Interview with Sean McCarthy

For my latest interview I met up with Sean McCarthy, my graduate mentor, for a quick interview over what it is like to be a graduate student and to gain some insights into the experience.
Sean is currently teaching a class at UT called writing in digital environments that, as the name suggest, explores ideas in and around writing in the internet age. His research area is also focused on the same subject. Besides teaching the aforementioned course, he is also the assistant director of the Digital Writing and Research Lab and just last month won the DIIA Graduate Student Instructor Award.
Sean has done and seen many things and lived quite a life before landing here at the University of Texas here in Austin. After getting his undergraduate and masters degree at the National University of Ireland, Galway in 1994 he got certified in ESL and taught in Australia for a year. When he got back to Dublin he got a job at a academic publishing company writing abstracts for academic journals but growing weary of the tediousness of the job after a year and a half went on to get a job at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) were he taught business communications. He did this on and off for three years, taking a year of in the middle to work on an online start-up company that developed online educational resources for K-12. After the online company and while still working at the DIT, he attained a 40,000 euro grant to make a documentary with a friend on Irish culture and history and the Irish language. Getting restless with his career up to this point, in 2003 he saved up some money and sold his car and traveled the world for a year, eight months in Asia and about two months in Australia and to Minneapolis to meet a friend that was currently undertaking a Ph.D program and then he had an epiphany. He saw graduate school as a good opportunity to keep on traveling but to make it more of an intellectually invigorating experience. He then started applying to graduate schools and got accepted into Tulane University but after Hurricane Katrina was placed here at the University of Texas where he's enrolled in the doctoral program. Like I mentioned before, Sean has done quite a bit and if you get to know him at all you will quickly find that he is ambitious and will take on as many projects as any human can handle.
I apologize for teasing out his career history for such an extent but I just wanted to make the point that graduate school isn't the next logical step after ones undergraduate degree. In a later question to Sean, asking him to give advice to potential graduate students, he said to wait at least a year. He's not the first one to tell me this for everybody, and I mean everybody that I've spoken to about graduate school has given me the exact same advice. Graduate school is an expensive endeavor and from what I hear more than a little rigorous. When asked what a day in the life of a graduate student is like, Sean simply replied, "busy." I can attest to this for I have about a thirty minute to an hour slot with him on Mondays after his class. I've heard/read horror stories from people who have gone to graduate school and either quit or finished only to learn that their Ph.D wasn't necessary for their career. Not to say that you shouldn't go to graduate school, because by all means if anything you gain immense amounts of knowledge and meet great people in fields you are interested in but as I'm learning through this experience with IE, it's a decision that should be well informed and well thought out.
There was more on my conversation with Sean but these were the major point really that I wanted to point out for this post. If time, and my knowledge allows, I may put up the audio file from our conversation sometime soon.