This x 1000. Part of the challenge is how young some people are when they start gunning for academia. We shouldn’t expect any 22 year old to have the kind of clarity you need to make these kind of distinctions, but non-trad students have to make them to survive it.
I absolutely would have made far more disastrous choices and trade-offs had I entered grad school at 23 years old, like I was “supposed” to. Absolutely.
At 29, you couldn’t lie to me about who I was. And you couldn’t get me to accept that you were always right. And you couldn’t convince me not to trust my own sense-knowing.
At that age I finally knew to listen to what they DO and not to what they say. You just cannot grasp that completely when you are younger, unless you are a phenom (which many of us are! Have to be to get that far.)
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A white dude called Bear in a vintage rock t-shirt singing country soul because a Black woman in the c-store where he spends approximately $28 on chips told him to as a Black dude hypes him up like Flavor Flav? Absolutely. I’m home.
I didn’t even say I was talking about work. I wasn’t, by the way. I was responding to some conversations with young friends. But even if I was talking about work, shut up with this “I live in the real world!” You live in Iowa or whatever. Chill.
And as a general rule, scolding Black people about “the real world” will always make you look like a fool.
When I talked with elite uni presidents and administrators, they weren’t so much dismayed by what I detailed in #LowerEd as much as they were interested in HOW THEY COULD COPY THEIR SUCCESS. Masters degrees decreased regulatory risk, increased revenue, & made for pretty charts
I could have made a lot of money had I been willing to brand the right language for adopting for-profit enrollment forms, online degrees, and masters degrees for elite and selective institutions. To them, the crisis was competitiveness.
I know this much, I’m not buying crawfish in an airport. I don’t even buy the airport sushi unless said airport is on the water. And I eat gas station food!
Airport employees are subcontractors of subcontractors twice removed. No sir and no ma’am.
You gotta eat seafood that’s as close as local as is possible and prepared by people whose house you can run up on if the seafood ends up being spoilt. These the rules.