This fall, graduate students accounted for almost 10 percent of those enrolled at the University of Kansas. But outside of taking a class taught by a graduate teaching assistant, undergraduates have little contact with graduate students. Two graduate students discuss what motivated them to continue their education, how it has affected their lives and what they want to do with their newly accumulated knowledge beyond academia.

Jordan Wade, a second year graduate student in American Studies from Charlotte, N.C., took a two-year break between completing her degree at the University of Richmond and coming to the University of Kansas. In those two years, she worked for non-profits in California and Texas, an experience that fueled her desire to go back to school.

“While I was very emotionally fulfilled, I wasn’t intellectually fulfilled in what I was doing,” Wade said. “I decided to come back to school for me, because I really love to learn and I’m curious about a lot of things.”

But she quickly discovered that learning in graduate school was very different from her experiences as an undergraduate .

“You’re learning more about less and less,” she said. “You’re getting really deep into random stuff not a lot of people know about.”

Her research focuses on yoga culture in the United States, including how yoga is viewed as a liberal, hippie practice when the people actually practicing yoga are primarily upper class. Wade found that the history of how yoga was introduced to America also needed to be explored in greater detail.

Diving into a subject with little guidance is another crucial difference between undergraduate and graduate work.

“You don’t get hand-holding,” Wade said. “You don’t get someone to guide you through it.”

Being self-motivated and aware of what you need to do to advance in your chosen field is essential, Wade said.

But the most challenging part of her experience has been balancing her own classes with research, being a GTA and having a social life.

Teaching and preparing for two American Studies 100 courses twice a week adds up to 40 hours per week of work, Wade said. Still, she finds teaching rewarding and feels that she learns things from her students that she might not have had a chance to stumble upon without them.

“I like the rapport that I can have with students,” she said. “I think a lot of times the material I’m teaching doesn’t seem that far removed from their lives. I teach race, class, gender and sexuality in modern America. Those are things that everybody encounters every day.”

In addition to the time she spends teaching, her own course load often requires her to read 600 to 700 pages a week. Research is also very time-consuming, leaving her little time for a life outside of work.

Leading what she describes as a monastic existence is a problem that played a large role in Wade’s decision to take a break and work for several years before returning to school to earn her Ph.D.

“I’m not ready to commit another five years right now,” she said. “I’m a very social person, so it’s a personal thing in a lot of ways. I still believe 100 percent in the value of learning and teaching and academics, and I love the teaching part so much. But the being alone so much, I’m less interested in that right now.”

Daniel McCarville, a second year graduate student in political science from McCook, Neb., has had a very different experience as a graduate student. McCarville’s research focuses on computer simulations.

“Basically, what I do is build computer programs that work like governments and politics do, so we can understand the inner workings we don’t get to see,” he said. “You can’t see what goes on behind closed doors, but you can create a program that creates the same results.”

After studying engineering as an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, he became interested in how society, like a machine, might work within certain parameters.

Like Wade, McCarville feels students in graduate school have to be very independent.

“As an undergraduate, you have a professor just kind of telling you things,” he said. “As a graduate student, their goal is to make you one of them. My undergraduate advisor told me it was the difference between going to church and going to seminary.”

He is also familiar with the pressure associated with being in graduate school, where the expectation is that your research will bring some new information or understanding to the table.

McCarville’s research topic is largely based on computer simulations and does not require as much time-consuming research. He also does not work as a Graduate Teaching Assistant, but McCarville does have to juggle his course work and research with his child, who has given him perspective about his academic experience.

“It definitely takes a lot of time out of my day and makes you reorganize your priorities,” he said.“There’s life out there outside school.”

McCarville will be exploring the world outside of academia next year when he expects to have completed his master’s. He is interested in pursuing a career in academic development, but still appreciates the personal benefits attending grad school has given him.

“In political science, you talk so much about politics that you really understand what you think about things,” McCarville said. “But even beyond that, the greatest benefit is getting to work with other people that are really interested in the same subject. Sometimes you feel like you’re the only person in the world that cares about what you do. But then you’re surrounded by a group of people that are all interested in the same subject and you get to hear their ideas.”

— Edited by Laura Nightengale