Education

[pegkerr]

Gacked from klig. I'd be interested to know what the level of formal education is among my LJ friends. I'm not snobby about education - I'm very well aware that a piece of paper is only part of the story.


[Poll #349908]

Leave details of your areas of study in the comments if you so wish.

Edited to add: I'm sorry I didn't have choices that fit some of the experiences that you have recounted, i.e., still in junior high, still in high school, finished some college but have no plans to complete, etc.

But I just wanted to say that you are all pretty damn impressive. It's been very interesting reading about the wide variety of your education and experience. Thank you, and congratulations to all those of you who have recently completed degrees!

Comments

[lizardlaugh.livejournal.com]

I put 'currently doing an undergraduate degree', even though at this point, I doubt I'll finish. I might. Maybe. Someday. Doubt it. Between changing schools twice and majors three times, I have enough credits for two degrees. I am less than a year short of a degree in business and about the same for a degree in biology.

I didn't figure out what I really wanted to do with my life until a couple of years ago. No, wait. I take that back. I figured it all out around age twelve, I just figured it wasn't very practical. And it isn't. But you only live once...

[heinous_bitca.livejournal.com]

There's no response for - "Some college." ;) That's what most education query forms say, anyway.

I did attend college for about two years. I did a semester before I started my freshman year, my full freshman year, and then 1/2 of a sophomore year before my father's death hit the scholarship/grant funds (he died between my junior and senior year of high school), and the money dried up *significantly*.

I was attending school at the time for Equestrian Studies/Business Management dual major.

[klostes.livejournal.com]

Ah, but you left out those of us with college/university experience (five year's worth) and no undergrad degree to show for it. Unless I can count an A.A., which was my sop to my ego so I would have *something* to show for the investment of time. ;-)

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Double major in computer science and English. Didn't love either enough to go on to grad school; never regretted it.

[tenebris.livejournal.com]

Currently working on a MA in Linguistics at UNM. If all goes well (and I can produce something publishable), this may become "working on a Ph.D in Linguistics" by next fall.

[perigee.livejournal.com]

I dropped out of Post Graduate education, but I'm not currently planning to finish that program.

I didn't vote

[cpolk.livejournal.com]

Because there was no choice that said, "I never completed high school."

Because, you know. I didn't.

[msisolak.livejournal.com]

BA in English. Advanced work for two credentials (elementary and early childhood education) and a certificate to teach in a Montessori program.

[malinaldarose.livejournal.com]

I have a traditional BA in French (well, Modern Languages, strictly speaking, but I only really studied French, with a semester of Spanish), but my masters is really cool. It was done via distance learning, through SUNY Empire College and I designed the program myself. Technically, it is a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies, but the entire concentration was Ancient Celtic History.

I was thinking this morning about how I'd really like to be back in school. I think I'd like an English degree.

[rvrjoe775.livejournal.com]

National Merit finalist, high school valedictorian, top GPA in college graduating class. Bachelor degrees in English and Computer Science. Will possibly someday leave the business world to teach.

[aynjel.livejournal.com]

I've got a BS in English... which sounds strange until you know that the college I went to, at the time, had the option of a BS if you took a certain number of science credits, or a BA if you took a certain number of foreign language credits. I'm wretched with foreign languages and was initially going to get a BS in Biology. I decided to double-major, then wound up one class short of the Biology requirements and with no motivation to make up that class worth of credits while I was in Australia my last semester, and so I have a BS in English.

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

Ph.D. in English, with Old English literature as my main field and Old Icelandic as my cognate.

Which makes me another one of the lapsed medievalists infesting the sf/fantasy field.

[ctrinity.livejournal.com]

I did really well in high school, but i wasnt allowed to go to school out of state...which left Iowa State U. and U of Iowa. Which were about as interesting to me as turnips. I went to ISU but i didnt apply myself, fell into depression, my funding was cut and I had to leave. I wanted to go back when I lived in Minneapolis, but I got into a car accident which...this story just gets worse and worse so I'll stop here. the point is that I want to go back, desperately, but after my ISU debacle, no one will let me in!

All of you that finished school, even if you doubt whether it was worth it, be grateful you got the life experience it provides.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

How about a category of "lots of college credits, no degree"?

At this point in my life, I'm quite taken with the idea that I have no college degree whatsoever, yet I edit the writing of Big Names who have lots of letters after their names and run universities and chair departments and write esoteric scholarly books--and they all think I do a helluva good job, as does a curmudgeonly SF writer who once did an annotated edition of one of his books just to show how badly editors and copyeditors screw up. The whole situation just appeals to my working-class, eschew-conformity, question-authority worldview.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I put "undergraduate degree" because my one year of Nuclear Physics grad school will never, ever, ever have any other years to go with it, so I'm not in the middle of anything that way. I was very happy with my undergraduate physics degree from Gustavus (minor in English, to give me a formal excuse to devote time to writing in given semesters), but I was also ready to be done with both physics and formal education by the end of my first year of grad school.

I take reading suggestions in all fields from anyone who wants to bother, and I have a Friends of The Library card up at the U of M that I use pretty regularly. But I can't conceive of a degree program that wouldn't interfere with my reading, my writing, or both, to say nothing of the rest of my life.

[penmage.livejournal.com]

I'm in the last semester of my undergraduate degree. I'm majoring in History, concentrating in Medieval History, and minoring in English Lit. I'm also picking up an Associate degree in Judaic Studies, which is kind of nice.

[porcinea.livejournal.com]

Strictly speaking, I am ABT (all but thesis) on my master's (computer science, emphasis in artificial intelligence). So, no, I don't actually have one. But I did all the work, including the damned thesis (my professor kept wanting more changes, I was too busy with my new job to do any more revisions, and I didn't take advantage of a friend's offer to transfer and get my degree signed off by her). And I've relied on that work in my professional life, which is why I count it as completed.

Someday I wanna be Dr. Pig, but that's looking less likely as I make other life choices.

[misia.livejournal.com]

English degree, shminglish degree. We don't need no steeenkin' English degrees.

Or so saith the Misia, whose degrees are (in order) in music performance, musicology, women's/gender studies, and history, and who has learned more as an autodidact than she ever did in any degree program anywhere, despite that.

[misia.livejournal.com]

There are some of us who bypassed the high school completion thing and still ended up with a degree or two, though. And there's never a space on a form for that, either.

[pnh.livejournal.com]

There's a space for it here--it just asks for your "highest level of completed formal education." It doesn't matter if you skipped graduating from high school, so long as you completed something higher.

It does, however, exclude the possibility of people who never finished high school and never went on to anything else. Some of whom actually hold professional jobs, read LiveJournals, and live in houses with floors, honest... :-)

[eeyorerin]

I just finished my Ph.D. in English, with a specialization in rhetoric and composition, in May 2004. (So it still feels weird.)

[misia.livejournal.com]

Indeed they do. Rather nice houses, some of 'em, in my experience. Nicer than mine, anyway.

As you imply, people who didn't finish (or in some cases among the people I know for whom that is the case, even start) HS and didn't go in for any post-secondary education often resent not having that acknowledged as a legit standing, and resent the assumptions people make about them on the basis of their educational background. They've got good reason to.

But I occasionally get slightly tweaky about the common presumption that if one *has* gone in for post-secondary education, one must perforce *not* be a high-school dropout, too -- for some of the same reasons.

[harpie84.livejournal.com]

BS in music therapy but no job due to Reaganomics when I graduated; puttered around for a while and discovered I was really good in public relations. I went back to college ten years later and got an MS in public relations.

I'm now working as a journalist, which is a lot more interesting than doing PR. I started working on a master's in public administration but abandoned it when I discovered I had zero interest in finishing the degree or ever working in the field.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

If I remember correctly, Lois McMaster Bujold never completed college. A couple of years ago, she decided to take a college course on medieval Spanish history "just for kicks" and her study of the life of Isabella of Spain gave her the plot for The Curse of Chalion. Which as you probably know, did quite well for her, being a finalist for the Hugo and winning the Mythopoeic.

So even just a smidgen of book learning can be grist for a good writer's mill.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Good heavens! No offense was intended by the way the poll was worded, I assure you.