Honestly, this post is not about whether you should go to graduate school or not, because there are X number of factors involved in that decision, and it is going to be your's and your's alone. But what I'm going to do is tell you about a few things I should've learnt there but did not. Some I learnt soon enough, and some, I'm clearly on the way to learning.
I failed to learn how important it is to expand your network
Believe you me, they tried to teach me, I just refused to learn or give it my best shot. My second week at grad school, we had a networking seminar with industry experts and I was absolutely mortified to know I would have to attend it. I did everything I could to avoid it, and in fact, it was a pattern I followed all through grad school. It's not even that I have any difficulty talking to new people, I do just fine. But at that time I honestly did not have any idea how to speak to a complete stranger for reasons that seemed clearly one-sided (I used to think - "what can a broke grad student do for someone else, really, other than sound totally selfish and offer themselves up for full-time employment?". In hindsight, I wish I'd had the courage to do it anyways. It wasn't until I actually started job-hunting after graduation that I realized I didn't have to talk to all these people just because I wanted a job. I could talk to them because they wanted to connect with other people too, they had awesome experiences they wanted to share, and they also wanted to talk about failures as much as they wanted to talk about their wins; and in general they were just like me in a way or at least had been at some point.

I failed to learn that it is useless to follow the crowd

There are obviously, many contexts to the dramatic-sounding sub-heading above. Sometimes it is imperative that you follow the crowd. But here's my graduate school 'follow-the-crowd' situation. You see, we were all a bunch of really smart and talented engineers who were all a wee bit lost. We were all on the verge of drastically changing our lives forever, for better or for worse. Most of the people in my program wanted to get into consulting or finance, and for the longest time I thought this was what I was naturally supposed to do as well. At the end of one year, I remember I was interviewing with a few companies for a summer internship. During one of them, I sat in my first round interview with a famous-bank-that-shall-remain-unnamed, and halfway through the interview I thought to myself - "I can't even convince myself that I want to work here, how am I going to convince this interviewer?". I must've been terrible at that interview, because I didn't even get a response on whether I had made it to the next round or not (my classmates all did).

I failed to learn just how important it is to speak up

The other day I was thinking about the past few transformative years of my life, and how I went from being 'someone who was too afraid to speak up' to 'someone who is too afraid to stay quiet'. This one is going to be the most difficult for me to explain, so bear with me as I try.During most of my classes at graduate school, my classmates would classify me as one of the quieter people in any given room. I cannot deny this at all. But there is one thing I candeny, but I'm the only one who knows this - there was always something on my mind running at the speed at which things-in-the-mind-usually-run that I wanted to say but I couldn't muster the strength to do so. Maybe it was because I was afraid it was going to sound stupid, or maybe I thought that it was not going to make any sense. I sat and watched as people stole the words right out of my mouth. I sat and watched as people said things that made much less sense than what my brain was urging me to just share with everyone else. I sat and watched till I couldn't do it anymore.


Yet, I wouldn't trade my experience for anything in the world
Although I feel like I learnt these three things more so after graduate school than when I was actually there, I know the role it played in my professional and personal development. I think of it as means to an end, and obviously, the end is far from near and I'm always excited to be on the journey I am on. I feel everyone gets something different out of graduate school, and for me the things I needed to learn came from within the classroom, outside the classroom, and surprisingly from completely beyond the classroom as well.

Issokay