Concordia Update

It's been WAY too long since I've posted something useful, but here I am finally getting around to it.

Anyway, I was accepted as a Qualifying Student at Concordia in Montreal for the Fall term. In case you don't know what a "Qualifying Student" is (I didn't), it means that I have everything I need to get accepted to the Master's program EXCEPT a degree in a related field. As such, I need to go and do a bunch of undergraduate courses to get up to speed on the material.

I'm not too surprised that I was accepted (I know that sounds over confident, but really, my grades were good and I'm willing to pay them... what more do they REALLY look for?!), but it's nice to be officially accepted so that I can get started on making plans and arrangements.

The big road block was my job and my boss. I don't want to say my boss was a road block himself, but in this case the job and the boss are inextricably linked. You see, I travel a lot in my job which is a problem if I want to go to a class one night per week. I knew that I might be going back to school and so when I interviewed I told my then-future boss that I could do the traveling job for about a year. Then, four months after I started on the job (11 months before school was to start), I told my boss that I intended to go back to school. He was very positive and helpful and - while he made no promises - implied that things could be worked out. Yay!

So I pursued getting accepted into a program (ultimately it was the Master's in History and Philosophy of Religion at Concordia). This was a LOOOONG process. Mostly because I didn't know all the hoops I had to jump through. But Tina, from the Department of Religion, helped me though she made pretty clear that I was irritating. Anyway, I didn't know how the process worked and I didn't know anyone who did, so that's why I kept bugging her. In February I had my review with my boss and he asked where I saw myself in the next six to nine months. I'm not one to lie (I despise lying and I'm no good at it) so I just told him that I saw myself moving into another role that didn't require so much travel so that I could go back to school. Boy oh boy, he didn't like that one bit! He told me that there was no need for someone in the other role and that I'd have to set my priorities and decide which is more important, my job or going back to school. It was a horrible conversation. It sat with me for the next five months weighing me down and making me doubt my decisions. It didn't help my career, either, because I was totally not invested in my job anymore. I started looking around and applied for a few jobs, but nothing materialized.

Finally, when I was officially accepted, I could go back to my boss and really figure out what I was going to do. I was dreading the conversation completely! I managed to put it off for a week, but I knew that I had to do it. So I called him and started off with trying to butter him up with talk about the previous days' World Cup final. It seemed to work OK, so I quickly slipped into ultra-professional mode and made my case as succinctly as possible.

Then there was a silence. A silence that seemed to me like an eternity though it was probably fewer than two seconds. But in those two seconds after I had made my case and was waiting for a response a whole slew of things went through my head.

So after waiting what felt like forever, my boss responded that our company fully supports people who want to further their education and that I had made it clear that I intend to go back to school and we would have to find a solution. After this initial "Are you willing to talk about this" question, I started in on the details and after some back-and-forth we came to a compromise. It isn't a perfect situation for me (for sure), but it isn't perfect for my boss, either. And this, I suppose, is the heart of compromise. We each gave a little from our ideal situations and met somewhere in the middle. I'm a little bit concerned about how it's going to work out, but we'll see how that goes.

And now I need to figure out how to be a University student again. I went to orientation this week (what a joke) and - much to my surprise - I wasn't the oldest one there. I bought myself a new laptop/book bag that I can use (I needed one, anyway, so it worked out) for work and for school. I'll be going to buy myself a Five-Star One-Subject Notebook sometime in the next month.

And so my first class will be Shiite Islam. There's more on that at my other blog.

Wish me luck!