Category — Grad School Resources

I know what you’re thinking–I need a master’s degree to become a librarian? Yes, you certainly do. I’ve checked this out because I have a book fetish and harbor a secret crush on many a librarian.

Upon investigating though, I found that it is not really as easy as I thought it would be. Librarians of today have more going through their pretty heads than the Dewey Decimal system. If you want to become a librarian, you need a master’s degree, and the competition is fierce!

For Library Studies programs, you can specialize in any of these areas:

• Archives and Preservation
• Digital Librarianship
• Health Librarianship
• Information Systems
• Law Librarianship
• School Library Media
• Services for Children and Youth

Your top ranking graduate schools for Library Studies in 2008 are: University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, and Syracuse University (NY)

To find the top ranked graduate schools for your specialty, check out the other Library Studies Graduate School rankings.

Photo librarian

The National Academies of Science and Engineering and the Institute of Medicine offer students a free online career/grad school planning guide called “Careers in Science and Engineering“. Included are topics such as evaluating career goals, deciding on graduate school, and choosing your graduate research topic. Make sure to click “contents” to get inside of the book!

US News & World Report has announced the 2008 top ranking graduate school programs for Business. Let’s take a gander through the top 10, and let’s see if there are any surprises:

1. Harvard University (MA)
2. Stanford University (CA)
3. University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan)
5. Northwestern University (Kellogg) (IL)
5. University of Chicago
7. Dartmouth College (Tuck) (NH)
8. University of California–Berkeley (Haas)
9. Columbia University (NY)
10. New York University (Stern)

To find the top ranked graduate schools for your specialty, check out the other Business School rankings.

There’s a great article at the Daily Princetonian that you’ll want to check out if you’re considering going to graduate school. Princeton professor Anthony Grafton gives some great insight into what graduate school is like and the present challenges facing those on a quest for a higher education:

If you love editing friends’ chapters and arguing about their ideas, if you find that being immured in a carrel for long days and nights with several hundred books is oddly exciting, then you have good reason to think about making another, longer dive into the scholarly deep. But don’t jump before you find out exactly what lies below.

–Anybody Thinking of Graduate School?

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to take classes at top notch universities such as MIT, Tufts, or Johns Hopkins? Well wonder no more–now you can, for free! Here’s the deal:

MIT has a program called OpenCourseWare where educators, students and self-learners from around the world have the opportunity to take classes at MIT for free!

Of course this is completely virtual–you take the classes from your home at your own convenience. You get all the class notes, quizzes, exams, discussion groups and some audio/video of the lectures for over 1400 classes they offer–at no cost. Classes are available on the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Some of the departments I’m looking at are Anthropology, Foreign Languages & Literature, and History. It’s MIT, so they also have the science/techie departments. Under each department there are tons of classes to choose from, all at different levels.

Since it’s free, you don’t get any direct teacher interaction, and there are no grades. You also don’t get credits for taking these courses, but this could be a great way of exploring other fields of interest before or after you start graduate school.

There are 3 other universities in the US that are also offering OpenCourseWare:

Johns Hopkins University School Of Public Health
Tufts University
Utah State University

According to US News & World Report, the 2008 top ranking graduate school programs for Fine arts are:

Rhode Island School of Design
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Yale University

If you have a speciality such as ceramics, sculpture, graphic design, industrial design, painting/drawing, photography, printmaking or multimedia communications, there are a whole slew of schools that stand out from the crowd.

To find the top ranked graduate schools for your specialty, check out the other Fine Arts Graduate School rankings.

One thing you’ll want to consider before deciding if graduate school is for you is whether your financial investment will pay off in the end.

Think about it–getting a higher education costs major money, but it can also lead to a higher salary. According to the US Census, people with master’s degrees make 2.6 times as much as people with high school diplomas. But is the salary you would be able to get with a master’s degree high enough to justify the tuition spent on a graduate school education?

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I remember when I was in my last year of college and had the sudden realization that I would soon be out on the streets and having to get a real job. At that point reality hit me, and I started thinking “What do I really want to do with my education? Do I want to join the workforce now or continue on to graduate school?” I am somewhat of a professional student , so graduate school was much more appealing to me.

Before I made that decision, the idea of graduate school was very far off–I was focusing on just trying to get through college. If I had any advice to give, I would say learn from my delayed decision, because I know I would have had many more options open to me if I had set graduate school as my goal a few years earlier.

If you’re considering graduate school, here are a few of the issues you’ll want to pay heed to now:

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I’m an avid reader of openeducation.net and have recently taken an interest in TeacherTube.com. I’m starting to see a shift in education as more people are eager to continue education while working in their career paths. Imagine the future where teachers will be able to upload lectures to an internal video upload site, interact with students in blogs, and Campfire like applications.

The University of Phoenix is one potential incubator of such growth. As more and more Americans utilize continuing education and alternative career paths look for leaders like the University of Phoenix to continue developing tools to revolutionize education.

Tools that have been developed online eventually make their way into the classroom and that’s true for continuing education as well.

What if your career path is in health care, and you desire to go to grad school? What are your options? I recently stumbled upon healthdegrees.com, a resource for folks looking to learn about degrees in health care. Recently they published an article on Health Care Programs for Prospective Grad Students.

Specifically they pointed out some management degrees that are fairly interesting.

The most common master’s degrees in the field of health care administration and health care management are:

• MHA: Master of Health Administration

• MHA: Master of Health Care Administration

• MHSA: Master of Health Services Administration

• MPH: Master of Public Health

• MBA: Master of Business Administration: Health Sector Concentration

Many people don’t realize how specialized the education is for health care managers, there’s a lot that must go into this and it’s a very rewarding career path.