back to school?
I am going back to school this November. It was a spontaneous gesture, I know, and if anyone will ask me why I decided to take up such master’s degree, I wouldn’t even know what to say, exactly. This UP-SOLAIR thing is relatively far-out considering the fact that it has nothing to do with my journalism degree back in college. The art of journal writing and the humanity of industrial relations are entirely different fields, there’s no point of correlation in any way. But who needs correlation when the road map of your life is still as cluttered and as disorganized as the one we have in EDSA. Bad pun, but its true.
But I think I won’t turn my back on this one. Even if uncertainty has already become a day-to-day phenomenon in my life, I still decided to study. Maybe because I want to prevent my intellect from completely deteriorating. The non-functionality of my intellect because of routine tasks for three years has already taken its toll on me. And I think there’s already a dire need for me to crank up the volume of these brain neurons from their three-year slumber. Again, this is major uncertainty but who cares?
I came across an article in Relevant Magazine entitled What To Know When You’re 25(ish). I am not the biggest fan of self-help articles but this one really got me thinking hard about things. I found the article so practical and empathizing I can’t help but marvel on its content. It said… “Don’t get stuck. Move, travel, take a class, take a risk. Walk away, try something new. There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming.”
So there. Take a class, it argued. I’ve always wanted to study because they said that it is an important prerequisite of promotion. Who wouldn’t want that, right? But I started to think that life isn’t about promotion and getting a better pay. There’s something about studying – about cramming for exams, about the anxiety over a graded recitation – that makes me feel alive. I want to feel that familiar adrenalin rush I last felt before college graduation. That’s it, even if the road map of the life-that-I-call mine is still slippery and mixed-up; I want to go back to school.
There’s no guarantee that taking up a master’s degree is a direct route to success but I want to give it a try for once. I’ve been too fed up by my chronic disease of a low self esteem that for once, I want to try something new. Out with the old, so they say. It’s about time that I begin to track my way to who I may become in the future. I can’t dwell too much in uncertainty, I’ve subsisted on it for too long and I want to allow myself to hope and to come to terms with this idea that it is also human nature to trust and dream that one day, living in this 3rd world country isn’t as morbid as it appears on television.
The quest for knowledge may be too much of an understatement. I know that I am not that smart. I know from a fact that my intellectual capacity is so limited that sometimes, all I can offer is a sigh of dimwittedness. Taking the credit of being smart cannot be my thing, at all. But passing the braincell-wrecking exam in UP-SOLAIR is just so inviting I think I will give in to such temptation. Like what the SOLAIR professor stressed during the orientation, “you must be proud to enter UP”.
In between uncertainties of what’s life ahead, entering State U is a natural high. Its a fix for people like me who’s been strangled by doubt and the overrated disease they call, quarter-life crisis. The scholastic environment, when I visited UP was so nostalgic, memory lane suddenly presented itself without warning. The pavement felt like it’s trying to direct me to something larger than life. Such invitation was so irresistible; I suddenly lost all these pathetic defences.
I am about to take my master’s degree this November. I felt lazy with the idea that this is a five-year course, and I initially wanted to step back, thinking that I’d miss my long hours of idleness during days-off. Five years are a while. Things could make and break in my life in a span of five years. But as I look at it, at this point in my life, there’s nothing else to lose. I haven’t achieved anything worth keeping yet so there’s no point of contemplating whether or not I should grab this master’s degree. Since I’ve got nothing yet, I want to do something to at least mobilize this dismal status quo in my life.
Industrial Relations and Journalism are water and oil. Twenty-four years of breathing this life actually and vicariously, however, has gotten me to think that life is just a labyrinth of things with no rhyme and reason. I want to think that having another one of these absurdities won’t hurt that much.
UP-SOLAIR, here I come! :)
But I think I won’t turn my back on this one. Even if uncertainty has already become a day-to-day phenomenon in my life, I still decided to study. Maybe because I want to prevent my intellect from completely deteriorating. The non-functionality of my intellect because of routine tasks for three years has already taken its toll on me. And I think there’s already a dire need for me to crank up the volume of these brain neurons from their three-year slumber. Again, this is major uncertainty but who cares?
I came across an article in Relevant Magazine entitled What To Know When You’re 25(ish). I am not the biggest fan of self-help articles but this one really got me thinking hard about things. I found the article so practical and empathizing I can’t help but marvel on its content. It said… “Don’t get stuck. Move, travel, take a class, take a risk. Walk away, try something new. There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming.”
So there. Take a class, it argued. I’ve always wanted to study because they said that it is an important prerequisite of promotion. Who wouldn’t want that, right? But I started to think that life isn’t about promotion and getting a better pay. There’s something about studying – about cramming for exams, about the anxiety over a graded recitation – that makes me feel alive. I want to feel that familiar adrenalin rush I last felt before college graduation. That’s it, even if the road map of the life-that-I-call mine is still slippery and mixed-up; I want to go back to school.
There’s no guarantee that taking up a master’s degree is a direct route to success but I want to give it a try for once. I’ve been too fed up by my chronic disease of a low self esteem that for once, I want to try something new. Out with the old, so they say. It’s about time that I begin to track my way to who I may become in the future. I can’t dwell too much in uncertainty, I’ve subsisted on it for too long and I want to allow myself to hope and to come to terms with this idea that it is also human nature to trust and dream that one day, living in this 3rd world country isn’t as morbid as it appears on television.
The quest for knowledge may be too much of an understatement. I know that I am not that smart. I know from a fact that my intellectual capacity is so limited that sometimes, all I can offer is a sigh of dimwittedness. Taking the credit of being smart cannot be my thing, at all. But passing the braincell-wrecking exam in UP-SOLAIR is just so inviting I think I will give in to such temptation. Like what the SOLAIR professor stressed during the orientation, “you must be proud to enter UP”.
In between uncertainties of what’s life ahead, entering State U is a natural high. Its a fix for people like me who’s been strangled by doubt and the overrated disease they call, quarter-life crisis. The scholastic environment, when I visited UP was so nostalgic, memory lane suddenly presented itself without warning. The pavement felt like it’s trying to direct me to something larger than life. Such invitation was so irresistible; I suddenly lost all these pathetic defences.
I am about to take my master’s degree this November. I felt lazy with the idea that this is a five-year course, and I initially wanted to step back, thinking that I’d miss my long hours of idleness during days-off. Five years are a while. Things could make and break in my life in a span of five years. But as I look at it, at this point in my life, there’s nothing else to lose. I haven’t achieved anything worth keeping yet so there’s no point of contemplating whether or not I should grab this master’s degree. Since I’ve got nothing yet, I want to do something to at least mobilize this dismal status quo in my life.
Industrial Relations and Journalism are water and oil. Twenty-four years of breathing this life actually and vicariously, however, has gotten me to think that life is just a labyrinth of things with no rhyme and reason. I want to think that having another one of these absurdities won’t hurt that much.
UP-SOLAIR, here I come! :)
posted by czacza @ 2:21 PM
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