December Days 02025 #22: Magister
Dec. 22nd, 2025 11:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptIt's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.
22: Magister
The specific position that I occupy requires that I hold an accredited master's degree and that I have applied for and received a Professional Librarian's certificate from the state. Which means, yes, I have gone through grad school. Before that, I had to take the entrance examination (the Graduate Record Examination, or GRE) to prove that the increased workloads and complexity of graduate school would not be too difficult for me to handle. And that I had, in fact, learned enough in my undergraduate that I could learn more and synthesize it all together into a body of knowledge that made me a librarian.
Before that, of course, were the years of undergraduate education, and before that, I had to take a standardized examination in required schooling to prove that I could handle the rigor of undergraduate instruction. It's not quite turtles all the way down, but it could be, if the US education system were more like the Japanese education system, where there appear to be increasingly more punishing entrance examinations to continue on to the next step of the academic ladder. The U.S. has their one-and-done at the national level by taking either the SAT or the ACT, plus or minus any state-required standardized tests to determine, as is attributed to George W. Bush, "Is our children learning?" Once past the standardized tests and into the undergraduate, the only question is whether you then choose to or want to go on and take the GRE and continue on into a higher degree. For some professions, like teaching and librarianship, the additional education is required, either up front or as part of continuing education requirements that pretty well can and should be used to bump up the degree that someone has. In others, the additional degrees are really only useful if you want to teach others. ("Doctor," after all, is the one who has the license to teach others.)
There is a lament among many that the required schooling of the United States does not actually send someone out into the world with what they need to work a job that will pay sufficiently well to hold down a place of living and/or raise a family. The usual rejoinder to that lament suggests that fully funding education would be an excellent start, as would hiring enough teachers for all the students such that the class sizes become actually manageable, instead of one instructor needing to somehow provide high-quality education for thirty or more students. Plus, additional supports for those who are struggling, have disabilities, and who have English as a second or greater language. Spending the federal defense budget on education instead would provide many improvements to the system. Treating education like it is important and deserves to be well-funded, instead of as one of the many feminized professions where thse who participate are supposed to want to provide the highest quality education out of maternal instinct for the students and vocational awe would help a lot.
The other, more substantial lament is that an undergraduate education and the bachelor's degree it confers is used more as a class marker than as a sign of having studied sufficiently well to pass. The requirement of a bachelor's degree for so many positions seems to be this, a way of signaling to the employer that you come from a place that had enough resources to get you through four years of schooling and keeping the crippling debt from bankrupting you along the way. (Although there are some very predatory loans out there, some offered by the government itself.) The musical Avenue Q made fun of this with the song "What Do You Do With A B.A. in English?", demeaning the Bachelor of Arts degree in the study of the English language as mostly useless to the jobs that are available and that would train their new employees on the essential functions of the work. Lower degree requirements or on-the-job training could certainly be enough for many positions, without the additional overhead of having spent four years of tuition and board to obtain the piece of paper that unlocks the offer.
As it was, I mostly sailed through required schooling and the standardized tests, scoring sufficiently well as to receive merit scholarship money for the institution of my choice, as well as an offer of significant amounts of credits paid for by the school from one of the "directional" schools in the state. I turned them down, knowing I was headed for one of two institutions in my state for the required graduate schooling, and I figured I'd have the best chance of getting in if I received my undergraduate degree from that institution. (Plus, cool marching band.) Because I knew I was going on to graduate schooling, I had no need to select specific courses for my undergraduate degree, and took what looked interesting and what would be good to challenge myself with on those subjects. As it turns out, the coursework that I took rather neatly lined up with most of the requirements of a Bachelor of Arts in History, having taken the prerequisite class and passed it (because it looked interesting) and having taken sufficient coursework on literature, history, religion, civilizations, and the like to fill out the distribution requirements and the all-rounders. I was only made aware of this possibility by the teacher of my Chaucer class, who was the chair for the program that my eclectic and interest-based coursework selection had put me most of the way to the degree already. Thus, I describe myself as having walked backward into my undergraduate degree, because I certainly didn't intend to do so with any kind of forethought or intent to do so. (This probably says something about me, and it's unlikely to be flattering, but I do find it hilarious.)
What remained to complete the degree that I was most of the way there to was an art history course, which I took on Buddhist art, and the completion of an undergraduate thesis. So, not only had I walked backward into a possible degree, I had walked backward into an Honors degree, and would therefore be doing the graduating part on Hard Mode if I went through with it. I was up for the challenge, though, and I succeeded, turning in about sixty pages of thesis, most of which was very solid, and a couple of spots were probably shakier than I would want them to be now. The point was that I met the page requirements and demonstrated my ability to do an independent research and synthesis project to create such a thing. And so, I graduated with an Honors degree, and the excellence of my work in all of my classes meant that I also graduated with a distinction for good grade point average. All in all, for my undergraduate degree, I collected High Honors and High Distinction, all of which was basically prelude to the most important test that I was going to take to determine whether I was still going to walk the path of librarianship or not.
I'm still proud of that work, and I was definitely bowled over when, at the ceremony held for me to describe my thesis and accept the departmental laurels for having succeeded, there appeared a legend of the professorships in the undergraduate school. A person whose classes filled up nearly instantly from all the students who wished to register, and who I had the distinct privilege of being taught by for one team-taught class and one by himself on the English Bible as a work of literature and storytelling. That professor has since retired from teaching, but I treasure that I had been able to take what classes I could from him. And there he was. The only reason I could determine for his presence was that he had been a reviewer for my undergraduate thesis. My program director has asked me about who I would like to have stand as reviewers for the thesis, and I mentioned other people I had taken classes with who would likely be knowledgeable and good fits for a review, and mentioned this particular legend because he taught Shakespeare as well as the Bible, and I knew from experience that he would have no trouble following along with the thesis and providing useful commentary on it, but he was essentially the "since I'm naming names, I may as well name this absolute legend as well as all the others who I expect to be the ones actually reviewing this paper" ask. His appearance at that ceremony was entirely unexpected, and that means that, at the very least, I'd passed a paper through him and he'd approved of it, or at least found it sufficient to make commentary on it and pass it through with revisions. (So, y'know, ask for what you want. Sometimes what seems like pie in the sky for you is entirely doable by others.)
Onward, then to the GRE, which is in much the same form as the SAT and ACT examinations, but testing at the level of someone who has finished an undergraduate education. It is also a test designed to make you feel foolish by the time you're done with it, as it arrives at the score you receive by increasing the difficulty for each correct answer provided and reducing it for each wrong answer provided (in the multiple choice answer sections, anyway.) The early questions have larger jumps in difficulty, which is why most preparation guides say to spend more time and effort on the early questions, so that you get to the right ballpark and start fine-tuning from there. For both the math and the language sections, I hit the wall by the time I was done, and mostly felt like I was a chump for not being able to solve these highly difficult differential equations (to the point where I was mostly going "I think I know how to evaluate that part of this equation, only this answer has that piece in it, that's the answer I'm selecting.") and getting pasted by analogies and comparisons between words that even I only had a dim understanding of their nuances, and questions that asked me to do a lot of inferring, deducing, and occasionally making outright leaps of faith to determine whether I was comprehending what I was reading enough to cross those gaps. Even knowing going in that the design of the test is to find, with as much specificity as possible, where your wall is and to get you there in the fewest number of questions it takes, I came out of those sections feeling very stupid from struggling at the difficulty that I had set for myself based on previous answers. I'd had difficulties like that before, but persistence and review, and being able to accept that my grades were only important enough so as to get me to the point where I could get to graduate school, helped me get through those difficulties. Being on the Arts and Letters track, of course, meant that most of my classwork was in writing papers of various lengths and depths of analysis. In other words, most of my work was in my wheelhouse, and occasionally, in places that were still in the strike zone. The GRE is meant to eventually make you swing at curveballs that look like they're going to be taters before they drop shraply out of the zone and leave you a big whiffer. And all of this is on a time limit.
In addition to the multiple-choice segments, there's also an essay-writing component, which in my case asked me to read a short article, analyze it, and provide my best arguments as to where the article fell short in its own arguments, from lack of logic, or leaps thereof, or facts not in evidence, or wrong conclusions or distorted data. I did my best on that, as well, since that is also on a time limit, and it's not on my usual word processing programs, so I don't have quite as easy access to cut and paste to move the arguments around until they are in the right order. But I got it done all the same, using the time I had to re-read for typos and to make sure that I was saying the things I wanted to say. It took most of a day to get all of that done, and I was wrung out by the end of it.
My scores came back above the minimums needed to get accepted to both of the accredited schools that I had made application to. (Substantially above, although nowhere near perfect scores.) And my first choice accepted me, since they had already seen me for undergraduate and knew that I could handle the rigors of their graduate schooling. And so on I went for two more years of learning how to be an information professional, at much higher tuition and loan rates, and learning that much of graduate school is the same as undergraduate, just the papers get longer, the lectures are longer, and the projects are more involved. There I learned the underpinnings of the profession and did things that I could then translate into the specifics of the processes wherever I landed and was willing to employ me. Once I was in graduate school, I still strove for good grades, but since the pressure was finally off about having to get into a higher level of education, I could accept some of the lower grades that I received without them being some kind of referendum on my ability to do the work. I may have joked that "Cs get degrees" at that point, and made reference to the George Carlin bit about "What do you call the person who is last in their med school graduating class? Doctor, and someone, somewhere, has an appointment with them tomorrow." but I think I still got through it with Bs and better, because the classroom and the defined requirements and expectations of academia have always been better for me and my particular brain pathways.
I understood exactly what was going on in Lisa Simpson's head when she was begging to be graded and marked, and her complete relief at having an "A" marked on her forehead, because I thrive much better in placess with well-defined expectations of what is good work and what is not. The real world is too messy for me, and involves too much of people making decisions based on something other than a published syllabus and rubric for grading. Yes, even though my workplace supposedly has a rubric for determining what is good work and what isn't, because it's the thing that my evaluations are based on, and that I have to fill out in anticipation of my evaluation. But the things that are there are still very squishy and rely a lot on whether the humans around me believe that I am doing the job according to the parameters. I have seen too many ways in which that process can be subverted, defeated, or poisoned based on what the humans in the situation want to do and how they relate to me, so I don't particularly like having to deal with all of that humanity in the process. But, with time and competent managers, I'm better at communicating these things and their worries to the people who can reassure me or give me correction on the matter.
So, yeah, I was one of those kids who did really well in school, and who kind of misses the structured environment and limited number of situations and problems to encounter. And grades. I might have hated it more if I didn't do so well in it. Those were definitely days where I felt I had the right amount of responsibility and the right amount of support for my life, without having to do things like work a forty-hour week. I do miss them in many ways, because they were easier for me, even if they weren't necessarily so for the people around me.
The only thing that I don't really get all that much opportunity to use is my academic title. At least in the States, "Doctor" and "Reverend" are really the only professional titles that get used with any kind of regularity. I think, perhaps, we miss out on getting to add "Bachelor" and "Magister" as titles of address to have on drop-down forms. Since, y'know, I went to school for all those years and paid back all those loans, I should at least have the option of having it used as a title of mine.
22: Magister
The specific position that I occupy requires that I hold an accredited master's degree and that I have applied for and received a Professional Librarian's certificate from the state. Which means, yes, I have gone through grad school. Before that, I had to take the entrance examination (the Graduate Record Examination, or GRE) to prove that the increased workloads and complexity of graduate school would not be too difficult for me to handle. And that I had, in fact, learned enough in my undergraduate that I could learn more and synthesize it all together into a body of knowledge that made me a librarian.
Before that, of course, were the years of undergraduate education, and before that, I had to take a standardized examination in required schooling to prove that I could handle the rigor of undergraduate instruction. It's not quite turtles all the way down, but it could be, if the US education system were more like the Japanese education system, where there appear to be increasingly more punishing entrance examinations to continue on to the next step of the academic ladder. The U.S. has their one-and-done at the national level by taking either the SAT or the ACT, plus or minus any state-required standardized tests to determine, as is attributed to George W. Bush, "Is our children learning?" Once past the standardized tests and into the undergraduate, the only question is whether you then choose to or want to go on and take the GRE and continue on into a higher degree. For some professions, like teaching and librarianship, the additional education is required, either up front or as part of continuing education requirements that pretty well can and should be used to bump up the degree that someone has. In others, the additional degrees are really only useful if you want to teach others. ("Doctor," after all, is the one who has the license to teach others.)
There is a lament among many that the required schooling of the United States does not actually send someone out into the world with what they need to work a job that will pay sufficiently well to hold down a place of living and/or raise a family. The usual rejoinder to that lament suggests that fully funding education would be an excellent start, as would hiring enough teachers for all the students such that the class sizes become actually manageable, instead of one instructor needing to somehow provide high-quality education for thirty or more students. Plus, additional supports for those who are struggling, have disabilities, and who have English as a second or greater language. Spending the federal defense budget on education instead would provide many improvements to the system. Treating education like it is important and deserves to be well-funded, instead of as one of the many feminized professions where thse who participate are supposed to want to provide the highest quality education out of maternal instinct for the students and vocational awe would help a lot.
The other, more substantial lament is that an undergraduate education and the bachelor's degree it confers is used more as a class marker than as a sign of having studied sufficiently well to pass. The requirement of a bachelor's degree for so many positions seems to be this, a way of signaling to the employer that you come from a place that had enough resources to get you through four years of schooling and keeping the crippling debt from bankrupting you along the way. (Although there are some very predatory loans out there, some offered by the government itself.) The musical Avenue Q made fun of this with the song "What Do You Do With A B.A. in English?", demeaning the Bachelor of Arts degree in the study of the English language as mostly useless to the jobs that are available and that would train their new employees on the essential functions of the work. Lower degree requirements or on-the-job training could certainly be enough for many positions, without the additional overhead of having spent four years of tuition and board to obtain the piece of paper that unlocks the offer.
As it was, I mostly sailed through required schooling and the standardized tests, scoring sufficiently well as to receive merit scholarship money for the institution of my choice, as well as an offer of significant amounts of credits paid for by the school from one of the "directional" schools in the state. I turned them down, knowing I was headed for one of two institutions in my state for the required graduate schooling, and I figured I'd have the best chance of getting in if I received my undergraduate degree from that institution. (Plus, cool marching band.) Because I knew I was going on to graduate schooling, I had no need to select specific courses for my undergraduate degree, and took what looked interesting and what would be good to challenge myself with on those subjects. As it turns out, the coursework that I took rather neatly lined up with most of the requirements of a Bachelor of Arts in History, having taken the prerequisite class and passed it (because it looked interesting) and having taken sufficient coursework on literature, history, religion, civilizations, and the like to fill out the distribution requirements and the all-rounders. I was only made aware of this possibility by the teacher of my Chaucer class, who was the chair for the program that my eclectic and interest-based coursework selection had put me most of the way to the degree already. Thus, I describe myself as having walked backward into my undergraduate degree, because I certainly didn't intend to do so with any kind of forethought or intent to do so. (This probably says something about me, and it's unlikely to be flattering, but I do find it hilarious.)
What remained to complete the degree that I was most of the way there to was an art history course, which I took on Buddhist art, and the completion of an undergraduate thesis. So, not only had I walked backward into a possible degree, I had walked backward into an Honors degree, and would therefore be doing the graduating part on Hard Mode if I went through with it. I was up for the challenge, though, and I succeeded, turning in about sixty pages of thesis, most of which was very solid, and a couple of spots were probably shakier than I would want them to be now. The point was that I met the page requirements and demonstrated my ability to do an independent research and synthesis project to create such a thing. And so, I graduated with an Honors degree, and the excellence of my work in all of my classes meant that I also graduated with a distinction for good grade point average. All in all, for my undergraduate degree, I collected High Honors and High Distinction, all of which was basically prelude to the most important test that I was going to take to determine whether I was still going to walk the path of librarianship or not.
I'm still proud of that work, and I was definitely bowled over when, at the ceremony held for me to describe my thesis and accept the departmental laurels for having succeeded, there appeared a legend of the professorships in the undergraduate school. A person whose classes filled up nearly instantly from all the students who wished to register, and who I had the distinct privilege of being taught by for one team-taught class and one by himself on the English Bible as a work of literature and storytelling. That professor has since retired from teaching, but I treasure that I had been able to take what classes I could from him. And there he was. The only reason I could determine for his presence was that he had been a reviewer for my undergraduate thesis. My program director has asked me about who I would like to have stand as reviewers for the thesis, and I mentioned other people I had taken classes with who would likely be knowledgeable and good fits for a review, and mentioned this particular legend because he taught Shakespeare as well as the Bible, and I knew from experience that he would have no trouble following along with the thesis and providing useful commentary on it, but he was essentially the "since I'm naming names, I may as well name this absolute legend as well as all the others who I expect to be the ones actually reviewing this paper" ask. His appearance at that ceremony was entirely unexpected, and that means that, at the very least, I'd passed a paper through him and he'd approved of it, or at least found it sufficient to make commentary on it and pass it through with revisions. (So, y'know, ask for what you want. Sometimes what seems like pie in the sky for you is entirely doable by others.)
Onward, then to the GRE, which is in much the same form as the SAT and ACT examinations, but testing at the level of someone who has finished an undergraduate education. It is also a test designed to make you feel foolish by the time you're done with it, as it arrives at the score you receive by increasing the difficulty for each correct answer provided and reducing it for each wrong answer provided (in the multiple choice answer sections, anyway.) The early questions have larger jumps in difficulty, which is why most preparation guides say to spend more time and effort on the early questions, so that you get to the right ballpark and start fine-tuning from there. For both the math and the language sections, I hit the wall by the time I was done, and mostly felt like I was a chump for not being able to solve these highly difficult differential equations (to the point where I was mostly going "I think I know how to evaluate that part of this equation, only this answer has that piece in it, that's the answer I'm selecting.") and getting pasted by analogies and comparisons between words that even I only had a dim understanding of their nuances, and questions that asked me to do a lot of inferring, deducing, and occasionally making outright leaps of faith to determine whether I was comprehending what I was reading enough to cross those gaps. Even knowing going in that the design of the test is to find, with as much specificity as possible, where your wall is and to get you there in the fewest number of questions it takes, I came out of those sections feeling very stupid from struggling at the difficulty that I had set for myself based on previous answers. I'd had difficulties like that before, but persistence and review, and being able to accept that my grades were only important enough so as to get me to the point where I could get to graduate school, helped me get through those difficulties. Being on the Arts and Letters track, of course, meant that most of my classwork was in writing papers of various lengths and depths of analysis. In other words, most of my work was in my wheelhouse, and occasionally, in places that were still in the strike zone. The GRE is meant to eventually make you swing at curveballs that look like they're going to be taters before they drop shraply out of the zone and leave you a big whiffer. And all of this is on a time limit.
In addition to the multiple-choice segments, there's also an essay-writing component, which in my case asked me to read a short article, analyze it, and provide my best arguments as to where the article fell short in its own arguments, from lack of logic, or leaps thereof, or facts not in evidence, or wrong conclusions or distorted data. I did my best on that, as well, since that is also on a time limit, and it's not on my usual word processing programs, so I don't have quite as easy access to cut and paste to move the arguments around until they are in the right order. But I got it done all the same, using the time I had to re-read for typos and to make sure that I was saying the things I wanted to say. It took most of a day to get all of that done, and I was wrung out by the end of it.
My scores came back above the minimums needed to get accepted to both of the accredited schools that I had made application to. (Substantially above, although nowhere near perfect scores.) And my first choice accepted me, since they had already seen me for undergraduate and knew that I could handle the rigors of their graduate schooling. And so on I went for two more years of learning how to be an information professional, at much higher tuition and loan rates, and learning that much of graduate school is the same as undergraduate, just the papers get longer, the lectures are longer, and the projects are more involved. There I learned the underpinnings of the profession and did things that I could then translate into the specifics of the processes wherever I landed and was willing to employ me. Once I was in graduate school, I still strove for good grades, but since the pressure was finally off about having to get into a higher level of education, I could accept some of the lower grades that I received without them being some kind of referendum on my ability to do the work. I may have joked that "Cs get degrees" at that point, and made reference to the George Carlin bit about "What do you call the person who is last in their med school graduating class? Doctor, and someone, somewhere, has an appointment with them tomorrow." but I think I still got through it with Bs and better, because the classroom and the defined requirements and expectations of academia have always been better for me and my particular brain pathways.
I understood exactly what was going on in Lisa Simpson's head when she was begging to be graded and marked, and her complete relief at having an "A" marked on her forehead, because I thrive much better in placess with well-defined expectations of what is good work and what is not. The real world is too messy for me, and involves too much of people making decisions based on something other than a published syllabus and rubric for grading. Yes, even though my workplace supposedly has a rubric for determining what is good work and what isn't, because it's the thing that my evaluations are based on, and that I have to fill out in anticipation of my evaluation. But the things that are there are still very squishy and rely a lot on whether the humans around me believe that I am doing the job according to the parameters. I have seen too many ways in which that process can be subverted, defeated, or poisoned based on what the humans in the situation want to do and how they relate to me, so I don't particularly like having to deal with all of that humanity in the process. But, with time and competent managers, I'm better at communicating these things and their worries to the people who can reassure me or give me correction on the matter.
So, yeah, I was one of those kids who did really well in school, and who kind of misses the structured environment and limited number of situations and problems to encounter. And grades. I might have hated it more if I didn't do so well in it. Those were definitely days where I felt I had the right amount of responsibility and the right amount of support for my life, without having to do things like work a forty-hour week. I do miss them in many ways, because they were easier for me, even if they weren't necessarily so for the people around me.
The only thing that I don't really get all that much opportunity to use is my academic title. At least in the States, "Doctor" and "Reverend" are really the only professional titles that get used with any kind of regularity. I think, perhaps, we miss out on getting to add "Bachelor" and "Magister" as titles of address to have on drop-down forms. Since, y'know, I went to school for all those years and paid back all those loans, I should at least have the option of having it used as a title of mine.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 09:13 am (UTC)Good to hear that you got such a card!