Ep12 Transcript: How to Decide If You Should Go Back to School – Quick Fix Friday

Andrea Vahl: Hey Dreamers, it’s your host, Andrea Vahl, and in this episode of Quick Fix Friday, we’re going to dive a little deeper into the idea of should you go back to school. This is based on episode number 10 where I interviewed Dr. Philip Merry and talked about his journey to getting his Ph.D. at age 69.

Intro: Hello Dreamers. Welcome to the Late Starters Club, giving you the inspiration mindset and tools you need to start something midlife and beyond. Remember, it’s never too late to follow your dreams.

Andrea Vahl: To dive into this topic further, I found a great set of questions on Coursera.org, which will be linked here in the show notes, but I want to talk about some of these questions as they relate to how Dr. Merry got his Ph.D.

The first question you might want to ask yourself is, “Will going back to school further your career?” And I would also ask, does that even matter to you? For Dr. Philip Merry he knew that he always wanted to get his Ph.D. and he wanted to dive deeper into his topic of synchronicity and do some research on it. So he knew that he wanted to get his Ph.D. for that reason.

You might be deciding to go back to school to further your career because of higher earnings, and you definitely want to balance the cost of going back to school with those higher earnings, but you want to just decide if it’s something that you really need for your career. And if that matters. You might be realizing that you’re getting a nudge from the universe for going back to school.

Oh, you should do that.

Maybe that nudge has always been there, or maybe it’s something new, but definitely take some time to explore that.

The second thing you want to consider when going back to school is the financial aspect. Obviously. You want to know if you can do it, if it’s going to work, how you’re going to do it, and if it really makes financial sense.

The third thing that I would say you definitely want to consider are other options. Is there a different way that you could achieve the same result without having the time-consuming and expensive choice of going back to traditional school? These might include online courses, might include certificates that could be out there that show your expertise in a topic, or you might do some sort of shorter-term boot camp that would also get you where you needed to go.

And then of course, there are the questions of how you’re going to go back to school. Do you need to go back part-time while you’re still working, or would you want to go back full-time and shorten that timeframe to getting your degree? You also want to see if you’re going to do online or in person. If you have to do something more unusual or extreme like moving, that’s going to be a bigger consideration.

But there are lots of options out there for finding the right school for you. I would definitely suggest making sure you interview people who have been through the program, and I would say you could find those people maybe on LinkedIn doing some searches there to see who has that school in their bio and possibly the school has some graduates that you could talk to as well.

Going back to school might not be for everybody, but if you are getting that nudge from the universe, I think you want to honor that. And as Dr. Philip Merry has shown, it is never too late to go back and get that degree because he dove deeper into his research and was really happy with how everything turned out. And like we say, it’s never too late to follow your dreams.

Outro: Hope that was helpful, and make sure you grab the free guide Top Tools for Late Starters on the website at latestartersclub.com and let’s turn dreaming into doing.