29. You may not start with plans to be a professor, but…

People often go to graduate school without any firm plans or expectations for their futures. For many, graduate school serves as what they think will be a temporary escape from the “real world.” Continuing their educations is a way of putting off career decisions or even adulthood itself (see Reason 12). However, once you have begun investing in graduate school and the academic enterprise more generally, you will discover that it is both hard to quit (see Reason 11) and takes a very long time to finish (see Reason 4). By the end of your graduate school experience, you will have spent a long time building a resume and acquiring a very specific skill set that is optimized for exactly one thing: being a professor.

This is something that you should consider carefully before starting a graduate program. Do you want to be a professor? If the answer is no, think twice. If the answer is yes, the problem is further complicated by the fact that the competition to become a professor at even the most modest academic institutions is fierce (see Reasons 8 and 14). So whether or not you can answer that question now, if in the course of your journey through graduate school you are able to resign yourself to the idea of being a professor (or some kind of college instructor), you will then be faced with the reality of the job market. There are a few jobs outside of academe that require a PhD, but there are not many. Would it have been worth it?