P-GQS Symptom 1: Uncertainty about future plans

Pre-Graduation Quarter Syndrome occurs in students either entering or in the last quarter of their degree program.

The first and foremost symptom is a persistent uncertainty about future plans. Whether it be in discussions with career counselors trying to assist in the furtherment of the student’s career or with the student’s grandfather about what company the student is going to employed by so that the grandfather can buy stock in the company, the student may have difficulty contributing to the conversation. Typical stumping questions include, but are not limited to, the following: Where are you going to be in three months? Are you going to graduate school? What’s going to become of you and your significant other once you graduate?

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“Uncertainty is the only certainty there is.”

John Allen Paulos

Unfortunately, this fundamental principle of the universe is something that I’ve become all to familiar with.

When I enrolled in the computer science degree program at Oregon State, my initial plan was to apply to graduate school for machine learning and artificial intelligence. I geared all my electives towards this goal. I took an on-campus course CS499 – Deep Learning, for what I hope, are obvious reasons. I took CS475 – Parallel Programming to learn how distributed computing works, because it can be applied to machine learning to reduce the training overhead. Since I transferred in course credits from my first bachelor’s degree, I only needed to take 3 electives and a project course. But in order to achieve my goal of applying to grad school, I decided to take 3 more units than necessary, transferring an extra $1500 from my pocket to Oregon State. The reason for that was because I wanted to take CS 493 – Cloud Development because of the prevalence of integrating machine learning applications with the cloud. Of course, taking CS 493 meant I needed to take CS 372 – Intro to Networking, because it is a prerequisite.

When it came to my summer internship, I had three options:

• Option 1: Get paid the most and work on what seems to be an unimpressive project.
• Option 2: Get paid a decent salary and work on a cool project that will expose me to DSP and machine learning.
• Option 3: Get paid next to nothing and work on a cool project AND get a letter of recommendation from a professor for my graduate school applications.

Gung-ho, graduate school bound me chose Option 3.

Now, in my final quarter at school, I’m supposed to be applying to graduate school and gearing up for potential internships. This plan was going smoothly until I, out of curiosity, applied to some entry-level jobs at some large tech companies. After doing some of the online assessments and getting further in the interviewing process than expected, I’ve begun to re-evaluate. Is going to graduate school, for a degree that will not immediately increase my net worth, worth it? Am I willing to pay the opportunity cost of not working at a tech company and not garnering years of software development experience?

I’m not sure about the answer to these questions, but I do have a big interview coming up for a company that I think I can’t turn down. Hopefully, a job offer from that company, or lack thereof, will clear up some of the fog surrounding what’s to come.