Admissions Blog

Written by:SPP Blogger
1/7/2009 6:23 AM

One of the key features of SPP that attracted me was that the programs are tailored toward working adults, such as me. When I was admitted in the Fall of 2006, my career was on a great fast track. I didn't want to give that up to continue my education. I loved my job. Furthermore, my job was IN public policy. What could be a more fantastic opportunity than applying what I learned in the classroom immediately to my everyday life and vice versa?

Despite the fact that I hadn't been in a classroom in five years (I finished undergrad in May 2001), I felt confident that it would be easy to hop right back on that bike. Lots of reading esoteric policy books and journal articles? No problem, I did that in my job anyway. Lots of writing? Even easier, I wrote about policy nearly every day.

Boy was I wrong.

The thing is, after a full day of reading and writing, I didn't want to go home and do more. But I had to. In order to be successful being a full-time career/part-time graduate student, seemingly every waking moment I had that wasn't taken up by work was taken with school work. It was hard to get back into the swing of things, much more difficult than I expected.

Furthermore, while I expected a decrease in activity in my non-policy life (i.e., social life, reading a book for pleasure, cleaning my condo), I didn't expect it to completely disappear. I had always been the Queen of Doing Too Many Things At Once. During my first semester, any semblance of a life outside of work and school vanished.

But don't despair. A funny thing happened after that first semester (where I even once pulled an all-nighter). I adapted. I became more productive and efficient at work, freeing up more time to study and to have a modicum of a personal life. I also became more productive and efficient in studying, freeing up even more time for other things. As I became more productive and efficient, my grades became steady "A's". I received stellar annual reviews at work.

An important lesson I learned is balance and organization. I learned to do things such as relate my school research to current work projects. I looked ahead and planned my courses carefully so that in semesters where I would have a more difficult course (for me, that was stats and econ), I would have a course in my concentration area (which was my policy area at work, a policy area I love) to stabilize the load. I started research papers early, just doing a little bit each week. At the beginning of each semester I took my syllabi and my upcoming work projects schedule and meshed the two so, as far as I could control, my work load would be light when I had a big deliverable at school. Of if I anticipated a big project at work taking up more time that usual, I read ahead in class so I wouldn't fall behind.

Moral of the story: your first semester as a full-time career/part-time graduate student is going to be difficult. But it gets easier. You will still have to do a delicate tight rope act to balance all the areas of your life. However, it is a sacrifice worth making.

Now that I'm done with graduate school I keep joking around that I need to find a hobby to fill my newfound free time. Only I'm not really joking. Blogging can only fill so much time, after all.

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