Keep your eyes on the prize. The reasons and motivations for going back to school will vary person to person. They can range from just wanting to learn to have to have a degree to get a job to have to get a more advanced degree to keep a job. The same applies to certification.
The idea of the prize is the same for all of these. The attainment of a degree. Or a certification. The degree or the certification IS the prize.
I’ve written about degree creep before. Of always having to have a higher and higher degree. You follow that path and you end up in the terminal degree program. The end degree.
The final countdown, if you were.
Yes, that is a terrible joke.
What makes us want to strive for more, to push ourselves higher, further, faster.
Yes, that is another joke using the Marvels tagline. Which was a good Marvel movie, even if the boys deny it.
What makes us want to do that? To have deadlines, and lectures, and assignments, and the like?
Everyone’s answer to that is different. Some want the promotion, some want to learn, some can’t think of anything better to do. Some, like me, are on the bucking back of the degree as long as they can hold on.
We all have our eyes on the prize.
It is just that the prize has a different outcome for all of us.
I was questioned, quite thoroughly, by my coworkers about what I was going to do after I got the degree. They couldn’t believe that I was going to continue to work as the call nurse. That any work that sprang from my PhD (which I don’t have yet!) will be my side gig.
Operating room for life! Or as long as I can manage it. There is much to research in the OR.
I finally was able to put a meaning to this feeling of education for the sake of education.
I called it an intellectual exploration and an intellectual exercise.
Isn’t that what all education is? An exploration of how high, how far, and how fast we can get there?
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 