<p>Hello, I got a bachelor's in International Studies and have not been able to get any jobs since graduation. I want to go back to school and figure that I should get more of a trade. Would it be better to get an Agriculture or Geography degree than stick with International Studies?</p>
<p>Trade? Go to community college and pick up a AA/AS in something useful. You’re only going to accrue more debt getting a Master’s and will still have to compete for jobs in a down market.</p>
<p>I don’t think either of those will get you jobs any more than your current degree does. I would also advise against going for another UG degree or costly graduate degree until you really examine what you want in life. Right now, everyone is finding it hard to find a job so I don’t think there will be an easy path for you. Decide what you really want out of your job (money, satisfaction, both, etc.), then look into what jobs actually provide that and how available they are. It might help to get some sort of internship in that field before pursuing it full time, as well.</p>
<p>Basically, you will need to do a lot of work before choosing your next step.</p>
<p>Did you just get your BA in May? It’s only July, that means you’ve been out of school for 2 months. In this market, it’s taking people 6 months or more (some people a whole year) before they find employment.</p>
<p>Regardless of how long you’ve been out of undergrad, though, before you incur the considerable expense of a master’s program you need to figure out what you want to do and what your purpose for getting that degree is. Graduate school is not like undergrad - where you just go and figure it out along the way. Because it’s generally more expensive, a lot more focused than undergrad (you study one or two things instead of exploring many) and is usually financed almost completely by loans at the master’s level, you need to take a careful approach to it. Don’t just rack up degrees because you think they’re going to get you a job, because even an unfocused MBA will have a hard time finding jobs even in a good market.</p>
<p>Like Mace says, think about what your goals are and what kind of jobs you want to do. See what people are doing the work that you want to do, and then figure out what they did to get them there. It may turn out that the people in your desired field don’t have graduate degrees at all, but that they just worked their butt off as a grunt worker for a couple of years and moved up.</p>