Anyone who knows me, or has read previous posts here, is aware that I am back in school after sixteen years. I talk about it a lot, because it has been a significant decision and a big change from visions of working in the restaurant industry or moving back to retail, as I always expected to do. Moreover, it involved getting over a lot of my fears—particularly that pesky fear of failure—and making me do something scary for the sake of an end result that is far from immediate. Scarier still was facing my past academic record, which left much to be desired.
When I went to college the first time, I originally applied for an A.A.S. in Computer Network Administration. Before I had even enrolled, I switched to an A.A.S. in Business Management—not to be confused with an A.S. in Business Administration—and in the Spring semester of 2001, I took my first college courses. Aside from Financial Accounting, in which I earned an A, the semester did not go well. I dropped MGT101, ironically the core course of my degree, and got dismal grades in Business and English. Not because I did not understand the material, but because I did not take the time to do my homework, a refrain that would be incredibly familiar to any teacher I had from my K-12 years.
Having decided that Business was not the field for me, I turned to the idea of studying Spanish and teaching it. I am not certain how I thought the kid who never did his homework was going to be effective at convincing other people to do theirs, but then, I’m not certain how I thought I would get a degree at all. Nevertheless, I changed my major to Liberal Arts and Sciences—again, note that this is not the degree I should have been enrolled in—and registered for two classes in Fall 2001, a Geography course and a Latin American Literature course. I passed the former with a C, and dropped the latter mid-way through the semester. I took the entire year of 2002 off, and returned in the Summer of 2003 to re-take English—I failed the course. Discouraged and confused about my future, I dropped out and in essence forgot about the idea of college entirely.
I am left wondering what I was thinking. Was academia a difficult arena? Certainly. Was competing in the job market without a degree any easier? Nope. But, in looking through the course catalog and requirements for my Associate’s degree, I also did not see how all the general education courses mattered, nor did I see evidence that I would gain enough specialization to actually know what I needed to for a career. For anyone who understands how these things work, you may find yourself as I am now, aghast at my lack of understanding. As embarrassing as it is to admit, I never really knew how degrees past the Associate’s worked, and so I stuck to working in jobs where even the Associate’s was an unnecessary qualification.
After twenty years in those fields, I will say that there is nothing wrong with working in retail and restaurants. Firstly, someone has to do it, and secondly, they require more skill and mental acuity than the general public seems to ascribe to them. I have learned more about work ethic and adaptability by doing those jobs than I might have done had I earned a degree when I was younger. By some twist of irony, I think doing work that did not require a degree prepared me for the work of earning one better than anything else in my life has.
Another skill taught to me by my service industry work is the understanding of how each individual task, and whether it is done poorly or well, contributes to an end goal. Every individual step of service, every position worked by an employee, is a necessary function that keeps the business as a whole, well, in business. Again, perhaps this is not some grand revelation, but so often we can fall into the trap of thinking of someone as “just” a cashier or “just” a dishwasher. Yet, if that dishwasher is inefficient at their job, or doesn’t take proper precautions to make sure plates are actually clean and sanitized, an entire restaurant’s reputation is at stake. A store’s cash flow can be severely impacted if the cashier is not conscientious about scanning every item, or counting money correctly. The task may not be difficult, but difficulty is not the same as importance. As the extra side of ranch to the restaurant experience, so the literature assignment to the college degree.
I say all of this because I understand it now in a way I wish I would have, but never could have, walking into my first class in January 2001. The exact reasons I lacked the capability to rationalize backward from a goal, to the individual actions necessary to achieve it, would require a deeper understanding of human development than I have yet attained. In the end, I don’t know if it matters that I know why I did what I did. What is important is that I have taken away something from the experiences I have had since.
As I was in the winding-down phase of my management position at work, I spent one day looking through tools I developed, working on instructions, double-checking formulas, and thinking about the work that had gone into them. Specifically, there are three spreadsheets I designed for my job: a daily cash accounting sheet, a bi-weekly commission sheet, and a food inventory and costing sheet. Each of these involved hours of painstaking work using formulas and functions I had learned through reverse-engineering other spreadsheets from prior jobs. They also involved, at their core, an understanding of Algebra, a class I did so dismally in that I took it twice in high school—shout out to Mrs. Lagle for putting up with me twice. Algebra, which I had, at the time, thought had no practical application in my life.
I walked into the classrooms of Parkland College in August 2019, understanding two things that I had not on my first go-round:
- Just because the course material is not directly related to my major does not mean the knowledge I gain from the course will not be applicable to my work.
- The grade I get matters, whether I want to take this particular course or not.
I took a 14-credit-hour Fall semester (four classes), and a 16-credit-hour Spring semester (five classes), and I finished both semesters with straight A’s. In my entire life, I have never worked so hard at anything. I have also never had a straight-A grade report. There were days where no one heard from me while I pounded the keyboard to crank out a paper, and nights where I lost sleep to make sure an assignment was done after getting off work late. It was not easy. What, though, ever is?
As I entered the Spring semester, the class I was most dreading was Music Appreciation. I have very little musical skill or understanding, and am the embodiment of the saying, “I may not know art, but I know what I like.” True to the course catalog, we covered a broad spectrum of musical knowledge and history, both Western and non-Western, foreign and domestic, familiar and not so. What I learned in that class about music was, indeed, a greater appreciation for the thought and care that goes into the composition of any piece, whether I care for it myself or not. I listened to mid-1990s West-Coast rap with a new ear. I heard Medieval choral music and learned how polyphony and harmony are not the same thing, and how to tell the difference.
I learned a new way to look at something unfamiliar and connect to it, drawing parallels between things that are not as dissimilar as they seem.
Ah, yes. This is why I had to take a Fine Art class to graduate with a Social Work degree. It is not just about the content of the class, but about learning to think in a new way. While I may not deviate massively from the styles of music I prefer, when I hear a new song I can now pick apart its pieces and consider why each one is present. Similarly, one day when I have a client sitting in my chair and telling me about a problem going on their life, I have to be able to look at it in context, and consider each piece of their situation. It is inevitable I will meet people whose experiences are anything but parallel to my own, but that does not mean I cannot connect those dots.
Sitting in these general education classes with students who are, quite literally, young enough to be my children has been challenging on a few levels. I feel out of place, of course, and in some ways I default to that sensation of being “the weird kid” in school. Years of working with the public have given me the outward appearance of confidence that is the only reason I can speak up in class. Many of my classmates, however, are prone to side conversations, complaining that they think the professor is off topic, or they don’t care about the class, or the ever-present, “why do I even have to take this?” Hearing them talk like this made me so angry, and I came to half a dozen explanations for my reaction, none of which really seemed to make any sense.
It took until mid-Spring semester for me to realize I was angry because they sounded like me, nineteen years ago. Given the option, I wish I could go back and tell myself all of this, but in reality I don’t think it would do any good. What I want to tell my classmates, instead, is that if you aren’t willing to put in the effort, maybe taking a break is not such a bad idea. While I do not necessarily think everyone has to take sixteen years off, what matters more is that when the time is right, you will know.
After all, it took me this long to be, finally, a sophomore in college.
Daniel K. Sheff 