Inner Excellence: Back to School - A Class Second Act
From Carol Orsborn, Ph.D., 8/23/2010 11:27:25 AM
I founded my own company when I was 21, so by the time I was in my late forties, I had spent 25 years pretty much calling the shots.
Horizontal management philosophies aside, the truth is that many of us who have held positional power, whether in our own enterprises or in a leadership position within a company, share something in common. We seldom find ourselves in the presence of people within our own organizations who tell us what we should do.
In fact, many of us have found that the tradeoff for being at the top of the organizational chart is at least some degree of separation from the troops in the field. We may be beloved and respected, but we still rarely have access to the idle chatter at the water cooler.
And then came my first doughnut hour and suddenly everything changed. The doughnuts, you see, were not purchased nor paid for by me. They were underwritten by the Vanderbilt department of religion and lay at the heart of the weekly Friday morning ritual: the informal gathering of the grad school community.
As a new grad student at 40+, I was older than most in the room—including many of the professors. But it quickly became clear to me that age alone, let alone one’s previous identity in the work world, did not confer status. In fact, refreshingly, they mattered not at all. Rather, this was a hierarchy that valued one’s position in the community from tenure professorship at the head down through the ranks to the lowliest of grad school students: that would be me.
And I loved it! I grabbed my doughnut and made straight-away to the water cooler, happy as a fish in water. While the full professors held court, I gossiped with my fellow recruits. Oh the pure pleasure of having peers! Equally clueless, we shared whatever intelligence we gathered, complained about how much our texts cost and shared in the kind of esprit de corps I had only witnessed from afar during the long course of my career.
But the greatest pleasure was yet to come: having others tell me what to do. I reveled in assignments, feedback even grades. Imagine the joy of my first office hour visit to a professor, actually a teaching associate, asking advice on a paper I’d been asked to write. She was somebody (who cared that she was only in her late 20’s?) whose task it was to guide me, mentor me, care about me. And as the semester went along and I began turning in assignments, devoid of positional power, I had to sit there and hear the unvarnished truth. Not just once, but over and over again. There was absolutely nothing in this for her except the satisfaction of sharing and cultivating knowledge. And like a piece of over-dried fruit, I plumped right up.
I’d only intended to go for a one-year masters, but something deep and important in me, long-neglected, begged for more. So, to make a long story short, I got my doctorate in the History and Critical Theory of Religion from Vanderbilt at the age of 50. And yes, it was worth it to me professionally. But more importantly, it gave me a time-out to think about the meaning of my life and to revamp my goals and expectations for what I now think of as “my second act.”
So when people ask me whether it’s worth going back to school “at my age”, I ask them “what is life for?” And then, I tell them about the doughnuts.
