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10:17 a.m. - 2006-01-11
I do not want to go to grad school
Not to sound dumb or whatever...

(I had a friend in high school who started out a lot of sentences like that...)

OK, so I had been toying with this idea of going to grad school. As you know. See approx 5 blog entires ago...And I talked to some people and had meetings with some people and asked some people currently or recently in grad school what they thought. Well, I decided to hold off on going down that path for a while and instead gear up for a job change. I think I found a great one by the way. Fingers crossed! We'll see how the interview process goes and if it's realy a good fit.

But back to the grad school thing. So, I'm in this class with 35 other "young leaders" and we have this session coming up on Ethics. Our group coordinator emailed us the other day and attached some "light reading" to gear up for our upcoming session. I read the first paragraph of this paper by this PhD guy called "Leader Authenticity: Key to Organizational Climate, Health and Perceived Leader Effectiveness.

It's not that the words are too big or too complicated. I know what they all mean. But the way they are strung together just makes me want to fall asleep for 27 hours. I had this perfect revelation as I mucked through those 5 sentences about identifying ways to measure the authenticity of leaders: I have no desire to read things like this and I know grad school is basically two long years of reading things like this.

So, I knew as I tried to internalize and care about the difference between "Thrust", which measures leader authenticity and "Esprit" which measures group authenticity made a good decision, that I had made a good decision. I think if I had plunked down my first grad school enstallment of $4K, and I opened up that first 12 pound text book or 1,000 page "paper", I would have just cried. CRIED. And then had a panic attack. And then cried again. And then closed the book and marched out the door in search of a stiff drink.

OK, not really. I mean, I made it through undergrad somehow while having my nose in just about every activity there was to get involved with...Advertising Club, Newspaper, Navigators Ministry Group, Swarm of Dykes (hey, why not?) Coalition to Educate About Sexual Endangerment, that one meeting with the Waterski Team...

The point is, ok, fine, I could probably do it if I wanted to. But I guess that's the whole thing: I don't.

If nothing else, it feels good to cross something off the list.

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