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Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

Oh hey, a great opportunity for a counterexample!

My wife got a Bachelor's from UCLA, then a Master's in Museum Studies from University College, London. She then worked for free (it was called "interning" - which is kind of crazy for someone with a master's) at the San Diego Air and Space Museum (some kinda weird folks there...), and the USS Midway. She gave up weekends and time she could have spent earning an income. It amounted to nothing, though she did get a neat volunteer dinner from the Air and Space Museum. Now she has a normal job in a normal office because she has to pay off the debts from school and can't afford to work for free.

Anyway, your anecdote is valid, but so is mine.

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Hey there fellow San Diegan! Your experience absolutely is valid, it's a rough industry - I consider it more like breaking into the entertainment industry than a normal job. If she wasn't exposed to so many high profile people (Jerry Sanders, Audrey Geisel, the artists from Art Alive that year) things likely would have gone a different way.

That's an apt comparison, and appropriately enough I'm sure there are plenty of people deeply regretting their time spent in unpaid internships in the entertainment industry.

A master's in _museum studies_? Why? Why in the world would you pay for that? What could the study of that possible produce?

Apparently, when your ex-husband whom you started dating at 17 is an abusive asshole who says you're an idiot, your interests are stupid, and you'll never amount to anything, you may, upon divorce, feel a strong sense of internal motivation to do all that stuff you always wanted to do, and make decisions not based purely on financial rationality.

Also, I totally understand the whole "why in the world would you pay for that" but if you work in tech you're in a fairly privileged position. The thing I desperately wanted to do most of my life happens to pay well. Somebody else desperately wanted to work in museums/heritage/archaeology and share knowledge. And museums do good work - one of the projects she worked on was repatriating artifacts stolen from Native American graves in the early 20th century. Since the thieves generally didn't take good notes, it could require a lot of time, effort, and knowledge to determine an artifact's provenience. That was more related to her undergrad studies - the graduate degree was more about a mix of preservation, conservation, etc.

I'm not sure it's worse than making some F2P game or Tinder for dogs. But it's definitely less profitable.

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