Shifting gears: Grad student redux

Remember Former Finnegan No. 3? Right brain happy, left brain starting to gasp for air, the creative part in the middle trying to get the left & right to find a common course. Just when something needed to give, I was inspired by my boss's enthusiasm for teaching as a sideline and I thought, “Hey! If I'm teaching part-time, I can probably be happy as a full-time graphic designer,” and I started giving the matter some serious thought.

I needed a program that would allow me to take classes at night or on the weekend, and one that I could afford. There was a state university branch in my city, which would be convenient and affordable, but the programs available were uninspiring to liberal arts me. On the other hand, there was a private, Catholic university a couple of suburbs down the road that had some wonderful graduate programs tailor-made for liberal arts nuts like me, but the tuition would be higher than a state university. I found out that if I enrolled in a master’s program as a degree candidate and took the minimum for a full load (two classes per semester), I was eligible for a half-tuition scholarship, which meant I would only have to come up with about $1000 per semester. Still, that was $1000 I didn’t have.

I happened to mention my concerns about paying tuition to my boss, and she reminded me that one of our employee benefits was that that our employer would reimburse us for any credit course we completed, provided we had passed with at least a B grade. I knew about the policy – I had taken advantage of it when I took a graphic design course at the local junior college – but I had no idea it would cover courses that were not job-related. I guess someone on the benefits committee had heard that happy, well-rounded employees were more productive, and that continual learning helps people be happier (see my previous posts on this topic). Anyway, haroo-harray, I was soon taking an evening course in Literature in the Age of Enlightenment one evening per week, and another one on World Drama every second Saturday. And loving it! 

I had forgotten how much I had missed being a student. I was so excited about my new classes that I was getting up at 4:30 every morning to read things like Giambattista Vico’s New Science and Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchantes.  Forgotten corners of my brain were sparking for the first time in too long, and soon I realized that I’d actually been missing writing papers for classes and having the companionship of people who actually cared about great literature. My focus was definitely shifting away from the right-brain tasks of graphic design toward the more intellectual challenges of my coursework. I wasn’t yet ready to entertain the possibility of a complete change of life but, unbeknownst to me, that decision was just around the corner.