I got the completely wrong college degrees. I’ve never been bothered by this. At least I have some college degrees. And their wrongness is an accurate reflection of my nature (blooming ev-en-tu-al-ly). I didn’t know and/or embrace what I wanted out of life early on.
Who cares, because I got what I wanted in the long run—a self-made, totally authentic writing career. People pay me to write. Sometimes. That supercedes all ill-conceived college degrees, right?
Yes. Until recently. Feeling the need for something new, something less speculative, something to prepare me for the not-so-far-off future when I’ll need medical benefits, I recently looked into teaching writing at the local community college.
And learned that, two college degrees and ten years of professional writing aside, I am not qualified to teach even pre-college level writing. To do so, I would need a MA in English. (Not even an MFA in writing, incidentally, which I think says something about the controversy around MFAs in writing. Someday I’ll blog about that).
It’s the first time I’ve regretted my academic past, or rather regretted that I wasn’t more directed in my academic past. No point to this regret, naturally—it won’t change anything. And in the big picture, I believe you can’t be where you aren’t yet. In 1996 when I started down the road of MS in Natural Resource Education, I wasn’t a writer yet.
But the question remains—what now? Do I live with my inapt resume, or correct it by getting another master’s degree? Hmmm. We are education junkies in my family. But yikes almighty, back to school? (The third option is to write a mega best-selling novel, which would pay for those medical benefits.)
By the way, I took a teeny tiny job as a writing tutor at the community college instead. Apparently, I am qualified to do that. Next post: Blooming is reacquainted with comma splices, run-ons and fragments.
