Big gal on campus

On the decision to go back to school

Did you know there’s a wrong way to read?

I didn’t until I attended a webinar for first year masters students, hosted by the Writing & Rhetoric Center at my school a couple weeks ago.

In my first six weeks of grad school, I had been reading all wrong by trying absorb every word. Apparently, highlighting isn’t enough. You need to take copious notes. And, wow. It’s so much reading. So much note-taking.

Oh yeah, I decided to go to graduate school to pursue a masters in Positive Organizational Psychology and Evaluation. Could there be any more words in this degree??

Since finishing college 15 years ago, I’ve considered graduate school three times, applied twice, and actually enrolled in classes just once, at only a few months postpartum with my second child. So, here I am, leaving my baby with a nanny as I drive to campus for a lecture once a week, and logging on to an online class every other Thursday.

Seems like a lot right? I now have an amazing full time job I actually like (thanks to my newsletter yelling at the universe that I was sick of freelancing), a three year-old child, seven month-old baby, marriage, house, and a bunch of great friends who I mostly see via years-old text threads. Why would I decide NOW, of all times in my life, to go back to school?

Unfortunately, you usually don’t get much of a choice in timing when your higher purpose decides to reveal itself. And, like Billy Crystal famously said in “When Harry Met Sally,”

For me, that “somebody” is my calling. And, even though it seems like a terrible time to take this onto my already full plate, I want the rest of my life, pursuing the work I was meant to do, to start as soon as possible.

After freelancing in the isolation of a pandemic for a couple years, I began to feel untethered to anything other than my computer, baby, husband, and house. My world was small, my work was rote, and I was as Adam Grant (probably the most famous organizational psychologist) put forth last year, languishing.

With parenthood and the pandemic colliding like meteors, it’s been difficult to parse which feeling belongs to what part of myself. Was my exhaustion, burnout, malaise, and general dullness a result of becoming a mother, or because the world flipped upside down? I still don’t fully know.

It was clear that I had hit the ceiling on my career. And, with every new client and project, I kept bumping my head and it was starting to hurt. At the top of my game, and nowhere to grow in a big way, I suspected that I had more to give the world than pithy copywriting and engaging branded content.

One of my favorite conversation starters is, “If you could go back to school, what would you study?” My answer is always organizational psychology.

About a year ago, in a passing conversation with a former coworker, I mentioned this exact sentiment. Her response was that she had a friend pursuing that very same degree at Claremont––a fantastic school that’s only a half hour away from my house. I had no idea.

One visit to their website snowballed into emails to the admissions office, which led me to requesting letters of recommendations from former bosses, colleagues, and professors, writing a bleeding heart of an entrance essay and, ultimately, pressing submit on my application at eight months pregnant.

Try as I might to talk myself out of this decision, I physically couldn’t NOT apply.

Organizational psychology focuses on the behavior of employees in the workplace. This area of study applies psychological principles and research methods to improve the overall work environment, including performance, communication, professional satisfaction and safety. Can you tell I copied and pasted that definition from Google?

I’m attending Claremont Graduate University, where the positive psychology movement emerged, so my particular focus will be on taking a positive approach to enhancing employee well-being. As a natural optimist, this is very much my jam.

If you’ve known me (or worked with me) for a while, this pivot might not seem like a huge leap. I’ve been interested in organizational psychology for years, ever since I learned what it was, and understood that it was the solution to many of the organizational frustrations I’ve felt my entire career. I’ve always had a natural instinct to make connections between structural problems and people, but I want to know––more formally and factually––what the hell I’m thinking and talking about. Moreover, I want to be able to use this knowledge to go back into organizations and fix pervasive problems that have no business existing. Work has always been a cornerstone of my entire being, and I’m passionate about making workplaces more enjoyable and equitable for everyone.

More specifically, I want to solve for this:

Whether it’s entertainment, advertising, or the arts, I want to study the psychology behind creative work, and help ideas thrive in environments where they would otherwise die on the vine, or become a turkey candy pizza.

And, of course, I want to write––about all of it, which you might start getting bits and pieces of here. Also, motherhood in the workplace? Sure! I want to study that too, because it sure seems like no one else is doing enough of it.

The floodgates of knowledge seeking had apparently been strained for years and I’m overcome with a desire to expand intellectually. Perhaps it’s an obvious reaction to three intense years of parenting, pent up in a small house, or the beginnings of a natural crescendo to a well loved career. Probably both are true, one bumping into the other. Either way, I have been led to this moment and that’s all that matters.

I’m just starting my journey, and I’m open to ending up somewhere I never expected. But this is the path I’m currently following and I’ve never been busier or more fulfilled.

Most importantly, I’m no longer languishing.

It’s not going to be easy balancing everything in my life, but I’m trying to focus on putting one foot in front of the other. Week by week, I somehow get it all done and I trust it will only get easier. As Miranda Hobbs so aptly said in the last season of And Just Like That, “You can have it all. It’s just really fucking hard.”

I have so much to say about going back to school and how significantly it’s impacted me in just a few weeks, but I’ll save it for another newsletter because I have to go do my reading, and finish something for work before my baby wakes from her nap and I have to go pick up my son from school.