Oh to be back in Academia! But alas, the Real World calls.
Way back (in the seventies) when I first graduated, I was going to change the world. Then the Real World hit me. Rent, student debt, food, life events, work obligations, and work realities all overtook my zeal for change. Living life became my priority…but I was young still, and optimistic! I must admit however that I was rather naive in my belief that Academia would prepare me for the Real World.
Life and the Real World have a way of taking over, priorities change, and one wonders what all those studies and papers, lectures and seminars, deadlines and readings have to do with life. The fact that I got an ‘A’ on a particularly well-written critique and modern-day application of Shakespearean sonnets doesn’t really matter to folks in the Real World.
After working what seems like a lifetime, I decided to go back for further studies in information access & privacy. But, what could they teach me? I’d already had almost a decade of experience (in this new field) in the Real World. All I needed was the ‘piece of paper’, but didn’t expect to learn anything that I already didn’t know. Then I fell in love with Academia again and the joy of absorbing as much knowledge as I could.
In spite of still living and working in the Real World, studies and papers, lectures and seminars, deadlines and readings took over my life. And I discovered a new-found, fresh optimism…I was going to change the world again!! And the Real World hit me. Yeah, yeah, what does academic rhetoric matter to a taxpayer who feels he has been done wrong by Government? The philosophical understanding of an individual’s quasi-constitutional right of access in a timely fashion doesn’t help you read seventeen record boxes of documents in a week (concurrent with other stuff to be done).
So, are the Real World and Academia mutually exclusive? Must we choose to live in one vs the other? Basically, what is the point?
I have to take a bit of umbrage with the assumption that school isn’t the “real world”. Does that mean that the costs, stress, and workload are not “real”? As my MLIS is my 4th degree, and having spent 10 years teaching, I can most certainly say that school is often more difficult than so-called “real world” work. Are the thousands of students attending post-secondary school across Canada, and the other thousands employed by post-secondary institutions thus not real?
Perhaps “academic” vs. “non-academic” would be better terms.
Thank you, Nicole! This is what I was hoping for…it’s all ‘real’. And I was on some dimension being a bit facetious about the “Real” world. ‘Life is what happens and passes you by when you put it on hold.’ Life in all it’s incarnations and stages is very real. However, many people tend to compartmentalize stages of life.
As regards your offering of ‘academic” vs “non-academic”…nah, that doesn’t work either. As my life has discovered (and as it appears your’s has also) academic vs non-academic are not mutually exclusive. It is not an either/or scenario. It’s life and all of the individual worlds that we all exist in are the structure of life. And sometimes what we expect to learn isn’t the actual message.
[The next blog “…the Point Is” is a continuation of this one, btw.]
I know! As soon as I said academic/non, I didn’t like that either. I got that sense that you were poking fun at that idea, but I couldn’t resist weighing in!