06/01/2007
Another thing I did was a year and a half of "school work," nine courses, in eight weeks. This was in the sumer of 1997 at George Washington University's Publications Specialist Summer Institute. It no longer exists. Below is a remodelled 2002 recollection of my experience in "adult education" as offered by a prestigious university.
Twenty Smart Suckers
For me, the George Washington University Publications Specialist Institute was an impulse buy. I got the flyer in the mail. My Dad who had needed a lot of caregiving had died. I had $4,000 to blow and I thought GW might help with life's next chapter.
I completed the application and wrote the essay. I went to Institute HQ to take a qualification test of my computer proficiency. It turned out to be a written test with questions such as "What's between the Delete and Page Dn keys?" Silly me! I had expected to take a test on an actual computer! I was crestfallen at not being able to conceive the QWERTY keyboard perfectly, however the GW people winked, "Just come back next Tuesday, Charles Van Doren, and take it again."
Only later did I realize that were I even a cock-eyed baboon, I would have been admitted to the George Washington University Publications Specialist Institute. My classmate, Tim Scanlon later reminded me that some of the questions on the computer test made no sense at all.
None of the twenty or so other people who enrolled were cock-eyed baboons either. A mix of young women and middle-agers, none of us had just jumped off the cabbage truck. Some had advanced degrees or were far above the entry-level in publishing. One was a society dame with a mansion in McLean and a horse farm in Kentucky. She came to class wearing old black velvet dresses that had probably made their debut in The Hamptons.
But in spite of our CVs, we were still all suckers. It does happen. During one of our many gripe sessions as the institute and its perpetrators sank to new depths in our esteem, I pointed out that were we community college grads, we would be saying, "Man, what a challenge! It's so hard, but we're really learning something!"
Such people would be impressed by the George Washington University Publications Specialist Institute. We were not. We knew the difference between something and nothing and that achievement is not necessarily interchangeable with long hours, intensity and the heavy load of busywork that was heaped upon us. We had gotten suckered.
Like marines in boot camp, we all bonded pretty well. In fact, had not all of us been committed or Catholic, a major boinkfest would have erupted during the fifth or sixth week of torment.
I Can Fly to Paris...
That the GWU Publications Specialist Institute was less than touted became evident early in our eight-week travail. Within the opening hour, we discovered that the program director was nuts and that the Substantive Editing instructor was mean. We would soon find out that she also was nuts.
What hit us the hardest that first week, however, were the costs over and above the $4,000 price of the program, costs that nobody had given us even a hint of beforehand, i.e. the cost of an expensive piece of publishing software that we learned that we had to buy.
I got one of two copies of this software remaining in the GW store for the student price of $180.00. Any classmate who didn't get to the store in time had to hunt up the package for the full $600. To load the software, I had to get an external CD drive for $200 from that idiot CompUSA Store.
"No problem!" Tim Scanlon shrugged when another surprise expense was dropped on us, "I can fly to Paris every night!"
The workload, as promised, was horrendous but aggravatingly burdensome rather than educating. A long-term assignment was the gathering into a binder of samples of different kinds of printing. As I said, a Cosmetology major would equate such busywork with achievement, but it reminded me of the scrap book about transportation I had made in kindergarten. It was the same thing on a grander scale, and an annoying time-eater when other instructors were dumping hours of more challenging homework on us.
Thank God for Anders, a free-lance writer and something of a bum who was doing the program in 1.5 years instead of eight weeks. Already versed in the institute's shortcomings and personalities (He also topped the s**t lists of the latter.), Anders warned us, "Don't bother doing anything you don't have to turn in!"
Sound advice for the institute and a good lesson for life as well.
Left-brained
Never in all my years of schooling have I met teachers who were so obvious in their likes and dislikes of students as those of the GWU Publications Specialist Institute, likes and dislikes reflected in grading. But of course, they weren't real teachers. GWU was extra money for them.
The program director, as I have noted, was insane. In fact, Anders, in one of his head-butting sessions with her, once demanded, "Why do you have to be so psychotic about everything?!"
This director told us at the outset that we would be under such stress that we would come to her office to cry on her shoulder, talk about our problems. When the line of woeful didn't form at her door, she got mad at us.
Anders: "Our problems pale by comparison."
I got on her s**t list because I noticed that the Desktop Publishing classroom was flooding. Heavy rain drainage had been diverted by construction. It made the institute look bad; the director took it personally. If only I had kept my mouth shut about that water rising around our feet and the electrical cords on the floor--
Lots of people are mean. Many go out of their way to be mean, but it has only been at the institute that I've met someone who makes meanness a part-time job, who was there to satisfy sadistic needs. This was the Substantive Editing instructor, a Tennessee-Williamsesque woman whose claim to fame was an editorship at Ranger Rick, the kids' nature magazine from Smithsonian.
Again, to a Washington School for Secretaries alumna, she would have seemed a goddess (which she probably expected to seem), but to our crop of pupils she was just a yo-ho. One female student worked up a great imitation of her limp.
She hated Tim Scanlon, me, the beautiful young women, everyone except a couple brown noses who never complained and who said, "Y'know, this is really great! I'm really learning something!"
Some people were marked wrong for things that others were not. I used the word "forebears;" she took off 2 points and scratched in the margin "Grizzly or black?!" She just didn't like the word. It's not a nether-Potomac idiot word.
Her ultimate cruelty was perpetrated during the final exam. The reference materials she provided had no indexes meaning that 20 people not only had to vie for a few books to check facts, but also had to thumb through them to find info that was God knows where.
She told me that I was right-brained. Whatever. At least I wouldn't rewrite "Who can ascend the mountain of the Lord?" as "Who can climb God's mountain?" That's what inbred, left-brained, sadistic ex-editors of Ranger Frigging Rick magazine do.
Quack Quack on the Mac
Halfway through the Institute, most of us were ready for a mutiny of running through the halls of GWU's Adult Education Center, killing every Landscape Design, Event Planning and Railroad Signalling student we could corner.
We covered copyright law in three different courses, a testimony to the institute's ill-conception. The nutty program director and nuttier Substantive Editing instructor stopped speaking to each other, causing an abeyance of communication in general. Nothing was being taught about this little thing called the Internet.
In addition to the nine classes we had to take, there were weekly 3-hour workshops/field trips. These were compulsory. The director threatened us--and I mean threatened--with unspecified evils if we didn't attend them. She had just forgotten who was paying four grand to whom.
It was during these short features that the funniest things happened.
One instructor covered everything there was to know about Electronic Editing in the first fifteen minutes of three hours. Ya highlight the text you're cutting in red. Ya highlight the text you're adding in blue. That's that.
When it became apparent that she was going to be recapitulating these procedures for another two hours and 45 minutes, my classmates and I, who could be making a dent in our pile of assignments or catching up on lost sleep, became antsy.
No one wanted to just get up and leave in front of her face. So we waited until she turned her back to us to write on the blackboard. Each time she did so, two or three people grabbed their bags and scrambled out of the room. Only the three suckers stuck in the front row remained when I skedaddled myself.
It was at the Institute that I learned that MacIntosh computers make duck-quacks. This was probably the most useful thing I learned there. The quack function is something I now use every day at work.
The discovery occurred in the Photoshop seminar. Everybody laughed at the first quack. I made my Mac quack again. They laughed again. Anders and Tim made their Macs quack. More laughter. Soon we three forgot about Photoshop and the poor instructor and embarked upon a project to harness this newfound amusement. We tried playing The Blue Danube Waltz--you know: Da, Da, Da, Da, Da, Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack--but couldn't get the timing right.
Acting like 13-year-olds hit the spot and I'm sure saved not a few landscape designers from horrible deaths.
Oh, I later took a much better class in Photoshop from NPR "Computer Guy," Tom Piwowar. Thomas J. Piwowar & Associates makes GW look like The Rinky Dinky Day School.
Epilogue --10 Years Later
I remember riding downtown on the subway about 1.5 weeks before the end of the institute's session. Faced with the huge climactic workload, I was just going to chuck it all and quit. No point in suffering any further. It's a rip-off and a joke anyway.
But the Holy Spirit showed me more corners I could cut; I saw my way through and "graduated." I got my diploma and a T-shirt. No, it did not say, "I spent five grand and all I got was this lousy t-shirt."
Not everybody graduated. One young lady was struck with kidney stones and they wouldn't let her make up anything.
What good did the Institute do us twenty smart suckers? Not much. Tim Scanlon, the only classmate I have remained in touch with, is a tour guide and one of Amazon.com's Top 500 Reviewers. Others, if they got publishing jobs at all, got them mainly through connections.
As it turns out, I'm the one who got the dream jobs promised by the institute. However I did not get them because of the institute. The hiring person at a Catholic non-profit who hired me for my first "dream job" never heard of the "prestigious" institute. She hired me because the Catholic non-profit had to retool after it dismissed its writer/editor, because it had come out that he was an ephebophile priest. I was also the first one to answer the "help-wanted" ad. I got my second (and current) "dream job" with the Washington news media because of my first dream job, not because of the institute.
However, I'm glad I experienced those eight stressful weeks. My classmates were good company and it was an adventure. I didn't learn much, but it didn't destroy me and therefore it made me stronger. It was a rip-off, but not a damaging rip-off. Thank God it was only $5,000 and not $50,000 which, I suspect, a lot of people are paying for graduate education that is not much better.
Copyright 2002, 2007 by Neal J. Conway