy in the family with “just” a masters. They’re constantly measuring themselves against some difficult standard. Someone like that isn’t going to solve a self-esteem issue by getting the PH.D. though.
As for doing poorly on tests, or failing exams. If those things affect your self-esteem then your self-esteem is already in trouble.
True, but “humbling” shouldnt’ mean “ruin self-esteem” either.
It’s a dumb guy who goes into college/grad school/real world thinking he knows it all.
What grad school is good at teaching you is what your strengths and weaknesses are. If that ends up having an effect on your self-esteem, it’s not grad school’s fault.
Nope, my self-esteem was considerably higher after grad school. If you can handle the work, I don’t see how it wouldn’t be, and I’ve only known a few people who got in and couldn’t handle the work. I didn’t mind doing shit work for my advisor; it’s just part of the game.
When I was contemplating getting my masters in education (I didn’t) we were warned that having a masters already when starting a teaching career would make us less desirable hires for precisely the reason you mentioned - many schools don’t want to pay more for someone brand new with their masters.
People in much of New England are too educated for the current job market, though. There are people I work with (and have supervised!) who have masters and even PHDs who are getting no benefits and making $10 an hour simply because it’s the only job they can find. I’m not sure about other parts of New England, but I know many people who have been turned down flat for retail jobs because “you’ll leave when you find something better” - true, but they’d rather work at something unbefitting their education than have no money…doesn’t sway many employers, however.
People wonder why I haven’t gotten my masters yet, but why would I? I’d be even more in debt, and I’ve seen tens of examples of how getting a higher degree doesn’t lead to making more money.
Grad school helped me out in many areas. A lot of stuff that daunted and cofused me as an undergrad seemed so simple the second time around. Of course working full time while attending grad school is brutal on your sanity.
In my experience (of course, in library school and not a PhD physics program) grad school mostly tests your ability to suffer fools. In my field, however, you need the masters’ degree, so you gotta do it, but that dosen’t mean you have to like it or have a great deal of respect for your fellow students. (Actual professionals with this degree aren’t like that; I have no idea what happens to the fools. I suspect they quit.)
For tests, I suppose it depends on the grading philosophy of your undergrad school. If it was one where a 90% was an A, 80% B etc., and your grad school grades on a curve, I can see that you might get lower scores than ever before. In college 50% class averages were not unknown, and in my first grad school though I got good scores on tests, the class I helped TA in used curves also. The first time I met up with the predefined score range was at my second grad school, where I spent a term as a lecturer. I gave a test that was quite hard, and got a 60% class average, and the class just freaked, until I told them that I was grading on a curve, and that no they weren’t all going to fail.
But I could see a more valid self-esteem problem if someone has trouble with the aggressive give and take expected in the grad schools I went to. It’s not a place where you can be ashamed of expressing an opinion.I rather enjoyed it myself, and it stood me in good stead when I started working at Bell Labs, which had the same culture. This was in Computer Science, I don’t know if Humanities Departments have the same.
Shag, Dartmouth seems really terrible in the sciences. We have a friend who got a PhD in Chemistry there, but only after dropping out for a while from the pressure. His advisor had a grad student just before who committed suicide. My wife was in the Bio department there 27 years ago, her advisor was good, but there was such a lot of politics (the botanists didn’t talk to the rest of the department) that she had to wait for one of the members of her committee to go on Sabbatical to defend her thesis, since the guy wanted her to do another year of experiments. The departments I was in were mutual admiration societies in contrast. Was there still so much politics when you were there?
In what degree program(s)?
C. None of the above.
You are painting the graduate school experience with a very broad brush, even though your experience with graduate students seems to be quite limited. (That kind of logic wouldn’t fly in grad school, btw.) I am in an MA program, I talk with the people in my classes, and at work several people are in grad school and my immediate supervisor recently earned an EdD: I haven’t seen or heard anything to indicate that it is impossible to get standard As or Bs on graduate-level tests and exams.
I did ok with only one class this semester (while working full-time), but I’m registered for two classes next semester and am hoping that I haven’t doomed myself. 
Last year I took 6-credit undergraduate courses each semester, and once I adjusted to being wiped out at the end of each week I was fine, but I know that 6 undergrad credits != 6 graduate credits. Hopefully I’ll still be somewhat coherent at the end of May. 
Most graduate students I’ve met, myself included, don’t think they’re particularly stupid. I had a 4.0 gpa during my masters, which I was pretty proud of. Of course, I don’t use my masters degree, but that’s another thread entirely.
Anyway, in my experience, once you have had an opportunity to work with so many smart people, you realize how little you actually know. I think I’m fairly intelligent about what I DO know, but what I know is unfortunately just the tip of the iceberg. It’s daunting when you think about all the experiences people around you have had that you haven’t, and how many discoveries, new things, ideas, etc., these people have thought up. To me, it’s amazing that people can also take what they do know, apply it to something completely different, and make yet another discovery. It just blows my mind, and I want to learn to do that.
So I don’t think graduate students necessarily think they’re idiots, but I think that, when presented with the vastness of a particular body of knowledge that exists about just one subject, it really hits home how little you really know. I mean, I could spend the rest of my life studying just South American archaeology in just one small geographical region and never learn everything there is to know about. To think that there are other regions, other entire divisions of archaeology (dating, forensics, paleoethnobotany, lithics, etc.), that I will never know about it more than a little humbling.