Fishbowl

...My name is Brian. I work in the legal field doing "conflicts analysis", which just means helping attorneys determine whether a conflict-of-interest might prevent them from taking on a case. I am a fish in a bowl right now. By that I mean that I am removed from my natural environment, an environment that I have never actually experienced (like a fish born in a bowl, if you will). I received my undergraduate degree in Anthropology from the University of South Florida. As you can imagine, my current job has nothing to do with my education. This can be frustrating and is one of the reasons I chose to enroll in the distance degree program in Community Development at Iowa State. Just as a fish belongs in the ocean, my “natural environment” is learning about and working to better the society in which I live. And like the fish born in a bowl, I have not yet experienced this type of environment. This, of course, is where the degree in Community Development will come in handy. In two years, give or take a semester, I hope to flop over the edge of the fishbowl and into the vast ocean that is the rest of my life. This semester (Spring 2007) will be my second semester in the program. My first semester was a sometimes frustrating mixture of the expected and the unexpected. I consider myself a good student. I do not procrastinate (much) and I do my readings, sometimes extra reading so that I understand the material more fully. But I did not foresee how easy it is to fall behind. Even postponing one assignment a few days can send the most organized mind into a spin. I learned to maintain a detailed list of homework items in a spreadsheet, graying-out each item after it was completed. I also found a way to organize my time so that my personal and work lives do not suffer. I decided early in the first semester that my weekends would be homework-free. While I have, out of necessity, not held strictly to this it has helped to push me to get my homework done and submitted on time. My self-pride hurts to admit it, but the online learning environment is more of a challenge than I first thought it would be. By contrast, something I did foresee was the ease with which I could communicate with my classmates and instructors. I am not a talkative person and in undergraduate classes I rarely participated in class discussions. But online I feel free to give my opinions, be they off-the-cuff and naïve or studied and well-worded. I am helped in this by the openness and friendliness of my classmates, many of whom are already professionals in our field of study. I think I have learned as much from the dialogue between classmates as I have from the instructor and the assigned material. I do not believe this would have happened for me in a traditional classroom. In fact, were it not for the untraditional format of distance learning through which Iowa State offers this degree, I would probably be even further away from my goal of leaving the fishbowl of “conflicts analysis”. Cheesy metaphors aside, I sincerely feel that my participation in this program will change my life for the better. I am 30. I am over working temporary jobs, dissatisfied with the euphemistic status quo that I call my career and tired of identifying myself as a “conflicts specialist”. I am ready for something else.