Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
It’s not unusual nowadays for older people to return to school when faced with long periods of unemployment, profound changes in their lives, and/or redundancy in their field. In the past, many of these people have gone into the computer sciences in one form or another, probably accounting for the fact that the information technology industry is now faced with double-digit unemployment.
I’ve been exploring the possibility of returning to school myself, and not just for reasons of being unemployed; using this time as an opportunity to refocus my life, to explore new things, is a very seductive proposition. After all, I tend to think of our middle years (anything between 35 and, oh, 90) as a ‘do over’ time — a time to suddenly discover that there’s a path beaten through the forest between the road taken and the road not.
One option I’m exploring is going for a graduate degree in either psychology or the computer tech field, both of which I hold bachelor degrees in. There are so many new possibilities of study in psychology, ranging from the more traditional clinical or industrial studies, to new explorations into social behavior and neurosciences. As for the tech field, though we’ll never see the manic behavior of the dot-com era, I do believe the industry will recover eventually, and there continues to be new and fascinating exploration into uses of technology.
In particular, the possibility of someday being in a position to encourage more women to enter the technology fields is an attractive one; this is in addition to gaining a better understanding into why we’re so underrepresented in the first place. In some ways, this exploration could lead us to a new awareness of being ‘woman’ as compared to being ‘man’ that can stretch beyond just the study of technology.
However, I don’t have to focus on graduate studies in psychology or computer science — I could explore all new fields, either at the graduate or undergraduate levels.
I love to write so it seems natural that I look at the possibility of literature or journalism. There’s also my interest in history and politics, and in the last few years an increased interest in humanity’s earliest recorded history, which belongs more in the realm of archeology than history.
What I would really like to do is explore something that blurs the lines between all these fields. I would like to take a little history and the organizational and social side of politics, some information management, writing (of course), psychology, and a bit of archeology, and blend it all together. I would then use this academic soup to spend my time discovering humanity’s global unconsciousness, which manifests itself through tales and stories, rumor, legends and myths.