Describe a risk you took that you do not regret.

This is an excellent question, each day these are great and today is no exception.

In anticipation of a career change 6 years ago I made the decision to pursue my Master’s Degree in English. This was a real departure from the 22 years I’d worked in information technology. Not to mention the 25+ year hiatus and going to school/college. I enrolled at GCU (Grand Canyon University).

At first, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get it done. Learning about the new for me new APA writing format was so difficult to adjust to versus MLA which I used pretty much up until that point. Assignments were awkward class participation, and threaded discussions was such a new thing for me.

But once I got into a good flow, everything fell in the place, and it was pretty effortless to be honest. I wrote my papers if not all of them the night they were over 3 to 4 hours each time. And as crazy as it may sound I got “A”s on everything I touched.

It was weird. It was like I’d go into almost a trance and just go stream a consciousness, and my essay/papers would just take shape. And to deal with my problems with the new APA format I basically would take my previous paper, gut it rename, it save it, and then put the new content in there. this assured that I would not have any issues with format or design of my assignments.

Since my masters degree, was online, one new and challenging part was submitting each essay for originality. There’s actually software out there that will compare your paper to other papers written for the same courses and scan all the text and give a score. The lower the score the higher the originality so I was always shooting for under 10% and often got it. 99% of the students in my classes were teachers versus me, coming from technology perspective, so as a result, my papers were very unique.

Before I knew it two years gone by and I finished my 11 classes and gotten my masters degree in English. I’d leverage that degree for writing jobs and even change careers and write full-time now (as well as part-time here).

In conclusion, I must say that the risk was worth worth it all. Writing is my passion and working in it for a living is a dream come true and far more lucrative than I ever imagined…

-aaa