Dawn Is Me

So, here’s my question of the moment: Should I go back to school?

This isn’t the first time that people around me have encouraged me to go back to school. I’ve attended some very first-rate universities but, for reasons into which I will not delve right now, I never finished.

Yes, it’s true. In spite of my obvious brilliance, I do not have a degree of any sort from an accredited 4-year post-secondary institution of higher learning.

That has never really mattered to me before. As I told my lamenting mom back when David was a baby, I haven’t been doing anything I needed a degree for and, if and when I decided to do something for which I’d need a degree, I’d go get one.

It’s possible that I’m at the point where I need to go get one.

That’s because I’m at the point at which I am conducting research studies, via one of the divisions of my company. All of the folks I’ve been dealing with around this research — and I’ve only just started actually writing papers, for the record — has been very encouraging and very ready to take me and my work seriously and very ready to let me know that they don’t care that I don’t have twenty-six letters after my name and I shouldn’t care either.

Except that I do care.

For one thing, I am aware that there is quite a bit about research methodology that I don’t know because I’ve never studied it. Besides that, without even a B.A., I feel very insecure about my work and tend to question my qualifications.

Anyway, one of said colleagues has been encouraging me to consider going back and getting that degree. The biggest difference is that, instead of getting a degree in Economics, which is what I had been thinking about, we talked about me getting a different social science degree.

Maybe Sociology. Or Modern Anthropology. Or even Psychology, in which I have always had an interest.

Given what I do, you might find those choices odd. But it’s all about the kind of research training I want. Right now, in the field of the microbusiness, there isn’t enough information out there for number crunching to be useful. Or maybe I have that backwards: there’s too much information out there for number crunching to be useful.

We don’t need to know what these tiny businesses do at this point. We need to know why they do it. That means surveys and interviews and stuff like that, as opposed to regression analysis and econometric models and stuff like that.

So, anyway, yeah … I’m thinking about going back to school. What do you think? Give me advice.