Noel B

I know! I understand that we're all trying to get teenagers to start thinking of themselves as agents of their own lives so that they can make the transition to adulthood as successfully as possible but...

Maybe the "real world" cliche is not super useful, especially when all you know about it is the cliche you heard your own professors invoke when you were a student and then you never had the opportunity to check for yourself?

Yeah I have to imagine they are a real small minority??

I am terrible at estimating age which is why I don't do it. The only ages are "child" "my age" and "old," so I just never mention people's age

Yeah, the people I'm getting along better are also the people that were out "in the real world" at least a little before going back to school.

going back to school feels like returning to the starting area in an RPG and makes you realize how much better you've become.

This is the perfecto analogy lmao

I think it also makes a difference that when I first went to school and dropped out I kind of went because that's the default path after highschool. But now I actually had to move shit around to go back, it kind of guarantees that I actually, really want to go to school and I find my approach is different. Not that I hated school when I was a teen, but I remember feeling more "ugh, classes" then. Now I'm sad because next week is a holiday so we'll have one less class and I really wanted to get to the next text in the syllabus.

(Sorry this got so long, I did struggle deciding!)

I actually posted here about it a while ago while I was deciding and I specifically had trouble deciding what to go back for.

Backstory is that I've been working as a copywriter for the past decade, mostly freelance. I'd been burnt out for the last year or so because marketing is a soul-sucking industry if you're not down with a few grifts. Then ChatGPT exploded in popularity and my income and number of projects suddenly dropped to almost nothing. Same thing was happening to a lot of colleagues.

And I found myself thinking that, while I probably could work really hard to carve myself a smaller, less exciting, and worse-paid niche in the now ChatGPT-flooded industry... I did not want to. So I needed to find something else I wanted to do with my life.

How I decided:

Spouse suggested going back to school but school is expensive, so I decided I would only go back for something completely different from what I already have experience on, meaning: only go back for something I truly need formal instruction for.

My second condition was that I would only go back for a degree that would actually allow me to change careers, a degree that was specifically geared towards a specific path, not like a general major that is interchangeable for every desk job. (At this point I've been out in "the real world" so long that having a degree is not really the thing that moves the needle on my resume, compared to work experience. Also I can and have lied about it before, so. It's fine they were shitty companies to work for anyway lol)

So English and related majors were out. I love words, but I've been working as an actual writer for almost ten years. Business and all of that, also out. Freelancing is running a business of one (which is fine because you could not pay me to study business). Unless I only wanted to work in academia, which I don't, then most of the humanities were out as well. Again, love them, but not really narrow enough to actually help me change careers, considering my work experience.

So time to look at my other interests. I don't want to look at a computer any more than I already do so not computer science or engineering of the software kind. So maybe some kind of science?

I've always loved nature, ecology and biology. The earliest career I remember wanting when adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up was..."marine biologist". I lived in a landlocked city lmao.

I never pursued it because I got told it wasn't a practical thing to study and then undiagnosed and untreated ADHD made me drop out. I kind of assumed I would never go back to school and I needed to find a career that didn't actually require higher education. Fortunately I loved writing. I still do, I'm bummed about not being able to keep doing it for a living, but the industry fucked me up.

Anyway I've been volunteering to help restore the natural areas in Chicago parks and preserves all through last year (I also have some posts about that!). I still am, but we pause for the winter lol. And it's been consistently the most fulfilling activity I did all year long. I want to keep doing that, but I also want to do more. I want to understand what is actually going on with these ecosystems we're trying to bring back, I want to figure out ways we can be more successful. It's something that I love and that I also think it's important. And it haves an immediate effect on the world around me.

So that's how I decided I wanted to go back and study biology, with a focus on ecology, and I will try to go into conservation.

It's something completely different from what I've been doing so far. I need formal instruction in it, and it's narrow enough for me to actually need a degree to be able to change careers. It's something that I love and I'm interested in and have been for most of my life. And it's something that aligns with my values and will help me tangibly influence my environment.