A friend that I used to send letters back and forth with in high school found me on Facebook a few weeks ago. It was nice to see her and catch up. In a way, one of the reasons I signed up to Facebook was to see if she was there. She, and another person who recently found me on Facebook are really the only two people from high school that I'm happy to still be in touch with. Anyway, we've been chatting about life and religion while playing Scrabulous and Saturday night, I spent some time talking about education. Knowing she works with non-traditional students at a private college, I was curious to see what her reaction would be.
I shouldn't be surprised that working at a university, she thought it ultra-important to go back and finish my degree, but it's still been gnawing at me today. Over the last year, year and a half, I had finally gotten myself to a place where I wasn't consistently thinking about what it would take to finish. Where I felt fairly good about myself... and maybe didn't think of myself as some sort of failure for dropping out when I relocated here. Suddenly, today after this conversation, I'm back to thinking about it. Ugh.
I don't like the game. I don't particularly care about the game. I love the learning. If I didn't have to hop through the hoops I'd go do it. I hate having to pander to a professor. After all, I'm paying THEM out of my own pocket. That's probably the wrong attitude, but as long as that attitude is there, it probably doesn't make sense to go back.
At the same time, am I being hindered? In her e-mail, she mentioned that he husband worked somewhere that had instituted a policy that they wouldn't look at any resume for a position at his level if they didn't have a degree. He's in IT. Is that such an issue when you have a quality portfolio, a stack of references and are trying to get a design job at a small design shop or in-house department?
As I was shopping my portfolio last fall, most of the people I talked to about it, aside from saying pretty positive things about it, seemed to think that i was in a position to GET a position. I'm getting to the point where I'll need to test that if we're going to move to Austin. If I stay and finish up my bachelors, we're going to be here another 1-2 years.. maybe longer since who knows how many credits I can take at a time while doing freelance and keeping the day job going. If we move, it'll be at least a year of waiting for my Texas residency to kick in.
Anywa, that's the main thing roiling around in my brain tonight and I figured it might be worth starting to hash it out here before I send an e-mail back to her.
Tomorrow... pictures of the Oscar Meyer "Weiner-mobile"
