<p>^ I agree. I have been absolutely amazed at the people my former employer hired back, after various experiences that you would think would have disqualified them. Part of the reason for this is that bosses come and go, and it’s an individual boss that makes hire decisions.</p>
<p>What I would hope that you could do is reflect on how someone as accomplished as yourself got into a boring job, and what you would recommend that others do to avoid your situation.</p>
<p>And I would take the summer at the school over staying at the old job if money isn’t a consideration. Good luck!</p>
<p>When my husband left his last job to start our business, his boss threatened legal action if he contacted any of the company’s clients! Our attorney told us that was ridiculous, so we just ignored the threat. Anyway, shortly after that, this same boss hired us to complete multiple projects for him! Business is funny that way.</p>
<p>"What I would hope that you could do is reflect on how someone as accomplished as yourself got into a boring job, and what you would recommend that others do to avoid your situation.
"</p>
<p>haha i’m not really accomplished but i will reflect on how i got here. I had a couple offers while I was in school and picked one of those but it fell through. Then I applied again and after about a month and a half i was offered 2 jobs. One of them was for a regional firm and another was for an international design firm. I went with the latter cause it paid more and the people seemed nicer. The thing with my company is that we have a lot of “easy” work and someone has got to do it. Examples include entering data and photocopying. With my previous employers, these things would be taken care of by co-op students (me) but at this place we don’t seem to hire any.</p>
<p>so my employer wasn’t mad at all, they took it quite well. They were actually looking into hiring a friend i recommended but he didn’t make it past the 2nd interview stage. </p>
<p>Sorry, I don’t feel comfortable naming the company but its a pretty big one. I think one of the reasons why work was a bit more balanced there was that there are a few offices in the nearby cities and if we had too much work , we could pass it to them and visa versa.</p>
<p>Glad to hear you had such luck Thermo1, I think anyone making a similar decision should go with there gut and do what is best for them. </p>
<p>I not too long ago was faced with a similar choice. I was working since a week after graduation in a job I hated, it made me miserable everyday. Sure it was an ok paycheck for a company doing well, but after 6 months of it I just couldn’t take it anymore. That combined with my girlfriend breaking up with me, and my life was feeling rather awful. I sorta forgot about 2 weeks, just left, went to my professor (now advisor in grad school) and asked him to put me on a research project we had discussed the month prior. Needless to say was that smart? Who knows, but you can’t live your life based on everyone else and doing what other’s think is right. My point is that sometimes you can’t just doubt yourself, what other’s will think, and so forth. Did my former coworker’s support me? Nope, everyone I called a friend thought I was…Wasting my life, giving up 60K a year, stress free job, endless possibilities to make almost six figures within 10 years, forcing myself to live at home for a few more years on scraps of a graduate student wage. </p>
<p>Fast forward a bit I’m working towards my PHD now and will be working in Academia as a career. I knew I wanted to always learn, push myself, do exciting research, and most important share that with that with other’s through teaching. Hopefully you realize what your path is an take it.</p>
<p>I also agree with someone else who said why not love what you do and love things outside of work too? I much rather pull my hair out, get rattled and stressed over the workload, and spend on average 60 hours a week doing something worthwhile that I love, versus 40 hours in a mind numbing job that is easy and dull. My best friend is an MD in residency, she works like 70-80 hours a week, comes home exhausted, and has some of the worst days and best days back to back. She does it because it’s what she loves to do (Before you say anything about money, if you knew the woman… you’d know she doesn’t care).</p>
<p>I did graduate school while working 50-60 hours a week at my company doing engineering. It was difficult, and I didn’t have much of a life, but they paid for my education plus I made an engineer’s salary plus overtime. So financially I did very well.</p>
<p>From my perspective, I think this is a better strategy than leaving the workforce to pursue graduate school.</p>
<p>That depends entirely on your goals. If your goals dictate that getting a thesis-based MS is advantageous, then you have to leave work to do it in the vast majority of cases.</p>
<p>I think it is better to say that if you want to get a phd, then leaving work makes the most sense. I looked into it and found it was virtually impossible to pursue a phd while working full time.</p>
<p>If I wanted to do a thesis, I would have done that while continuing to work, or perhaps taking a 6 month leave of absense. But I saw no value in pursuing a thesis based masters degree program vs a non-thesis masters program, since I am not pursuing a phd.</p>
<p>This isn’t virtual. This is a fact. Except in the case of maybe a handful of exceedingly rare special cases, you can’t get a PhD while working elsewhere full-time, and if anyone had managed it, I would be very skeptical of their credentials. Earning a PhD is a full-time job on its own, probably even the equivalent of having two full-time jobs at some points. Anyone who does it while working elsewhere full-time either has a special case where their other job was their PhD work, took 10 years to do it, or they got a watered-down degree.</p>
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<p>Getting a thesis-based MS while working is possible under a couple of conditions. Either your employer needs to be cooperative and let you take that ELA or the work you do for them would have to feed into your thesis; otherwise the odds are you are not producing a very strong thesis. So much of the learning involved in a thesis-based degree comes from interacting with the other graduate students or employees on a day-to-day basis that doing it any other way but full-time is a waste.</p>
<p>Of course, this is all unimportant for a non-thesis degree. You are just taking classes anyway, so doing it online or through some other form of distance learning is exactly the same as doing it in person.</p>
<p>Again, it really comes down to what your career goals are. There are plenty of reasons to get a thesis-based MS even if you don’t plan to get a PhD. In particular, it is useful if you want to punch that faster ticket into an R&D department. Someone with research experience will absolutely have an advantage over someone who doesn’t in that sort of case. Of course it also depends on the nature of the company as well.</p>
<p>I agree with the above posting on the thesis ideas. Personally to finish a GOOD Master’s thesis, present at a conference, publish your work. You won’t be able to finish that in a 6 month leave of absence of work. It’s a good full year of work without taking other classes if you want to turn in something that’s more than just a piece of paper with words on it.</p>
<p>What about the intangibles? Getting a course only Master’s while working is great for money reasons, but I wouldn’t give up having a published article to inspire me everyday for anything. All depends on what drives you and your mind.</p>
<p>A coursework only Master’s is nothing close to a thesis master’s, trust me. Those 9 credits of research are all consuming and pretty heavy amount of work compared to 3 extra classes.</p>
<p>To each his own. Engineers make 60k - 100k a year, so that published article has a lost opportunity cost of ~80k. To me, I’d rather keep the 80k in lieu of having a published article.</p>
<p>We have opportunities to publish through work, although I haven’t gone that route.</p>