How to Grad & Beyond with Betul

When you are fresh out of college or grad school, there is an excitement that surrounds you: new start, big ideals, huge goals. Soon, a realization hits that life often moves much slower than our ideals and goals. Not only that, sometimes these ideals and goals change a little, or even completely. In other words, life rarely moves exactly in the way we plan.

When I graduated college, my plan was to finish my Master’s in two years, get into a PhD program immediately after and finish it in five years max, then become a professor at a university right after PhD. In reality, none of these steps went as planned: Master’s took three years, PhD seven years and I didn’t even consider being a professor at the end of my PhD but rather moved to a different field: tech.

Why didn’t my plan get manifested as is? First, degrees took longer to complete, which I realized was the norm for the majority of grad students in my field. But I didn’t know this when I was making my plan in the first place and I was too idealistic to consider potential delays. Second, the job market was changing swiftly throughout the course of my PhD: Not only did academic jobs become harder and harder to get due to increasing scarcity and demands, but COVID-19 pandemic and the AI revolution made tech jobs easier to get. This was a change I could not have foreseen when I first made my plans.

All this to say that life happens and we cannot control most of it. You might experience similar processes to mine as well. It is important to keep an open mind and adapt to changes as they happen. It will make your life much easier.