Overheard conversation

Sitting down to dinner recently in a restraurant after some successful Christmas shopping, I overheard a conversation between a graduand and his parents at the table next to us. As parents have a wont to do, they were asking their son what he was planning on doing now that the treadmill of standard higher education had come to an end.

His options made for interesting eaves-dropping and though I doubt very much he actually knew what he wanted to do, going on to study for a postgraduate degree was certainly one of the options.

For the purposes of this diary, I shall now only briefly discuss one of this person's statements concerning the possibility of starting a postgraduate degree and will come to the other a little later.

There were two main concerns about postgraduate study: the first, he said, was whether it was the correct career move in the long-run, and whether he might just be better off moving straight on into a job (this being inextricably linked with the point i shall discuss briefly later); the second point was that he didn't know if he was good enough to study at a postgraduate level.

This may sound a little strange, but there really is no need to worry whether you are clever enough to undertake a postgraduate degree, the reason for which is simple: the admissions process, which includes interviews and funding applications, will soon tell you if you are good enough. The depth to which departments investigate potential postgraduate students far exceeds that to which they perform for undergraduates. No supervisor wants to be "lumbered" with a below-standard student and hence will make it perfectly clear whether or not they think a student is clever enough to study at a postgraduate level. I suppose the main reason for this is money: if a department has a set number of grants to allocate per year, they will want to ensure they have the best students taking up those grant. Thus, the filtering process that determines who becomes a part of the department's research should determine whether they think a student is clever enough to be there in the first place.

The other consideration this person highlighted, as mentioned earlier, was whether or not he actually wanted to do a postgraduate degree or was maybe just "putting-off" working full-time. I would suggest that if he did undertake a postgraduate degree for that reason, he would last less than a year.