It is now the middle of December. I have all of my
applications finished. I applied to twelve schools, and I want to go to every
single one.
Well, for the most part. I am still trying to get a straight
answer from one school to see if they need official transcripts before they
will consider my application.
I hope they do not. Everyone else wanted unofficial transcripts,
and it was nice to just upload pdfs and be done. This was a bit different from
the last time I applied to a bunch of graduate schools at once. Back in 2004-5,
I had to get the packets together myself. Everything was on paper. It was probably
easier for my letter writers since they just wrote one letter and ran it off. I
think they gave me copies to put in the packet. I remember writing checks for
the application fees and feeling like sending those packets off at the
Morgantown post office was the scariest thing I had ever done.
It was the second scariest thing maybe since it was the
second time. When I graduated, that year I applied to four MFA programs and did
not get into even one. I actually got a thick envelope back from Oregon. However,
it was about housing. I waited for the formal acceptance, but their next correspondence
with me was a single page rejection letter.
I did not know what to do with myself then because graduate
school was literally my only plan. I wanted to get out of Morgantown, and
needed somewhere to go. Then I did not get in anywhere so I ended up keeping
working at the same pizza place and drinking and hanging out with the same
people (who are excellent, of course but that was not my bohemian dream).
In the ultimate irony, every time I saw someone from the
department that year they would ask me why I did not apply to WVU since I most
likely would have gotten. I did not apply to WVU because I did not want to be
“stuck” in Morgantown, which seemed like an easy thing to do. In addition, of
course, there I was stuck in Morgantown.
Also that was the year I got promoted to manager and then
got hit by a car and spent a good chunk of that time high on Percocet, but it
was also the longest time I went without drinking until I experimented with sobriety
in 2016. That bit of clarity helped me as I applied to eight schools. I did not
even retake the GRE since I didn’t have the money too, but it was worth the
application fees for one last chance out the door I went for MA schools instead
of the MFAs and got into at least half of the places I applied to, and got
waitlisted at least one more. I think only KSU offered me any money so I went
to KSU.
I went to Kansas State and met a bunch of cool people and
fell in love and realized I did not want to go after the PhD in English. The
path is long and then on the other end even in 2005 there was a horrible trend
where you almost had zero possibility of getting a job. Something like one in
eight people who start a PhD ended up with a tenure track position. Only 12%! I
would say as a justification. I also knew smart people in the department who
were acting as instructors. One thing I would do differently is I would have
actually written my thesis but there were a number of factors that the
incentives were not there. Therefore, I spent two years without a degree.
What I did do was realized I liked teaching so I got a
teaching job and then lost it because teaching high schoolers is a vastly different
experience than teaching college kids. Then the recession happened so I had a
good period to figure out what I wanted to do and what interested me.
I got into economics, following the blogs, trying to read
and understand the classics and figure out why the managers of the macro
economy had fucked up so bad. You know why they fucked up? The economy is complicated;
people hoard resources and those who hoard resources structure the power dynamics
to justify and continue that hoarding; and the high princes of the economics caste
thought they had the business cycle solved, so everything would be fine.
On the other hand, that is just one interpretation. Who know
if the business cycle is “solvable” under capitalism? Maybe that is the appeal
of Minsky – he just shows the mechanism of in what form it is broken, and you
can go to Kindleberger to see that happen repeatedly.
The thing the crisis and the recession did to me was to see that
I needed to figure out something practical. I spent a year and a half trying to
figure out how to get back into teaching even though I had a bad experience
with the high school kids – maybe only “half bad.” I liked teaching some of the
times and coaching track was great. It was just that so many kids did not want
to be there but were there so they acted out. Maybe I should have been teaching
English and not chemistry. Weirdly at the time there was such slack in the job market
that the schools were asking for teaching certificates for substitute positions,
I applied for the Chicago Teaching Fellows (Twice!) and did not move past their
cattle call interviews, and then I applied for a Master’s in Teaching at UIC and
did not get in.
Not getting into UIC was a moment I took as a sign that
teaching as a profession was not for me. As an aside, it is weird how ten years
ago the programs were oversubscribed and now the profession is in crisis because
people are not attracted in the programs. Young people are brought in and
chewed up, there is an amazing amount of attrition because it is such a hard
job and it is poorly paid. Put that up on the wall with social work – the intrinsic
compensation of doing good is not always in balance with the difficulty of the
job in its requirement that you remove the boundaries of who you are and totally
subsume yourself in the profession.
What I did do was try to take this thing that had taken up a
lot of my attention for the past couple of years and see if I could help.
Economics was broken and I alone could fix it. I participated in the blogs and
wrote Amazon reviews about the books I was reading. I gained confidence in the
idea that I knew what I was talking about. I figured the next step was to
formalize my education so I was in correspondence with a professor at UIC about
what I could do to enroll in the Master’s program for economics. Talking about
my experience and my transcripts, she suggested that the best path to make
myself ready would to be enroll in some undergrad classes since I had not taken
a single business or economics class at that point. There were two big problems
with that. First was that I needed money for school and it is very hard to get
loans for undergrad classes if you already had a bachelor’s degree and going
back to school meant that I would forfeit my unemployment benefits. Therefore,
I doubly could not afford it. In addition, there was the fact that my meeting
with her happened to take place on the first day back for school in the fall
semester. The earliest I could have started was January when I wanted to start
now. Then-now, of course, not now-now.
Then this whole weird arc in my life happened. Trying to
actively make changes was not working so I went with the flow on things and it
led to some of the most successful professional times in my life so far. I saw
an article about this job-training program the city was hosting called “Chicago
Career Tech” that was aimed at people who had been middle-income professionals.
I emailed the reporter because I could not find the information and he gave me
a link. I applied and was interviewed and accepted. They said, “You’re on the
medical coding and billing track”. Now, I never saw myself in this realm but my
unemployment was about to run out and I was one step from begging restaurants
to let me work the line so I said I’m going to do this and do my best. They
sent me to DeVry and I got all A’s and I interned with the City and I interned
with Community Support Services and after the program was over I took the
national certification test and passed on the first try. I then started
applying for jobs and was chagrined to find that there was not much out there.
The best I found was the same job two different placement agencies were trying
to place me at for twelve or thirteen bucks an hour, and it would have been a
commute I would have to drive to because it was in the suburbs.
As a side note, this is when I was on Jeopardy, flying to LA
by myself because we did not have any extra cash.
But then after a month or so my former supervisor at CSS put
in her notice and the CFO, Andrea Finnegan, called me offering me my former
supervisor’s job. In addition, at CSS I found a good professional home under
the CFO. She encouraged me to learn within the department. Moreover, to take
classes. I did a certificate program with Notre Dame to introduce me to
nonprofit issues; I started to take those business classes, one at a time from community
colleges. I did the practical thing and started talking classes for an MBA at a
local college. Through this, I was moving up the ladder. I went from Billing
Coordinator to Accounting Manager to Director of Finance in six years as I
worked and took classes.
During the MBA, I had a list on a legal pad on what I wanted
to do when I finished the program, from learning my bass better to getting a
CPA. One of the things on the list was to get more involved with the community,
so I started working with the local library in the campaign to pass a bond
issue to build a new building. Things were going fine.
Then there was the winter of 2016-7. My grandma died, the
bond issue failed, Trump was elected, Andrea was fired, the guy they hired to
replace her made me feel stupid, and I ran unsuccessfully for the library
board. I was demoted. It was a bad winter.
However, it was good in a way. It made me reassess my
personal goals and to prove myself on my own without the shelter of Andrea, as
good a mentor as she was. I ended up with a different position in the agency
that worked to my strengths and helped build my CV. I also applied for and was accepted
to the Economics Master’s Program at Roosevelt. At the time I was not sure of
the answer to the question “What are you going to do with it?”, but I have been
fortunate to work with peers and professors that made that question irrelevant
as the act of studying and developing was reward in itself. The sad thing is it
is almost over.
It does not have to be. I have gained the practical
knowledge and experience with the MBA and almost a decade now at CSS. However, I
want to do the practical impractical thing by going on to get a PhD. I have
spent a good part of the last year thinking about this process, from asking
professors to write letters for me to researching schools to convincing Anita
that this is the thing to do. It is harder to think of making the move as a
couple in our 30s than the choices I made in my early 20s. We both have
careers. It is a potential hit to our finances. Nevertheless, I was sitting in
a presentation at the URPE conference in October of 2018 and I realized that this
was the scene I wanted to be a part of. It is not just the blogs and twitter,
but real life. Importantly, I have both the learning and intellectual capacity
to positively contribute to the community.
I write this now because I keep thinking back to one of my
first blog posts I wrote back in 2013, which feels like a lifetime ago. It is
short and titled “Don't get a PhD”.
In it, I say:
I hear it's a waste of time. Just prove you can do the math with an
MA. There's no reason to write a
dissertation that no one will read.
Unless you got into MIT, Harvard, or the University of
Chicago.
No matter what, at that point, you can be Megan
McCardle.
I was wrong. Get a PhD. You only live once. Heck, I am still
waiting on my responses from Harvard and Chicago. Send those applications out.
The deadlines are getting close.
