By the time some people get to high school, they seem to know exactly what they want to do for the rest of their lives. Others, like me, take a lifetime to discover a profession that aligns with their passions. My academic and professional journey has been more like Aesop’s tortoise’s, rather than the hare’s. Having to sit at a desk was, and still is, torturous. Since I graduated from high school in 1976, I have enrolled in more than a dozen (no exaggeration) different graduate institutions, and in the process, I earned two undergraduate and three graduate degrees. As a matter of fact, I was recently enrolled in my thirteenth college, a local junior college, where I completed an anthropology class. I have also been studying a couple of different languages—Hindi and Bengali—for the past three years because I want to be able to read folktales and textbooks in those languages.
If someone had told me when I was thirteen that I could get scholarships to learn languages, to learn about different cultures, to listen to folktales and to play with words as I translate the folktales, maybe my journey would have been different. As it stood, when I returned to college in 2012, after a twenty year hiatus, I had to learn how to learn.
