Oops, what can I say? It's been a busy week, but a good one as well. I finished writing two large grant applications at work this week - what a relief! I also had three exams this week, just finished the last one so now I can relax. My week culminated with coffee at a friend's house - what a wonderful way to enjoy a Friday, I'd been looking forward to that all week! Now for my weekend I can actually pry my nose out of my textbooks, have a go at a bit of housework, finish sewing a jacket I've been working on since before the semester started, and ... write on this blog! Yay!!!
One thing I'm starting to wrestle with in my personal life is choosing a path for grad school. I know that I need to have a decision made by fall so I can start applying to different programs to start the following fall. Right now I'm looking at different opportunities, and I think I've found a really good one - a Masters of Public Administration program through the University of Colorado at Denver, that I can complete entirely online, with a concentration in Nonprofit Management. This is my current front-runner, even ahead of the Master of Social Sciences program at CU-Denver. In an effort to be thorough and to explore all of my options I do plan to investigate other schools, primarily CU-Boulder, Regis University and the University of Denver. Honestly though, I'm just too egalitarian to really go for DU (expensive private school and you really pay for their name and reputation - $31K a year for undergrad, don't know how much grad school is) or Regis ($25K a year for undergrad, a Jesuit school with a strong reputation for scholarship). I think state-sponsored schools are much more my cup of tea. In contrast, this MPAd program at CU-Denver will run me around 18K FOR THE WHOLE PROGRAM, not just for one year, and will help prepare me to do what I want to do - work to create positive social change at either the nonprofit or government level. I can also use my electives to get enough graduate-level credits in one specific discipline of the social sciences to qualify me to teach at the community college level with this degree.
The problem I've always had with making up my mind about educational and career paths has always been my perspective that making these choices narrows down my path in life, and I expressed this last night to my friend over coffee. She has also been wrestling with these choices, and referred to an e-mail I sent her a few weeks ago, which I am exerpting here:
"Hey, I just had a mind-blowing thought. I was talking with Hubby and words jumped out of my mouth that took me by surprise, so much so that I had to send you a quick e-mail. I told Hubby (in answer to my own question of why didn't I go back to school a long time ago) that back then I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up but now I know I don't have to restrict myself to just one thing - I can be a teacher and work for a nonprofit and be a writer and a political activist and rabblerouser. This was my epiphany - and that's what has really freed me from stressing over what to major in and what path to take. In my head it was all about making THE RIGHT CHOICE, like once I chose a path I was irrevocably locked into it for life, and that really stressed me out like you wouldn't believe. Once it became clear that I could use a very broad education to prepare for multiple roles simultaneously, I started to see that selecting a path of study doesn't really narrow down my choices nearly as much as I thought. Yes, my path of study is a crappy one if I want to be an astrophysicist, but it will be great for any of the areas I want to be involved in - I don't have to choose just one! And even after I get my BA, and my Masters, I still don't have to choose just one - I may wind up doing Fund Development part time, teaching part time, writing books of social commentary a la Noam Chomsky and working on various liberal political causes in my spare time.
"The reason it felt so important to share this with you ASAP is because I know you've stressed a lot as well over the path you want to take with your education, and I thought this notion might be helpful for you as well. At this point in college I don't think it's about narrowing choices down to one specific field and position within that field, it's about selecting a few broad areas that really speak to you and learning as much as you can about them. The rest will come."
By reminding of me of my own words my friend made me realize that I was falling right back into my old trap and looking at the choice of a Master's program as restricting my choices rather than opening them up. Thanks to her I now realize that whichever program I choose will create more choices for me than I currently have, and no choice is irrevocable. Thank you, M!
I also had an interesting conversation with a brilliant coworker this week on acceptance, childhood incidents and perfectionism. His insights always help me learn more about myself and gain a better understanding of my own actions and how they are motivated by childhood experiences and long-held beliefs. I was trying to finish the aforementioned two large grants and was frustrated because I thought I'd omitted a fairly major piece of required information. I was starting to freak out a little bit as a result, and I think he could see that. The story he related helped me see that my own quest for perfection and my perfectionist traits stem from a quest for acceptance from my family. I won't go into major details here but I always felt like an outsider in my own family, and I think on some deep-down level I thought if I could only be perfect then they'd have to accept me. That's a heavy load to carry, and it certainly doesn't teach you how to deal with the inevitable screw-ups that are just simply bound to happen. If you're perfect and never let yourself fall, you never learn how to pick yourself up and dust yourself off and try again. You never learn to say "Oops." Learning how to say Oops, clean it up and go on without self-recrimination is crucial. Like I said, he's brilliant.
“Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right.” - Gandhi
Or, perhaps, denying themselves of the precious right to err.
Peace,
AuntieM
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