Unqualified Success

Here is a thing about me that I'm ashamed of: I don't have a fancy degree.

I do have a degree, but just barely. It's a three-year bachelor's degree, not a four-year "with Honours" degree. It's a "yeah yeah, good enough, just get out of here" degree.

I'm ashamed because to me, degree means smart. And I want people to know that I'm smart.

Without getting too deep into it, I would guess that's it’s important to me that people know I’m smart because I was a weird, awkward, fat little kid and for most of my childhood, "smart" was the only thing I had going for me. I was heaped with praise and affection for being smart.

You can see how this might become a problem.

But as it turns out, it takes a lot more than smart to get a degree. In fact, you could argue that being smart is neither necessary nor sufficient for getting a fancy degree. What it actually takes to get a degree is persistence, patience, and a belief that it is important enough to spend years of your life and tens of thousands of your dollars on.

So what happened to me?

My first chance to get a degree was the usual time, after high school. When I finished high school, I was very keen to get on with my life, which at the time meant earning money and spending it, getting married, buying a home and having children. I wasn't interested in academia and I figured my career would somehow work itself out if I got a decent, practical degree to start off with.

I chose my degree accordingly. I started off meaning to study actuarial science because I heard that was very lucrative. Actuarial science is notoriously difficult and boring, but with the hubris of a bright person from the sticks who had never been academically challenged, I figured I would be able to hack it.

I could not hack it.

I soon switched focus to computer science but stayed in the faculty of math, and that decision directly led me to my current non-degree-having state. The fact is, I wasn't interested enough in math to study it at a university level. I picked up a few study skill, but they were never enough to make up for my lack of interest and my intrinic inability to work hard on things I don't care about. By the end of my time at university I was desperate to do something, anything else, and they were desperate to get rid of me.

That was my first stab at higher education. My second chance came a few years ago. In 2017 I was casting about for my next career and I thought about a few possibilities (project manager, librarian, publishing) which would have sent me back to university.

Ultimately I decided on coaching, which for entry-level certification requires only 36 hours of training and 100 hours of practice. (And of course, since it's not regulated, in practice requires no training or practice at all — any asshole can call themself a coach. That's a blog post for another day.)

Why did I make the same decision against higher education that second time, even though I had long felt ashamed about my lack of degrees? Pretty much the same reasons as the first time: pragmatism, impatience, and risk-aversion. I wanted to get on with working and earning, and not spend a lot of time preparing.

I didn't want to risk a lot of resources — time and money — on something which might not even be the perfect career for me. In fact, I'm not convinced there is a perfect career for me; if I know anything about myself it's that I am interested in a lot of things, and I get bored. It just doesn't make a lot of sense for me to invest a bunch of money into one path, since I'll probably want to do something else sooner or later.

For someone like me it's smarter to accumulate skills like writing, editing and coaching, which are flexible and can applied in lots of different contexts, rather than commit to a long course of training which leads to a rigidly defined path.

Why it's okay that I don't have a degree

I believe in trade school. I think it's great to learn a skill and then go out in the world and ply it. Coach school is trade school, although they don't frame it that way. Computer science school is also trade school (or it tries to be while pretending it isn't, but that's a whole 'nother post).

Academia is great, don't get me wrong. Thank goodness there are people who can hack it, because we need researchers and analysts. We need people with the patience to learn everything we already know about some topic and then figure out even more. But that's not me.

It's also true that, as Tara Mohr says in her book Playing Big, women tend to get degrees as a hedge against the inner critic, and as armour against a world that says we're not good enough or smart enough. We get degrees when we are stuck in our careers and trying to find a way forward.

I'm not suggesting that I recognized this pattern and consciously decided to subvert it. But I have learned to take a kind of defensive pride in my refusal to get a degree: If you think less of me because I don't have a degree, fuck you maybe. I don't need a fancy degree to permit me to take up space, to have ideas and express them, to justify my audience or my ambitions. (Neither do you.)

After all that

And as it turns out, after all I don't need a degree to prove I'm smart.

I have done numerous exercises designed to identify and describe my strengths. (It's the kind of thing you do when you're a coach, because coaching is strengths-oriented and we take our own medicine.) In the results of all of the exercises, curiosity, learning, and analysis show up at the top of my strengths. If anything, various kinds of smartness nudge out strengths that might be more useful for a coach, like empathy and communication.

So am I really at peace with not having a degree?

I wish I were. If I was, I wouldn't need to write this. But after writing this post, I have a deeper understanding of the mechanisms and tendencies which led me to my current degree-less state. That understanding helps me to hold myself with some compassion.

But it's hard to maintain that kind of solid self-understanding and confidence when I'm out there in the world, where almost everyone either values degrees or acts like they do. Every time a speaker or podcast guest is introduced, their degrees get a mention. People put all their letters after their names, they list their education on LinkedIn. Not having a degree is weird, it makes me an outlier.

But it is what it is, I am who I am, and I'm out in the world trying to make something of myself as myself. This is yet another aspect of self-acceptance and self-love, and it's always a work in progress.