I don’t just mean reading a magazine article a couple of minutes every day. I mean proper study, whether for fun or interest.
This means that it would have to be a particular topic or group of topics, so that you in time develop specialised knowledge.
I for example work as a filing clerk in a small firm. However, I’m currently studying to be an accountant, so eventually I’ll be able to take a set of exams privately and (with some luck) qualify.
A dude I know in the firm is training to be a lawyer, so every lunch hour and pretty much every square break he gets, he seems to hit the books.
I’m not quite so zealous, but I’d say that for the past two months I’ve been at it for an average of two hours per day. Obviously the rest of my time is taken up by work (and the occasional play).
Trend looks set to continue, even though in school I was one of the, shall we say, less interested students.
Well, I do both, but just out of curiosity, why no for number 2? Do you just mean study in the sense of reading and absorbing printed material? That’s cool if you do, just trying to see where you’re coming from.
Good for you! If they don’t do some serious study on the side, they should. In my day it was more common than not for a young person to be studying to improve themselves while also working full time. When I started work in NYC in the forties I went to night school for two years to add to my knowledge as an insurance underwriter. Then, for fifteen years spent weekly evenings attending Marine Reserve unit meetings and taking correspondence courses final enabling me to graduated from the Army’s Command and General Staff college. Since retiremen,t I still take occassional courses at a local college. I’m a firm believer in keeping the “little gray cells” active, to parrot Agathe Christie.
I think you’ll find that there are a lot of people who work full-time and are enrolled in some kind of degree or certificate program. In fact, I was a little surprised to confirm that you were actually asking that, because the answer to the thread’s title seemed like a no-brainer to me. It’s really not unusual.
Not at the moment, but I’d like to eventually apply for a MA program in International Development or International Relations and you need to have a background in economics for that sort of thing. I had such a lousy experience with high school econ that I never studied it in college, so last school year I took both macro and microeconomics. (Got two As, go me!) I’d like to keep studying it, but that’s all the city colleges offer and it gets harder to work around a work schedule when you start taking classes at four year universities.
Since graduating college, I’ve also taken courses in Spanish, Arabic, and math. I like school. My coworkers all think I’m nuts.
I don’t care much for schools, but I have been teaching myself to play the guitar, speak French & Spanish, and I taught myself about electricity, electronics, light and color (enough to be able to do my job, anyway :P).
I’ve taught myself to play keyboards, lead and rhythm electric and acoustic, and electric bass guitar, drums, composition, arrangement, studio technique, recording practices, remixing, editing and mastering.
Going on 37 years I’ve been compiling an encyclopedia’s worth of data on records for collectors. It details mix and label variations, foreign issues, release dates, chart positions, every single scrap of information I can find to describe a record to someone who can’t see it or hear it.
I’ve learned how to completely declick and denoise records on the computer - since so many other people do it without learning how first.
And every day, I work on the database of my record collection. All this has taught me proofreading, copy editing, and writing in concise, unambiguous statements. I guess it’s taught me database design, too!
Both my husband and I work full time.
Last year we took an American Sign Language class at the local Junior College, just for the heck of it. This year we are thinking of taking either the second ASL class or a Spanish class. My husband has also taken other misc. classes in the past, almost all of them related to IT, though he does not work in that field. It’s just a hobby of sorts.
I work 40 hours a week, have two children who are almost six and almost seven, and go to school half time for … accounting. Its a career change for me - if I actually follow through with the change- I have 20 years of IT under my belt, am currently employed as a Program Manager, and will take a paycut as a CPA.
I work 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. I am (trying) to teach myself to play the guitar, am taking a night course in bookbinding and am taking a vicarious philosphy ‘course’ through a friend studying it at University who says it it helps him remember and properly digest the information when he has to repeat and discuss with somebody else. So we both win.
So far I’m crap at guitar (curses!), pretty good at bookbinding, and pleasantly indecisive about the various philosophical notions bandied about in our late night ‘study’ sessions. Never have so many peanut M&Ms been consumed.
I realise you specified ‘reading only’, but I am studying the theories of guitar playing (well, music) and of bookbinding as well as the practice.
I am currently working a 5X7 hour job as a programmer and going to school to learn how to be an animator (5X3, minus homework.) Pretty fun except when I have to work 10 hour days at work too because of insane scheduling.
