scholarship vs. scholarships
Another piece of advice Dr. Munn gave me in our advising session the other day was even bigger than the monuments "write your damn paper already" advice.
A few weeks back I asked Dr. Munn to write a letter of recommendation for me when I was applying for the Masters in Social Work at UW Tacoma. She happily wrote the letter, and undoubtedly it was one of glowing approval. But yesterday she called me out on something that had been seething deep inside of me; UW Tac is not the right school for me, and the MSW is not the right degree for me.
"Mo," she said, "Honestly, I always envisioned you in a doctoral program for women's studies, or even psychology. I just can't imagine you being adequately stimulated in a MSW program. I think you need something more intellectually challenging than that."
Yes, Dr. Munn, I agree. And I knew it all along, I simply wasn't ready to verbalize it. The MSW was probably an "easy out" so very tempting to a burnt-out, broken-down, in-debt college senior because of its easy application process, low admissions standards, and free tuition scholarships.
When I attended the program preview night I was excited at the prospect of free tuition in return for on-the-job experience, but I was definitely under-whelmed by the lack of academia. While I certainly know that I too have my own intellectual limits, I believe that the standard's of that particular program are set too low below my limits for me to feel satisfied upon completing the degree.
And I don't mean to imply that this program is full of sub-standard students, for the truth is quite the contrary. I have several highly motivated and accomplished friends who are applying for the UW MSW. The UW MSW program is just a differnt type of stimulation that I am best suited for, and I think that my energies might be better uetilized if chanelled into a more academic pursuit.
I have spent too much time at SMU being the best student in the class; I'm really not that bright! I ought to have found a more challenging envirnment when I was choosing colleges, but I didn't. I was 17 years old, feeling the pressures of appeasing my family's expectations and financial needs, and I settled at The Saint because they had such an alluring financial aid comprimised my abilities for a dollar amount once already; I cannot, in good consciouse, do that again.
So, in a world of dreamers... here are a few dreams:
trendy school of worldly thinkers
the linguistic challange of a lifetime
sunshine and stimulation
posted by Mo @ 4:11 PM
1 Comments:
Dear Mo, this is perhaps a little late, in comparison to the date of the post as to something else. i am a lurker of your blog, and i thought maybe i should just... say something.
i am a student who have lived for years unsatisfied with my education, which in turn created terrible results in my school. i am not saying i am a genius, but how i function is, if i don't like something, i just don't bother with it.
when i joined college/uni, i didn't know what i wanted very strongly either, and things fell apart after sometime due to other factors.
what i am trying to say here, i guess, is this:
you can do something and perhaps achieve some form of results in it, and do something in the future that you CAN do. nothing's really impossible. but don't ever hate yourself or the life you lead because of these decisions. it would suck.
probably an unwanted advice, but i felt the need to say something hehe, coz you DO look intelligent.
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