From the Bottom, It Looks Like a Steep Incline

Twenty years ago, I gave up on college. By the spring of 1994 I had attended two years of school at Redlands Community College and one year at South Western Oklahoma State University, and still didn’t have enough credits or the right combination of classes for a two year degree. After three years of college I had run out of time and money. I quit school and joined the workforce full time.

In the year 2000 (nine years after I had originally started attending college), Susan sat down with copies of my transcripts and ran the numbers. “You only need like five more classes to graduate,” she said. With help from Susan I enrolled at Oklahoma City Community College, and one semester later I was the proud recipient of an Associate in Arts Degree in Journalism and Broadcasting.

(My overall GPA from Redlands was 3.25, and at Weatherford I had a dismal 2.75. At OKCCC I earned a 3.75 — four As and one B.)

Roughly five years later, Susan suggested that I enroll at Southern Nazarene University. SNU had a night program designed for working adults. After Susan finished her degree at SNU, I started mine. I attended night classes for 13 months, and in the spring of 2005 I graduated from SNU with a Bachelor of Science in Organizational Leadership. My GPA at SNU was a 4.0, but my accumulative GPA (thanks to the classes I blew off 10-15 years prior) was a 3.485. Fortunately a 3.485 gets rounded up to 3.5, and I graduated with honors (Cum Laude).

I used to say that college didn’t directly help me in my career. I was performing the same work both before I started college and long after I graduated, so finding any direct correlation between college and rewards at work was difficult. I didn’t get a raise or promotion or bonus or even a high-five at work for earning my degree. The government simply doesn’t work that way. Looking back I can say that I have definitely been able to apply some of the knowledge and skills acquired in school to my job. While there may not have been a one-to-one relationship between advances in my education and advances at work, certainly school was not a waste of time.

I’ve been lucky and fortunate to find work that I enjoy. I’ve been hooked on home computers since my dad brought home that TRS-80 Model III back in 1980. Something about computers clicked for me, and whether it’s been physically running cable and setting up networks in the, doing security and vulnerability scans and reports, helping manage a nationwide network, deploying hundreds of virtual servers or simply troubleshooting everything from name resolution issues in Alaska to authentication errors in Germany, I’ve done it and I’ve enjoyed doing it.

I’ve come to realize that enjoying your job and liking your job is not the same as loving your job. Again, I feel extremely blessed for landing the job I have, and on a scale of 1-10 despite the daily grumblings and frustrations that come with every job, I would say based on what I do and the money I make my job is a 9 out of 10.

Which means, somewhere out there is a 10.

Susan, the troublemaker that she is, recently discovered that the University of Oklahoma offers a Masters degree in Professional Writing. The degree is similar to (and was spun off from) their M.A. in Journalism and Mass Communication, with an emphasis toward writers of “freelance fiction and nonfiction books, screenplays, magazine articles and short stories.” And man, does doing that for a living sound like a 10 to me.

The first step toward applying for this program is taking the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) test. Last Monday, I signed up to take the test four days later on Friday. I immediately hit the internet for study guides and found two: “Mastering the GRE in 40 Days,” and “Your 12 Week GRE Study Guide.” My studying and cramming more closely resembled one of those Benny Hill skits in which everything ran in fast forward. Actually, it more closely resembled this:

I spent every spare moment over the past four days cramming for the GRE. I’ll write more about the test later, but I described my cramming for it as the abridged version of Adam Sandler’s Billy Madison. In that film, Sandler retakes every grade school class, spending two weeks in each grade. In my case, I had to re-learn every algebraic formula and geometric rule taught between 8th and 12th grade while learning a couple hundred new vocabulary words. The part of the the test that frightens most people — the free form essay portion — didn’t worry me in the slightest.

After four days of studying and almost four hours in a Prometrics testing center, I am proud to announce that I passed the GRE — “not with flying colors, but perhaps an 8-bit color spectrum,” as I joked on Twitter.

The next step is gathering my professional references and officially applying for the program. If everything goes according to plan I’ll be starting in the fall as a college student all over again. Of course I plan to continue working at my current job, probably for many years to come, but you never know what’s over the hill until you take that first step.

Hill, here I come.