Reflections on Life, Liberty and Library Science

Still, I had the sense to realize that I’d probably be of more use to the academic world than Corporate America, and thus began a long, painful, confidence-crushing search for a graduate program. Sparing the details, here is a laundry list of the programs I explored, in no particular order:

• Politics: This was my secondary area of study at U.C. Santa Cruz and I researched several masters programs but none of them appealed to my genetic proclivity towards socialism.
• Educational Policy: 90% chance I would have ended up as a high school principal. No thanks.
• Law: Working in a law firm as a clerk for one year was enough to convince me that I didn’t want to be a lawyer. Walking out of the LSAT halfway through the test sealed the deal (oddly, I found it hard to focus on the exam while my mother was undergoing reconstructive surgery).
• Teaching: I considered becoming a teacher during the “teacher shortage” under former CA governor Pete Wilson, and I even took the CBEST and applied to work in Oakland and West Contra-Costa. Thankfully for me and for the children, I didn’t get as much as a return phone call.
• Art and Design: When I went to college, I decided not to pursue art because I didn’t want to end up designing advertisements. I also took hubristic pride in being an untrained artist. After I graduated from UC Santa Cruz, I felt somewhat regretful and took a ton of community college courses on graphic design, Photoshop, etc. But I never followed through with a portfolio, coming back to the conclusion that I didn’t want to design ads. I also now realize that I am more of a frustrated illustrator than I am a designer.
• Semiotics: For whatever reason, I forgot how much I despised Modern Literary Studies, and got the brilliant-but-delusional idea that I was destined to become an academic expert on the study of signs and symbolic systems. I came to my senses after discovering that very few universities even teach semiotics; the likelihood of spending a decade in northern rural Denmark (think: The Star Wars Rebel Alliance base on a moon in the remote Hoth system) was enough to dissuade me from pursuing this any further.
• Computational Linguistics: Close, but no cigar. I attended a great symposium at the Copenhagen Businsess School, but the professor was not willing to humor my interest. Undeterred, I wrote to a former politics professor at UC Santa Cruz asking for a letter of recommendation. He sounded supportive but totally slammed me after seeing my half-baked letter of intent. It was pretty obvious I didn’t have my shit together, and he was about as discouraging as a professor could be without actually telling me to fuck off.
• Media Studies: One of the programs I looked at was the School of Linguistics at MIT, where Noam Chomsky teaches. While surfing their Web site, I stumbled across the Media Studies program.  The program’s soon-to-be-former director is a comic book fanatic and a prolific blogger, and I had a few encouraging interactions with him during an online informational chat session. But ultimately I could not justify the cost and consequence of uprooting my family to go study comic books and video games in Cambridge.

By this point, I had been out of school (as in full-time university education) for 10 years and had already passed my self-imposed deadline to start a graduate program by the time I turned 30. I felt the door of educational opportunity was slowly closing and realized I needed to change my mindset somehow if I was going to end this long period of arrested development. On a whim, I signed up for a hokey night class called “The Psychology of Peak Performance” through Stanford’s Continuing Studies program. My employer reimbursed me for the tuition fee, and it gave me the chance to get out of the house one night a week. The teacher made a living as a “personal improvement” coach and had several corporations and athletes on his client list so the class was, in part, a viral marketing platform for his services.

Regardless, the teacher had obviously developed a system for his services, and provided some useful tools for achieving what he labeled as “peak performance,” including techniques for “making effective assumptions” and “finding the exit keys” to get out of a rut. However, the most illuminating moment of the class for me emerged during an email exchange with the teacher. He gave the class an assignment to describe a current challenge in our lives, and I told him about my “issues” with graduate school.

His response? “I find it interesting that going to grad school is still on your to-do list.”

For some reason, I felt like he was telling me to give up. Which made me more determined than ever to get my act together and apply to a program. “Fucking bastard,” I thought. “I’ll show him.”

Of course, old habits die hard and I had more fits and starts in the months that followed. But the real epiphany came when I decided to stop being such a fucking snob and researched the school of library and information science at San Jose State. The old me was a stuck-up prick who wouldn’t settle for anything less than a top university. The new me was a working father with a mortgage to pay. And the masters program at SJSU seemed to dare me to apply: no GRE, no letters of recommendation, no statement of intent required. And the program is taught entirely online. The only real requirement was a “B” average in college, which I had achieved despite my best efforts. No excuses left to hide behind!

So I applied. And I was accepted. And now I am giddy with anticipation and relief that I finally took the next step.