i guess you know you're a "real" blogger when you promise a next-day entry and a week goes by before you get around to it. granted, it's been a busy week. registering for tests and classes, ordering study materials and books, and attending a high school reunion across the country on a whim at the last minute. but i'm getting ahead of myself.
so yeah, there i was, trying to figure out what i wanted to do. my mind kept rolling back to high school and some career aptitude test we all took. it involved a lot of folded-over pieces of paper and a pushpin, and if someone can remember the name of it, i'll devise some sort of excellent (if small - hey, i'm unemployed, remember) prize to give you, because i feel as though i've exhausted every avenue i can think of to find it. anyway, at the end you unfolded it, and maybe ran it through some huge computer mainframe (this was 25-30 years ago, mind you), and it told you what you should be when you grow up. mine came out that i should be in a "helping profession" and made some suggestions: nurse, social worker, guidance counselor. all perfectly respectable choices ... unless you grew up in my family.
with the exception of my mother, who's more of a liberal-artsy person like me, my dad, older sister and younger brother are all engineers. i loved math and science in high school, and i was good at both of them, particularly math, although i had to work at it. so these "helping profession" suggestions made no sense to me. well, maybe nurse - but if i was going into health care, you could be damn sure it'd be as a doctor and not a nurse. (believe me, i have healthy respect for nurses now that i'm older, but i was 15 or 16 at the time, so please forgive my teenage naivete'.)
so at the time there was no consideration of any of these types of options. i figured the test was wrong (of course it was! how could it not be?) and went my merry way to college, intending to be a math major. that's a different entry, or maybe a different blog altogether ("musings of recovering math majors"?), but the cliff notes version is that choice didn't exactly work out (pull the politically incorrect barbie doll string: "Math is hard!") and i switched to political science while at duke university in north carolina.
i graduated with honors, coming very close to also qualifying for majors in history and art history. i took a single math class and a single science class my freshman year and bombed them both. ouch. for the rest of my time at duke, i stayed away completely from anything business-related (econ, finance, marketing, etc.). i figured i was there to learn how to think - to get an excellent general liberal arts education. i took the LSAT (as did, it was rumored, 40% of my senior class), figuring law school was the next step, but decided as i was filling out the applications that more school right at that moment might kill me. and anyway, employers would flock to me just knowing that i'd gone to a great university. right?
well ... it didn't turn out exactly that way. there were two significant flaws in my thinking. first, i graduated in 1991, in the middle of a deep recession. (you can relate.) second, i moved to san francisco, where the duke name had very little pull. (i was actually asked questions like "hmm, duke - that's in virginia, right?" i nearly fell off my chair at the time.) so i worked a lot - and i mean a lot - of temp jobs, and finally landed at a company called working assets (now rebranded credo), which was one of the foundational "socially responsible" businesses in the country, or perhaps the world. aside from making $20K a year and trying to live in san francisco on that, it was a great time. i loved the idea of a for-profit company doing good, especially because i'd had a fair amount of experience volunteering with not-for-profits in college and afterwards and always found myself frustrated at what i interpreted as a lack of organization and a lack of focus on making money. (it was almost as if they were afraid to make too much for fear of looking like a business. some of them didn't seem to understand that making more money was the only road to doing more good.) it also seemed like a very fragmented, redundant community.
you get the idea, so let's skip ahead a few years, to 1994 or so. i had moved from san francisco to washington, dc, and was working as a marketing assistant at a consulting firm. (life lesson: make sure you're "line" and not "staff," wherever you are. this is advice i myself have not followed throughout my career, but do as i say and not as i do - or, more accurately, have done.) and, well, now it was time for graduate school, because that's what i wanted to do. or thought i should do. or thought others expected me to do. take your pick.
i started researching programs. i'd continued to volunteer in dc and wanted to make it a mission to turn around the fucked-up world of nonprofit management. (yes, i was 24 years old and thought i could do this singlehandedly. ah, youth.) so i looked at programs in nonprofit management. and then, i admit it, i thought about the moneymaking potential there and balked a little. but no worries, because I came up with what i thought was a great idea - i'd go get an MBA with a concentration in nonprofit management, and then i could move more seamlessly between the public and private sectors. it was genius, i thought, especially because i'd decided i wanted to live in the bay area, and doing that on a nonprofit salary - well, i just wasn't sure i could pull it off.
ok. so once again this is getting long. let me give you an idea of what to expect when i finally get through all this back story. i have, here at the edge of middle age, at fairly significant risk to my finances and overall livelihood (um, especially now, with my investments shrinking daily - why, oh why, didn't i buy gold at $800/ounce?), decided to make a career change. in a little over a week, i will be sitting in an undergraduate psychology class with a group of 18-year-olds who will undoubtedly be wondering why someone who could be their mother (or, if you're a fan of MTV's "16 and Pregnant," their grandmother) is in class with them. i will also be studying for the GRE to get into a masters' program; it will be the fourth time i've taken a post-college standardized exam (the LSAT [twice], the GMAT, and now this). i have vocabulary flashcards en route from amazon as i type this. and that whole process, my friends, is what i really intend to write about. what's it going to be like sitting in that class; studying vocabulary, reading comprehension, algebra, and analytic writing; actually sitting for the exam; and going through the application process to get yet another degree? the idea is pretty fascinating to me, so i'm hoping it might be interesting to others as well.
plus, i'm as solipsistic as the next person (there's a good GRE word for you), so there's that. Until next time ...
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