My Mom Will Be So Pleased.

Lately I’ve been toying with the possibility of going back to college, but I’m not sure how or when I can make it possible. How can I work to support myself, attend classes, write papers and continue to pursue theatre? I can hardly support myself now, and I’m already spending the majority of my time at my job. I just don’t see how I would be able to fit schoolwork into my schedule on top of everything else. I do understand why the system pushes kids into college right out of high-school: teenagers don’t usually have to worry about finding ways to make rent or try to balance a full-time job with a full course load. Eighteen-year-olds are used to being supported by their parents, and it’s accepted and even encouraged for them to engage in a bit of frivolity while they’re working to “complete” their educations. (I use the quotation marks there because I refuse to accept that a college degree is a person’s only path towards success.) Unfortunately, the campuses then end up filled with immature students who don’t know why they’re at college, who don’t know what they want to study or even who they want to be. I was one of those students.

I didn’t want to go to college directly after high-school, I was sure of that. However, I was an honors student who graduated with a 4.0 GPA, SAT scores well above average, and nearly a full year’s worth of college credits earned in AP classes. I knew that there was no way I would ever have been able to convince my family or my teachers that I felt there were better things for me to do after I was graduated. And so, in a fit of passive-aggressiveness, I secretly threw out all of my college applications, thinking that I would be able to hide it long enough to make it impossible to me to attend school the next year. I was wrong, and just after the typical deadlines, my guidance counselor discovered my ruse and searched for schools with later application dates. She found one, a small public liberal-arts college at the opposite end of the state. My parents forced me to apply, and I was accepted — and given a full academic scholarship. In the fall of 2000, I officially became a freshman theatre performance major and everybody, except for me, was absolutely thrilled.

The typical education system has never worked for me. I learned to read at age two and by four I was reading the newspaper from front to back every day, teaching myself multiplication, long division and fractions, and conducting science experiments in the bathroom. My parents refused to let me skip grades in fear that I would become socially stunted, so I spent every day in school from first grade onwards staring out the window in boredom, only to run home to the encyclopedia so I could study whatever subject interested me that day. (The absolute worst experience I had in elementary school was in the fourth grade when my teacher placed me in the “slow” math group, and refused to move me up even when I got the only perfect score in a math contest that was given to every student in the school from grades one through eight.) By the time I started high-school, my hatred of the system was permanent. I couldn’t stand going to class and being told that I had to learn whatever topic was on the curriculum that day. I refused to complete homework assignments and frequently ignored test questions in order to write my own essays on unrelated subjects. Many of my teachers understood my frustration and I managed to earn decent grades from them; a select few punished my independent nature and gave me Ds and Fs. I can’t say that I blame them.

Things didn’t change when I started college. I read my textbooks from cover to cover, but I found attending classes to be boring and tedious. Fortunately, I had been exempt from all of the typical freshman courses and was able to start studying interesting subjects right away, which meant that at the very least I was writing papers about topics that were fun to me. Still, I was unhappy. I wanted to drop out when the year was over, but again, I was afraid of what my parents would say. My passive-aggressive nature once more came out and during my second semester, I made every effort to fail all of my classes, ensuring that I wouldn’t be allowed back. (Interestingly enough, I found it quite impossible to fail all of my classes. I at least managed to get my GPA low enough to achieve the desired result.) It would have been easy enough to explain to my parents and friends if I had been able to admit that I got caught up in the night-life like so many students do, but that wasn’t what happened. It took me less than a month into my first semester to decide that all of the alcohol, drugs and casual sex wasn’t for me. It was much more difficult for them to understand when I tried to explain my position. How can a person who finds school so easy, dislike it so much? I’m not quite sure that I understand it either.

After I left school, I worked very hard to prove that I wasn’t descending into a life of delinquency and that I wouldn’t be spending the rest of my days working behind a cash register or a fast-food counter. My worst nightmare was that I would wake up one day and find myself aged thirty living in my parents’ basement. I found a job in an office and had my very own cubicle by the time I was nineteen. I worked with a voice teacher to improve my singing technique to the level of a professional so that I could start to find legitimate work in theatre. I bought a car with my own money, paid all of my own bills, and moved 140 miles away into an apartment by myself shortly after my 21st birthday. I wanted to prove to myself and to others that I could successfully support myself as an adult without a little framed piece of paper hanging on my wall. I think I’ve done that.

And so, now that I’ve had several years to live the way I wanted to live and prove the things I wanted to prove, I’m interested in pursuing my education once more. I believe that I’m more able to handle a structured learning environment than I was when I was eighteen, and even though I have continued to educate myself in what I consider to be important subjects, I do miss the easy access to all that academia encompasses. I’m considering re-enrolling someplace for the next school year in 2005, but I think that I would rather go to a school that’s closer to home, seeing as I don’t intend on living here forever. However, I’m not sure that I’ll be willing to move away from here so soon, because my goal here was to make contacts with people in the theatre and build up a resume, and I’ve been pretty successful at that so far. By 2006 though, I think I’ll be ready. I’ll move back to North Jersey near my parents, and find a way to earn enough money to pay for an apartment and general living expenses as well as tuition, which at the school I’ve been thinking about, will be blissfully cheap. I think that I would like to study English/Writing, since that’s the only one of my many interests in which I need that outside interference, criticism and guidance. I know that I do not want to be a theatre major again, because those classes came very close to ruining my love for it the first time. I also know that I have time to change my mind because I’m not being expected to adhere to a strict timetable like I was straight out of high-school. I’m excited and eager to start working towards a college degree once more, because this time, it’s my choice.