I have a question for you all.
What is a college education worth these days? What does a degree really mean? How important is college to pursuing your life’s dreams?
Monetarily, it’s worth as much as you can make after you have it, minus what you paid to get it. To calculate total worth, add to that number to what you can do afterward that you couldn’t do before.
My daughter’s goals all have to do with creativity. She wants to write. She wants to make movies. She wants to create things that bring other people joy. She wants to write and direct plays and form a theater group that goes around the country performing these plays for benefits to raise money for non profit agencies. She has seven years of ASL under her belt and is pretty fluent in sign language and she’d like to use that skill to work in school theater with deaf kids.
I studied film and then audio. Now I make websites. The part of my education I most value was proactively taking advantage of opportunities for doing. Helping out with shooting a scene for a trailer of an independent film. Hands on stuff that was most definitely not vanilla curriculum. School isn’t required for stuff like that, but it does provide ample opportunities.
School is a struggle for her. It always has been. She had learning disabilities early on that she overcome through a lot of determination and a self awareness that few people her age have or ever will attain. There are things that make school a struggle for her, not the least of which is OCD which I won’t get into her but suffice it say, it makes the way she studies and completes projects very difficult. But she passes everything. She always has. She just has to work so hard at it and now that her first year of college is over - she’s attending community college while she gets her grades up enough to transfer to another school - I can see the toll it is taking on her mentally and it breaks my heart somedays.
I failed Algebra 101. Twice. The key for me was to find forgiving programs / professors / deans and to find the paths of least resistance. If I could do it over, I’d take the gen eds at a community college first.
She wants to do well. She wants to succeed. But she flirts with the idea of taking time off from college to work on her film portfolio and her photography portfolio and do some creative things and I every time we talk about it and I tell her it’s her choice I can see a brief moment of relief come over her before she goes into her what ifs.
I guess it depends somewhat on what she’s studying, but she could try to do both. Creative progress comes slowly, at least for me. As long as i’m constantly learning & improving, it doesn’t really matter if i’m doing it full time.
I want her to do what she wants. I don’t want to force her to get a degree that will be meaningless in the long run, I don’t want to force her to do four years of what amounts to hard labor and mental stress for her. I don’t want her to end up in a career she hates or regretting the time spent pursuing a degree that got her nowhere. Mostly, I don’t want her to be me, sitting here at 46 years old in a dead end civil service job wondering why I didn’t pursue some kind of creative career after high school, why I didn’t go for what I really wanted to do instead of what people expected me to do (all of which got messed up in the end, anyhow).
I want her to be happy. And I want her to be successful. I’m torn between encouraging her to drop out of college, save her sanity and pursue her dream and telling her to stay in school because she needs a backup plan in case her dreams don’t come true.
She’s happiest when she’s creating. Unfortunately, happy doesn’t always pay the bills. And I suppose that’s what it comes down to in the end. Which is kind of sad.
It’s hardly anything I’d call perfect, and it falls apart regularly, but I’ve been happiest when I’ve found some semblance of work/fun balance.
I’m lucky enough to do what I love and earn a living at it, but that, like most things, is a dual edged blade. At times, I forget to appreciate what I do. It simply becomes work. Nobody likes that.
Final words: Help her on her journey. Stand by her. Listen to her rant. Help her when she asks for it, and let her know how proud you are of her.
