So, I joined ToastMasters here at USPS a few weeks ago and I have to give a four to six minute “Ice Breaker” speech to my fellow Toast Masters in a few weeks time, telling them who I am, etc. Here is what I plan on saying, I’m sure I’ll be editing it a bit. [believe it not, it looks long winded, but its ~5 mins long].
My first five years of college (yes, that’s right, 5), right out of high school, I had a “flunked” or “withdrew” rate of about 40%. That’s right, for every five classes taken, I either flunked or withdrew from two of them.
You see, in high school, I wanted to become an architect. But, while learning how to become a draftsman, I wasn’t aware that you also needed some training in ‘artistic’ skills as well. So, my classes that first year in college were oriented toward art, free-hand drawing, painting, and not about drawing straight lines with a t-square or triangle! Keep this in mind, we’ll come back to this at the end.
So, I fell back on “Plan B”. I switched majors to Computer Science. However, my study habits stayed the same, and I eventually flunked or withdrew from 16 classes out of a total of 39 classes.
For a variety of reasons, I took some time off from college – mostly due to having received a promotion at work, requiring me to relocate to southern California. A year after my relocation, my new manager indicated I really needed to go back to school and get my degree, since, with that promotion, I was now a so-called “professional”, and the job description said, you had to have a degree.
So, I investigated a few of the local colleges, and came across a new type of alternative college level learning. Oriented toward the working adult, you just attend one evening per week, taking only one class at a time, each class lasting just 6-8 weeks, and they even told you the specific sequence of classes you were taking. You may be familiar with this – Bethel, Concordia, and others now have these types of programs now. Anyway, after enrolling, and attending 17 classes, without any of the usual breaks, (and not flunking or withdrawing from any of them), after a little less than 2 years, I finally graduated with my Bachelors ten years after leaving high school.
That was close to 25 yrs ago. About 3-4 months after my graduation, the entire office in L.A. was given the “opportunity” to transfer to either Mason City, Iowa, or Roseville, MN. We learned (via the local HR representative), even though Mason City was in a rural area of Iowa, it was where the musical Music Man was filmed in the 1960’s! Who would have thunk! And since we had never heard of Roseville, MN, we thought it was in a rural area as well – we later learn it was near where “Mary Richards” (AKA, Mary Tyler Moore) lived! Well, given rural Iowa or the big city of Minneapolis (or was it Saint Paul?), I chose the frozen tundra of MN.
Within my first few weeks here, I met a guy on my project team, who would quickly become by best friend, and has been for more than 25 yrs. Why am I mentioning him? Well, three yrs after meeting him, I attended his graduation ceremony where he received his master’s degree from Saint Thomas. This one event inspired me to set a goal of getting my masters degree some day.
Well, that was 1991. Since then, I married, bought a house on a lake, bought a boat, divorced, sold the boat, bought a different house, switched jobs six times during the next 18 yrs at Unisys, and became team leader of three different teams, finished a basement, and was sometimes on call 7×24. I also became an instant pseudo step dad to 3 young boys, and discovered at the age of 41, I had a 17 yr old daughter. So, you can see, I was kinda busy, which I used as my excuse for not pursuing my masters during those last 20 yrs, along with just being plain afraid of flunking out.
That is, until this past August, when I decided it’s a perfect storm, the time was right, the kids were out of the house, I’m not on-call any longer, no more 55 hour work weeks as a team lead, so I threw caution to the wind, and enrolled for the fall term – 2 weeks past the application deadline. Fortunately, the people at Saint Thomas said, hey, here’s someone that’s been wanting to attend our program for the past 20 yrs, let’s give him the chance to accomplish a lifelong goal of his.
So, I’m in the middle of my second class now, and just have eight more classes to go. This’ll probably keep me off the streets for the next 2 yrs.
So, do you remember when I mentioned not having any artistic skills during my first yr in college? Well, in my late 30’s, I decided to try painting, and painted my first Bob Ross style painting, and – it was the most god-awful thing – no, just kidding, it actually came out pretty well.
