soooo one thing i've been thinking about lately is
going back to school. i quit school to move to philadelphia, with about 2.5 years under my belt, and realized when i got here that
i'd basically never be able to afford to go back (as a teenager, based on my family income of like.. 14k/year, i got really sweet grants and basically got paid to go to school. i mean, like, an excess of $2k/year, and not enough that i could quit working, but that felt like millions at the time). a few years after moving here (2006 !) i got a job at a university that offers
full tuition benefits, and
incidentally has a program where certain degrees can be obtained entirely after work hours.
i was disheartened to find that my
clown college credits from florida barely transfer- a handful of classes do, and about half only transfer as electives (!!!), so i basically have to start from scratch. i guess that's good though because i have decided to switch from pursuing chemistry to
history.
i
feel really stupid for not taking advantage of these benefits before- i've started the registration process and
sort of trailed off several times before. i was thinking about it the other day and it really struck me that i would've killed for this opportunity when i was 18 and that my mom would've killed for it to while going into
extreme student loan debt and probably aging herself a million years while trying to work full time, raise two kids by herself, and go to school in her 40s, and that most people do not get opportunities like this.
i also have
no false illusions about the usefulness of a history degree. i'm pretty happy with the field i'm in now, which is one of those fields that bafflingly requires "a degree" (in anything), so i basically will just get to study something i'm interested in and see what i can do with it on
a personal, if not professional, level, and possibly make more at my current job because i got the degree.
on another note, here's
a video of my little cousin setting himself on fire that appeared on court tv !
