If you’re wondering about grad school (should you go? Is it worth it? It’s expensive! It takes forever!) Jacob Curtis has a few words for you.
“Get comfortable with the uncomfortable,” he says.
That’s what he told himself starting undergraduate work as a first-gen college student. “And for grad school, I listened to 18-year-old me. If you want to be competitive in the (job) market, even if you’re already working full time, this is a step you can take.”
Curtis, a Roux Institute masters’ student, fulltime software expert for a large medical provider and former Maine Career Catalyst intern, says his graduate work was the next logical step for him in an unlikely career progression. How unlikely? He was the first in his family to attend college, and his life growing up in and around Bangor did not prepare him for the demands of academia or a corporate career. When he landed at the University of Southern Maine, he was on his own.
“I knew even as a kid, I loved school, I loved learning,” he said. “I even hated missing the school bus. But I wasn’t encouraged. When I was in high school I was told, “if you want to go to college, that’s on you.”
Always a self-starter, Curtis thrived and became a Promise Scholar at USM. College life took some time to get used to, but he soon found himself entranced by data science, analytics and the problem-solving side of business. Curtis actively sought out programs that would help him thrive; he worked for two summers as an intern in the Maine Career Catalyst program. At Unum and MaineHealth, he broadened his scope of knowledge, learned lifetime career skills and not incidentally, acquired valuable mentors from both organizations. He landed a post-grad job doing software implementation for Intermed, PA, a large medical provider in Portland. One of Curtis’ mentors recommended he also challenge himself with a tech-heavy masters’ program—an MS in data science rather than a traditional MBA. Now, Curtis has advice for anyone considering grad school:
“Start out part-time if you’re juggling full time work already. At the Roux, you can go part-time at first (he did) in a way that you can finish and that’s affordable. You can see the scholarships that are offered. But start.”
For Curtis (and he suspects, other students like himself) “going to a school like Northeastern is uncomfortable. It’s a higher level of difficulty. There are a lot of students. Taking the next step in education was the “uncomfortable” for me.”
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For more information about graduate programs at the Roux Institute or to register for a day of grad school exploration, go here
