My Grad School Decision (Why I Turned Down Harvard)

[Music] hey guys welcome back so as many of you know i'm currently in grad school and it's around the time of the year when a lot of people are considering whether to go to grad school applications will be due at the end of the year and also thinking about where should i go to grad school what program it can be really overwhelming so i want to take this video be really brief and just describe how i decided where to go to grad school and there's going to be no fluff so let's just go right over to the white board and i'll show you how i made my decision so to get just right into it i was deciding in the end between three programs so the first was ucla which is the university of california at los angeles where i got my undergraduate degree the master's in statistics in berkeley same thing masters in statistics and the last one was harvard's master's in data science now looking at these names you might think this one looks the most flashy or the most marketable on some levels maybe you'd be correct but at the same time whenever you see something that says data science in the title of your masters or phd program i want you to raise a little bit of red flags because what it ends up being is more of a marketing tool to suck people into the program a lot of times i'm not saying it's always like this but if you look under the hood and look at exactly what they're going to be teaching you a lot of times it's just a combination of classes from stats the cs department the math department instead of actually a whole new program so really if you ever get into or are considering a program that literally has data science in the title i want you to be a little bit suspicious and think about whether this is actually a real thing or if it's just a marketing tool to suck you in so that said there was three major criteria that i was looking at when deciding where to go to grad school so just for frame of reference at this point i had been working for two years as a software engineer after graduating from ucla and i had a pretty good idea of what i wanted to get out of a graduate program so the first one was duration so how long is this program going to take me now this was important to me for two reasons one i didn't want it to be too long because having worked for a few years i truly did understand that a full-time salary can be a very important thing and when you go to grad school if you go for one or two or three years every year that you're in grad school is a year you're missing out on your full-time salary so i didn't want to be in school for too long but there's also the opposite side of the coin which is that i didn't want to be in school for too short because i wanted the experience to be worth it i wanted to actually learn the things that i came here to learn based on the gaps that i found when i was working for a couple years so looking at the durations ucla was very flexible between one and a half to two years kind of based on how fast you can get the requirements out of the way berkeley was a pretty set one year uh two semester kind of deal and harvard was also a pretty set one and a half year or three semester kind of deal now the second thing that i was looking at is the flexibility of the coursework so as i said before after working for a few years i knew exactly or kind of more or less exactly what i wanted to learn so it was important for me to yes i'll take some required courses that you want me to take but at the same time there are certain things i came here to learn and i don't want the requirements of my curriculum to get in the way of that so looking at the flexibility of curriculum was number two for me when i looked at the ucla it was very very highly flexible in fact none of the courses were actually required there was a lot of highly recommended courses but there was a lot of flexibility in exactly what you do take berkeley was probably the most unflexible of all of the programs i was looking at and part of that comes from the fact that it was just one year or two semesters so that all the courses were required in these two semesters and i think there was just one elective where i could actually choose what i wanted to do with that harvard was somewhere in the middle it was pretty uh moderately flexible coursework so because it was a little bit longer there were required courses but there was also some leeway in what i would like to take and this brings us to number three which is actually the most important consideration that i thought about when going to grad school and that is cost of education so as important as the duration and as the flexibility of coursework are at the end of the day i was going to get my masters as a lot of people do versus a phd because i wanted to increase my earnings potential going forward so i wanted to make sure that whatever i was paying upfront for the program would eventually be worth it so let's look at a couple things let's first look at the base price tag of these three programs which are going to be very different and then we'll look at what the final price tag would have been after we take into account ta ships which is teaching assistant internships and stuff like that so starting with ucla's program ucla's program had a full price tag of 35 000. so 35k berkeley's program had a full price tag of 40 000 40k and harvard's program as you might expect had a very very hefty price tag of 84 000 for the full program so something you already see is that there's a big disparity in how expensive these two programs were going to be for me in total so ucla's was around 35 berkeley's was in that same ballpark around 40 and harvard's was just way out there 84 000. so a lot of people might be screaming and saying yeah but it's a harvard education it's worth it you gotta go but you're gonna see the considerations that i'm gonna make and see that actually it may not have been worth it in the long run so before even going forward in this video there's a point that i really really want to hit home if you take nothing else away from this video and it's in the way that we view education so i think education gets portrayed as this really really great engine for social mobility especially if you're the first person in your family to go to college and yes that is a huge deal don't get me wrong but at the same time i think there are cases and when you're getting your masters or your phd this is one of them where it helps to think of education as just another product that you're purchasing in the economy so it feels weird to even say that because education is supposed to be more than that but at the end of the day education is a product and as you can see there's many different price tags that come with this same product and you need to decide if that price tag is worth it based on your current situation so now i wanted to get the true cost of this education because just because that's the price tag doesn't mean i can't whittle it down through actions i do while i'm in grad school and one of the biggest ways that students pay off their tuition is through ta ships so for those of you who maybe know it by different names teaching assistant jobs maybe sometimes graduate student instructors basically just grad students who are helping teach undergrad courses in exchange for some or all of their tuition covered so i asked around a lot i did a lot of research and it turned out that ucla was going to be very generous in offering me teaching assistant positions as a master's student berkeley was very unlikely basically saying that maybe but since it's only a two semester program it's not very likely that it's going to happen and harvard was even less likely so i went to their orientation and asked if there's a chance i could do a ta ship and while maybe one or two students in the program had been doing them there was pretty resounding answer of no which means that the harvard price tag wasn't going to go down by a lot so after doing my calculations i said it's going to go down by about 5 000 taking into account just like a summer internship that i might have keeping it on the conservative side so the final cost that i would have to pay is 79k at harvard now berkeley there was no chance for a ta ship and it was a one year program so there wasn't even a summer internship between any of this so the price tag was pretty set at 40 000. ucla was the most interesting story so you see this price tag of 35k which is moderately expensive i would say but because they were basically saying that ta ships are very likely you're probably going to get them and the way ta ships are structured at least at ucla is that they refund you the tuition for the quarter you're teeing and they pay you a couple thousand dollars a quarter on top of that so after taking into account that maybe i'll ta half the time i'm in grad school at ucla and taking into account a summer internship i actually got this 35 000 down to negative 5 000. what does negative 5000 mean that means that actually while i'm in grad school i will be making 5 000 when you take into account the fact that i'm reducing tuition on certain quarters and making more money on top of that and internship and stuff like that so while it's not a full-time salary by any means it means that i'm actually not going to be paying anything for grad school if i go to ucla i'm actually going to be getting paid a little bit of money so those were the considerations i was taking into account now at this point i was ready to rule one school out completely not even considerate at all and that school was berkeley so with the fact that i wasn't going to be getting much assistance with this tuition in terms of teaching with the fact that it was only a one-year program where i didn't have any real control over my coursework i was very much ready to say that this is not the school for me so berkeley was ruled out so that leaves ucla and harvard and it really came down to a matter of money because these other parameters the length of the program and the flexibility of the coursework i thought were pretty equal in my mind there was no clear winner so it really came down to which one am i willing to pay for and if you look at just cost itself it seems like ucla is the right deal but of course harvard does bring with it a certain name and that may increase my future earnings by a certain amount that's what was going on in my head so i actually sat down i set some sort of realistic parameters about how much more i could expect to earn after graduating from harvard versus ucla so the key metric that i wanted to get at was what was the time it was going to take how many years would it take after graduating from these programs in order for me to see my return on my investment and the way i calculate that is basically first take into account how much am i paying for this investment in the case of harvard for example it's i'm giving you 79 000 up front but there's another hidden cost which is how much salary how much full-time salary would i have made if i didn't go into the program at all so this is called sometimes an opportunity cost but you have to take that into account right because if you didn't go to the program you'd probably be working for this one and a half years and you have to add that lost salary to the literal cost you're paying for that program and you need to see how many years it takes until this investment or this investment is worth it and so i actually sat down and came up with these graphs so as you can see they both break even at around 20 years and before even going on there's kind of a hidden there's kind of a hidden message here too it's going to take 20 years somewhere in that ballpark for me to see my return on investment for these master's programs for a lot of people who are in this area the stats data science area that's not worth it and i completely get that that's something that was going through my mind too when i was deciding whether to go to grad school at all do you want to be going to get an investment that's going to take over 20 years to potentially pay off and a lot of people are like no i'm just going to keep working i'm going to keep getting experience i'm going to keep getting my salary and i'll just go into my career that way kudos to you honestly i think that's a great idea as well for me personally it was worth it so i went ahead and went to grad school so having considered all of that i eventually decided that i'm gonna go to ucla go bruins and that's where i've been for the last year and i'm very very happy with the decision i've made there was there were small other perks as well i'd gone there as an undergrad so i kind of understood the system obviously you can't beat this california weather compared to the east coast and also i got to ta or be a teaching assistant for a whole year now which has just been of course it's been paying off my tuition but it's also been an extremely rewarding experience to teach python to undergraduates and that's something i would not have had the chance to do probably if i went to harvard instead so that's it guys that's how i made my decision about a year and a half ago about where to go to grad school and the key takeaway is not the decision i made that is completely based on my circumstances my life experiences and yours are going to be different so your decision might be different as well so i think if you take away one thing from this video it's to treat education as a product in the economy just like anything else and of course this product is going to be priced differently in different places different brands but i want you to really sit down and think about is this product i'm about to buy for this much money worth it in terms of how fast i'm going to return my investment because i think at least for master's programs that is the key consideration and if your answer is no after doing that analysis then i think you have your answer so if you guys have any questions about this video or any ideas for future videos that you would like to see please put them in the comments below also please like and subscribe for more videos just like this and i'll see you next

Channel: ritvikmath

Views: 6,053

Rating: 4.9480519 out of 5

Keywords: college, graduate school, statistics, harvard, ucla, berkeley, education

Id: jqXwGRCmyjk

Length: 12min 16sec (736 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 17 2020