local contacts

I went to planning school (for a PhD) basically on a whim: I wanted to better understand some local planning developments and I had not been able to make much progress with the local planning authorities. In retrospect, this was a very wise move, as the most valuable thing that I got from planning school was my local contacts. When I eventually gave up on my dissertation, it literally took me one phone call to get a job!

Since then, I have always told anyone considering graduate school in planning to first consider where you want to live. If you want to live in one particular area, choose a school there, even if it is not necessarily the "best" school! I have a friend who did a planning degree at Colombia University even though she knew that she intended to move back to Montreal. I am sure that she greatly profited from her studies there, and she had no problem finding interesting positions in NYC, but now that she has moved back to Montreal she is basically an outsider in the planning community.