College

In a little less than a week my daughter will be graduating from the University of Oregon and I will be in the crowd snapping pictures and screaming and clapping for her when her name is called.  It’s going to be a wonderful day for me personally and for me as a parent.  College is important to me and seeing my daughter complete that will be a wonderful thing!

I was the first in my family to graduate from college.  Neither of my folks went to college.  My mom took a few community college classes, but mostly for work-related skills.  I think she was more interested and probably would have done well had she had the opportunity, but instead she chose to focus on starting and raising a family.  My dad entered the Air Force out of school and was, at best, a disinterested party with respect to school.

I always knew I was going to go to college.  From my earliest recollection I knew that was going to be one of my goals.  Not that it came easy, at least from a financial perspective.  I graduated school with a nice GPA but I didn’t have a load of extra curricular activities or sports.  I worked at a grocery store from the time I was 16 for 20+ hours a week to put gas in my car and pay for my insurance and have some money left over for fun.  So, by the time I graduated I did get a couple of small grants but that was about it.  I didn’t really have any guidance about applying for schools or applying for scholarships.  I didn’t really know what to do and really would have benefited from someone helping to guide me through that process.

But, in the end, I did get accepted to a few schools, including the one that I wanted to go to: The University of Portland.  From my perspective it was perfect because it offered an early program for Computer Engineering which was a rough cross between a budding Computer Science degree and an Electrical Engineering degree.  Additionally, it was a small school so I figured there’d be a good student to teacher ratio and, finally, it was almost 400 miles away from Spokane.  And it was in Portland which was, from my perspective, The Big City.  So, far enough away to be a fresh start, but near enough that I could take a train or catch a ride home.

I went there for two and a half years before my finances caused me to have to re-evaluate my plan.  Which is short-hand to say I ran out of money and my parents couldn’t help out as much as they had been working hard to help me for the prior years.  So, I was forced to take a semester sabbatical back home in Spokane.

During my sabbatical I was still fixated on writing software so I wrote my own assembly language compiler in BASIC running on, I think, a Commodore-64.  I had a great time fixating on the compiler and the programs I was writing and debugging because it kept my mind off the fact that I was not in college as I really wanted to be.

The result of this fixation, this hyper-focus, was that I spent inordinate amounts of time in my room behind a keyboard, staring at a monitor or, more likely for the time, television screen from 18 inches away.

I saw it as hyper-focus and fixation.  I suspect my father saw it as unhealthy.  Late nights, sleeping in, total focus on the task in front of me.  In the end, he gave me a month or two but after that it was made clear that it was time for me to get a job.  And, to be fair, I was 20 years old and living in my parents house and not working.  So the boot out the door was pretty reasonable given the circumstances.

I got a job at K-Mart.  Land of the Blue Light Special.  I can still call a Blue Light Special in my sleep.  For those who haven’t experienced the joy of the Blue Light Special, let me elucidate.  Imagine a rolling cart with a six foot pole on it with a blue light on the top.  When turned on, this light would revolve like the red light at the top of a classic cop car.  This box was rolled around to different parts of the store on roughly an hourly schedule.  It would move from department to department.  I worked in Sporting Goods and Automotive, two areas that I was singularly unprepared to give good advice on but that didn’t stop me from giving it.  So, if I sold you the wrong oil or recommended a reel or pole or lures that didn’t work, well, I’m sorry about that.  I probably got the advice from another customer and passed it along as my own.  But, back to the Blue Light Specials.  During a Blue Light Special, there was a fifteen minute period where some selected items would be on sale.  These were always preceded by an announcement on the overhead saying what the deal was and where it was.  They went something like this:

“Attention, K-Mark Shoppers!  Back in the Sporting Goods Department today we’ve got an amazing selection of fishing poles and reels on sale right now.  If you join us back in Sporting Goods, we’ll take an additional 15% off this incredible selection for the next 15 minutes only.  Again, that’s 15% off select rods and reels back in Sporting Goods for the next 15 minutes.  Thank you and thanks for shopping at K-Mart!”

The first time I tried to do one of these, because everyone was expected to take their turn, my voice locked up and I was absolutely incapable of completing what I was supposed to say.  The next time I tried writing the entire thing out and that helped.  But, as with all things, practice leads to comfort and after a while I didn’t need anything, I could just wing it.  And, here’s the dirty secret: I enjoyed them!  In fact, I enjoyed working at K-Mart.  The work was easy, it was fun to talk with customers and selling Sporting Goods and auto parts was sort of interesting.  This was where I figured out that I actually could talk with strangers and not be so terrified by nerves that I couldn’t function.

I worked at this job for about two and a half years, even after I returned to school six months later.  I worked there an average of 32 hours a week even while a full time student.  It helped pay for things.

I was able to get back in to school that fall, albeit at a new school.  I finished out at Gonzaga University in Spokane because they had an Electrical Engineering program and almost all of my credits would transfer and I could save money by living at home.  I effectively lost a semester and didn’t attend a semester so my four year degree ended up taking me five (calendar) years and nine semesters instead of eight, but I got there.

I also graduated with a non-trivial load of student debt, but I was prepared for that if it got me the degree I wanted which, I was convinced, would enable me to get the jobs that I wanted.

I didn’t really give much thought to getting any additional education which, for me, would have been a Masters.  There was no evidence at the time that it would dramatically increase my earning potential and, additionally, I was ready to be done with school after 18 years of school (including kindergarden, of course!)

As I mentioned in the beginning, my daughter will be graduating from the University of Oregon.  She’ll have a Bachelor’s in Psychology.  I don’t think she knows yet what her focus post graduation will be but she has plenty of time to figure that out.  She’s got options.  And options have always been what college is all about for me.

My belief has always been that college doesn’t make you happy and, in fact, it’s hard and expensive and requires focus.  It’s a short term cost for a long term gain at a time when most young people are all about the short term instead of the long term.  It broadens your scope and, hopefully, teaches you how to think rigorously and more broadly and more deeply.  I always knew it was the right thing for me and I’ve always believed it to be something important for my kids and I hope that I’ve helped to pass along that belief to all of my kids.  I’m very happy and not a little proud that it looks like all of my kids are on a path to go to college.  It’s often said that as parents we want more for our kids than we had and I understand that.  I’m not naive enough to believe that college is inherently the right answer for everyone but I am realistic enough to believe that the difference in terms of options available to someone who goes to college versus someone who doesn’t is immense.  For me, it’s always been about making sure my kids have options.  Not that options mean happiness, but options DO mean choice and choice is an important ingredient for a happy life and what more could I wish for my kids than happiness?