How does graduate school work exactly and how is it different from undergrad? My knowledge is limited to this.
Grad school is generally divided into a masters & Doctorate (there are also professional degrees, and I don’t know much about them either). The Masters requires about 24 credit hours of graduate classes and a thesis and takes 1-2 years. The Doctorate requires closer to 50 hours of classes and a dissertation and takes 5 years or so.
So, what are graduate classes like compared to undergraduate? I was looking up info on a M.S. in chemistry and they said it would take about 2 years full time, which doesn’t make sense as it was a thesis and 24 credit hours of classes. Are the classes so hard and the amount of lab time and thesis writing to intense that you can only do 6 credit hours of classes a semester on average?
I also know that in undergrad you need a C or C- to pass but in grad classes you usually need a B or B- to pass.
What about ‘non-thesis M.S. degrees’ I have heard of? Are these taken seriously, and do colleges just give more grad school classes to make up for the lost effort put into a thesis?
What is the schedule of a grad student like? Spend 8 hours a week in class, 15 hours studying/homework, and 15 hours working on your thesis?
I think you also have to take a test, the GRE to get into graduate school. is that for all graduate schools?
Frankly, I thought grad school was in fact much easier than undergrad, but that might be just me. I was an English major in UG and a linguistics major in GR and I had about double the work for my BA than MA.
A lot of it depends on the school and the major, so no one can really answer all of your questions. As for me, in G, I spent about 3 hours a day in class, one hour teaching (part of my funding) and maybe one more hour prepping for teaching. As for out-of-class work, I spent maybe 30 minutes a day doing reading and maybe one hour per week writing papers. (See, as an English undergrad I was reading 2-3 novels and writing at least one big paper per week, so it was nothing for me in grad school to keep up with the work.) I mostly spent a lot of time playing ultimate frisbee and spending time with my first real boyfriend (an asshole, but that’s another story!)
Other students, especially ones who had not gone straight from undergrad to grad, would spend hours and hours each day on reading, etc. (It should be noted that I was one of the few in my class not to graduate with a perfect 4.0, but I was quite happy with a 3.7 and a life.) Oh, and my program was supposed to have a thesis but they dropped it at the last minute and we just had to submit a 30 or so page paper of secondary research. No biggie.
There were a few classes that I found to be hard, but on the whole it was the easiest 2 years of my life (though as I said, I am strange that way!) The best way to decide is to research the schools and ask for a schedule of classes that the current students follow. That should give you an idea of what your time will be like. Will you be working your way through school? Add those hours in. Will you be doing a teaching assistantship? Find out how many hours a week that is expected to take. As for studying time, that’s hard to know. If you have good study skills and go to your classes regularly, you might not need to study as much as you think you’ll need to.
I don’t know if this is that helpful for you; if I think of anything else I will let you know.
Graduate and post-graduate school differ greatly depending if one is in Arts or Science.
Most scientists working at a M.Sc. or Ph.D. (or post-doc) level take very few classes-- Maybe two, tops, depending on which university they study at. However, most of their time is spent in a laboratory doing research. I know dozens of grads and post-docs, and not one of them spends less than 70 hours a week working.
In essence, doing grad work means you’re not in school, you just happen to be working *at * school.
Grad schools vary widely, but this was more or less my experience doing an M.A. in the immensely practical field of Russian & East European Studies:
30 semester hours of required classes with a concentration in one of four areas (arts & literature, sociology, history, or politics & economics: I did the last of these), plus writing/defending an interdisciplinary thesis and passing a foreign language proficiency exam. Most people were at least semi-fluent in their chosen language going in, but any additional classes you took to get up to snuff didn’t count toward the 30 semester hours. The exam was pretty tough: you had to do a sight translation of a text passage chosen to relate to your specialization given 15 minutes and a dictionary to prep. Then you had to discuss your thesis topic in a reasonably fluent manner (meaning some small grammar mistakes are OK, but you have to be able to understand and participate in native-level discussion, including technical vocabulary, in your field) with an oral exam committee.
Classes are much, much more intensive in grad school than in undergrad. The rule of thumb we got was that in undergrad you should expect 2 hours of work outside class, but for grad school the ration is more like 4:1. Expect lots of reading, and expect to have the professor assume you have read and digested all relevant material on the subject before you show up for lecture. Lecture isn’t review of the reading; it’s a much higher-level discussion and analysis. Minimum full-time course load was 8 semester hours in my program, but most people did 12. Add on 48 hours of homework and reading, and maybe a part-time job or assistantship (plus many grad students have families), and you can see how demanding your life gets.
In my program I think you needed a B average to graduate. But admission was so competitive that anyone who was accepted was capable of doing much better than that. If you weren’t averaging at least a B+, it was understood that you needed to work and bring your performance up a notch.
Depends greatly on the field of study. The M.A. program in Russian history (I knew most of these guys; we usually had some overlap in courses) at my university was very competitive and highly regarded, and it didn’t require a thesis for graduation. Of course, history students ended up writing so many really long seminar papers that a thesis would really have been duplicative. Plus most of them were going to end up going for a Ph.D. and writing dissertations anyway.
See above. And keep in mind that you don’t start working on your thesis from Day 1 of grad school. If you’re smart, you write your term papers on subjects related to what you think your thesis will be about, so you can use chunks of them later on with minimal reworking. Later on, you will spend a greater proportion of your time on your thesis; some programs let end-stage grad students sign up for a course called “thesis research” or something similar as part of their regular schedule. It varies a lot.
Most grad programs in the liberal arts and sciences have you take the GRE general exam, and some may have you take additional sections as well (math for science and technical students, for example). Professional schools do things differently…the LSAT for law school, the GMAT for MBA programs, etc.
In many ways the work is much harder and more intesne, but the grading is easier. Most grad professors I have met have never given anyone less than a b+. There is less of a distinct grading scale. By which I mean rather than the undergrad way of like a test with 25 questions, converted with a percent, and then average with all the other tests to give a grade. In grad it’s usually more geared toward demonstrating that you understood the subject, and put appropriate effort into your work. And since the vast majority of grad students make a conscious choice to want to be there they all do the approprate amount of work, and everybody gets an A.
Hehe I see you wern’t in the Engineering or CS areas. In those I’d say 5:1 undergrad, 10:1 grad.
P.S. And I still havent started on my freaking Thesis.
I’ll agree with what everyone else has said, and add something about the “non-thesis” Master’s. That’s what I did, though mine was in English Lit, not in the sciences. IIRC, you had a choice of 27 credit hours plus a thesis, or 33 credit hours plus comprehensive exams; I took the latter.
The comps were extremely intense; I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re a good test-taker. Basically, a few weeks before the comps you turned in copies of all the syllabi for all the courses you’d taken in grad school, and the committee drew up four questions based on what you’d been studying.
So you had four hours to answer these four questions. One of mine was something like, “Describe the history of the English-language novel. Discuss narrative technique, characterization, psychological influence, authorial intent, readership, and any other relevant issues. Be specific.”
One question involved choosing a work and discussing it from at least four different critical perspectives. One involved being presented with a fairly obscure poem they were pretty sure you’d never seen before and being told to analyze it in terms of form, historical influence, and so on (my poem was “Shiloh” by Herman Melville).
We took the test in a computer lab, thank heaven, so we could type our answers out instead of writing them by hand. I typed 22 pages in four hours. Actually three hours and 45 minutes. But I got a “high pass” on it, along with a mostly worthless Master’s degree.
I thought grad school was both easier and more fun than undergrad, overall, in large part because I did a PhD program (physics), not a Master’s. The best part of grad school for me was having some time to study problems on a longer timescale than just a semester or two. Also, I was a pretty lazy grad student, in that I rarely worked evenings and weekends.
Here’s how grad school worked for me:
year 1: take 3 classes/semester and work as a teaching assistant roughly 20 hours/week. Lots of work, but grading was very forgiving which relieved a lot of stress (although it took us a semester or two to realize this).
year 2: take classes (1-2/semester), do research. Change research advisors at the end of year 2, once I realized that I don’t like doing experimental physics.
years 3-6: do research, sometimes taking one class/semester. These classes were not required at all, but simply ones I found interesting. My advisor had enough grant money to pay me to do research, while some of my friends had to teach occasionally to earn their stipends.
Man, now I sort of miss grad school. Grad school was fun! (The best part was the social aspects, really, although the relaxed research pace was really nice too.)
What I told my kids thru-out their lives (which they doubted totally) was: Grade shcool is great, Middle school sucks, High school is ok if your involved but sucks if your not, college is way better than high school in either case, and Grad is so much fun they have to kick you out after ten years so you don’t hang around forever. Now that they are both in Grad school they finally agree (yeah Mom’s right again.)
Now down to specifics.
Courses vs thesis for MS: Depends on what you want. Are you going to do a PhD? If so blow on by with courses and just try to get into the PhD program. If you don’t get into the PhD program they usually give you a Masters as a consolation prize.
Is it harder than undergrad? Not at all, just totally different. On my road to a PhD I took one semester with 3 classes, due to the fellowship I had. The rest of the time I took only two. This allows you to really learn the material better than in UG when you are taking 5 - 6 classes a semester. The rest of the time you are in the lab or the library, way fun if your in the right field for you. If you dread the lab and libe duty you may be in the wrong field.
Taking the courses only route you can get an MS, in Engineering at least, in as little as one year and many do this. This is a very different thing then mentioned in (2) above. If you choose to do this you are essentially taking a 5th year of undergrad. IMHO you don’t get the “grad school” experience with this method. But for some it works well and is all they want.
I got an M.A. in Public History. It was 36 hours of course work, and instead of a thesis, a fairly long internship at a museum, archive, historic site or the like.
Undergrad was a breeze; grad school kicked my ass. The courses were much more intense. As an undergrad, we were expected to write 10-12 page papers for each class. As a grad student, the expectation was that your stuff was 25-30 pages (which if you’re taking 3 classes a semester means a lot of research and a lot of writing). While a B in grad school was a passing grade, it was not an acceptable grade, at least in the eyes of my advisor.
The stress and comparative workload also has to do with what else is going on in your life. Since grad students tend to be older than undergrads, many of them have families and, at least in my program, lots of us had full-time jobs as well. I worked about 30 hours a week while going to school full-time.
It depends upon what sort of graduate track you’re on, of course, but most graduate courses that I’ve had have been a lot more specific than undergrad courses. For example, as an undergrad I took both graduate and undergraduate courses in archaeology because I was planning to go straight into my PhD (didn’t happen - I ended up with an MA in Linguistics instead, but that’s another story). In my undergrad archaeology courses, I took classes like “South American Archaeology” and “Ethnobotany.” My graduate courses were more along the lines of “Paleoethnobotany among the Nazca Indians” and “Prehistory of the Illinois Hopewell Culture” and “Lithic dating techniques: an overview of electron spin resonance.” Also, for arts & sciences anyway, you have to write a hell of a lot more, and if you’re going to be successful later on, some universities require that you publish a certain quantity of papers, books or reports per quarter or per year and that you do a certain amount of actual fieldwork and labwork per year. Oh, yeah, and for archaeology, you have take a lot of advanced statistics classes for graduate study, and also have to understand advanced chemistry and physics, depending upon whether you’re going into forensics. Even if you’re not, it’s strongly encouraged.
Grad school is totally different from undergrad, so it’s really hard to compare.
Courses are different. Professors have higher expectations. Your courses tend to be smaller and therefore participation is a bigger part of your grade. Expect more seminar courses where the professor doesn’t really lecture but hands you a list of journal articles to read and discuss each week. Expect more term papers that require *good[/i writing. Also expect to find courses that are taught by brilliant, world-reknown professors who can’t teach for squat. Grad courses are reserved for instructors who cannot teach very well because most of the learning is independent anyway.
Grading tends to be easier, though. Getting a C in grad school is like failing, so professors are kinder in their evaluations. I do know of a couple of people who failed a course with an F, though, so it does happen.
If you’re a TA and doing a thesis, expect to only be able to fit in 2 courses a semester.
It’s easy to jump in thinking its an extension of undergrad, but it isn’t. In undergrad, you could blow the two hours you had between classes in the dorm, surfing the net or sleeping. In grad school, it’s different. If you’re not sitting in class, you’re setting up lab for general chemistry. If you’re not doing that, you’re doing an experiment. If you’re not doing that, you’re grading papers or doing library research or sitting in a colloquium or meeting with a student in one of your sections. If you go home after class, somebody is going to be looking for your ass. It’s more like having a job than being a student, IMHO.
All of the above applies if you’re in a Ph.D program, and maybe even a Master’s. But not a non-thesis Master’s. Most of the non-thesis Master’s people I know are biding time while they wait for med school acceptances. I know some institutions distinguish between a thesis and non-thesis Master’s, but I don’t know if most employers are that persnickity. Research does count as experience, though. And of course, a thesis student has more funding opportunities at their avail than one who is just taking classes.
I’m actually just finishing up this semester, finally, assuming that my advisor ever gets around to reading the dissertation that’s been sitting on his desk for a month now. So bear in mind that my opinions are probably a bit shaded right now by the relief of finally being done. I can’t speak directly to chemistry, since I’m in chemical physics, but I work with a lot of chemists, so I have some idea of what they go through.
Depends on the class, really. I didn’t think they were that much harder, in general. The problems assigned were often quite a bit harder but quite a bit fewer in number, so it all worked out. I have never had a class where we were supposed to write a term paper or where we were expected to read papers and discuss them, but in something less heavily math oriented than physics, such classes are more common. I’d actually say that most of the teachers I had were as good as my undergrad professors, but some of them were utterly inept. That might be out of line with monstro’s experience because the student:faculty ratio in physics here is probably no higher than 3:1 or so.
On average, most chemists I know only take 1 or 2 classes a semester, and as monstro says, if you have to teach on top of those 2 classes you’re already running pretty low on time for research.
My rule of thumb was that for every credit hour I had in classes, I spent one hour in the class room and 3 or 4 hours on homework. But that really fluctuated from class to class: some classes had no homework at all, and some classes had problems which might take all day to solve.
I don’t normally work weekends but often work pretty late, so I probably work something like 55 hours/week on average. Some weeks I’m lucky if I can manage to put in 40 hours of solid work; some weeks I’m up closer to 70 or so. It all depends on how enthused I am at the moment, and how much time I’m wasting on the internet…
Undergrad was an ordeal to get through, while grad school was something I wished would never end. I was much more stressed as an undergrad because I felt that I had less control over my fate than I did in grad school. I have a Ph.D. in biochem and my grad school career was as follows:
1st year: Each quarter we took one class and did a rotation in a professor’s lab. The classes were tag-team taught by several different profs. The material was much more in-depth than undergrad, but it seemed pretty easy to get “A” grades. By the end of the first year, you were to have decided which of the labs you were to do your thesis work in. We also took a long-ass written qualifying exam.
2nd year: Developed and began thesis project. Required to attend a weekly seminar class (with no complaints as the professor brought beer ). At the end of the 2nd year were oral exams: first, a presentation of your preliminary and planned thesis work and second, a presentation of a research project totally unrelated to your thesis. Possibly the most stressful part of grad school…once you survive orals it seems all downhill from there.
Year 3 to 5+: Slave away in the lab 12 hours a day, 6 to 7 days a week. The time goes quickly if your labmates are cool (as mine were), your advisor is the best in the universe ( as mine was) and your experiments give interesting results (which they did). If the lab has money, you may get to travel and present your work at international meetings. If your work generates worthy results, you will write papers to be published. I spent the last three months writing my dissertation. The oral defense of my work was a piece of cake as I’d presented my work so many times over the preceeding years I could’ve done it in my sleep. Plus, most advisors won’t let you write your dissertation and defend it until you are absolutely ready to.
Overall, the classwork required of grad school seemed really trivial. And once you’re through with the required courses, much of the day-to-day activities are much more like working at a job than going to school…working at the lab bench as crappily-paid grad student ain’t much different than working at the lab bench as a reasonably-paid career lab-tech.
I worked on a Master’s in economics at the school where I did my undergrad, a mid-sized, mid-west, teaching university. The grad classes were quite different. They wen’t much more quickly–in fact, I recall thinking to myself how nice it was to finally have a class going at the speed my brain operates at. The professors were cooler, more friendly, and gave you more lee-way. Some people were really worried about their grades at mid-term-ish time, and I recall one professor saying over and over, “Don’t worry about that, this is graduate school.” They didn’t listen and continued to fret, but he was right. You can fail a class, but don’t worry about not doing as well as you think you should during the semester.
The thing to remember is that you’ve been vetted by getting your B.S. and getting into the school. They care about you more, and you are treated with more respect. It is much more professional.
Later I went to another school to work on a Ph.D. Unfortunately, I failed to pass one of my qualifying exams and got a terminal master’s (I didn’t finish my M.S. at the other school just in case of that–good advice from a prof that I did follow). There the difference was even more marked. The feeling in class was very relaxed. One prof even graded our quizzes with smiley or frownie faces. If a bunch of students couldn’t get a homework problem, they went to the office and asked to have it taken off the assignment, and the prof often agreed. There you are treated as even more of an equal and in some sense you are much closer to being a co-worker than purely a student. They’re trying to find people who they can work with to publish papers and do research. You can still flunk out, even before critical points like qualifying exams and such, but they have much more faith & investment in you at that stage of the game.
This is especially true if you did your undergrad at a research university. Instead of being an annoyance to be tolerated while they try to publish papers, your importance is much greater and the respect you get is much greater.
I loved graduate school. I would recommend it very strongly. If you can get funding as a grad. ass., then definately go for it. The classes are more interesting and fun. The people are more interesting and fun. And you will be actually starting to learn the subject matter instead of Lie To Children. As an undergraduate, and even as a master’s student, I really had no idea what the basic models of economics were really all about, how they were built, and why the did/didn’t work.
I’ll pass on a bit of advice that I was given: When choosing graduate shcools, you don’t go where they don’t pay you.
The main difference I found in grad school (engineering) was that the professers did not “teach” as much as “guide”.
For example, in a class about advanced computer simulation the prof gave out a list of refrence materials that could be found in the library and a list of topics we would cover. Each week we were expected to do research and become somwhat knowlegable on the topic BEFORE class and come prepared to discus what we found and raise questions. We were required to pick a research topic and related project to explore that topic (I simulated a manufacturing facility to explore variance reduction techniques).
We were not spoon fed the information - the overall goal seemed to be to get us to “outgrow” the professors/university. I actually had one professor say that in the end we should not need professors anymore. We should be able to do our own research and continue to independently build on what we learned in order to publish and make real contributions to our chosen field.
Here’s a point I believe is important, and which it looks like no one has mentioned yet, on the topic of getting into grad school:
Going from high school to undergraduate college is not at all analagous to going from college to grad school.
I never felt that I needed a career plan in college, because I just blithely assumed that if I couldn’t think of anything else I’d simply go on to grad school in whatever field I’d major in and then become a professor in that field. No sweat, right?
If you’ve gone to a decent high school, you WILL get into a decent college. All I had to do in order to get into my Big State U was fill out a form. Name, DOB, SSN, etc. My high school attached a copy of my transcript, and a few weeks later I got a letter from State U saying I’d been accepted. I actually wound up attending a liberal arts college that was more selective than the State U, but getting into that institution wasn’t noticeably more difficult. They did strongly recommend an interview, and I’m sure I came across during the interview as someone who was genuinely interested in learning, and so I got in. Pretty painless. It was almost as though we were shepherded through the process, since high school more or less automatically made us qualified for college, without us worrying too much about choosing classes.
Well, you can’t assume that getting into grad school is the same way. You don’t just fill out a form and get accepted to your State U’s grad school. You really have to come across as being a serious scholar. Grad schools may require certain courses as pre-requisites which you haven’t taken despite having majored in the discipline. I wound up majoring in music, all along assuming that successful completion of BA in music = admission to music grad school. I procured a few grad school applications during my last semester of college, and I was overwhelmed. Music theory programs required classes in couterpoint, which I hadn’t taken; music history programs required submission of a 20-page research paper, which I had never had to do for any class. (Some even required the ability to sight-read an orchestral score at the piano. I was a piano major, and I can’t do that!) I was shocked to find that I wasn’t qualified, that, unlike my experience getting into college, I wasn’t simply going to fill out a form and be accepted.
If you’re in undergrad and you think you might be interested in grad school, it would behoove you to sit down with your advisor and make sure you’re on track for it. A BA/BS in a certain major doesn’t automatically qualify you for grad school as a high school diploma automatically qualifies you for college.
I thought grading papers was an interesting experience. When I was a TA the instructor had me pre-grade the papers, and I didn’t know how to go about it except in a very general sense.
I ended up classifying them according to my first impression of the grades they merited, putting them on the floor before me in piles for ‘A’, ‘B’,‘C’, and ‘D’. Then I reviewed each pile a couple times, weeding out the papers that didn’t seem to belong in it and deserved a different grade. And when it was all done the instructor agreed with most of them.
Ahhh, yes… I forgot about the joys of being a TA, or rather, blocked the experience out of my memory. In my department, the grad students TA’d for a biochem techniques lab that the med students had to take. It was fun lording over the fate of a group of those type-A personalities that annoyed the hell out of you in college. But their incompetence scared the shiat out of me too. After doing that stint, I swore that if I were ever wheeled into an emergency room and one of those med students were my doc, I’d pick up my entrails and flee. All the time, my fellow TAs and I would shake our heads and wonder “how’d this schmuck get into med school, especially ours?” (and this was one of the med schools that is consistently ranked in the top 10 in the U.S.). As you can see, it’s real easy to gain a superiority complex as a grad student TA.
If you need to do a thesis with your Master’s or are planning/hoping for a PhD, the most important decision you will make is who your advisor will be. The right advisor can make or break your experience. My experience is in Chemical Engineering. For reasons I will not explain here, I ended up leaving after two years with no Master’s degree. I had struggled through the neccessary course work but been unable to accomplish the research needed for the thesis. My school did not have a non-thesis Master’s degree availible in Chem E, and I did poorly enough I’m not sure I could have survived enough more courses to get a master’s. Part of the reason I did so poorly in my classes was that I just didn’t have the math. I can do Calculus, but LaPlace transforms make me buggy. The other thing which got to me was difficult math integrated into all my other coursework and a strong dose of theoretical stuff mixed in as well.
On the other hand, I enjoyed interacting with graduate students from other programs in my free time. The expectations with respect to what being a Teaching Assistant meant and the types of research done vary a lot by discipline. Still, though I rolled my eyes at the time, the most important choice is which professor will be your advisor. You need a good match of personality and styles. This can be hard for the average 23 year old to determine.
). At the end of the 2nd year were oral exams: first, a presentation of your preliminary and planned thesis work and second, a presentation of a research project totally unrelated to your thesis. Possibly the most stressful part of grad school…once you survive orals it seems all downhill from there.