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

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

I was a National Merit finalist, skipped grades, blah blah blah. But I did not Apply Myself (too busy surviving the bullies, ackshully). Parents wouldn't let me use my scholarship to my first choice college because I was only 16 when I graduated high school, made me live at home and go to local community college. Bored to death. Quit 5 credits short of Associates degree.

Sometimes I think about going back to school, but honestly I've learned more from self study than I did in college, and I don't know that it's economically feasible.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

It's never too late, you know. My dad graduated from college following the normal schedule, but he went to graduate school at age 55, and finished his Psy.D. at age 60. I've always thought he set me a pretty good example in that way.

It was weird, too, calling home to complain about my job, and he'd be complaining about his statistics midterm.

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

I know. But I'd like to have one less excuse to get out of writing. I used the "I don't have an English degree like most of my favorite writers" thing in my head for a while. Which is silly, because I wasn't ever planning on an English degree anyway; my path was Poly Sci.

If anything, I'll take classes that interest me a la carte, with no particular goal or degree other than learning useful and entertaining things that I can apply toward my writing.

[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.

[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.

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. That's why I read everything from physics textbooks to tabloids. You never know where your next plot is going to pop up...