Benjamin Todd

Getting good mentorship helps hugely with motivation and your future opportunities in academia.

It often comes down to the specific person you'll be working with and your fit with them.

Will the particular university be an environment where you can flourish?

For example, in terms of location and culture?

What's the reputation of the professor and university?

Your supervisor's reputation in the field will impact your future opportunities in academia.

Being at a well-known university is useful for opportunities outside of academia.

For example, as a communicator or in policy.

And will you get funding?

It could easily be better to do a subject you think offers fewer options in general if you find a particular opportunity that's strong in these criteria.

Should you do graduate study?

It's not a decision to be taken lightly.

In particular, PhD programs are often demoralizing and people doing them often struggle with mental health or don't complete them.

And master's degrees can cost a lot of money.

Both take substantial time.

It's also not a question we can answer in the abstract.

It depends on your other options.

For now, if any graduate school options seem plausible, add them to your list of ideas for next steps.

Then later in the guide, we'll come back to narrowing them down.

Or if you want to think about it now, you could compare graduate schools to your best other options using our career decision process in Appendix 4.