In 2017, when my child went off to college, I decided it was time to look at the Employee Tuition Assistance Program (ETAP) offered at my institution. I’d been at Clemson for 21 years and decided it might be time to get a second degree to expand my options as I got closer to qualifying for retirement. The experience has been all the things: challenging, time-consuming, worthwhile, boring and interesting. If you’re considering taking advantage of this pretty awesome benefit, here’s some advice I have before you start down that path, illustrated with some quick sketches of some things I heard from my professors.
THE ZERO MOMENT OF TRUTH
Before you decide if you want a second degree, you will need to look inward and determine what your goals truly are. You want a purpose for sitting in those classrooms. When I decided I wanted to take advantage of the ETAP program, I reached out to a few friends to say that I felt I needed to do this and to ask what degree program might help me get closer to those goals. One of my friends suggested the MBA as a versatile degree that would complement my design skills. As it happened, the MBA program has a robust program for full-time employees that made it easy for me to get to class without missing regular work hours. In other words, you should find your Zero Moment of Truth before selecting a program.
NAÏVE: WHAT EVIAN IS, SPELLED BACKWARDS
I cannot stress the amount of time it will take to get a second degree. Be honest with yourself about your life; do you really have the time to squeeze in another thing? If you don’t, then wait. You want to get another degree because you wish to better understand the material. In grad school, there’s a lot of material to cover. I’m grateful that I waited until my child left for college because I’ve had more than a few lost weekends trying to learn material that does not come naturally to me. I’ve even had lost weekends on material that does come more easily to me, because reading a 550-page textbook on branding in a summer class takes a lot of time. It’s important to not be naïve about the work you’ll be required to do to absorb the material.
ANY MATH OR STATISTICS CLASS IS ALWAYS GOING TO GET EXPONENTIALLY HARDER OVER TIME
Be strategic about how you take your classes if you have the flexibility to do so. (Some degree programs are more structured, even if you do them part-time. I am not in that situation.) If you take the two classes allowed under the ETAP, make sure they aren’t your toughest classes. Take advantage of summer school to knock out some of those less strenuous courses. Take those hard classes earlier rather than later because they tend to cover material that comes up in other classes and you want to do them while you’re still motivated to be in the program.
YOU’VE GOT HARDER RULES IN BOWLING
Maybe you’re in a program that is based in the liberal arts and your struggle will be the volume of reading and writing required for those degrees. Or maybe, like me, you’re in a completely different program that requires a significant amount of math. The good news: those math-intensive classes look scary, but you won’t be required to do any math by hand. Any graduate-level program is going to use software to solve those problems. For my program, that’s Microsoft Excel. It turns out Excel does some truly amazing things. The hard part isn’t the math; it’s understanding what the problems are solving for and how to set up those problems so you can solve them.
NET IT OUT
When you choose to get a degree in a very different field, you’re going to learn to see the world from a new lens. My undergraduate degree involved a lot of thinking creatively; I threw pots, studied art history and painted. Years of thinking metaphorically have not helped me in business classes. I sat in accounting wondering what on earth the professor meant when he told us to not “net it out” on the test. (He meant to show our work in how we came to the final answer.) And seeing this different way that people view the world is a good thing. I’ve been forced to see things from a new vantage point. I better understand why some decisions are made. According to Natasha Jen in her 99U Talk, Design Thinking Is Bullshit:
Design thinking is about affinity diagrams, alignment, bodystorming, breakthrough solutions, card sorting, co-creation, creating experiences, customer engagement, customer journey, deep design, diary study, digital storytelling, empathy, extreme user, five whys, getting traction, hills, ideation, key performance, indicators, mind maps, playbacks, prototypes, radical innovation, return on investment, reverse card sort, satisfaction system, scale, scenario planning, seducible moments, segments, servicescape, social learning, sponsor users, stakeholders maps, summative testing, the culture of collaboration, the feedback loop, think-aloud protocol, tight-loop projects, and user outcomes.
I’ve heard more of those things in business school than in art school. If designers are practicing true design thinking, they need to have empathy and understand the language their clients speak. We not only need to be able to speak to the marketers but be the marketers. We need to understand the vantage point of the people that control the budgets.
YOU WANT SOMETHING LIKE THIS: CHAOS
I’ve found a lot of group work in my program. Sometimes you get to pick your team, sometimes it gets selected for you. Embrace it. Most people in graduate school do want to contribute, so you are less likely to be doing all the work yourself. But, just like the real world, you’re going to have conflict and struggles in getting a project done. This is a great opportunity to learn to let go. Does your fellow classmate want to design the Powerpoint? And did he do a not-so-great job doing that? Have you seen your professor’s Powerpoint? Relax! You’re not going to learn anything by doing the group’s Powerpoint, so let someone else have the fun. Besides, chances are strong that the group project isn’t going to impact your final grade. Focus on what is the most important thing to get out of the class and try to control that. The real power of being in graduate school are some of the connections you will make. Work on that, let the group project be a little messy and chaotic and work on acing the test instead.
THE TRUTH IS AN ABSOLUTE DEFENSE
Wanna really know your school? Be a student. You’ll get the emails that current students get. You’ll see what being in a classroom really feels like. You’ll better understand the frustration of dealing with advisors and registration systems and classroom management systems in a way you could never understand, even as a parent. Sure, you’ll find those student benefits, like getting Spotify at the student rate (SCORE) but you’ll also learn the truth of what it feels like to try to manage your school’s classroom process. And if you design for admissions like I do, knowing what sorts of questions students have when they are trying to navigate your school’s bureaucracy is going to help you better understand the holes in your communication efforts.
OUR MOTTO: IT DEPENDS
Is graduate school worth it? It depends. I am a mere two classes away from finishing this degree. If I had gotten this degree on my own, it would have cost me about $30,000. Instead, my costs are books, driving costs and the taxes on the benefit (about $5,000 in taxes so far.) Be prepared for your purpose in getting the degree changing from when you started. I’m less than a year away from finishing this degree and I honestly don’t know how I will leverage it. But it’s ok, because even if I stay right where I am, I’m a much better designer for learning new skills, from seeing different perspectives and for pushing myself to tackle material I not only thought I couldn’t do but wouldn’t necessarily find interesting. (Looking at you, Decision Modeling.)
If you’re wondering where this little gem came from, a student whose background was engineering asked my statistics professor when you were running a regression, how would you know when to stop pulling out the outlier data and her response was “It depends.” Honestly? It’s become my go to answer for just about everything.
In the end, if you have the time and interest, it’s a great thing to expand your knowledge whatever your goals are. Good luck if you decide to take the plunge!
Christine Prado is an art director at Clemson University and a member of the UCDA Board. She is just six credit hours away from finishing up her MBA.