A big complaint a lot of people seem to have with school is that it’s not the real world. Academics swam in the theoretical, but that stuff didn’t fly outside the ivory towers. And for the longest time, this was the very reason I resisted grad school: as a lifelong learner, why go inside the box when the best learning was outside the box?
But after ten years in the trenches, I have enjoyed the theoretical elements of my classes. At my job, we don’t have time for intellectual pursuits for the sake of intellectual pursuits; we have to translate them into better programs or more revenues or less expenses. So it’s nice to just learn something in class and enjoy the innate pleasure of learning something.
In fact, I half-lament when my classwork has direct relevance to my job. When I learn a budgeting trick that I can use in developing our company budget, or a research methodology that can help us in our program assessments, I am half-glad that work and school are overlapping and I am able to apply lessons learned from one to the other. But another part of me seeks a little bit of an escape from the big bad world in the ivory tower, and hopes for some more lessons that are simply to ponder just to ponder.
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