Goulash is going to be a little more half-assed than usual for the next few weeks. I've got a few deadlines at work, school is getting tough, and on top of it all, I'm in defensive driving. Does that qualify me for a Nobel Prize? Probably not, but I wouldn't exclude it totally.
Now that I've been out of school for a few years now, I'm always tempted to go back and really solidify my credentials as a fancy pants. Every two years or so, I actually do enroll in a class and attempt to become Dr. Cody Powell. For the first month or so, I like thinking about weighty matters and learning all of this esoteric stuff. Then, the class starts to demand things from me, and I reach the point where I'm emailing the registrar and asking, "If I quit now, I can still keep my bachelor's degree, right? Come on, we're bros."
I was a good, albeit lazy, student in college, and initially, I didn't understand why that didn't translate to success in graduate school. I've got it now, though: the real world has poisoned me against education.
When I was in college, I learned all of this stuff about medieval European history, eigenvectors, and antitrust laws because I thought that maybe I'd need it at some point in the future. It didn't seem likely, but then I hadn't had a real job so I couldn't discount the possibility completely. For all I knew, when you clocked in at 8 AM every morning, you had an hour worth of linear algebra problems, regardless of your rank in the company. You exchanged papers at 9 AM and God help you if you forgot to show your work.
Now that I've have a real job for years now, I can declare that most of my education was like a personal jet pack: cool, but not very useful. The hard stuff at a job was the easy stuff in school: things like writing reports, working in a group, staying on task. What about the hard academic stuff? Well, I don't think it has a place in most jobs. Sure, it's interesting and fun to learn about, and those are both very good reasons to study such things. But in the real world, you're probably more likely to succeed by helping people disable the little paper clip guy in Word than by handing in 20 page papers about TS Eliot. That's not so bad. (Potential PhD dissertation: the little paper clip guy in Word as a manifestation of the id in TS Eliot?)
I'm writing this specifically so that I can turn it into toilet paper rolls. Then, in 2008 when I'm sitting in the bathroom, thinking, "I should go take a class or something," the toilet paper will remind me what's in store. (Didn't I say I was going to be half-assing this stuff? I disgust myself.)
Posted by Cody at November 29, 2006 7:59 PM