I’ve finally wrapped up a long weekend of celebrating my graduation (yay!), and figured now was as good a time as any to do some reflection on grad school. I’m pleased with how it went, and I feel like it was worth my time, but it definitely wasn’t perfect.

The Good

Before starting school, I was more or less just someone who was excited about transportation history. While I have a lot of good work on this blog that predates September 2023¹, reading it back now I can see that I lacked the familiarity with some aspects of the land use and transportation planning apparatuses that make the analyses feel somewhat incomplete. Spending the better part of two years studying land use regulations, transportation planning, and economic development has given me a lot more confidence to wade into more complex topics². Beyond blog posts, I’m proud of all the work I’m consolidating in my portfolio page, which you can check out at your leisure.

I’ve also had the opportunity to flesh out a long-standing interest in geospatial analysis, which predates even my interest in transportation planning³. While I struggle to find good words to say about Esri, having access to an academic license for the ArcGIS suite of products has come with perks. I’ve been able to create some at least moderately compelling analyses in the form of StoryMaps, some of which have had some real impact – most notably some of the work I did about bus route changes in early 2024⁴. Getting cross published in BikePortland a few times has been cool, and that definitely helped highlight the issues with a few specific service changes that I feel TriMet didn’t properly consider. Plus, it gave me the chance to overengineeer my silly yearly transit review wrapped bit.

Other unambiguious positives: I’ve met a ton of really great people. I won’t list everyone here, but I really have been fortunate to have gotten to know so many passionate, interesting, and kind people at Portland State. I also need to acknowledge the support, love, and care of Olivia – both for the moral support in getting work done, but also for her willingness to listen and discuss the ins and outs of urban planning policy. I truly am lucky.

The Mixed Bag

Of course, it wasn’t all great. I think there are some fairly substantial issues with the program, and while I would still recommend it to friends (and have!), it’s not without flaws.

On my mind now as I’m embarking on a job search is the imbalance of career options and prospective workers in the urban planning field in Portland. While sure, it’s nice that everyone is excited about urban planning around here, and Portland State plays a big role in nurturing that, it also makes for a sort of absurdly competitive job market. A job I got rejected from had north of 200 applicants, for an entry-level Planner 1 job in a suburb of Portland. This is sort of ridiculous on its face, and doesn’t speak well about the job market in general, but there’s a knock on effect that I’ve been mulling over since beginning the program. Basically every entry level job in the field requires a Master’s degree, and this is just stupid. In a city with so many people passionate about planning, it’s a crime to gate an entire profession behind multiple degrees.

For a program and university purportedly committed to advancing equity, and to serving the region, this presents something of a challenging situation. Of course, it would be wrong to frame my degree as an indoctrination, but the ideas I come up with now do fit more neatly within the existing framework of our legal and political apparatuses. As a deeply practical person, I think this is good, but it comes at a cost. Developing and understanding of how a system works makes you prone to accepting the framing of the system in general, which surely contributes to the lack of bureaucratic revolutionaries. On the other hand, I will loudly advocate for entirely revamping our property taxation system now, and I didn’t even know it was a problem before school.

And on a perfunctory note, many of the core curriculum classes were just a bit of a drag, especially the ones that get passed around through the faculty or were taught by adjuncts. I’ve surmised that this is more of a constraint coming from Portland State administration, more interested in building a second Keller Auditorium⁵ than replacing retired professors.

The Bad

The real negative was my experience as a graduate research assistant. I’ll be cordial here, but I did not enjoy the rigorous hierarchy of my workplace, and I had deep personal issues with my supervisor(s) that I feel they mishandled. As a friend has said, you don’t become an academic by virtue of your excellent people skills. I try not to speak publicly about this, since I feel that it’s not generally appropriate to air grievances, but it was troubling and made for a solid six month period of continual stress. I feel fortunate that I had the ability to quit.

Should You Go Back to School?

I’d give a solid yes, but only if you can afford it. Learning new skills is intrinsically rewarding, and I’m at hopeful that these skills will also transfer to a career that I don’t strongly dislike. Portland State is a good option for a Master’s too, since it’s relatively affordable⁶, and generally well-regarded (for urban planning at least). Sure, there’s things that aren’t great about going back to school. Money has been tighter, I’ve had generally less time for creative endeavors, and I found myself really missing out on some larger-scale adventures.

But there’s no substitute for learning more about the world. I think I’m coming out of grad school with a better understanding of the machinations of modern life, and better equipped to critique them. I’m hoping this blog can continue to be a place where I explore those critiques, and I should be able to find the time for those in the future. My latest pet interests is land economics, so expect to see some ideas popping out about that soon⁷.

What’s next for me? Well other than continuing the blog, I’m looking for a job. I’ve got a few promising leads, but you can never count chickens before they hatch. I’m also hoping to get back in the bike touring groove, especially since the weather is set to be pretty good for that kind of thing seeing as its summer.

Thanks for reading, and see you next time.

1. These are two good examples that I think stand up pretty well a few years later: High Capacity Transit in Portland, and National Parks And Cars ↩︎
2. These are two good examples of complex topics I didn’t have the analytical capability of tackling pre grad school: The Suburbanization of Swimming, and Staring Into The Void Of Zoning In Madison ↩︎
3. Way back in 2018 I was writing probably dubious code to do random little geographical analyses using Voronoi tessellations (link) ↩︎
4. Link to StoryMap, Link to BikePortland cross post ↩︎
5. I’ve never seen flashy graphics like this for information pertaining to hiring new professors, and PSU is allegedly a place where the intellectual labor of the faculty is why it exists ↩︎
6. My program, in the College of Urban & Public Affairs, has a per-credit tuition of $512, for a total tuition cost of $36,864 (72 credits). U of O costs nearly 40% more at $716 per credit. ↩︎
7. Well soon-ish anyways. I can never really keep a schedule with this stuff ↩︎