Why Get an Advanced Degree?

When we know your reasons for completing a degree program, we can provide better individualized mentoring and editing assistance. More importantly, your success in graduate school depends on understanding your own motivation for pursuing an advanced degree. Graduate studies are challenging, expensive, and uncertain, and therefore require a high level of self-motivation and dedication to obtain. Legitimate reasons for pursuing an advanced degree include:

• to satisfy curiosity
• to follow an interest area previously discovered
• to gain critical analysis and synthesis skills
• to gain employable skills and knowledge
• to develop a content specialization
• to discover new/previously unknown knowledge
• to solve or resolve an unsolved problem or challenges
• to qualify for admission to a related field

Why an advanced degree should not necessarily be sought
However, there are weak or flawed motivations for pursuing discretionary advanced degrees. Some reasons may be too weak to provide sufficient motivation to overcome the obstacles to graduation. Some reasons are flawed because they rest on questionable assumptions. These reasons may be good secondary but poor primary motivators, such as:

• to be able to earn more money as an investment in the future
• to be able to deserve greater respect and prestige as an elite
• to be able to be regarded as an expert
• to gain competitive advantages in the labor market
• to avoid boredom
• to satisfy a whim
• to avoid or escape the working world

Beginning a serious research project such as a Ph.D. dissertation or Master’s thesis should not be done lightly. We highly recommend finding a topic you are passionate about, regardless of the professional benefits of earning a degree. Genuine interest and engagement in your topic will carry you much farther than dreams of a promotion ever will.