Let me impart to you my greatest congratulations. In particular, I offer my admiration and accolades to those walking with master’s degrees and doctorates.

No doubt your degree path has been fraught with much grinding and gnashing of teeth replete with existential crises over your chosen paths of study.

I commend some of you now to the so-called ‘real world’ of work. Remember to eat well, make regular trips to the grocery store and check when tax day falls each year.

Also, your future boss will likely frown upon wearing sweat pants, flip-flops and ill-fitting t-shirts to work. Thus, laundry will need to occur more often than infrequent trips back to the West Side.

In so many words, if you did not have it together by the time you graduate, it may be time to get it together.

Others I commend to graduate studies, an academic world of its own caliber. It is to you that I speak most directly, and it is to you that I want to offer some advice as I prepare to enter the last semester for two graduate degrees myself.

Graduate-level education is much less about mechanical preparation for some sort of job and rather a reformation of one’s thinking.

In this regard, liberal arts undergraduate degrees might provide some advantage in terms of graduate-level preparation. Indeed, graduate school forces creative, innovative and – most importantly – original thinking.

Graduate school is not the place to indulge in dogmatic platitudes handed down by professors in undergraduate level courses.

No, graduate school is the time and place to independently study, research and verify every angle of a topic of inquiry.

A graduate degree is also not just a delay or halfway house for the world of work. The depth of research exponentially outshines that which is required for a bachelor’s degree.

Moreover, the education involved still teaches a skill set and mode of thinking beyond anything in undergrad.

Those who took 500-level courses as an undergrad will empathize with this statement.

A Ph.D. is even less of a halfway house before engaging with the world beyond academia. The purpose of a Ph.D. is to train a person to undertake and complete original research throughout a professional career.

The bottom line of a doctorate of philosophy in any field is to ask original questions and find original answers using the latest techniques and corpuses of knowledge.

I say none of this to frighten people away from graduate-level work.

However, you insult current grad students and defame yourself if you are graduating now or in May with the arrogant notion of, “Oh, I’ll just go get my law degree, Ph.D. or master’s.”

This demonstrates a pathologically poor understanding of the true nature and purpose of graduate work.

For those now wading into grad school in the next 10 months, let me be honest: you will experience a level of mental, emotional and perhaps psychological anxiety that will truly test your resolve.

You will ask yourself many times, ‘Why am I doing this?’ If the answer is not a steadfast love for your chosen discipline, then you ought to perhaps change paths.

Let me end this epistle, if it can be called that, by offering some encouragement.

Your decision to pursue ever-higher education is admirable and I wish you the greatest of fortune in your studies.

You will explore levels of thought and consider lines of intellectual exploration you would not have imagined in undergraduate work.

Go forth, Cougar graduates, and whether it is in work or in graduate school, always stay curious.

Tyler Laferriere is a graduate student pursuing his master’s in economics from Phoenix, Arizona. He can be contacted at 335-2290 or by [email protected]. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the staff of The Daily Evergreen or those of The Office of Student Media.