Thoughts on starting at the University

Day 334 of 1000

About the same time we arrived in Raleigh, another fellow named Troy showed up.  He had just made a major career change and decided to go back to school to help facilitate that.  We met him at church and, because he was single (waiting to get married), we ate lunch with him pretty often.  We talked about school a lot.  It is amazing what he did.  It seems like he did everything exactly right, but it was a TON of work.  For the areas where he thought he was weak, he got a tutor.  When he was not sure exactly what he wanted to do for a living, he went and talked to several professors in each of several departments to find out exactly what they did.

Part way into the program, he decided he might want to go to graduate school.  He found out it was extremely helpful to have done undergraduate research so he went and got TWO undergraduate research projects in the two different departments in which he was interested.  He did unpaid work in a lot of it.  In the end, he could have studied in either department and they actually were competing between each other to get him.  The big take-aways from all this is that if you invest (do unpaid work with knowledge that it will turn into something good even if it is only new knowledge), work really hard, and just keep going, something good will happen.

The reason I thought about this today is because Christian and Kelly are currently in almost exactly the same place.  Troy has finished his prelims and is well into his dissertation research.  The amazing thing is that he started this process from literally nothing only five years ago.  I am grateful my kids got to watch the process and even more grateful for Troy’s example.