My Higher Education, part 2

Continued from Yesterday.

No Longer a Cop

            After law enforcement, I went back to working at the bookstore part time while studying for the LSAT.  All that time hoping that my experience as a cop would translate well to law school (it didn’t) and ultimately, I did take the test.

            I say this with no hyperbole, the hardest part of the LSAT test was writing the honor code out by hand in cursive, which is required.  I had not written anything in cursive in my adult life.  In fact, my hand writing is all capital letters in block type so that it can be read with ease by anyone.  Cursive is one of my personal bugbears and I see it as a blight on education, a tremendous waste of time that has zero value.  My hand cramped, I couldn’t actually finish writing the damn thing with any legibility, and I was the last person to finish the task, holding up the room.

            I took the LSAT, and did fine, well enough to later be accepted to Law School.  This is a fun little turn of fate because it is another test I barely studied for.  I bought a test booklet with 400 questions, I did 40 in total, spending about 3 hours overall pondering the questions and looking over the answers.  The rest of the time I played Sudoku and read science fiction novels.

            I later dropped out of Law School after spending a year there.  It was an expensive way to figure out that I was not destined to spend my life filling out paperwork with really tight and precise use of commas and quoting other people’s arguments.  I am getting ahead of myself.

Grad School

            Rather than apply to Law School first I wanted to pursue a regular Master’s degree.  Ultimately, my goal was to go abroad with some kind of charity or NGO.  I looked into the International Affairs programs around the state, first at Florida International and then at Florida State.  What was the tipping point for the one I focused on and eventually attended?  The application process for FSU was easier.

            When I entered the program, I did a poor job of managing my time, I was still working part time at a bookstore, a decision I look back on as a waste of time, and I did not prioritize getting the most difficult aspect of the degree done (for me that is the foreign language portion, that might not be an issue for you, but it is for me).

            I got the opportunity to study abroad in Turkey (which used up all of my savings from being a cop), and was sold on doing Urban and Regional Planning as a joint program.  The Planning tie-in provided what I was really looking for with International Affairs via a Peace Corp program which would have taken me abroad to work on development projects.  Again, I did not manage my time and priorities well as I did not commit to the idea completely and just dipped my toe in.

            My second year of Graduate school, after returning from studying in Turkey I was miserable.  I felt like I was going in a dozen directions, I was anxious, and I was obnoxious.  I almost immediately wanted to bail out on Planning and again tried to go on a new more focused direction, I applied to Law School and jumped in.

Law School

            Law School was paradoxically one of the more rewarding parts of my life in that I met a lot of good friends, so much so that I feel their association with me elevates my reputation while they are taking a bit of a ding to theirs.  But, aside from those friends I was awful at Law School.  This might be my own personal philosophy getting in the way but I often disagreed with the logical founding of many Supreme Court cases, and I often became rankled by the focus on cases rather than focusing on the laws themselves.

            To me, logic is an absolute, case law seems to take to its core that you have to back up your own logic with the opinions of other more important and credible people otherwise your logical founding is not right.  I see this as a logical fallacy called, “argument from authority”.  This is more than likely a distortion of what Case Law is.  Obviously, I did not grasp the concept.  I left Law School after year one, once more taking on an entirely new direction.

MAAPP

            I entered the Political Science Department. Couple floors up from Planning, couple more from International Affairs and entered into the first program that I could get my head around completely and managed to commit to.  Master’s in Applied American Politics and Policy.  Research political opponents, research how to message to constituents, research people you want to ask for money, and then build a message.

            It is a cynical, practical, and functional use of political science.  It is one that I managed to get a hold one.  It is the first Master’s Degree I completed and I was done after 15 months of taking every class I could fit and going to an internship which showed me several levels of field work in a campaign.  The internship by itself could fill several blogs with interesting material and I would go so far as to say it would make an interesting TV show.

            Completing this degree was my first real accomplishment as an adult.  An adulthood that was previously rudderless and full of fail.  This kind of turned things.

Returning to Planning and International Affairs

            I was able to go back to Planning and International Affairs.  I did so initially to pad my schedule while finishing my MAAPP degree but then came to realize how little course work I needed to do to actually complete the degrees.  Fun fact, you have seven years to finish a program, at this point I was half way thru year 5 and was 90% done with one degree and 80% done with the other.

            I took aim at the Peace Corp program again but as luck would have it ISIS was in full swing and many programs in Morocco and the Philippines and anywhere that had a Muslim population became dicey.  I was aiming for Albania, but with the number of positions shrinking, there were more qualified applicants than there were open positions and I was not chosen.  I do see this as a missed opportunity in my life, I know that having multiple years of practical experience tied into my graduation would have been immensely useful, but things happen.

            I decided to keep hammering here at home.  I committed to foreign language courses; took the lab/studio/final project that would have been replaced by the Peace Corp but now was back on the table; took all the required classes that would have been replaced by the Peace Corp; and gained 40 pounds in 5 months, turning into a slug of a human being from stress.

            I actually did not pass a foreign language class and had that hanging over my head for too long as it became the LAST CLASS needed for me to get all my degrees.  But before that I needed an internship (another thing that would have been replaced by the Peace Corp) so I started to apply.

Continued again in a third part tomorrow.

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My Higher Education, part 1

Pursuing Higher Education

Today is a sort of personal holiday for me.  This is the 10-year anniversary of my taking the GRE in hopes of one day going to graduate school.

I graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University in Spring of 2007 with a degree in Political Science, having been inspired to go into politics as a profession by the TV show “The West Wing”.  In hindsight, I should have gone into writing and television production, as it turns out what I really enjoy is well made TV shows.

Regardless of such personal insight having been gained I did not know what I wanted to do with my life.  I had a general plan of course, work as a social studies teacher while pursuing a Master’s degree from the University of South Florida, look for a job as a paper pusher in the state or county government and get a well-rounded work experience before trying to run for office myself somewhere down the line.  But there was of course a hiccup with all of that.

2007 was already starting to feel the rumblings of what would become the Great Recession.  I lived in Florida where the popping Housing Bubble and drop in tourism dollars was going to be felt more deeply still.  I had planned to get a starting position teaching or working in a government office, while at that same moment the state was working to cut positions and I was now competing with people who had been laid off with 10+ years of experience.

As is fitting for the quintessential millennial, I ended up living with my parents and working at a bookstore/coffee shop.

Pursuit of Education

The GRE was my way of continuing to move forward, my father has been and is big on education.  He succeeded at drilling an affection for the concept into me while I was growing up.  I signed up to take GRE without really knowing what it was.

I thought the test was more of a Myers-Briggs type personality test combined with general understanding of topics, I did not know it was essentially “SAT: Part 2”.  I had signed up to take it the Saturday of the same week and didn’t even know I could study for it.  The night before I got into an argument with my parents about how flippant I was being because I wanted to drive down to my undergrad school and play video games with friends who were still on campus.  I stayed home and was up late angrily playing video games by myself.

That morning I was up and off with far too little sleep and got to a testing center a 40-minute drive from my home and settled down to answer questions I had not prepared for.  Honestly, if anything can be said to be a “skill” for me, it must be standardized tests.  I banged out all the multiple choice question, and for the essay I wrote a fluffy couple of paragraphs on the value of public art with jokes and uncited references so topical I am sure whoever graded it had no idea what I was on about.

The single oddest thing was when it came to the end and asked me if I wanted to see the results, they give you a back out option.  They let you give in to your insecurities if you want.  I have no idea if they offer a refund if you decide not to look but it did cause me to pause.  I heard in my head my parents talking about how I wasn’t taking it seriously.  I worried that I had rushed to get this done and in so doing I was going to have bombed something I could have prepared for.  I worried that I will have shut the door of graduate school before ever really getting it open.

Then I woke up and realized it had been piss easy and hit “Show Scores”.

I had gotten a 1320 total score (same as my SAT’s), 730 Math and 590 Reading (This one is strange because I had not taken a Math class in 3+ years at this point and my math performance here was up from my 690 on the SAT and my reading was down).  Want to know how unprepared I was for the test?  I didn’t know that was a good score until later when I talked to my parents about it.

You might think that I would be right in my way to grad school that same year, but there was an issue with that.  The lesser issue was a lack of life experience, but the real barrier to my progress was money.

Work First

            My parents are lovely people with wanting to help support me in my educational endeavors but they did not want me to get caught up in student loan debt the way so many people do and as such supported the idea of getting and keeping a job for a time to help pay for all of this.  I decided to be a cop.

            I was miserable as a cop.  I did not enjoy the academy, I did not enjoy the job hunt, I did not enjoy the sleep deprived misery march that was my short career.  I understand that it is a difficult profession but it seems like the things I had the most trouble with (the sleep schedule and learning the radio) are perhaps not the things that should have broken me.

            It also did not help that the job market was still crowded and competitive on a level that made it clear to me (and everyone who was looking for work) that there was no slack time, adjustment period, or gentle slope on the learning curve.  My inability to adjust snowballed on me quickly and they had enough of an applicant pool that they could cut me loose.

            Ironically, these days there is such a demand for officers in Florida if I were trying to be a cop I probably wouldn’t get fired unless I did something deliberately criminal.  But, also ironic, if I had stayed on and still were a police officer these days, with years of experience under my belt, I probably would have jumped ship to seek higher education and a different job with the economic upturn as many officers have done.

            Being a cop was difficult.  Is difficult for all of those people who do it.  It is a draining, boring, dangerous, stressful job and I have a lot of respect for those who can do it.  I never want to be a police officer again, patrol was miserable.

Continued in Tomorrow's entry.

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