scarfman | bump in the road, essay (Reply)

I've hit a bit of a hitch in my plans to return to school fulltime at the end of the month. I've landed a part time job, which was part of the plan. But when my financial aid award was made, despite the switch from part time to full time, it was a fraction of what I'd been receiving because I've reached my lifetime cap for federal aid. My tuition isn't covered, and we sure don't have it. The financial aid officer suggested I check for further possibilites with my advisor at the adult education program, who was able to point out a few program grants I could apply for. If those don't work out, I could possbly switch from the traditional degree program to the adult ed. accelerated program which'll get me a B.A. for half the tuition. Meanwhile to apply for one of the program grants I had to write three hundred words on why I've missed five or more years of college and what I intend to do with my degree when I've earned it.

I've been working on my Bachelor's degree half-time at Creighton since 2003. Before that I took a hiatus from school for about ten years while my wife was completing her undergraduate degree preparatory to attending Creighton law school, where she graduated in 2005. Before that we lived in Chicago where, between 1987 and 1992, I attended classes in the School for New Learning at DePaul University, a B.A. program for non-traditional adult students. Previous to that I earned an Associate's degree in Commercial Art from the American Academy of Art in Chicago 1985-1987. Previous to that I attended Northwestern University for a year 1978-1979. My year at Northwestern was right out of high school.
For almost forty years I've been an informal student of the modern screen action-adventure hero as the contemporary equivalent of the fireside oral folklore hero of all of human history up until, relatively, recently. Upon completion of my present in-progress English degree I would like to enter into graduate studies to become a formal student, and teacher and professor, of this aspect of the story-telling phenomenon like, for instance, Dr. Henry Jenkins, the director of media studies at M.I.T., author of such works as Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. I believe the explosion of what Jenkins calls "participatory culture", brought about by the last fifteen years' advances in electronic communications, shows that it provides necessary human psychological needs, such as social contact with like-minded people and even value systems, than people have not been able to find reliably elsewhere in Western cultures since religion began falling out of favor with the Enlightenment. I plan on continuing to graduate work in either media studies or in King Arthur studies - a particular favorite area of my own - where in the time before the Enlightenment the relationship between the attractions of pop storytelling and the attractions of religion became explicit with the tales of the Holy Grail. When there is no human culture that doesn't tell stories, storytelling is worth studying and passing along.