“I can’t wait until I can be done with school and never need to learn anything ever again!” she huffed. I knew she didn’t mean that. She loves to learn and absorbs new material like a sponge. In this particular instance, she was just unhappy with the amount of homework she had cutting into the few hours she had at home before bedtime each night.
I gave her the same answer I’ve repeated to her several times. “You’ll eventually be finished with school, and it’ll then be your choice as to what you want to do from there. Many kids go on to college, where most of your classes will be in whatever subject you’re really interested in, and I hope you’ll do that. But I think no matter what, you’ll want to keep learning new things your entire life. Think of how boring life would be if you stopped learning anything new! Someday you’ll stop going to school, but education is something that should keep going for your entire life, whether you’re in school or not.”
And truthfully, I do believe education is a life-long endeavor. After all, since starting kindergarten at five years old, there have been just six years in my life where I wasn’t formally enrolled in a class in some way. (Yes, ONLY six years, and I’m 37!)
I went to college right out of high school, completing my four years and graduating with a BA in History, cum laude. I changed my major three times during those four years of college, mostly because I had too many interests and trouble deciding which direction I wanted to go.
After college, I immediately went into a Masters Degree program for History. However, halfway through the first year, I discovered my primary professor was planning a sabbatical for the next year, meaning I’d either have to take a year off from my program or choose a different focus. I quit the program before the year was up, choosing to work until I could determine what I wanted to do next.
A history degree isn’t exactly a perfect match for jobs in the real world, but my self-taught technical skills landed me a job in web design at a university library. I had been dabbling in HTML all through college (unofficial education), and that side-interest earned me a job.
I didn’t make it even six months before I decided I wanted to be back in school again. I applied for and was accepted in a Masters program for Theatre, specifically costume design and theatre history. I had also been working as a seamstress on the side, making costumes for our renaissance festival for myself and friends. I minored in Theatre in college, too, so theatre history was a good fit.
Thanks to my web design job, I had moved on to a job in online instructional design at that point, developing corporate e-learning courses for a private company. I worked from home for much of my time there, going above and beyond to meet and beat my deadlines while also taking graduate level courses in theatre history part-time, teaching Intro to Theatre classes to undergraduates every Friday morning, and serving as costume designer for one of the university’s plays that season.
I probably would have finished my MA, but after getting married in 2003 and then pregnant in 2004, we made the choice to move closer to family. I had planned to finish my degree remotely, since I was only a class and a thesis away, but the demands of work and baby pushed all of that to the back. I also realized at that time that I probably wouldn’t find a lot of jobs related to that degree.
It was just after Cordy was a year old that I got the idea to go back to school for nursing. When I was in college the first time, I considered going into pre-med. At 28 years old, I thought I was too old for pre-med, but still young enough for nursing school. My hope was that nursing would give me the job flexibility I needed for my family.
I started with the prerequisite courses first, and found them to be a breeze, giving me confidence that I could make it through nursing school. By the time I started my clinical courses, Mira had joined the family, so I was committed to a full course load, clinicals, and a preschooler and baby at home. (That was about the same time Cordy was diagnosed with autism, too.)
Cordy helped me study Chemistry back then
Was it easy? No way! It was probably the most intense period of my life. With all of the responsibilities on my plate, adding college into the mix was tricky. But I was passionate about the subject, which made it easier to stay up late doing homework while everyone else slept and study for exams with Dora the Explorer as background noise.
I graduated in 2009 and immediately got my RN license and a job. That wasn’t the best year for jobs in any sector, with the country in full recession, and I moved to another job in 2010 when it was clear that the birth center I worked at was going to close due to hospital budget cuts.
I worked two years at the next job, as a nurse and manager for a pediatric nutritional call center. My previous work experience prior to nursing helped me get the manager position, while my RN license got me in the door. It wasn’t the perfect job by any means, and I didn’t have the flexibility I was expecting in nursing. I considered going back to school for my BS in nursing, or possibly becoming a nurse practitioner.
It was in 2012 that I was abruptly let go when the company scaled back and got rid of the overnight shift entirely. I had been working when everyone else slept for three years, so I wasn’t sad to go back to the land of daylight.
Thankfully, through long-standing connections with blog friends, a job presented itself quickly and I jumped on it. Only it wasn’t nursing – I’d be back into the land of IT and computers. The position would challenge me with an ever-changing list of responsibilities, and required me to brush up on and grow my technical skills. I was ready for a new challenge and jumped at the chance.
Over a year and a half later, and I’m still in love with my job. It’s a position with variety, challenge, and the need to continue adapting to new products and situations. It’s also flexible and meets the needs of my family, too. While I haven’t gone back to school, I’ve spent a lot of time in self-study to improve my technical skills to be more useful for my company. And there’s a good chance I may eventually find myself enrolling in classes again to formalize and improve on my IT knowledge.
My nursing degree certainly hasn’t gone to waste – at the very least, it’s good knowledge to have for personal use. I take continuing education courses to meet the requirements of my license and keep it current, and if it wasn’t for the chain of events that ended with my previous nursing job, I wouldn’t be where I am now.
Nursing and IT are both hot fields to be in, and I’m glad to have experience and knowledge in both. Each step of my education has been valuable, including that BA in History from years ago. Working any job requires far more than just the basic skills listed on the paper – the whole person hired to work in that position can bring a wealth of unrelated, but possibly beneficial, skills to the job. I consider myself well-rounded.
My advice to my daughters will continue to be that education is never a waste. While it’s important to consider career potential, and consider the timing of when you’re seeking to improve your skills and knowledge, you’ll always have some benefit to education throughout your life. Who knows? Maybe I’ll decide to go for another degree in my forties?
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