Nov. 23rd, 2004 05:51 am
This should be interesting
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textualdevianceIf all goes well, starting in January, yours truly will be taking the first class needed to start on a degree in Communications/Journalism at UW.
I've wanted to go back to school for a long time, but I'd just never settled on anything. I would love to finally finish out my music degree someday, considering I was only 10 credits away from it when I left, but I also know that's going to be next to impossible because I can't complete the piano requirements most schools have because of my stoopid hands. I thought for a while about a psych degree, since I was just a few credits off of the minor for that, or maybe a gender studies one in a similar vein. And most recently I've been pissing around with the idea of law, but frankly that scares the shit out of me, and I'd rather not just be a paper-pushing paralegal.
But the current dismal state of media in the US, combined with the fact that what I do all day already qualifies as a sort of journalism anyway (it's something like online magazine publishing) has me rather fired up to go back to my roots, as it were, and do what I set out to do a million years ago when I was a 17 year old journalism major at UNR, before the whole college experience kind of freaked my ass out.
The media/entertainment/arts industry is really where my heart has always been, particularly as concerns its ability to shape world culture. It all ties up neatly with virtually everything I've ever taken more than a couple of classes in (save the French minor I tried to work on for a while.) Music, theater, psychology... plus my background in radio and print media, my current occupation (of sorts) and my interest in politics. It really all comes down to the art and science of mass communication. I'm fascinated with the way humans interact with each other via mass-distributed means; how they relate to each other and the world around them based on what messages they get from entertainment and media, and how those industries respond in turn to the way humans behave, and communicate back to them. The never-ending cycle of art imitating life imitating art. So I think going into this will be good for me. It'll give me a way to focus and coalesce all those wildly diverse interests into one ball of wax, and just maybe find a way to parlay it into an actual career that earns me more than $20 a month in ad commissions. It all just feels right, in a way that none of my other ideas about my future have. This feels like it belongs to me, not like someone else's career I'm going to attempt. I feel like I'm halfway there already, and that makes the prospect a lot less daunting than if I were to start some other discipline from the ground up.
And really: what better major for a Gemini anyway? ;)
I admit I'm nervous, though. It's been almost 7 years since I took my last class, and almost 10 years since I actually went to classes regularly. A lot about my life has changed since then. There are some pretty big challenges I know I'm going to face, particularly where my health and controlling my ADD is concerned. It's weird. Most of my life I was a model student. Zipped through everything. Finished high school in 2 1/2 years and when I finally finished my degree I had something like 215 credits and a GPA around 3.75. And then it all started falling apart in 1994. My health tanked, my marriage tanked, I started having problems with my classes, I had financial problems. It all just came crashing down over the space of one year. So facing this now means having to totally re-evaluate myself and what I'm capable of doing, and try really hard to have courage that I haven't had for a long time.
This may, of course, derail whatever work I'm doing on my sites, but I hope to have those all in easy maintenance mode by January anyway. And the one class I'm looking at for the first term is just two days a week, and it's on the campus just 10 minutes down the road from me, so it hopefully won't take too much out of my time.
It's just one class. Just a few hours a week. I can manage this. Weird how it scares me so much, but if I can get through this, maybe it'll get me back on the track I got off of 10 years ago.
I've wanted to go back to school for a long time, but I'd just never settled on anything. I would love to finally finish out my music degree someday, considering I was only 10 credits away from it when I left, but I also know that's going to be next to impossible because I can't complete the piano requirements most schools have because of my stoopid hands. I thought for a while about a psych degree, since I was just a few credits off of the minor for that, or maybe a gender studies one in a similar vein. And most recently I've been pissing around with the idea of law, but frankly that scares the shit out of me, and I'd rather not just be a paper-pushing paralegal.
But the current dismal state of media in the US, combined with the fact that what I do all day already qualifies as a sort of journalism anyway (it's something like online magazine publishing) has me rather fired up to go back to my roots, as it were, and do what I set out to do a million years ago when I was a 17 year old journalism major at UNR, before the whole college experience kind of freaked my ass out.
The media/entertainment/arts industry is really where my heart has always been, particularly as concerns its ability to shape world culture. It all ties up neatly with virtually everything I've ever taken more than a couple of classes in (save the French minor I tried to work on for a while.) Music, theater, psychology... plus my background in radio and print media, my current occupation (of sorts) and my interest in politics. It really all comes down to the art and science of mass communication. I'm fascinated with the way humans interact with each other via mass-distributed means; how they relate to each other and the world around them based on what messages they get from entertainment and media, and how those industries respond in turn to the way humans behave, and communicate back to them. The never-ending cycle of art imitating life imitating art. So I think going into this will be good for me. It'll give me a way to focus and coalesce all those wildly diverse interests into one ball of wax, and just maybe find a way to parlay it into an actual career that earns me more than $20 a month in ad commissions. It all just feels right, in a way that none of my other ideas about my future have. This feels like it belongs to me, not like someone else's career I'm going to attempt. I feel like I'm halfway there already, and that makes the prospect a lot less daunting than if I were to start some other discipline from the ground up.
And really: what better major for a Gemini anyway? ;)
I admit I'm nervous, though. It's been almost 7 years since I took my last class, and almost 10 years since I actually went to classes regularly. A lot about my life has changed since then. There are some pretty big challenges I know I'm going to face, particularly where my health and controlling my ADD is concerned. It's weird. Most of my life I was a model student. Zipped through everything. Finished high school in 2 1/2 years and when I finally finished my degree I had something like 215 credits and a GPA around 3.75. And then it all started falling apart in 1994. My health tanked, my marriage tanked, I started having problems with my classes, I had financial problems. It all just came crashing down over the space of one year. So facing this now means having to totally re-evaluate myself and what I'm capable of doing, and try really hard to have courage that I haven't had for a long time.
This may, of course, derail whatever work I'm doing on my sites, but I hope to have those all in easy maintenance mode by January anyway. And the one class I'm looking at for the first term is just two days a week, and it's on the campus just 10 minutes down the road from me, so it hopefully won't take too much out of my time.
It's just one class. Just a few hours a week. I can manage this. Weird how it scares me so much, but if I can get through this, maybe it'll get me back on the track I got off of 10 years ago.
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no subject
Have a nice Thanksgiving weekend!