Two of USM’s graduate school offices will host a workshop day and a graduate school information day in response to the growing requirements for master’s degrees and other even higher education.
“So You Want To Go To Graduate School” is a workshop scheduled for Oct. 3 that will attempt to answer students questions about the need for graduate education in their fields, how to prepare for testing and how to finance their programs. Mary Ann Benson, assistant director of Career Services and Professional Life Development, and Lisa Sweet, administrative manager of the office of Graduate Studies/Graduate Admissions, will lead the question-and-answer formatted workshop. The workshop will be in Room 44 of Payson Smith Hall on the Portland campus from 1:30 p.m. to 3 p.m.
“It’s really designed to be just a ‘how-to’ for any level,” said Benson, “not just for a student who is a senior-but anyone who potentially has grad school on the radar for next year, five years from now, whenever.It’ll be more of a conversation rather than a lecture.”
“I think a lot of our students,” she continued, “particularly if they’re first-generation college students, they don’t have any experience with it. They hear the term ‘grad school’ but it doesn’t really mean anything to them.”
Misconceptions about graduate school are a major concern for Benson. “There’s a sense that it’s just an extension of undergraduate (programs),” she said, “that you can only get a doctorate where there are all kinds of levels, you can do master’s (degrees) and certificate programs-there’s a lot of misconception we want to eliminate with this.
“We also want to get at appropriate reasons and inappropriate reasons why people go to graduate school” said Benson. “I see a lot of students who tell me they’re going to graduate school because they don’t want to look for a job and that’s not a good reason.because graduate school requires a focus. There’s no such thing as an undeclared major in graduate school, you really have to have a very specific line of study in mind to pursue it.”
Among the topics Benson and Sweet hope to address are how to find and research schools, how to pay for them, the admissions process, tests like the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and personal statements.
“The personal statement piece is very big. It is key,” Benson said. “Most graduate programs require it. It’s sort of a stepped-up version of what people wrote for their undergrad essay.a personal statement is kind of the next level of intensity up because it’s more focused, the question is usually very related to the program they’re applying to and they’re really looking for evidence that this is a well thought-out application.”
The second of the graduate school information sessions is scheduled for Oct. 10 at the Woodbury Campus Center cafeteria from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., and will have a “college fair-type atmosphere,” said Benson. Over 30 schools will have representatives present, as well as a graduate school preparation program called Kaplan.
For Benson, the benefits of education past the bachelor’s level far outweigh the extra time and work associated with it. “It’s becoming more and more a necessity,” she said. “There’s some fields where it’s required. Some fields you have to do it. If you want to be a lawyer, you go to law school.My daughter is a science major, she wants to be a lab researcher, she’s got to get her PhD.
“For a lot of fields an undergraduate degree just isn’t enough.”