Returning to college after being in the workforce. (bachelors, skill, kindergarten)

[bluebelt1234]

I have been considering going back to school. I am currently a teacher and I am just getting a little burned out. Here in Arizona, we have to have this constant paperwork on top of all the grading, sharpening pencils, copying, lesson planning, writing out objectives, tying shoestrings, contacting parents who don't return your phone calls, attending meetings all the time. I am just getting overwhelmed to the point I think that my job is taking over my entire life. I mean I want to do other things after work, like dating and I feel like I don't have the time for it because my job is keeping me too busy. Plus I have a really tough class this year that is going to give me gray hair. I have one student that has had serious issues since kindergarten and still hasn't been tested for special ed. This is his 3rd year of school since he was retained in first grade. I was wondering if anyone has made the return to school after being in the workforce and how did you go about doing this? How did you pay your bills while you were going to school?

[Calibound-Yorkiemom]

Originally Posted by bluebelt1234

I have been considering going back to school. I am currently a teacher and I am just getting a little burned out. Here in Arizona, we have to have this constant paperwork on top of all the grading, sharpening pencils, copying, lesson planning, writing out objectives, tying shoestrings, contacting parents who don't return your phone calls, attending meetings all the time. I am just getting overwhelmed to the point I think that my job is taking over my entire life. I mean I want to do other things after work, like dating and I feel like I don't have the time for it because my job is keeping me too busy. Plus I have a really tough class this year that is going to give me gray hair. I have one student that has had serious issues since kindergarten and still hasn't been tested for special ed. This is his 3rd year of school since he was retained in first grade. I was wondering if anyone has made the return to school after being in the workforce and how did you go about doing this? How did you pay your bills while you were going to school?

I know exactly what you mean. I used to be a teacher. I taught 3rd grade & special ED H.S mostly. It can be a tough career especially when you are teaching the little ones. I have obtained 3 masters degrees, 2 of them while I was teaching. I'm married so my husband makes enough money that I can afford to stay home which is what I did when i studied for my last masters but when I studied for my 1st 2 masters I worked as well.
It was tough but doable. I have gotten 2 Masters degrees from a B&M school & 1 online. There are pros & cons to each.The 1st two masters i worked in the day and went to school at night. I felt as if i was always rushing to be somewhere & that I had no time to myself. The good thing about it is the workload is less demanding than online schooling.My last masters degree I received online. The course load is very demanding for online schooling. Much more than a B&M IMO. The good thing about online school is that you can do your work at your leisure provided that you make the deadlines.
Good luck in whatever you decide. Are you looking to stay in education or do you want to change industries?

[HOWELL_STREET]

For a moment, consider the flip side of teaching. Let's say that you decide to drop your teaching career in favor of returning to the Corporate status.

Okay, so you have now done your graduate work into returning to Corporate. And now you enter into some company that has great expectations for you. However, many people who have done this, soon realize that Corporate's goal is only to operate you at a constant high speed in THEIR favor.

I am now retired from a life long career in electronics. In all, I worked for about four major electronic companies. So you see, I soon figured out their goals for 'me'.

For a moment, consider Corporate's personal employee reviews. In many of those reviews, I considered myself doing 100% employee capacity 'work'.

So in such a review, my boss would ask me what MY accoomplishments had been for that past measuring period. After he read my written comments, he would then say something like... "Let's do better, the next time and then we will talk about a raise.

In the next review, I had pulled myself up to about a 110% output. And the same response from my boss. "Let's see what happens in the future and then we will talk about a raise."

Because at the time, I was a young person, I kept on going up to an output of about 125% without any raise. Then I finally realized my folly.

Even though 'you' may be burned out as a teacher, you are still in a far better position than joining a Corporate force where they are NEVER happy with your great employee performance. Corporate will constantly nag you for better and better performance while really not giving you any meanigful employment remuneration.

In fact, due to severe college graduate compeition of today, Corporate is either secretly now looking for Master degrees among the graduates. Or they are looking for someone who is willing to work for much less.

So they lay off their good but not super good employees... and then hire the best of the college graduates... to place 'you' into high gear for their own benefit.

So I highly do NOT recommend that a teacher moves back into a Corporate position. They are alsways looking over your shoulder. It is no longer worth your personal effort - - also - - considering the high cost of education, today. Stay put in teeaching but also try different methods that will help you in your teacher related stressful situation.

Carter Glass

[Mrs. H]

I worked for awhile before returning to college. I got my BA in History from San Francisco State and it was tough. It took me five years to do it but it was worth it. I lived with roommates, it was expensive to live in SF, I worked full-time throughout my entire college life, but through persistence I stuck through it. You also go through personal changes when you return as a working adult because most of the day classes are filled with 18-year-olds, which can be a daunting experience for most adults. This is why they prefer to take evening courses. I had to take 2 or 3 mandatory day classes and luckily I had a company who understood I was trying to finish my BA.

I won't lie to you - college costs continue to rise as I look at my student loan bill every month but in the end it's worth it. Good luck in your choice. Please just make sure you continue to assess yourself as a teacher. Howell_Street makes a lot of good points re teaching.

[ogplife]

Originally Posted by bluebelt1234

I have been considering going back to school. I am currently a teacher and I am just getting a little burned out. Here in Arizona, we have to have this constant paperwork on top of all the grading, sharpening pencils, copying, lesson planning, writing out objectives, tying shoestrings, contacting parents who don't return your phone calls, attending meetings all the time. I am just getting overwhelmed to the point I think that my job is taking over my entire life. I mean I want to do other things after work, like dating and I feel like I don't have the time for it because my job is keeping me too busy. Plus I have a really tough class this year that is going to give me gray hair. I have one student that has had serious issues since kindergarten and still hasn't been tested for special ed. This is his 3rd year of school since he was retained in first grade. I was wondering if anyone has made the return to school after being in the workforce and how did you go about doing this? How did you pay your bills while you were going to school?

This doesn't necessarily answer your question, but my goal is to return to school for my master's when I find an employer that will pay for it. I have already targeted an employer that will finance any and every course I am willing to take with no grade requirements for the courses (You need a 3.0 to graduate from most graduate schools anyway). They don't pay books and fees though. This will help financially, but also will eliminate all of the stress that will come with taking classes most adults have when returning to school. When you find an employer that is willing to pay for your college you have nothing to lose. You are a teacher and i'm pretty sure there you have some form of tuition reimbursement available to you. Take advantage of it before you leave.

[belovenow]

Originally Posted by bluebelt1234

I have been considering going back to school. I am currently a teacher and I am just getting a little burned out. Here in Arizona, we have to have this constant paperwork on top of all the grading, sharpening pencils, copying, lesson planning, writing out objectives, tying shoestrings, contacting parents who don't return your phone calls, attending meetings all the time. I am just getting overwhelmed to the point I think that my job is taking over my entire life. I mean I want to do other things after work, like dating and I feel like I don't have the time for it because my job is keeping me too busy. Plus I have a really tough class this year that is going to give me gray hair. I have one student that has had serious issues since kindergarten and still hasn't been tested for special ed. This is his 3rd year of school since he was retained in first grade. I was wondering if anyone has made the return to school after being in the workforce and how did you go about doing this? How did you pay your bills while you were going to school?

There is no blanket answer for your question. If you're lucky enough to have a spouse who will basically watch/entertain/raise your child while you do your course work then that will suffice (I have a family member who is doing this - a current hs teacher working on her online-phd and they have a 5 year old).

I also have a friend who went to school by basically taking out loans - they were able to get money to cover the cost of just about everything and they quit work, moved in with family, and their family (the mother's parents) helped watch their child. Their program was a masters program which required 2 years of full time attendance. When done there was massive debt, but a successful career change was facilitated and from when I last talked with her, my friend had no regrets.

I have another friend who with a couple 7-9 year old girls and a wife went back to school for a Masters degree full-time by obtaining a graduate assistantship which paid for tuition and provided a stipend. The biggest sacrifice was that his wife worked and took care of his kids while in class... and he was a bit older making a major career change. He has absolutely no regrets today although for 1 year it was hard to make ends meet. He finished the 2 year Masters program in 1 year by loading up on courses and working his butt off.

It all really depends on what you want to do. Do you want to go to school full time or part time and have you considered an online program? What occupation do you want to have? What school is best for that and will you need to move or can most of the work be done online?

I have family member living in Yuma right now - and the entire family there doesn't seem all that happy - and indeed I've researched the teaching situation there... it sucks. It seems like the teachers there are completely abused. A thought for you: why not continue teaching but move out of Arizona to someplace where teachers are paid well, there is high-demand, and perhaps a better environment for your child too? This way you don't spend time getting a different degree which will cost a fortune, but instead focus on finding a better place to work (and from what I've read... there are many better places to teach than Arizona).

Just some thoughts/experiences I know of. Take care and good luck.

[belovenow]

Originally Posted by HOWELL_STREET

For a moment, consider the flip side of teaching. Let's say that you decide to drop your teaching career in favor of returning to the Corporate status.

For a moment, consider Corporate's personal employee reviews. In many of those reviews, I considered myself doing 100% employee capacity 'work'.

So in such a review, my boss would ask me what MY accoomplishments had been for that past measuring period. After he read my written comments, he would then say something like... "Let's do better, the next time and then we will talk about a raise.

In the next review, I had pulled myself up to about a 110% output. And the same response from my boss. "Let's see what happens in the future and then we will talk about a raise."

Because at the time, I was a young person, I kept on going up to an output of about 125% without any raise. Then I finally realized my folly.

Even though 'you' may be burned out as a teacher, you are still in a far better position than joining a Corporate force where they are NEVER happy with your great employee performance. Corporate will constantly nag you for better and better performance while really not giving you any meanigful employment remuneration.

In fact, due to severe college graduate compeition of today, Corporate is either secretly now looking for Master degrees among the graduates. Or they are looking for someone who is willing to work for much less.

So they lay off their good but not super good employees... and then hire the best of the college graduates... to place 'you' into high gear for their own benefit.

So I highly do NOT recommend that a teacher moves back into a Corporate position. They are alsways looking over your shoulder. It is no longer worth your personal effort - - also - - considering the high cost of education, today. Stay put in teeaching but also try different methods that will help you in your teacher related stressful situation.

This post is right on - it illustrates a lot of my corporate experiences and highlights an additional point I want to make for you. The grass always seems greener somewhere else, but indeed you need to choose your next career move very carefully because although you may not have heard or read much about it, most of the corporate world (including all of the Fortune 500 companies) now are outsourcing significant numbers of positions (and increasing the numbers exponentially each year). Positions which were skilled-labor/white collar positions for US citizens. All major business processes are eligible to be done via India or China or some other low-cost country. Unless you choose a client-facing career, there's a good chance it will be outsourceable. I have posted about this topic in the past as I'm a business researcher and strategy advisor for a Fortune top 10 global company... indeed this is my current aligned specialty. What I've learned is flat out disturbing to anyone not in an executive position to capitalize on the savings had with outsourcing.

Another point I saw inadvertantly illustrated in someone else's response above is that you can get all the degrees in the world.. multiple masters degrees, undergraduate degrees, online or traditional... and indeed the schools will happily take your money (LOL - and I do speak from direct experience here - I have 3 degrees because of what I'd call educational ADD). But really, what I'm seeing in the corporate world today is that once you have a particular degree (bachelors or masters), you're just wasting time and money paying for another. More important than the degree is experience and the ability to present youself as capable of learning something new quickly. So please for your own sake choose your next degree carefully... and may I suggest one specific to a particular profession rather than one which is generic. There's absolutely no sense in going into debt getting another degree if it isn't going to directly lead to a job which will reliably pay for it.

[ogre]

You don't say what field you'd like to study, or enter professionally after your further study is complete. This makes a difference. The best way to finance your education when you already have a bachelor's degree, which I'm assuming you do since you're a teacher, is to enter a graduate program in a field that typically provides funding for grad students in the form of assistantships and fellowships, but this is an option only if you're looking at a field in which graduate programs typically provide such assistance, which would be most of the traditional academic fields.

I went back for a second bachelor's degree, and I can tell you that there's no painless way to finance this. You can save up a bunch of money and pay at least part of the costs that way. When you're working on a second bachelor's, you're not eligible for all the types of financial aid you can get the first time around. Unless something has changed in the several years since I started back to school, you're eligible only for student loans, so if you go that route, you're going to finish with quite a bit of debt.

What I did was a combination of: saving money before returning to school and paying as many of my bills as possible up front, taking out student loans, and eventually becoming a full-time employee of my college and living on that job. The final step began with a student job in the same department where I became a full-time employee. Being employed full time at your college has the advantage that many schools offer their employees free tuition. However, it's likely to take longer to finish your studies than you might like, since you're unlikely to be able to handle working and going to school both full time, so you'll most likely take a class a semester, at most two classes.

Now the old wish everyone has in life: that I'd known then what I know now. Ultimately, I majored in a field where graduate programs do offer assistantships and fellowships. What I should have done, since I ended up working full-time and taking classes part-time, was to have continued with full-time employment while taking graduate classes part time without being matriculated, then to have applied to a graduate degree program as soon as I had taken enough classes to show that I could do graduate work.

If you do what I should have done, when you move from part-time study to full-time, you'll be able to pay for grad school with an assistantship that requires you to work within your academic field, so it has the advantage of becoming an extension of your education, and being the start of your entry into your new profession.

If you're interested in a field where graduate programs don't usually offer funding, which is basically the professional degree programs--medical/dental/vet, law, business schools--the best advice I can give is to carefully research programs, in order to find those schools that offer the quality of education you need for as low a cost as possible, and to contact people at the schools themselves for advice on how to finance your education. They deal all the time with people facing this situation, and should know what means of financing your education are available.