Grey's Journal:
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For the past two weeks, I struggled with The Big Decision: to stay in graduate school, or to leave. To continue to stay in school next semester, I have £4,800 of additional tuition to pay. This sum would get me a piece of paper that says "I'm an economist" but not much else. With £4,800 I could buy 5 apple iBooks, or 2824 tubes of pringles. Is the diploma worth that many potato chips? It's hard to say. The classes were the most boring and aimless I've ever had. In undergraduate college, I complained that my sociology classes were too 'ivory tower', but my economics lectures at London Metropolitan University make those sociology classes look remarkably grounded. As example of the overly academic nature of the work, one of my assignments was to write 3,000 words on 'Why countries trade more with countries that are nearby than countries that are far away'. That's the equivalent of asking someone why they shop at the supermarket in their town, and not the one on the other side of the world. Instead of 3,000 words, I'll give you 3: Low transportation costs. But the assignment that really bothered me was to write a paper about how I would write a paper if I was given the chance. I'll let the exact words from the syllabus speak for themselves. "For this assessment you should present [a paper] that you would write had you been given the opportunity. Hence you are required to write a paper detailing how you would go about writing such a paper". It just begged for sarcastic comments about the paper being completed at a future date. Reading the articles assigned in class was nearly impossible. Not because the topics they discussed were difficult, but because they were so filled with excess words and unnecessary twists that I'm sure it was done intentionally to give the paper a more impressive look. The article's language was like a peacock's feathers - a whole lot of fancy nothing decorating a dull bird. I had to read these papers and write papers based on them. Papers that sounded like them. It was too much. I could do it, my sociology classes taught me how to write a lot about a little, but I didn't want to. It wasn't how I wanted to spend my life. The teaching staff at LMU was also less than encouraging. One professor gave out photocopied, hand-written notes everyday. When I asked about his choice of this old-world method of putting thoughts to page, he replied that he could write faster than he could type - implying he wrote a new set of notes for each lecture, and there wasn't enough time in the mornings to carve them into clay tablets. At first I accepted this as a strange idiosyncrasy, but as time passed I noticed the notes never mentioned anything that happened after about 1993 - ten years ago when word processing was coming into fashion. I suspected inertia and technophobia were the causes out the out-of-date information. I often find it is the small tortures that are the most unbearable. I could deal with the decade old notes, but I went mad watching him pass them out every day. He handed out the notes, one page at a time, to each student. He'd walk around to each of us, give us page one of the notes, return to the front of the room, read that page out loud, and then hand out page two of the notes, one at a time, to each student, return to the front, read page two... repeat for 15 more pages. After a month of this, I suggested it would be faster to pass out the notes all at once - he seemed delighted with the idea and took to it immediately. But by the next class, he returned to his old method. The major disappointments and minor tortures helped me decide that LMU is not the place I want to be. But not before I bothered all my acquaintances about it. I talked to friends, family, former professors, and just about anyone to solicit advice. My parents, as they are apt to do, provided the best advice: do not leave school unless you have a plan - a real, grownup plan. I had none. Sure, I dreamt of being a full-time social activist, a prolific writer, or, best off all, a professional lottery winner, but those are not ideas to safely base one's future on. Whenever I have a big, life-changing decision to make, there is one person I do have to discuss the matter with, and I take her advice very seriously: my daughter. I don't have a daughter, but I don't let a little thing like that get in my way. Perhaps it's a side effect of being an only child, but I have no problem creating imaginary people to talk to, even though I'm now 22 years of age. In my mind's eye, she is about 6 or 8 years old. Old enough to walk and talk and to ask reasonably intelligent questions, but young enough that the details of any situation are too complicated and bore her. This avatar is perfect to bounce ideas off of because I'm forced to ignore the details and to simplify the discussion so that my fictitious daughter can understand. I think I first created Alex when I was trying to decide if I should move to London. I took long walks with her in the ice-covered landscape of upstate New York as I thought about where I wanted to be after graduation. I asked Alex if she would rather grow up in the U.S. or the U.K. She didn't have an opinion one way or the other. She never does. After all, she is a subset of my own mind and by definition can't know more than I do. But when I noticed I created my pretend progeny with a British accent, I knew I had already decided. So now, I went on a walk in the nighttime London fog with Alex to try and decide what path my life should take. One tremendous advantage of discussing things with an imaginary person is that they are only as present as you need them to be. Sometimes Alex was clear in my mind's eye: a small girl in a grey coat with matching fur hat walking by my side on the bridges of London. But at other times, when my mind wandered from the topic at hand she faded away until I needed her again. Real people get annoyed if you expect them to do the same. I talked and simplified my thoughts down as far as they would go. Alex listened and asked occasional questions like: "Why haven't you bought any London Metropolitan shirts like you bought Geneseo shirts?" and "Are you happy?" It wasn't easy, but I decided that LMU, while it was a good way to get started in London, wasn't the direction I wanted to continue in. What will I do next? I have no idea. I'm frightened about the future, but I think I made the right decision. |
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Copyright © 2003 Wellington Grey  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. |
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