How Higher Education Can Win Back America

[Mott the Hoople]

Why did you ultimately decide to do a graduate degree in materials science, rather than biology?

That’s a long story. My father was a physician who got a late start on his career. He didn’t start college until he was 30 and finished his doctorate at 39. He graduated a month before I turned 18. Obviously he came from a rural working class background. Well after dad got his license to practice he decided to open a practice in a rural farming community of 3,000 and proceeded generate earnings in the lowest 10% of his profession.

So I entered college about the same time he opened his practice. Which means he couldn’t afford my ridiculously low tuition cost back then.

As I was growing up I showed a precocious ability in the life sciences at a very young age. Ergo as my father was completing his studies it became pretty much accepted by him that I was going to follow his footsteps. Me being a naive and inexperienced kid just fell in line and to put it mildly I was under tremendous pressure to get into graduate school as quickly as possible. I was also paying my tuition via student loans. So one of my fathers great bits advice was that at that time you could apply for Medical school after you junior year and as long as you met the required classes, had an acceptable GPA and did well enough on the MCAT you could skip your senior year and matriculate into graduate school. Well it was my father’s advice to go that route instead of completing my bachelor’s degree. So again being clueless that’s what I did.

Well you know how tough that first year in a Doctoral program is adjusting to working 12-16 hours a day, every day, with no let up. When it came to pay tuition for my first term of grad school my father simply didn’t have the money to assist me financially and because I skipped my senior year I wasn’t eligible for graduate level student loans. So I paid for my first year with some savings and a $2,500 undergraduate GSL. So after tuition, books and fees I lived on $300/month for the next ten month. To add insult to injury my school required 32 credit hours of course work per trimester.

Needless to say that was one miserable year of working my ever loving ass off while going hungry most of the time. I lost 30lbs and I only weighed 155 lbs when I started. So i had done enough course work in one year that would qualify by credit hours for two masters degrees. At the end of the academic year when I was burned out, malnourished and flat broke I went back home only to have my father express his disgust with me that I didn’t get a full time job and soldier my way through grad school. He was also out of touch with what the cost of graduate school was at that time as he had paid a fraction of what I would need to spend to complete my education which would be about $75,000. Well his solution to the problem was for me to work a full time job while being a full time doctoral student. So you can see I was under incredible and unrealistic pressure and I broke. I couldn’t psychologically handle it anymore.

Before you comment yes my father was being a real ass. So I broke and I moved to Columbus to find work to save money to go back to grad school and this precipitated an identity crises as I finally had figured out that I had made a huge mistake in attempting to follow his footsteps. If you ever saw the movie Dead Poets Society I could totally relate to the kid who committed suicide.

So while I was trying to get a job and figure out if I wanted to go back to med school or pursue my own identity I found a job with a start up environmental company that had developed a unique hazardous waste recycling technology.

I fell in love with the work and decided not to return to med school and to pursue an environmental career. Enter dear old Dad again who thought I had lost my fucking mind as his vision of environmental work was of a hippie chaining themselves to a tree to save spotted owls. He had no idea either that I had entered a pretty dangerous occupation. So he ragged me for years about my career choice and let me know it was work for losers. So due to that and because of the inherent dangers of doing field work in hazmat I just didn’t discuss my work with him as I didn’t want to worry my parents and I didn’t want to hear his opinions which were always insulting about my work.

So after a couple of years of doing hazmat work our company jointly landed a research grant with The Ohio State University graduate school of materials science and ceramic engineering. I played no small part in winning that grant as I wrote several white papers one of which was a paper on technology transfer. So my boss who was head of the project assigned me to be part of the research team which was composed of four Masters candidates including myself. That was both tough as materials science is not exactly an easy subject and because the Prof didn’t want me on the team as I didn’t have an academic background in either materials science or engineering but my boss insisted that I be on the team as they needed someone with a hazmat background as we were recycling hazardous waste. So two and a half years later I completed my masters with my thesis being “Utilizing Molar Basicity Calculations to regulate melt temperatures and viscosity of slags in high temperature vitrification.”.

I then went back to work at my companies recycling facility at a Nucor Steel Facility where we were recycling their electric arc furnace dust (EPA listed hazardous waste K061). Shortly after that I earned my Certified Hazardous Materials Manager (CHMM) credential. Oddly my CHMM credential did more to open doors for economic opportunity than my education did. Lesson for you young STEM field students. Earning a professional license or certification will do more for your economic opportunities than your degree will.

So that’s how I ended up with doing graduate studies in both human biology and materials science. Though oddly, from a professional standpoint I don’t consider myself either a biologist or a materials engineer. I consider myself a Hazmat Manager.

As for my father’s and my relationship I ended up remaining very close to my father and understood his flaws as a person nor resented him for the pressure and negativity. In the long run it made me grow up and learn to deal with adversity.

I also ended up shutting him up about my career as couple of years after I completed my Masters I was driving some where and he told me about a new GP that had opened a new practice in a nearby small town who had earned $75,000 dollars his first year in practice. He then turned to me and with a look and tone of bitter disappointment said to me “That could have been you. If you had just stuck it out with med school that could have been you.”

My response was “He made $75,000 his first year? Wow, that’s pretty good” ( which was pretty good for a small town area in the late 90’s for a GP’s first year).

My Dad then reiterated “Yea, and that could have been you!”. I then let out a long whistle and said “Wow Dad, he earned almost as much as I did this year.”. My father kept on ranting about how that could have been me when that comment sunk in. He then gave me a WTF look and asked me how much I had earned that year. I told him $90 KPY. He shook his head in disbelief and told me he didn’t believe me. So I showed him a pay stub and and the receipt from a $25,000 bonus check I had received. That was the last time he made a negative comment about my environmental career. I got a big chuckle that I had just crushed years of preconceived notions he had about my career.

So anyway that’s how I was educated in two different STEM fields. It was a long story but you asked. LOL

 

[Cypress]

That’s a long story. My father was a physician who got a late start on his career. He didn’t start college until he was 30 and finished his doctorate at 39. He graduated a month before I turned 18. Obviously he came from a rural working class background. Well after dad got his license to practice he decided to open a practice in a rural farming community of 3,000 and proceeded generate earnings in the lowest 10% of his profession.

So I entered college about the same time he opened his practice. Which means he couldn’t afford my ridiculously low tuition cost back then.

As I was growing up I showed a precocious ability in the life sciences at a very young age. Ergo as my father was completing his studies it became pretty much accepted by him that I was going to follow his footsteps. Me being a naive and inexperienced kid just fell in line and to put it mildly I was under tremendous pressure to get into graduate school as quickly as possible. I was also paying my tuition via student loans. So one of my fathers great bits advice was that at that time you could apply for Medical school after you junior year and as long as you met the required classes, had an acceptable GPA and did well enough on the MCAT you could skip your senior year and matriculate into graduate school. Well it was my father’s advice to go that route instead of completing my bachelor’s degree. So again being clueless that’s what I did.

Well you know how tough that first year in a Doctoral program is adjusting to working 12-16 hours a day, every day, with no let up. When it came to pay tuition for my first term of grad school my father simply didn’t have the money to assist me financially and because I skipped my senior year I wasn’t eligible for graduate level student loans. So I paid for my first year with some savings and a $2,500 undergraduate GSL. So after tuition, books and fees I lived on $300/month for the next ten month. To add insult to injury my school required 32 credit hours of course work per trimester.

Needless to say that was one miserable year of working my ever loving ass off while going hungry most of the time. I lost 30lbs and I only weighed 155 lbs when I started. So i had done enough course work in one year that would qualify by credit hours for two masters degrees. At the end of the academic year when I was burned out, malnourished and flat broke I went back home only to have my father express his disgust with me that I didn’t get a full time job and soldier my way through grad school. He was also out of touch with what the cost of graduate school was at that time as he had paid a fraction of what I would need to spend to complete my education which would be about $75,000. Well his solution to the problem was for me to work a full time job while being a full time doctoral student. So you can see I was under incredible and unrealistic pressure and I broke. I couldn’t psychologically handle it anymore.

Before you comment yes my father was being a real ass. So I broke and I moved to Columbus to find work to save money to go back to grad school and this precipitated an identity crises as I finally had figured out that I had made a huge mistake in attempting to follow his footsteps. If you ever saw the movie Dead Poets Society I could totally relate to the kid who committed suicide.

So while I was trying to get a job and figure out if I wanted to go back to med school or pursue my own identity I found a job with a start up environmental company that had developed a unique hazardous waste recycling technology.

I fell in love with the work and decided not to return to med school and to pursue an environmental career. Enter dear old Dad again who thought I had lost my fucking mind as his vision of environmental work was of a hippie chaining themselves to a tree to save spotted owls. He had no idea either that I had entered a pretty dangerous occupation. So he ragged me for years about my career choice and let me know it was work for losers. So due to that and because of the inherent dangers of doing field work in hazmat I just didn’t discuss my work with him as I didn’t want to worry my parents and I didn’t want to hear his opinions which were always insulting about my work.

So after a couple of years of doing hazmat work our company jointly landed a research grant with The Ohio State University graduate school of materials science and ceramic engineering. I played no small part in winning that grant as I wrote several white papers one of which was a paper on technology transfer. So my boss who was head of the project assigned me to be part of the research team which was composed of four Masters candidates including myself. That was both tough as materials science is not exactly an easy subject and because the Prof didn’t want me on the team as I didn’t have an academic background in either materials science or engineering but my boss insisted that I be on the team as they needed someone with a hazmat background as we were recycling hazardous waste. So two and a half years later I completed my masters with my thesis being “Utilizing Molar Basicity Calculations to regulate melt temperatures and viscosity of slags in high temperature vitrification.”.

I then went back to work at my companies recycling facility at a Nucor Steel Facility where we were recycling their electric arc furnace dust (EPA listed hazardous waste K061). Shortly after that I earned my Certified Hazardous Materials Manager (CHMM) credential. Oddly my CHMM credential did more to open doors for economic opportunity than my education did. Lesson for you young STEM field students. Earning a professional license or certification will do more for your economic opportunities than your degree will.

So that’s how I ended up with doing graduate studies in both human biology and materials science. Though oddly, from a professional standpoint I don’t consider myself either a biologist or a materials engineer. I consider myself a Hazmat Manager.

As for my father’s and my relationship I ended up remaining very close to my father and understood his flaws as a person nor resented him for the pressure and negativity. In the long run it made me grow up and learn to deal with adversity.

I also ended up shutting him up about my career as couple of years after I completed my Masters I was driving some where and he told me about a new GP that had opened a new practice in a nearby small town who had earned $75,000 dollars his first year in practice. He then turned to me and with a look and tone of bitter disappointment said to me “That could have been you. If you had just stuck it out with med school that could have been you.”

My response was “He made $75,000 his first year? Wow, that’s pretty good” ( which was pretty good for a small town area in the late 90’s for a GP’s first year).

My Dad then reiterated “Yea, and that could have been you!”. I then let out a long whistle and said “Wow Dad, he earned almost as much as I did this year.”. My father kept on ranting about how that could have been me when that comment sunk in. He then gave me a WTF look and asked me how much I had earned that year. I told him $90 KPY. He shook his head in disbelief and told me he didn’t believe me. So I showed him a pay stub and and the receipt from a $25,000 bonus check I had received. That was the last time he made a negative comment about my environmental career. I got a big chuckle that I had just crushed years of preconceived notions he had about my career.

So anyway that’s how I was educated in two different STEM fields. It was a long story but you asked. LOL

Congratulations on working yourself up from modest circumstances! Materials science sounds like a demanding degree

I must have been fortunate in having parents who never pressured me about college and supported whatever I did. My first major in college before switching majors was economics. I know my mother had a very low opinion of economics, but she never said anything bad about my choice, and even offered a few positive insights.

 

[Mott the Hoople]

Congratulations on working yourself up from modest circumstances! Materials science sounds like a demanding degree

I must have been fortunate in having parents who never pressured me about college and supported whatever I did. My first major in college before switching majors was economics. I know my mother had a very low opinion of economics, but she never said anything bad about my choice, and even offered a few positive insights.

You were indeed lucky and in retrospect I was lucky too. I think a kid with comparable abilities today coming from my background would have a tougher road to hoe. My parents were very supportive and my father was invaluable in my learning how to study subjects at a high level. Most of what I know of professionalism I learned from him… the hard way. I understood my father’s expectations as I needed to be pushed at times. I’m giving a poor impression of him when he was a great father. Let’s just say he was also the world’s worst motivational speaker. LOL

Now on the difference in difficulty between freshman year of Med School and a Masters in Materials Science. The Freshman year of medical school was far, harder work. It’s not that the subject matters are more or less difficult than the other but in my Masters I was also working full time as a research assistant and getting paid for it. I also completed it over 2.5 years, earning 45 trimester credit hours while doing full time research. My Freshman year in Med School in 10 months I completed 92 trimester hours (no BS man). Also, there was hardly any of a competitive nature to earning my Masters. No bell curve grading. Med School the grading was on a bell curve. It was super competitive which just added stress to the work load. So no comparing the level of difficulty there in an overall basis. When you have 7 classes a trimesters to 2 classes a trimester. So not even comparable. The hardest part of the Masters was writing a thesis.

As for the subject matter levels of difficulty. It’s hard to compare. For example in anatomy, and that’s mostly what you’re studying your Freshman year, you have to memorize a vast and overwhelming amount of information. That is not intellectually difficult but it requires a hell of a lot of work. There’s hardly any critical thinking happening but the work load is overwhelming.

In the Materials Science the critical thinking and problem solving part of it was more of the focus. That was more difficult from that viewpoint but I can’t say it was harder to do than memorizing vast amounts of information. Both have their place.

The most intellectually demanding classes I took were all biology. Those were physiology, microbiology and immunology, Molecular Biology and Cell Biology were all harder to grasp subjects than anything I studied in materials science engineering but to be fair, I wasn’t studying semiconductors. I was studying white ware and beer bottles.

Materials Science just ended up being one life’s adventures as when the recycling company went belly up my CHMM credential was more marketable and I also do have a passion for environmental work. I haven’t done any materials science work in almost 25 years. I had a lot of fun and adventures working in hazardous waste recycling.

 

[Cypress]

You were indeed lucky and in retrospect I was lucky too. I think a kid with comparable abilities today coming from my background would have a tougher road to hoe. My parents were very supportive and my father was invaluable in my learning how to study subjects at a high level. Most of what I know of professionalism I learned from him… the hard way. I understood my father’s expectations as I needed to be pushed at times. I’m giving a poor impression of him when he was a great father. Let’s just say he was also the world’s worst motivational speaker. LOL

Now on the difference in difficulty between freshman year of Med School and a Masters in Materials Science. The Freshman year of medical school was far, harder work. It’s not that the subject matters are more or less difficult than the other but in my Masters I was also working full time as a research assistant and getting paid for it. I also completed it over 2.5 years, earning 45 trimester credit hours while doing full time research. My Freshman year in Med School in 10 months I completed 92 trimester hours (no BS man). Also, there was hardly any of a competitive nature to earning my Masters. No bell curve grading. Med School the grading was on a bell curve. It was super competitive which just added stress to the work load. So no comparing the level of difficulty there in an overall basis. When you have 7 classes a trimesters to 2 classes a trimester. So not even comparable. The hardest part of the Masters was writing a thesis.

As for the subject matter levels of difficulty. It’s hard to compare. For example in anatomy, and that’s mostly what you’re studying your Freshman year, you have to memorize a vast and overwhelming amount of information. That is not intellectually difficult but it requires a hell of a lot of work. There’s hardly any critical thinking happening but the work load is overwhelming.

In the Materials Science the critical thinking and problem solving part of it was more of the focus. That was more difficult from that viewpoint but I can’t say it was harder to do than memorizing vast amounts of information. Both have their place.

The most intellectually demanding classes I took were all biology. Those were physiology, microbiology and immunology, Molecular Biology and Cell Biology were all harder to grasp subjects than anything I studied in materials science engineering but to be fair, I wasn’t studying semiconductors. I was studying white ware and beer bottles.

Materials Science just ended up being one life’s adventures as when the recycling company went belly up my CHMM credential was more marketable and I also do have a passion for environmental work. I haven’t done any materials science work in almost 25 years. I had a lot of fun and adventures working in hazardous waste recycling.

Thanks for a glimpse into your biograsystem in this nation

Med school would be out of my league. One probably really has to have a real enthusiasm for medical science, which I just don't have.

Hazmat must have been a good career, because there's always a need for that.

I feel sorry for kids who don't have parents to set an example and support aspirations for higher education for their kids. We almost have a caste system in this nation where most people who go to college and succeed were raised by parents who were also college grads.