Plan C

They say, “When God closes a door, he opens a window.”  They say, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”  They say, “Always have a back-up plan.”  They also say, “The third time’s the charm.”  For the answer to “What are you going to do with your life?”, it was Plan C that worked for me.

When I was a little girl, the only thing I ever wanted to be was a wife and mother.  I majored in education in college figuring that teaching would be a way to use some of my skills while I whiled away the time waiting for Mr. Right.  When I entered my 30’s and Prince Charming had yet to appear, I gave thanks that I lived in an age where a single woman could become a mother anyway.  I saved my money and researched adoption agencies.  But then I was diagnosed with breast cancer.  By the time I waited out the five years to be reasonably certain I had been blessed with a cure… I no longer felt invincible and sure I could handle motherhood so beautifully on my own.  So, it was time to move on to Plan C.

Getting a doctoral degree was the most amazing journey, and the best “plan C” I could have conjured.  I learned so much, I worked with wonderful people, and I aligned myself for opportunities I didn’t even know existed.

You would think that getting a doctoral degree would make you feel smart, but just the opposite is true.  The deeper you learn about the field you’re studying, the more obvious it becomes that you will never know it all.  And my cohort colleagues and professors were such incredibly smart people, I was running to catch up.  But oh, what I learned.  I thought I knew training and development as a field before I went to graduate school, but what I learned put my practice in a totally different class.  I am so much better at my job now!

You might think that getting a doctoral degree is a solitary endeavor, but in my case that wasn’t true either.  My cohort colleagues were not only smart, they were generous and fun and interesting and challenging.  Studying for my comprehensive exams produced some of the most intellectually stimulating conversations I’ve ever had – and yet we enjoyed ourselves in the process.  What stories I could tell of debates and laughter and camaraderie both inside and outside of the classroom.  The best times were Saturday nights of cohort weekends, when many of us had a family-style Italian feast at That’s Amore, a restaurant down the road from the campus.  I made some great friends!

You might think that a doctoral degree is the terminal point in one’s education, but it’s really just the beginning.  In our very first week of the program, Sharon Confessore (my favorite professor) gave an inspiring talk about what it means to get a doctoral degree.  She crafted her story around the significance of the doctoral robes and hood.  Truly, I can’t remember all of the details of her speech, but I do – still – to my very core –  remember the challenge she set forth regarding becoming a person who creates new knowledge to impact effective practice of human resource development in the field.  To this day, I can still see the emotion on all of my soon-to-be friends’ faces, and I can still feel the deep welling of awe and responsibility inherent in the path we were taking.  Over the course of the doctoral journey, I became a scholar.

I was so blessed to have this opportunity.  Soon after joining Vanguard, I asked (rather tentatively) what kind of support I might receive if I wanted to pursue the doctorate.  I had researched programs and found this really terrific executive program at George Washington University.  It required attendance only one weekend a month (Friday and Saturday, all day) along with a 10-day residence every summer for two-and-a-half years.  It was designed for people who would continue to work full time.  But it was really expensive.  Much to my surprise and delight, Vanguard offered to pay the full tuition.  (I still paid big bucks in expenses, but it was do-able.)  I remember when, just a few days before my 40th birthday, I learned that I had been accepted into the program.  I got the call in the middle of a management training class, and wound up having the conversation in the lobby of the hotel.  I was practically jumping up and down for joy.  Now I knew what I was going to do with my life!

So for the next four years, I worked my 40-50 hours per week at Vanguard Mondays through Thursdays.  Then I dedicated most of my time on the weekends to studying and cohort weekends.  I learned the fine art of juggling multiple projects and demands.  I learned to carry a book, a highlighter, and a pen wherever I went.  I learned to make the most of time with family and friends because it was so precious.  And I learned adult learning, and organizational diagnosis, and team dynamics, and qualitative research.  I learned how to read research and write in an academic voice.  I learned that I had a perspective worth sharing.  I learned to be what we call a scholar-practitioner.  So cool.

I have so many stories to tell about those years, about my dissertation project, and about what the degree has meant to my life and career.  But I’ll leave those details to another post.  Suffice it to say that the “C” in Plan C could alternately stand for cohort comrades, or constant coursework, or craziness, or cramming, or challenging conversation, or composing papers, or career-building, or the culmination of a grand adventure, or a concatenation of all of the above – and it still wouldn’t adequately capture how completely extraordinary Plan C turned out to be.