Welcome back! I may have lost a few followers after my last blog entry. Probably, I'll lose a few after ever post. In the end it will be my mom and Erin reading this post. And maybe not my mom if she doesn't figure out how to subscribe to this blog.
I'm feeling really focused today and I think I will be less inclined to allow my thoughts to completely derail this time. After all, it is one of the most important questions I must answer, "So what exactly are you going to do?"
And seriously, I'm almost there! But first, let me tell you what I am NOT going to do.
I am not going to be working 60 hours a week like some of y'all have to do.
I am not going to set an alarm.
I am not going to be checking my phone every 3 min. In fact, we will NOT even HAVE PHONES!!! So seriously, get all of your texts in to me now, because later you cannot.
I am not going to commute to work.
I am going to pay $1800 a month in rent.
I am not going to be wearing a coat in July.
There are probably other fun things that I enjoy doing that I won't be able to do, but those said items are the things I won't miss doing.
I must give credit here to Chris Guillebeau, author of "The One-Year, Self-Directed, Alternative Graduate School Experience." The list that follows is part of a suggested list that can be found in his book. If you are considering additional formal education consider doing these things instead (or in addition). Most of this list can be completed in 1 year and at a cost of less than $10,000. Significantly less than a year of graduate school for many people.
1. Subscribe to The Economist and read every issue religiously. Cost: $100 + 2 hour/week
2. Memorize the name of every country, world capital, and current president or prime minister. Cost $0 + some of your time.
3. Buy a round-the-world plane ticket to travel to several major world regions, including somewhere in Africa and somewhere in Asia. Cost: $4000 or so + 4-8 weeks (or 2 years).
4. Read the basic texts of the major world religions: the Torah, the New Testament, the Koran, the teachings of Buddha. Visit a church, a mosque, a synagogue, and a temple. Cost: $0-50 + 50 hours
5. Subscribe to a language-learning podcast and listen to each 20-min episode five times a week for the entire year. Attend a local language club once a week to practice. Cost: $0 + 90 hours
6. Acquire at least three new skills during your year. Suggestions: photography, skydiving, computer programming, martial arts, flying trapeze. Cost: Variable but probably less than three credits of tuition at a university.
7. Read at least 30 non-fiction books and 20 classic novels. Cost: $0-750 (library-purchase) + lots of hours
8. Set your homepage to a wikipedia random. Every time you open your browser, you'll see a different, random page and learn something new. Read it. Cost: $0 + 4 min
So here's where I'm at with that.
1. I have never read The Economist, but my friend Joel does. He is brilliant and I trust him so I might give it a go. Online subscription is no problem. I have however read "Freakonomics" (same-same, right?) and I might listen to that podcast on the regular too.
2. My boyfriend won the spelling be in junior high, now it's my chance to win the world capital geography bee. I'm game to try. And I hate to be one of those ignorant Americans that literally cannot name the leader of any other nation but their own. We're so dumb sometimes!
3. Ticket around the world? Consider it done!! This is a 5-6 continent world tour, my friends!
4. Been there, done some of that, gonna keep doing it. I'm hoping to participate in a short stay in an ashram as well. I was much more invested in exploring my spirituality when I was 15 than I am now but I'm looking forward to revisiting it.
5. Brandt and I both plan on being completely fluent in Spanish after our first year in Central and South America, and plan to learn bits and pieces of language all over the world. Total immersion is the best way to learn!
6. Number six is the best! I will be surfing, diving, hiking, doing yoga, and rafting every day!! Every single day! I'm hoping to be in as good of shape as I have ever been! Don't forget zip-lining, kitesurfing, kayaking, cooking, and farming (planning on WWOOFing in Australia).
7. My friend Lacey spent a year working in Vietnam and traveling around SE Asia and she said she read more books in that one year, than she had in the past 15! I LOVE reading, and with a kindle, this should be an easy and enjoyable endeavor.
8. I'm a maybe on this last one. We are hoping to power-down, unplug, disconnect, limit screen time, whatever else you want to call it. I'm hoping to do most of my learning the old fashion way.
Other things I'll be doing: volunteering on a farm/in a school/at a clinic, teaching English, blogging, planning where my friends will meet me, learning about animals, getting good sleep, trying new foods, boating down the Amazon, learning to play guitar, salsa dancing, and maybe I'll even eat a bug.
What would you do if you were traveling for 2 years? I wanna know, because I wanna do it too!!
I'm going to get an education! And I'm going to do it in an incredibly refreshing way I haven't really done before. To know where I'm going, you have to know where I've been. So let me start by telling you the brief long, disjointed, history and highlights of my formal education up to this point. This is part 1 of 2.
The first time I went to school I think it cost $25. Ahh...kindergarten (I'm skipping pre-school for the sake of sparing your already short attention span) - the best, first, real year of schooling that I remember fairly well. After 9 months of half-day schooling, I had mastered the alphabet, started reading, excelled in basic mathematics, developed musical, artistic, and new physically capabilities, started new friendships, and probably learned a million other things that I've forgotten about, or didn't realize I learned at the time. Thank you tax payers!! I favor strong, comprehensive, public school programs. Bent School, you served me well! And that is probably $25 of the best dollars my parents ever spent on my education. (*please note, that is $25, 1987 dollars. Despite my excellence in mathematics, I will not be adjusting for inflation. You may pursue that calculation if so inclined).
Fast-forward to the fall of 2000, my freshman year of college begins. Turns out my excellence in basic mathematics had failed me. Well, maybe not the math itself, I could still plug numbers, but I had zero-to-no grasp of the reality of my tuition costs, what it really meant, and who even paid for it. Switch from the public to private schooling sector, allow 13 years to pass, and the cost of 9 months of schooling is now something like $15,000 a year (that's tuition only). Ok, I don't care if its 1987 dollars, or 2000 dollars, that is so many dollars! Times four, plus cost of living, divided by my family is only marginally above poor, equals who the hell is paying for this??! Oh, but not to worry! "You HAVE to go to college", and "You can't put a price tag on your education", and "You'll actually make $3 million more in your lifetime than someone who didn't go to college" they all say. They all keep saying the same stuff so it must be true. But, back to the math! My academic scholarship covered 40%. I didn't know where that money (the 40%) really came from. Outer space perhaps? A Monopoly board? Or maybe it didn't come from anywhere, rather it was merely a negotiation on the tuition. "You're pretty smart, here, have a better deal". I knew that my home church would cover whatever scholarship was not covered by tuition. Naively, I didn't understand the generosity and magnitude of this assistance at the time. Thank you generous donors of the private sector and the Mennonite Church of Normal!! In the end, I thought my portion of the tab would be $0. I ended up with $14K in loans to Sallie Mae. Luckily, locked in at a low fixed interest rate, this is something I could handle over the next 10 or 20 years. And I did have something to show for it - 2 bachelors degrees, what I thought was a lifetime of life experience, the best friends I may ever really make, and I started to become more of a grown up. Did I have to go to college? Probably. Can you put a price tag on your education? Yes. Approx $80,000. Will I make $3 million dollars more in my life time than someone who didn't go to college? Hopefully, it will never matter to me. Was it worth it? Absolutely.
Do you see how there is the need for this story to become a 2-part blog here? I haven't even started to get to the fun part!! I'm just going on and on about whatever I get started on! Trying to be funny, trying to see if my punctuation is at least 90% correct, trying to make you laugh out loud. Especially if you are reading this on an airplane. I love when people laugh out loud on airplanes. Subtly (or not so), getting on a soapbox, and conveying my personal/political/social beliefs. But, what the hell, this is my blog! Isn't that the epitome of what bloggers do?? So hang in there, the good stuff is just around the corner.
The last chapter of my formal education was PA (physician assistant) school, from 2008-2010. This was about a million times harder than kindergarten, but only cost 6000x more. What a value! Sadly, after another $150K in loans, I became much more pessimistic about higher education in the private sector, and it's value. Perhaps one day, I'll be able to say it was worth it, without hesitation.
In the mean time, I'm looking to get a different kind of higher education at a fraction of the cost, on an extended journey around the world, and I couldn't be more excited. I'm hopeful and optimistic it will be worth every penny. I am quitting an interesting, secure, and fun job after all. One that over the next 35 years, may in fact make me $3,000,000 more than a college dropout. When you type out all the zeros, it really does seem like a beaucoup bucks, but I stick to what I said about it hopefully, never mattering to me. A very wise (and wild) man once told a children's story about how he was the richest man in all the world. It wasn't because of the money he made, and the fancy house he built, and all the things that filled that big house filled with fancy things. It was because his heart was so filled with love and happiness for his family and his friends and his god, and he knew he was filled with even more of their love in return. It was a richness that he could never lose or be taken from him, and it was a richness that was worth more than any other. The best part is that it isn't just a story, because it's also the truth. That wise (and wild) man happens to be my dad, and I have seen first hand that he really believes it to be true and he lives that truth. Luckily for me, it was one of the best lessons I could have learned in life, and I believe it to be true as well.
So I look forward to the millions of new things I will learn, the lessons the world can offer me when I approach learning in whole new way, and the value I place on this education. Sure, I may end up spending $20,000 or $30,000 over the next two years on this unconventional, advanced degree, but I am confident that it will lead to as much richness and wealth as any other traditional schooling. Can I tempt you to do the same?
Stay tuned for part 2 - The Syllabus! And find out what I'll actually be up to all the time!
