My daughter graduated in December 2023. She’s unsure what to do for a job, and she might return to get her master's. Do you have any advice I could give her to help her make decisions? Thank you!
My mom tells me that lots of parents think it’s a sign of weakness or incompetence for a parent to present themselves as not knowing the answer. So it might seem counterintuitive or even uncomfortable to take a stance of not having strong parental authoritative advice.
But I’m not my mom—my own kids know that, along with my irresistibly profound wisdom, I have experiences that may have no relevance to them, including blind spots, occasional tone deafness, and intermittent myopia. I would have no credibility if I claimed I knew exactly what they should do.
So, I encourage you to get comfortable with feeling just as lost as your recent graduate is.
If you haven’t already asked her a zillion questions, here are a few I’d be curious about:
If you’ve already asked her a zillion questions in an effort to help her articulate and brainstorm possibilities, but after talking through her ideas, she’s still wandering, here’s what I would try to fold into my thinking.
A first job after college can be, literally, anything.
It doesn’t have to be a professional springboard; it can simply be a money-generating glide through time while she lives an adult life, has experiences, develops work skills, and enjoys the awesome satisfaction of earning money.
All of our human experiences, especially after college when the structure of school fades away and we feel like we’ve fallen off a cliff, are opportunities to notice what we like and what we don’t like. The more experiences we have, the more we can sift and sort through them to discover where we want to go next.
My recommendation for getting a master’s is to start with one important question: Why?
Why do you want to get a master’s degree in X field? I think it’s important to pursue graduate work when something very specific calls to her, and the education she will receive and the experience she'll have in graduate school feel like the best next step in moving her toward something she can describe. It can be just fine to go to grad school as an I-don’t-know-what-to-do-next-so-I’ll-remain-a-student for a couple more years, but most master’s degrees aren’t funded, so it’s an expensive way to go.
Either way — getting a master’s or working at a job — she will be in the world, learning to be a person in the world. She’ll meet and relate to people who are different from who she is. And she will learn to be herself. No matter what she does, she can’t go wrong.
Yours,
