Maybe I'm crazy, maybe I'm sane - either way, I think I just changed my mind again about what exactly I want to do once I graduate from college. One thing is for certain, though - I HAVE finally secured that I will graduate at the end of this new semester with my Art History Degree. At the point that I will graduate, I will have been enrolled in college for 4 1/2 years, but it will have been 5 years since I graduated high school. Most people I know now don't actually know what happened once I graduated from high school - that's because most of them I did not even meet until after I had graduated or even a year later. It's not a problem, just that there is a huge thing that has caused me to take so long to get a single degree.
Right after I graduated high school, I had a job. Not even a month after graduating, I had a full time job working with people that I went to high school at a computer company. We worked for the school board imaging computers so they could be "school appropriate". You know all those proxies and firewalls and blocks and very specific programs and applications on every single computer in the school? Well, that's what I did - we would hook up the computers with external drives and literally put an image of what the computer could/should be allowed to do and have on each computer. By August, I had made a few thousand dollars, had worked all over the county, worked in two other counties and got my first car. (Which I am still paying for, but I couldn't love another car more than mine and I'm already well over 80,000 miles.) As the new school year got started, I saw no reason to give up my job and so I asked for an extension for my admission to Drexel University in Philadelphia, the only college I had bothered to apply to. They granted me a year extension - I wanted to keep working also because $50,0000 a year for my degree was so not cool and needed to be funded because I was not getting a bunch of scholarships like my friends were.
Unfortunately, the recession was starting to hit really hard and we started to get less and less contracts with the school boards in the companies' repertoire. I decided it was time to quit, I did not want to be let go and I still had a whole 6-7 months in which I had to find something to do before I moved to Philly. Well, I enrolled in my local community college and took on a full course load and found a part-time job at a lawyers office. Needless to say, that was the WEIRDEST job experience I have ever had, but it was also very awesome because I got to learn about law. Well, because I took some courses, I had to reapply to Drexel and got reaccepted but by the end of the summer semester and I left the law office because of medical problems, I decided that I would just finish out and get my associates degree because that would make transferring so much easier. Or so I thought. I then spent another 2 whole years in community college, not always with a job before I finally said enough, they clearly don't want to help me graduate and I moved to Tampa.
I am very glad that it will have only taken 2 years at the university I am at now because seriously - it gets aggravating when you are told oh, you only have a few more classes or one more class or that you are almost done but when you go do a check-up a little later, just kidding, not at all.
Having spent 4 1/2 years now on getting a single degree, not having it until 5 years after having graduating from high school is a blow to ego even if it's not that big of a deal and I am half-way to a second degree as well. Besides that though, having spent so much time working towards school, when I think that I will still need to do another year for a second degree is daunting. I would LOVE to have a degree in Art History and Anthropology - I would love to be an archaeologist and museum curator - but the thought of having the spend 5 1/2 years in undergraduate schooling, and then anywhere from 1 1/2 to 7 more years getting the other degrees I want so that I can get the positions that I want makes me want to not even bother. The problem is that in order to be a museum curator, one has to have at least a Masters of Fine Arts degree. AT LEAST! Well, that is just a little messed up, don't you think? Even if I had done the 4 years for my undergraduate degree and then the minimum of 1 1/2 years for graduate degree - that's a lot of money, student debt and school. I would have to pick the degrees and career that take a minimum of 6 1/2 years and a maximum of 12 years (or more!).
Having realized how long it will take me to get my degrees and knowing that I will not like how daunting it is, it makes me wonder if it's what I really want to do, because it's just so.... UGH! It makes me want to scream. Maybe it is what I want to do and I'm just stressing out about the fact that I don't want to put off starting my life and a family just because of school. I do know that I want to do one amazing, fun thing; Study Abroad in Italy. I really don't care how I do it or if it's for college credit but the chance of spending months in Italy studying the influence of Greek and Roman art on Renaissance Art. That is what I want to do with my life, but how to make a career out of that is another thing and may not be possible.
Anyone else out there have something you are worried about when it comes to your higher education or career?
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