My experiences.
Although my first experience as a college student was in the early 1990s, my current university journey began about a year ago when I learned that my employer would reimburse the cost of attending college classes. I took them up on the offer, as I have always regretted not finishing my degree (though not the experiences I traded it for). Knowing that I wanted to pursue an online degree in Labor Studies, I researched and happily landed at Indiana University. My first course was American Labor History, taught by Professor Amy Bailey, and I learned two major things from the class: First, my knowledge of labor history in the United States was remedial at best, and second, I am a much better student than I was back in the 1990s. I grew up in a union household, and my father was a business agent for a local of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). That, in combination with my day job, made me think I had a pretty good grasp of labor history in the United States. It turns out I was mistaken. It took the United States 159 years to pass its first significant piece of pro-worker legislation (the Wagner Act) in 1935, and only twelve years later to pass legislation to weaken those protections (Taft-Hartley). These two pieces of knowledge put almost every interaction I have had with a labor union over the past eight years into an entirely different perspective.
Returning to college has unsurprisingly shown me that I am a far better student than I was during my first go-around. Looking back at myself at 18 or 19, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and my early college career reflected that: I went from a Liberal Arts Degree to a Graphic Design Degree to a Theater Degree, and then a double major in Theater and Graphic Design. Young Dave, as I like to call him, swung from whimsy to whimsy and from major to major... and it showed when he tried to return to college twenty-odd years later with a ton of credits and nothing close to a degree. At fifty, Mature Dave (not Old Dave) has a lot of life lessons that have allowed him to settle down, concentrate, and focus on the task at hand. Also, Mature Dave is a lot less arrogant and cocksure than that bushy-haired dude in the picture.
One of my greatest accomplishments over the course of this semester has been my improvement as a writer. Professor Bailey’s American Labor History course has forced me not only to sit down and write each week but to learn how to write concisely about the materials that are being covered. It has been a slow and agonizing process, and the growth of my writing ability has been incredibly rewarding. It is a skill that I plan to continue to improve and build. If I have one piece of advice for myself next semester, it is to give myself some grace as I am writing... allow myself to appreciate how far I have come in the space of one semester.
