List of questions daunting. Will simply tell tale.
Began to attend Brandeis University in 1985, right after graduating high school, because they had a reputation for a good math department. It was my parents’ wish that I major in that.
However, many of the professors were so bad at leading a class that they would just come right out and admit it on the first day of class. Some didn’t even speak any English at all. Turns out the reputation was as a good math research facility. (What does that mean, especially in 1985, with the PCs back then and no serious mainframe on campus? Better pencils? More reliable batteries for your HP calculator?) Anyhoo, my bane as a student is that I can’t abide a bad professor, and don’t do work for them. Yes, I know, it only hurts me. Whadayagonnado?
At the time I began to attend, my family was coming apart at the seams. As a result, I was not stellar academic material, nearly flunked out my first semster, and spent at least one other. During a period of refelction, I found my young mind thinking this way: Shouldn’t my major in college be something that I enjoy being tested and challenged on? I like math, I engage with math to a degree that most people find psychotic, I like hearing about advances in the field. But did I care if I could prove how much I knew? I did not. What did I feel that way about? Music. I convinced my parents to allow me to get a Music minor, then a double major, then a Music major with a Math minor, which was dropped unceremoniously after I failed Topology.
By the middle of my Junior year, my parents had separated and one of the things that got caught in the middle was my tuition. My father made so much money as an actuary (What’s an actuary? It’s where they put dead actors… ba-dum PUM!) that I had never qualified for any financial aid, and the FA department was uninclined to believe that I suddenly had no access to funds. In October 1988, my senior year, I was told by the school to leave.
This was devastating to me. I had worked hard and overcome my earlier failings, and I was so close to graduation. My professors were sympathetic, and allowed me to continue into the spring semester, in the hope that I would be reinstated, which I never was. I went into a mental tailspin. What was worse was that my parents had always assured me that they would support me so I could focus on school: no job while studying. I had worked summers at the creative arts camp I had gone to as a child, and done some piano lessons and the like, but I was thrust into a receding Boston economy with no degree, no job history, no demostrable job skills, and a $15,000 unpaid debt in my name on my credit report. Lived at home until the mortgage got caught in the middle of my parents’ separation, and we were booted out. Stopped talking to Dad for five years.
Bounced from job to job, always wondering what to put on the application regarding my education, always wondering how I was going to convince a landlord I was not a deadbeat, lots of the work in informal education settings, getting gigs as a musician and an actor, reading voraciously to keep up in the fields of real interest to me, and taking night classes where I could, including an intro to comp sci course at Harvard, where I decided I would take a hint from the fact that I always became the de facto go-to computer guy in every office I ever worked at.
Reconciled in 1995 with Dad, who paid off my college debt (higher than a year’s salary at that point for me), leaving me free to ponder the future. The April Fools’ Day blizzard of 1997 convinced me to move out of the Northeast, and a detailed search of places led me to conclude that the widest array of choices of schools where I might be able to transfer in my music credits and switch majors to computer science (you don’t need a degree in music unless you plan to teach it) were in California: Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The latter would have been my preference, but LA seemed to offer more choices. So the plan was to finish school in LA, and move up north. A wife and house in Downey later, that’s not what happened, but that’s a different story.
Anyhoo, I enrolled at Cal State Domingues Hills (hey, it’s what I could afford) in 1999, majoring in CS. Seemed like a sweet deal at the time. Such a switch in fields I pretty much had to do my whole college career over again. Noticed that I was much better prepared mentally for the task. Wondered why the hell we send people to college so young in the first place, hell, they barely have a clue until they’re 20 anyway. Maybe we should promote a two-year, Amish-style rumspringa period right after high shcool. Then, those with the ambition can go on to college after finding out for themselves how full of shit the university graduates who claim you don’t really need a degree in this world really are.
Worked all day and attended classes at night. Very hard. Very, very hard. Didn’t have time to do much extracurricular stuff or socialize greatly, but got along wuite well with fellow students. Half of them were OLDER than me.
January 2002. Pressure really getting to me. Grades sliding, marriage tense. What goes? Shitty but much-higher-paying-than-anything-else-I’d-ever-had job coordinating education programs at the California Science Center. I had risen through the ranks by virtue of everyone above me being fired or leaving. Job had given me contact with JPL, whom I aspired to work with (found out later: with no PhD, forget it). Worked on campus maintaining databases for the last year until graduation in 2003, at age 35. Moved out into the world in what one of many employers who couldn’t hire me (but one of the few who was still in business) called the worst IT job market in two decades. Baaaaaaaaad summer.
Since it ended, I’ve been teaching Computer Science at a private school in Anaheim. I beat out 200 people, mostly out of work programmers, engineers, and IT techs, for the job, because I was the only one who knew how to teach. Which is funny, because all during my job hunt I’d been dope-slapping myself for spending all those years in education, rather than programming stuff.
I’m resting now. the last year and a half of school was really draining. The instant I graduated, though, I felt the weight of the world lift from my shoulders. Would I do it again? I am. I am weighing my options for grad school, and plan to start next fall somewhere locally, maybe CSULB or UCI. Not so sure about the medium-term future of CS, but I’m leaning toward something in Bioinformatics, maybe.
I spent a decade being jealous of my friends who had degrees and career paths. Now I have my degree, and all my friends are second-guessing what they want to do. All are contempating a career switch that would entail more education. So I finally feel like I’m on the same playing field as everyone else.
) with my first degree. I then got an office job in a cubicle making pretty decent money but everyday I would get to work and have this nagging feeling that I was just in the wrong place. Finally one day in January I was browsing the net during some down time at work looking at various music schools and that very day I decided I was going to be back in school for music the coming fall.
), you really need someone who understands what you’re going through to vent at. It helps that my partner is a part-time student himself, as he can commiserate with me.