Starting the second year of my masters in political science in a few weeks.  Comparative politics major, international relations minor.  Particularly interested in political economy, and labor relations.

Trying to decide on the PhD.  Thinking about the comparative politics of work for the diss.

And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg

So:
Graduate of Ecole Polytechnique
Ph.D in economics on "the independence of a country lessons from game theory and application to the case of Ukraine"

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

I was much inspired at my first art college in Leicester, by a head of department (sculpture) saying to me "You're here to learn how to learn. This is only the beginning, and it will still be only the beginning when you leave here in 3 years"

He also said "This is the most fun 3 years you will ever have". Which turned out to be not entirely true.

You can't be me, I'm taken

Now post-transition and feeling a suppressed personality begin to emerge, I realise that, in fact, I would have been better off doing entirely different things. I'd love to do other study, but don't really know how to find out what it is I want to do (I'd really like to go back to school and start again).

Still, I like beer and cheese
and that's better qualification than all of these

keep to the Fen Causeway

I did a DEA along with my last year of engineering school, but found I wasn't really capable of the unfocused work of research. Not enough self-motivation.

Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères

I have a masters in counseling and a PhD in psychology...

"Once in awhile we get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if we look at it right" - Hunter/Garcia

but that doesnt help my IQ seems lower than the average ET ;-) LOL

4 very nice years at Camberwell Art School, a bit too relaxed actually, based on the Romantic myth of the artist - just hang around and wait till inspiration comes. When, so often, it didn't (not much input, not much output), it was across the road to the pub for a chat :-) But it was a nice way to mature - a bit.

Then 9 months art teacher training, when we had massive input by comparison, history, philosophy, psychology of education, and I found it very stimulating. But a key event was almost last day of the course when they showed some extracts from classic films I hadn't seen (one might have thought this seventh art would have been given a bit more prominence in a course for art teachers in the 20th c.) - it was a revelation.

That summer I went on a Brit Film Institute summer school and loved the discussions. I started their four year evening diploma course. During the day I was teaching art in a mixed grammar school. Nice job. Had a great, very intelliegnt lecturer for that first year who had a sort of Marxist-Leavisite (close reading) approach. For the fourth year I opted to make a short film instead of a thesis - pretty radical for an academic course then.

I overlapped that year with first year of a four year evening course in philosophy at Birkbeck College, London. I was in my argumentative (you noticed ? :-)) element. Did well and was accepted to go straight on to a Ph D (things were more relaxed then) in art and ideology.

But I got a chance to write two course units and make a TV programme on War and the Media for the Open University, so gave up the Ph D to do that (gave me a bigger audience and more motivation and direction).

The subject matter was due to the most important part of my education - reading Noam Chomsky; worth ten of most academic courses. My first published piece was a letter to the Listener showing that the reviewer of one of Chomsky's books, who'd called him a "subtle casuist",  deserved the appelation himself because he'd misleadingly put together two sentences from the book as if they followed each other, when they were 100 pages apart! The reviewer was no less a figure than Warden of All Souls College (post-grad), Oxford, very high on the academic ladder. It helped cure me of my slight (working class) awe of such people.

Then I had the wonderful luck to go on to be a lecturer in media theory and history. Because it was a relatively new subject, I was left alone to write my own syllabus, constantly changing as I educated myself at the same time. Since the media includes just about everything, it was a very broad, continuing self-education. My education continues in researching for diaries and comments here - and like others, I find the level often as high as anything in academic courses.

Well, you asked :-)

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.

I started as a machine-tool operator, went to adult vocational training were I got a mechanical fitter CAP (vocational training certificate). I became an engineer in diesel engines, heavy trucks and earthmoving equipment through on the job learning. I then moved to be a training designer and became a consultant in human resources. I then went to University while working as a consultant and got a DESS (master) in business administration. I needed to add theory to my practical knowledge, so I did another two years of University while working and got a DEA (half-way between master and PhD) in management science focused on strategy.

However, I must say I learnt a lot through two channels:  debating in bistrots and reading literature.

I also qualify as a father of two daughters (but they might deny me the qualification...)

I used to be highly qualified as a night reveller and a lover, but I need retraining (or at least refreshing) in both disciplines.

"Dieu se rit des hommes qui se plaignent des conséquences alors qu'ils en chérissent les causes" Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

you are the media you consume.

Someone should do one about hobbies.

"When the abyss stares at me, it wets its pants." Brian Hopkins

Not quite a total waste of time, because I learned how to hack the Uni mainframe and play on the Internet back when it was still DARPAnet.

And I borrowed plenty of interesting books from the library, very few of which had anything to do with electronics.

Subsequently did the usual start-up grind (and wasn't that fun) before drifting into media. And currently re-inventing myself as an artist, apparently.

There's also an OU module on music theory and composition in the mix somewhere.

I'm still sort-of interested in a PhD somewhere or other in something or other, but it's hard to think of something that I'd be accepted for that wouldn't be a complete waste of time.

so at 16 i went to a crammer, asked to leave from that, had a private tutor, who was an eccentric genius, but we had too much fun to pass a-levels, so i went to another day-crammer and got 3 a-levels, in english, german and french.

happily shook off academics as a waste of time, and launched off into the experiential, hitching around morocco for 6 months, coming back to london, earning a bit of money doing shit jobs, then bailed to india overland, through yugoslavia, bulgaria, greece, turkey, iran, afghanistan down to tamil nadu, where i studied yoga at an ashram.

got tired of being asked to give pseudo-adulation to a conman, so took off walking and hitching round s. india for three more months.

went back to england, found no avenues open, so got a job working in vineyards, raised the money to go the states, worked shit jobs there, and in my late thirties went to massage school, obtained my state license with a 100% exam score, and went on to further studies in thai massage in bangkok, craniosacral in switzerland and california, and various other healing disciplines here and there.

by then i had regained the joy in owning an intellect, and had discovered public television in the usa, opening a passion for public affairs and history/politics which has never left, leading me here!

i studied choir music in summer school, and had the privilege of singing with big choirs at salisbury and st albans, which had a bigger effect on me than i realised at the time, exposing me to extraordinary acoustics and mystical architecture.

i studied one term's piano when i was 9, which also had a much deeper effect than i realised.

swept up in the brilliant musical waves that rolled across england during my teen years, i got into folk and blues guitar, and performed at little clubs in london like the troubadour, in earl's court.

got into songwriting while in the usa, and this has become my main avenue of self-expression, along with instrumental piano pieces.

now i'm studying organic farming and land management.

have been a voracious reader since the age of 4, had a psychic orgasm when the whole earth catalogue came out, and love learning about almost anything my mind can grasp.

so i know very little indeed about quite a lot of things, and would adore a university environment at this point in my life, if i could decide what to study there...

architecture, ceramics, computer music recording, music composition, electronics, amp modding, solar plumbing?

aspiration?

to be as much of a 'sodding polymath' (lol!) as i can be!

i always liked hanging out with folks smarter than me, and i sure lucked out here at ET!!

i guess you all must need a token dropout to give the views of a brain untramelled from too much academia...

helen,  i love your diaries!

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

and then there's a vast black hole of interesting stuff online, that i've been sponging off of ever since i discovered it, i suppose that's a sort of "independent study" education in its own right. ET is a great place for that sort of thing, and it's really nice to listen to some unabashed socialists for a change, after all the defensive no-i'm-not-too-radical-really-i-support-the-status-quo dreck you get on most american political blogs.

I don't think it really matters, I don't call myself "Dr." nor put letters after my name. I can say I was a great student, but I was positively underwhelmed by my research.

Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?

After a few years homesteading in the rural south (US) and running a small electrical business, I accepted an offer as a journeyman with an electrical contractor and headed back west. This led to an opportunity to join the local electrical union as a journeyman. I availed myself, for the next two and a half years, of their nightly journeyman classes. After about eight years of the daily grind, I tired of it and started up my small electrical business again.

I have subsequently married and moved to Europe. I am currently taking an intensive language course (Deutsch), and will look for work as a solar electrician or start up my own shop. Although my wife's offer of support while I finish my undergraduate (and desired law) degree is awfully tempting, I miss the tools and will probably decline, for now at least.

BTW: My wife has an MPH and an MBA, both from top Universities, and I always joke that she's just holding mine or that she has enough for the both of us. ;-) The women are smarter in every way!

Gioele

PS: Still waiting for the paperwork to be processed for my Cittadinanza Italiana to be processed, all the docs are in but the Italian bureaucracy is slow...

Geography BA Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, CA (just north of San Francisco)

Empire College School of Law.  Nights while working in the Public Defenders office days.

"I said, 'Wait a minute, Chester, You know I'm a peaceful man...'" Robbie Robertson

Since I'm new, here, I thought it might be an occasion for me to introduce myself.

Lasthorseman, melo and Helen's remarks had me nodding in agreement, in particular.

Like Lasthorseman I grew up in the US [California, as for me] but have spent most of my adult life in France. Shortly after graduating from U of Ca, San Diego, I was invited to collaborate on a design project in Strasbourg ... and, well, I simply never returned to the US. It isn't as though at any point I actually made a decision to stay, I was just too excited by France, learning French [ie, a whole new way of thinking] and discovering Europe, to give the idea of return much thought. The delight continues as ever.

As for education, after some hesitation, I settled on a 'special studies' program combining studio art and pre-medical science, which ended in a BA.

I've been working in publication and mutimedia, for years, now, with some success and renown, but am wondering, presently, how/when I'm going to end the enslavement to digital equipment ...

That aside, the first real and most formative education I received came from spending much of my childhood on me Pater's sailboat. Living on a boat, you learn how to do with a minimum, and that's a lesson that endures. Sailing and boating provide serious problem-solving challenges which, applied more broadly, could ultimately amount to golden advice to the land-locked of this energy-challenged age [cf, DeAnderer].

Cheers, all

I'm a PhD in a history program at the University of Washington. My focus is on urban development and political change in San Francisco in the decades after World War II. I might actually finish the damn degree this year. 6 years is long enough.

I received an MA from the same program. My BA is from UC Berkeley, a truly great place.

And, like wu ming, I've found that my coursework has been greatly supplemented by a much richer and broader education through the blogosphere. I've popped my head in and out of EuroTrib since it launched, and enjoy it immensely. I plan to be in Europe next summer, either for a honeymoon in Portugal, a conference in Lyon, or some combination of the two!

And the world will live as one

My education stats:
B.S. and M.Eng. in Electrical Engineering from MIT
(The M.Eng. is a weird degree offered only to MIT undergraduates in EE/CS as an extension to the undergraduate degree. 'Cause MIT undergraduates are so superior that they can be allowed to complete a shorter masters that is mostly research and a thesis...)
Presently I am doing a PhD in Electrical Engineering at the University of Bristol [Precision RF phase measurements of charged particle beams], my research is carried out at CERN

This little PhD project has had me way to busy for the last month or so. Ahhh. I miss ET...

Wrapped up the MSc. Geology thesis on medical geology late 2005, tried to stick to the subject for a follow up, decided after a few fruitless months later it was not for me and reverted back to my interests that bloomed during my Master: Structural Geology. Which brought me to my current PhD research on the Witwatersrand Basin in South Africa, almost six months counting and am very confused.

The best analogy ive read of enduring a phd is Frodo's mission in Lord of the Rings, writtten by David Pritchard,
Lord of the Rings: The Ph.D. Analogy

And somewhere in between there I held a corporate jo and a job in law enforcement. Neither were for me.