Last year, we talked to Kio Stark: journalist, novelist, and NYU faculty member whose Kickstarter-funded book Don’t Go Back to School: A Handbook to Learning Almost Anything gave our bank accounts new reason to smile. Partly inspired by her own experience as a PhD-dropout, Stark wrote a guide to independent learning, gathering tons of insights from successful self-taught pros. Of course, she didn’t stop with just the book, she’s still spreading the no-grad school gospel, and will continue her crusade with a party/teach-in tomorrow night at Studio-X in Manhattan.
Curious? Flabbergasted? 100% horrified that no one told you this before you married yourself to debt? We were too. But also pretty inspired. Because this is back-to-school season, Kio and her pals are sitting down to talk not going back to school, and about what it takes to learn yourself a degree’s worth of skills in creative writing, coding, and graphic design. Plus, if you’re inspired from the event, the life doctors of Make it Happen will be on hand to give you ritual consultations that will help you commit to making your dream work already, damn it. Plus, it’s all free, so even if this doesn’t turn your life around, it’s not like it cost you $100,000, like some other education programs who could name.
Read an excerpt of “Don’t Go Back to School” here.
Don’t Go Back to School Party and Teach-In, Thursday, September 12, 7:30pm, Studio-X, 1610 Varick Street, FREE
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Grad school was the biggest party of my life. Also, funding! There’s lots of it in the professional programs. I never had so much money and alcohol in my life!
The values of being an autodidact are clear enough on their own, but Kio’s argument that you can build a career on self-learning is pretty frail. It seems nearly all of her points are based on anecdotes such as, “but I’ve HEARD of tenure track professors without of advanced degrees” and “a friend TOLD me he doesn’t even look at resumes”. There are many reasons not to go to grad school, but doing so because you think you can compete in the PhD job market without a PhD should not be one of them.