I won't need my high school diploma anymore

As most of you are probably aware by this point, I'm going back to school. I got into Roosevelt for a second bachelor's degree, majoring in psychology, and classes started yesterday night. (I'm still working full time while taking, at the moment, two night classes a week.)

It's pretty weird to be back in a college environment. Since I never did work study or anything like that, my education and professional periods had been pretty well separated - I graduated Northwestern in December of '04, but didn't get my first full-time job until May of '06. Yet now I'm working 40 hours a week and taking two classes, and in future semesters that may even bulk up to three. It's going to be a challenge, no doubt, but I think I need a challenge. Much of my life up to this point - particularly where school was concerned, but really with a lot of work-related stuff as well - has been kind of built around what the easiest thing to do was. I coasted through middle school and high school, getting good grades in the classes that came more naturally and not working particularly hard at the ones I decided I wasn't very good at (basically, anything involving math). When I went to college it wasn't because I had a plan for my life, it's because I was 18 years old and capable of getting into Northwestern. 18-year-old kids who can get into prestigious colleges generally go to college. So I went to college. The fact that I majored in radio/TV/film tells you a lot. I mean, at the time I legitimately thought that my career could be as a video editor, or later as a film critic. But these were things that I liked to do for fun; I didn't work very hard at them because I didn't feel like I should have to, and I didn't work very hard at anything else because what did anything else matter? I got the social part of the college experience - really, pretty much every significant friendship I still maintain (there aren't that many, of course) derives from college - but I don't think I got nearly as much of the actual education experience as I should have.

When I was home for Christmas, my mom told me a story about when she was teaching philosophy in college in the mid-70s. She said that the students who were the most eager and interested were not the bright-eyed 18-year-olds, but rather older women going to college after having skipped it earlier in their lives (that being an era when it was considered a woman's job to get married and raise a family, of course). The women going to school with the benefit of additional years, if not decades, knew what they were there for; the kids just went to college because kids go to college. That's how I feel right now - with the benefit of additional years, I've learned a lot of things about myself, and I head back to school now with this in mind. It's going to be a challenge, but for once I think I'm actually ready for it.