Do I Have To Go To College

DO I HAVE TO GO TO COLLEGE? Two issues impressed this week’s publish. First, my daughter has been accepted to a non-public artwork school here in Seattle, and we’re all very excited. Now we’re off, like all dad and mom of faculty-certain students who usually are not independently wealthy (and no, I am not independently wealthy), scrounging round for scholarships, grants, charity, unfastened change, empty pop bottles . . . anything that can help pay for what, on the finish of 4 years, might total very almost $200,000. The second factor is that I’m on the point of do a seminar, based on The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction, at Emerald City Comicon on March 30. The last time I did this event was at WonderCon in San Francisco final year, and it obtained a fantastic response. The whole college factor made me think of a query from an aspiring SF/F author at WonderCon, paraphrased: “Do I have to go to school?” I would possibly simply get that query again in a pair weeks. What was my answer? No, but you must. There are certain occupations that require publish-highschool, and even graduate degrees. You cannot practice regulation with out first graduating from law college then passing the bar examination, and you'll’t get into regulation school with out first getting some type of undergraduate degree. Doctors need to go through a good longer, costlier, and extra grueling strategy of education and licensing earlier than they'll hang out their shingles. Teachers want a level, then need to move a battery of exams in order to gain certification earlier than they'll train in public colleges. There are all types of different jobs you need to have some type of license or certification for, or just cannot make it via the primary stage of the hiring process and not using a diploma. When I was at Wizards of the Coast and we were in want of a brand new editor, I was asked by the human resources department if I needed to require a college diploma and I mentioned, “Of course I do.” Resumes with out no less than a bachelor’s diploma never obtained to me. They had been rejected out of hand by the HR rep. Your self-study textbook! But there isn't a governing physique, like the assorted state bar associations, that license authors. There are organizations just like the Writer’s Guild and the SFWA, but the former is a union and the latter is sort of extra like a club. You’ll have very little luck writing for movies or TV with out being a member of the Writer’s Guild, however for authors of SF and fantasy fiction, membership within the SFWA is entirely optionally available. I know as many members as non-members. As an editor I never even bothered to ask if potential authors had been a member of the SFWA. It didn’t matter to me in any respect, somehow. I haven’t done any kind of survey or anything, however I have little doubt that there are many non-faculty graduates among the many ranks of SF and fantasy authors, and among the ranks of authors generally . I’ve never heard of a publisher asking for a resume for fiction work. Non-fiction is a horse of a special color, typically requiring a serious have a look at your credentials in order to current you as a subject-matter skilled, however even then, I doubt there’s some kind of formal instructional requirement. What which means is that no, you simply do not have to have a school degree to write SF and fantasy. You can study from books like mine, and even be “self-taught.” Pick it up by yourself by trial and error. But I can’t simply go away it at that. I’m too much a supporter of education. It’s one thing I believe very, very strongly in. I have a bachelor of arts diploma in cinema and photography from Southern Illinois University. At least whereas I was attending within the early 1980s, SIU had a nationwide reputation as a celebration school, even ranked in a Playboy magazine article. How proud we were. Okay, it wasn’t Harvard, however I obtained an honest training t here. I may get in with my crappy highschool grades. It had a movie program. My mother and father could afford it. In my humble opinion, those are three perfectly acceptable standards on which to base that call. Among my “author associates,” there's a librarian (you want a degree for that), a lawyer (you need two degrees for that), a couple of trainer, and a whole listing of individuals doing other jobs that won't have strict licensing necessities but that you must have a level to get. And that’s where the faculty diploma stops being elective for an author, and turns into something that's, more and more, essential to an individual. The job market sucks, and has sucked for a very long time. If you could have a highschool diploma solely, it sucks even worse. If you don’t even have a highschool diploma, good luck. If you have a degree in software engineering and are flexible about where you want to stay, the job market has virtually by no means been higher, however in any other case it is true, school graduates are additionally having trouble finding work in the Great Depression II. But why make an already tough situation all however impossible? There are a couple of statistical outliers like Brett Easton Ellis or Christopher Paoliniâ€"authors who received revealed and bought a ton of books earlier than they had been confronted with the necessity to get a “day job.” That’s two that I can consider, which signifies that fairly probably everyone else needed to do one thing for a dwelling earlier than that vast greatest seller came along. And most authors still keep that “day job” whereas they navigate the treacherous, and never terribly profitable seas of the so-called “midlist.” Now, I’m not advising that you've what my father used to name a “fallback plan.” If this is what you have been born to do, then you need to maintain preventing tooth and nail to do it, but having one thing else that you just love, that you can do not as a substit ute of writing but in addition to writing, properly, you might simply be able to hold yourself in luxurious items like housing, meals, electrical energy, water . . . that kid of loopy stuff. Writing could also be your principal ardour, but absolutely it isn’t your only interest. And even if it is, can you employ that zeal and talent to get a gentle pay check? Can you write for a online game studio? Can you add some technical writing programs to your school schedule and write . . . I don’t know, medical or software documentation? And in the end, faculty makes you smarter, and smarter is all the time better than dumber, no matter what. â€"Philip Athans About Philip Athans