D.D.S. 1990
still love going to work everyday
Have a JD, loved law school, went for free and owe no student loans, find the work I do now very rewarding excepting very brief periods of extreme aggravation.
MSc in Theoretical Chemistry. Actually a PhD dropout.
Masters in Workplace Safety, long distance. By the time I started on it I’d had so much training on the issue that I was correcting the book.
Graduate Diploma in Translation.
None of them is a direct requirement of my current job, by my current customer is a chemical company and they like that I’m familiar with industrical chemical processes and issues.
Currently trying to perform a career turn (not quite a change) to a path where the Masters in Safety is valued for similar reasons, it indicates an interest in the “industrial” side of things.
DVM. I love what I do.
M.S. in Optic s and Ph.D. in Physics. Very interesting, a lot of fun but a LOT of work It took me longer than it should have for reasons unconnected to my academics and progress. Between these two and my bachelor’s (for which I also had to do a thesis) I did three theses and got involved in a lot of areas I otherwise wouldn’t have, including stroboscopy, biomechanics, ultra high-speed photography, mathematical modeling, various versions of least square regression, particle physics (building big particle detecting devices, operating a Van de Graaf accelerator), crystal growth, electrolysis of solid crystals, additive coloration, lots and lots of spectroscopy, lots of vacuum system building, electronics, plumbing, mechanical construction of a huge amount of my own lab equipment (including a complex gear box), building more lasers than I can recall, rate equations and Laplace transforms, nonlinear optics, operating and repairing just about every type of laser, diamond cutting, and a heckuva lot of writing. Got a half a dozen papers out of it all.
That sounds like fun! Do you need an articling student?
(My JD is marginally more useless than my masters in musicology, IMHO. I think I will try for a PhD in Music, or maybe History, once I’ve gotten my license.)
Had finished most of the Microbiology coursework for an MS and decided I wanted a PhD in Public Health - but from Berkeley, not Pitt.
Moved to California to work a year - worked five doing infectious disease research, published once and taught myself to program… ended up with 30 years in the software industry.
Hello fellow Triton!
I went to UCSD as well for undergrad and stayed for an MS in Mechanical Engineering. I have been working as an engineer ever since. I didn’t learn much getting my Masters that I didn’t already know from my BS other than I hate research. Having the MS might have helped me get a couple of jobs though.
Doctorate in psychology, paid out of pocket (no assistantships), enjoyable/meaningful/worth every cent, use it at work (along with a master’s in writing), love it.
MA in English. I went to private schools for both degrees, and although I had scholarships and grants, I still had to take out some loans to cover the rest. Another 5 years and they’ll be paid off.
I teach college English and love it. I don’t regret any of my coursework, in any discipline, at all.
Ugh - The same can be said for Efficiency Engineering. You’d have thought through all the recession and everything we’d be in high demand, but most of my classmates… we’ve not ended up where we thought we would. Places would rather hire a charming MBA who stumbled through a green belt course than an engineer who might bring real math to the table (I have a touch of bitter on that one… that exact scenario played out at my former workplace, and I was told that I was too negative and I hadn’t brought numbers that backed up the project. My numbers were, in fact, based in reality, and the project imploded quickly for the exact reasons I said it would. Turns out being able to see patterns in data matters when trying to make a profit. In their defense, I have a tendency to under-explain the math, because it’s obvious to me why those numbers make sense, but, still… )
Actuarial fellowship in 1990.
It was very challenging, but satisfying too. It cost me nothing except my time. My employer paid all of the expenses.
It has provided me with the knowledge for a stimulating and very well paid career.
I have an LL.B. (common law).
I use it, as I practise law. My school experience was great, though articling was a drag (but I did learn the practical aspects). I’m glad I got my law degree; I find being a lawyer very rewarding.
BS CompSci and Math. Paid for working on oil rigs and flying (teaching in the school’s aviation department between classes). It took a lot longer than 4 years, but graduated with no debt.
MS Sys Engineering (SMU). Like John Galt, my company paid for the MS in full. Tuition, books, laptop, and all expenses including meals.
Been mainly doing avionics software for the last 25 years, so I’m still in my field of study.
PhD in Geophysics. My undergraduate degree in ChemEng would probably have been enough to get hired on in the O&G industry but my adviser suggested that I get an MS and PhD to increase my chances of not getting laid off ( it was the early 80’s ). My parents had the money to fund much of this and my employer sponsored the remaining work.
PhD in history from a school that likes to style itself as the ‘Princeton of the South’ (as do a number of unis south of the Mason-Dixon Line). Grad school was holy hell – I was in a back-stabbing, political department with nasty fellow grads and professors, awful experience. Had an adviser who hated women and who filched my dissertation research to publish under his own name.
Couldn’t actually work in my field or academics for the first few years after graduation which cost me what little momentum and networking (and the assumption that I was ‘out of the game’ is why my adviser felt that my research was fair game to share with his cronies and to publish himself).
Went back for s PGCert in Museum studies at my old undergrad institution thinking that there would be work there (or at least a leg-up back into academics). Didn’t pan out, but I did end up becoming an adjunct at that uni, and thus trapped in adjunct hell for about 6 or 7 years.
During that time I applied for about 150 academic jobs that fit what I did (at the time, I taught in my side-fields and never in the field in which I did my PhD work), couldn’t even make the short list, as jobs are really scarce in history and highly competitive.
After about 4 years or so of a trans-Atlantic relationship, my partner asked me to move over to the UK with him, so I wrote to all of the unis in a 60 mile radius of his house asking for part-time teaching work. One school asked me to send them my CV.
In the space of a year, the one class they offered to me (at about the rate of $1000 for the semester) has turned into a permanent full time position, I have been promoted to the level that I should have been at in the States (I would have been an associate professor with tenure had I not gotten sidelined/sideswiped by life in the US), I have been placed in charge of a newly created degree pathway in my department (kind of like how you can be an English major with a concentration in journalism, &c). It is recruiting like gangbusters with incoming freshers, and my upper-level classes topped out at their maximum capacity the day registration opened. I am apparently shortlisted for one of the Teacher of the Year award things for 2013-2014.
Even though I was hired on the strength of my subfield, the one that is the new degree pathway (which I have retreated into as my adviser turned me off completely my PhD field), and for the first time I have been able to lecture in my PhD field at this school. Even better, I taught history of rock and roll in the States for a log time, and it’s miles away from my field(s) of study, but I was granted permission to carry on with my research and conference papers as I have a publishing track record and because I tend to get invited to conferences on my subject here and in the UK.
So while grad school was the pits, and the years afterwards really sucked in terms of no support from those who were supposed to be my mentors (and zero support or recognition for my accomplishments from my adjunct uni), a random email landed me the chance for a complete 180 and more or less a renaissance of my interests and abilities. I got so used to having to pay out of pocket for all research and conference travel that it still astonishes me that my current dept forks out money for me to fly all over the place to give papers that range from Roman emperors to the Kinks. 
Also, going from living in Section 8 housing and no means to health insurance in the US (my American uni worked me to death, but juuuust under the number of hours you needed to be fixed term FT, so no benefits at all, unless you count classes three times the size of the ones my FT colleagues were teaching for 3x my wages), rationing food, and living like a starving student into my 40s &c to a house in the south of England, NHS, and wages good enough to upgrade my clapped out car for a 2009 Mini, and London just up t’road, it’s been all right, really.
A paper on the Kinks must have been fun to research. I suppose there might be some similarities between the excesses of the band and those of the Roman emperors. 
Elagabalus! El-la-la-la-la lagabalus! El-la-la-la-la-lagabalus!
PhD in biochemistry in 2001. I never had any intentions of staying in academia. Thing have worked out okay, I have a non-research job with the federal government, but if I had to do things again, I would have chosen a career that allowed me to travel internationally frequently.
MBA from Thunderbird. Not overly useful. Alumni association useful for finding a drinking contact anywhere in the world. Generally mid level folks.