9th
Read This Thing I Link To, And Just Say No
I recently came very close to giving into peer pressure. I made it through high school without so much as a toke, but this one almost got me. Everyone’s doing it, after all.
Recently, I considered applying to graduate school. That’s the part of college when you’re not a college kid anymore but you know you’ve peaked in the role and you’re not ready to it let go. Plus, you know no one’s going to hire you right now and you enjoy having your loans in forebearance and you still haven’t learned not to be an elitist prick about music preferences.
Grad school. The part of college where you pay way too much tuition to do way too much work and become way too specialized in your chosen subdivision of a specialty degree program so you can have your masters, at which point there aren’t but six other similarly educated people in the world to give two clicks what you have to say in 60 pages about the latest vote in the Laos parliament about composite vinyl mixes for fupa retaining straps.
THEN JUST TODAY, a former professor of mine, Bill Sledzik, mentioned an excellent editorial in the New York Times by Mark Taylor. (Probably Dr.) Taylor’s the chairman of the religion department at Columbia University, and he makes a great argument for a big overhaul of American higher education, including several constructive proposals that are so good I even let slide his kind of stale joke about Detroit.
Taylor’s piece is brave from the viewpoint of a professor (Sledzik even warned other professors, calling it “a does of reality,” although I believe he meant “realty”), as Taylor argues for the systematic annhilation of tenure and everyone who has it.
Also, it was nice to feel vindicated for once about not wanting to go to grad school, a decision which in most other contexts just looks like a lack of ambition. Not that I have any qualms with my real reason for dodging it, which is one part Eat my shorts to two parts Hey BUD, what’s your PRAWblum?
I don’t mean to slight the bravery of my friends who are headed to grad school or my mom, who has a university teaching job she loves because she earned her master’s degree. I have a lot of respect for the whole lot of them, but it’s the kind of respect you have for those guys who cover themselves in calf blood and ride sharks. Ballsy, but not my thing.
AN INTERESTING NOTE FOR PEOPLE WITH SCROLL WHEELS: The irony of the situation is that Bill Sledzik had a lot to do with my decision not to go to grad school and he doesn’t even know it. I needed three letters of recommendation for my application, and though it wasn’t required explicitly, one of them needed to be from an academic in my field. Although Sledz taught a lower division course in my as-yet incomplete journalism major, he’s the last journalism professor I’ve had for a class I finished, and even though that was almost two years ago, I like to think we have a pretty good relationship.
I typically consider men(tors) like Sledz to be go-to guys for letters of recommendation, but this time my conscience wouldn’t let me ask. I couldn’t stand the idea of asking a guy I admire so much to recommend me for something to which I already knew I wouldn’t apply myself. I can’t help it. This is as boring as I’ll allow my writing to get.
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