First and Last Week of Grad School

“Why do you want to be a therapist?” questioned my professor from her poorly lit room into my computer screen. I stood sweating and said, “I...I don’t...?” Then improvised some jargon about how I’ve been told I would be good at it and that right now my degree was just a MA in Psychology. 

“Ok. Thanks.” And she moved on to the next virtual student. 

I took a free seven-week course online about Psychology over the summer and was so fascinated by the subject, that I immediately applied to grad school for it. I’ve been out of college for almost twelve years, so I didn’t think I would even get in. Yet after a few magic letters of recommendations, a personal statement and my transcript from theater school showing I’m capable of getting mostly A-’s, I got in. Rather quickly. It was so quick that I was immediately skeptical of the whole process. 

I had spent several weeks leading up to the first live class reading the books, watching the online lectures, and submitting papers. I was nervous and excited. And then the time came to join the first live session. 

I was immediately taken back by my professor sitting on the floor, in the dark. This course alone was costing me roughly $5,000. I figured twenty dollars of that could have been used for a “ring light fee”. 

We then proceeded to spend forty-five minutes going over the syllabus, which I had already read several times at this point because all of the homework was due 24 hours before this first class. As she continued to explain the weekly reflection papers due, the group assignments, the open book midterm that was basically expected to be perfect because it was open book, and a final ten page research paper on two different theories of counseling, my heart began to panic. 

I had never experienced such a clear moment of my brain telling me, “This is not what you are supposed to be doing.” As twenty-three-year-old student after twenty-three-year-old student talked about opening their own private practice to help patients, all I could think about was how it was possible to apply any of this to a magic show. 

My initial idea for going into this was to be able to give keynote addresses on the psychology of magic and make my current solo show more scientific to the brain discussing memory, cognitive bias, and more fancy things I currently pretend to know stuff about. 

Class ended and I immediately went upstairs and made an Old Fashioned. I sat on the couch staring blankly and slowly told my wife, “I am in over my head.” 

She knows I am not one to quit things. I took Japanese for 6 years before I realized I didn’t know how to speak Japanese.

“Well, just give it to the morning. And if you want you can differ or quit,” she said. 

I began to panic even more about quitting. Our senior citizen dachshund wakes us up every couple of hours to pee in the night, and by the third time, I could not fall back asleep. Deep panic engulfed my brain as I questioned if I wanted to do this, and the financial burden it would incur. I had taken a free online course on finance a few months earlier and the professor spent lots of time talking about diversification and risk management. This now seemed like a terrible $75,000 investment. 

Regardless, I decided to go to my second live session the following day, just to see if the panic was temporary. No time was spent on the syllabus, but instead, we went through bullet points of the video lectures we had all completed the day before. 

As my second professor also sat in a poorly lit room, I decided I was going to try and have a little more fun in this class. So when she asked, “What do we mean by critical thinking?” I stupidly opened my mouth for the first time in front of a group of people who did not know me or my humor and said, “Well, I spent three months in China, and I got to experience first hand what it’s like to be in a society that doesn’t teach critical thinking.”

Silence. Followed by a, “Ok....anyone else.”

At that moment I knew it was time to pull the ejector seat. With the help of a few great phone calls from friends and family, I was able to take the leap and withdraw from classes. The biggest thing I was worried about was feeling like a failure and wasting the money I had already put into it between enrollment fees and books. But the second I sent off the email to my advisor saying it was game over, a psychological weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I no longer had to prove myself as being smart enough to get my Master’s degree. 

I don’t feel like I quit or failed. I know I could do the work and pass, I had proved that by doing all the reading and assignments prior to the first live sessions. I just didn’t want that to be my life for the next 18 to 24 months.

I learned that I am more of a creative person than I have previously wanted to acknowledge. I don’t want to turn my back on 20 years of the creative process. I don’t want to be a therapist, but I want to provide therapy in a mass setting via escapism. I might not get to diagnose why you are in love with your father’s, brother’s, former roommate, but I will try to give you a little bit of wonder. 

With the pandemic still at large, I don’t know what will become of the entertainment industry. I just know that this year has proven how little time we might all have. And that choosing to spend it wisely is as much as we can do right now for ourselves and for others.