Grad school has been a positive experience overall. Yet sometimes I wondered if it was all just a waste of time, especially when I was looking for my first job afterward.
S1E3: Grad School
Tyler Small: In some ways I really loved grad school. And in other ways, It was a worthless experience.
[00:00:09]This is Tyler Small with hacking emotional intelligence. And just to continue my story in this third episode. I want to tell you about my grad school experience and it wasn't always amazing. The results were sort of lackluster at times.
[00:00:31]Well, I don't doubt that my graduate degree has won me many opportunities and a lot of respect throughout my career. The actual practical value of it was somewhat limited. Some of that's my own fault. I admit. , and I certainly had amazing professors. Let me just jump right into my experiences .
[00:00:54] The people I met, there were all fantastic. They were really smart. They were really good at what they did. my, my peers, the students there. My professors. It was a great environment for learning and creativity. I did fairly well in my coursework. I taught an undergraduate course. I should say I did very well in my coursework, except for one course that I took and failed.
[00:01:25]But it was basically my own pride and stubbornness why I failed. Because I thought that the term. Project assignment was not helpful. And , I chose to do something different and that was a poor mistake on my part , and lesson learned, like play the game, jump through the hoops and make it happen so that someday you can change the rules.
[00:01:56] Anyway on my path through grad school, I learned how to write academically. I had a wonderful advisor, Peter Rich and he's a real hard worker, very personable, extremely creative. And I would say he's more practical than many in the academic industry.
[00:02:22] He was especially helpful in teaching me to write. So I would write something , or I'll do an outline and then he would have me come in and he would kind of pick through it and helped me see the flaws in it. Go back and redo it. Oh, I would bring it to them over and over and over again. So there's the numerous feedback cycles of deliberate practice, right?
[00:02:45]So I did a bunch of original research and at least it felt like a bunch to me. I did a few papers. Um, published a little bit in an academic journals. And then, for my thesis , the took up the majority of my time. , over a thousand hours, I studied instructional design theories, which is very interesting. I was considering going on to do a PhD and ultimately decided not to.
[00:03:14] And the research that I did was sort of interesting in the value that it would have later in my life. , at first it had absolutely no value. I'll talk about that in a minute , but in other ways it has had a bit of value. I'm really digging in deep to the theories of instructional design. Basically the theories of how people learn and how we should go about teaching people. Because I was so interested in finding the best ways to do that . , and identifying what is most important to teach people . Studying those theories and their overlapping points and their differentiators ,their pros and cons, advantages disadvantages. That was really foundational to my confidence in creating programs utilizing deliberate practice.
[00:04:04] So studied all these instructional design theories. And basically what I was looking at is , where did the field come from? And I studied what were the top theories and who influenced those theories and where they came from. What research they were citing. Who their mentors were. And I traced the roots of the field back several generations.
[00:04:27] And came to a really solid understanding of where the field of instructional design came from. Which included the big ideas that drive major decisions in public education, in universities , and all different types of educational formats. So that was really helpful for me to see what was going on at the time.
[00:04:54] And then as I moved on into the leadership development industry, to have a confidence in kind of bucking the standard practices of the day and pushing the field forward. So. After I graduated. I went to, find my first job and I applied and I applied and I applied some more. The trouble with, applying for jobs is that you rarely have any feedback. It's just a big rejection or, Hey, we'd like to interview you.
[00:05:28] But all those ones that you get rejected, you have no idea why there's no way to identify what you can improve on, the vast majority of the time. I did pick up one form of feedback and that was a question that came up over and over again, that I was never really able to answer. The question these hiring managers were asking was, tell me about a course that you developed from A to Z.
[00:05:58]So they're looking for a course, something for students or adult learners of some kind where I had created the curriculum, the exams, the plan, the methodology, and all in one all encompassing package.
[00:06:14] And they wanted me , to share this experience with them and how it went and what were the results. And it turned out that I hadn't actually done that. I think some of my peers, had .
[00:06:25] Especially when they knew that they were going to do a master's degree and that was it. And then they would go out into industry and then want to apply those skills. So it wasn't that none of the students had done what they're asking for. It was just that I hadn't.
[00:06:43]I had done evaluation projects. I had built parts of courses. I had designed courses. I had done usability research. I understood the theory behind it. I had written academically. I could now write a paper very, very well. and the problem was that. I had absolutely no skill set for the corporate workplace and that said, most of my professors we're really engaged in helping their students become better researchers. And those were some of the skills I had. I just was completely unprepared to actually create the things that everyone was talking about in the research part of the industry.
[00:07:33] So at that time, I considered my master's degree to be a very expensive piece of paper.
[00:07:41] There I was with wife and two kids and enormous student loans and I couldn't find a job. This was a big problem, and I had no idea how to solve it.
[00:07:54] Some people said I should. Get a job at McDonald's. Others said I should go get a different degree.
[00:08:01] I didn't know what to do, and I felt more stuck than I had ever felt. And my entire life.
[00:08:10]In the next episode, I'll tell you about what I did to get unstuck. This is Tyler's small and this is hacking emotional intelligence.