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I went to grad school for an MSW/MPH; so far I'm only using my MRS.

May 20 '04 (Updated Oct 20 '11) Write an essay on this topic.

The Bottom Line Suffice to say that if you go to grad school, you might at least find true love.

Before I get started on writing my sordid tale of woe, let me preface by stating that this is my contribution to Krissieliz's education write off. I'm not very good at writing poetry-- especially Haiku, so I reckoned I'd stick to prose. I've already reviewed both of my collegiate alma maters on Epinions.com, and I've already written about how I earned two master's degrees and am failing to use them in any meaningful way (read: I don't get PAID to use them). So, what the hell, I figured I'd write about how I met my husband. For had it not been for graduate school, I would likely still be single, living with my parents, and waiting tables at a once great restaurant whose reputation is now rapidly sliding into ill repute.

In October of 1999, I had ordered and received my brand spanking new Gateway computer two months after I had started my dual master's degree program in public health and social work. I was fed up with trying to use the computer labs in the University of South Carolina's School of Public Health (now called the Norman J. Arnold School of Public Health due to a large infusion of funds from the above named individual) and the school's very tacky and confusing library, which was constantly overrun with boisterous freshmen. Although the Department of Health Administration (also since renamed since my departure in 2002) had its own private computer lab that I had paid a special matriculation fee to use-- and was the only department in the school to have its own computer lab-- to be polite, the computers sucked. I wanted one of my own. So one day, after a particularly frustrating session in the library, I yanked out my credit card, went to Gateway.com, and ordered my computer. Unfortunately, my credit card bill hasn't recovered since that fateful day, but my lovelife sure has.

Six weeks after I set up my fancy new machine, I was surfing the internet. Still new to Columbia, I didn't have much of a social life because I didn't have a whole lot of friends, and I had a lot to do. But one evening after the Thanksgiving holiday, I landed on a website that happened to have a chatroom. In the past, it had generally been my policy to avoid chatrooms. I had heard too many horror stories. But the website had intrigued me and I was bored. I was also curious about the type of people who might be frequenting the website, so I went ahead and clicked on the button that would open the java applet and found myself a member of a lively group of people chatting about a variety of topics. Before I knew it, I was chatting with some young guy who was attending college in Georgia, which was, of course, not so far from where I was.

Bill was in the chatroom that night too, and he happened to notice my posts about my travels as a Peace Corps Volunteer and a military brat. He saw that I was also in graduate school. I don't think we "talked" that night, but I got hooked on that room and returned, but not before I downloaded mIRC, which is a chat program available online. Then I found the same chatroom on mIRC and it made the whole experience easier for me. Chatting was a great stress reliever from my classes and the low paying jobs I juggled in order to be able to stay in school. Luckily for me, Bill got hooked on the chatroom, too. One night, soon after we met, he asked me if he could send me a "private message". I was too much of a newcomer to chatrooms to realize that one shouldn't accept private messages from people that one doesn't know. But Bill seemed like a nice guy, so I accepted his request. He told me he was an Army officer posted at Leavenworth, Kansas (not the prison, mind you). I looked him up and he checked out okay. We ended up hitting it off... and we also made a couple of other mutual friends whom we never actually met in person! One of them actually sent us a wedding present off of our registry.

After chatting on mIRC for awhile, Bill and I got tired of other people butting into our business. After you spend some time in a chatroom, people get to know you, and when you become a couple, they get nosey. We switched to Yahoo Messenger so we could chat alone. Bill was attending graduate school at Webster University while working full time, so he could really relate to the fact that I was a full time student, working as a graduate assistant and an intern. I probably wasn't as busy as he was, or was going to be in the very near future, but he knew I had a lot to do and he was supportive. In May 2000, he was sent to Columbia, South Carolina on Army business at Fort Jackson. I would actually have the chance to meet him-- except the one day he was going to be in town, I had to be in Virginia for a doctor's appointment. Bill told me not to reschedule it on his account. In retrospect, that was a blessing. I wasn't ready to meet him-- the prospect made me nervous-- and had I met him, it would have been very hard to go back to just typing on the computer and not having actual visits.

A year later, in March 2001, we were still chatting, and Bill let me know that he was going to be visiting Columbia again in May. This time, I would be in town to see him. I was still a little nervous, but I was convinced that he wasn't some kind of a nut. I had never caught him in a lie after chatting with him since late November 1999. Before Bill came to Columbia, however, he had to go to Little Rock, Arkansas. I happened to mention the fact that Bill was going to Little Rock to my favorite aunt, Gayle.

Gayle's brother, Ralph, is a former Virginia state trooper and a current member of the Kansas National Guard. He lives in Virginia, though, and visits Gayle often, and he had mentioned to her that he was going to Little Rock, too. She told me that it wouldn't surprise her if Bill and Ralph met in Little Rock. So Gayle told Ralph to look out for Bill and I told Bill to look out for Ralph, but while they were at the conference, they were looking in the wrong areas. Ralph was under the impression that Bill was a Kansas Guardsman, when Bill is actually an Arkansas Guardsman and he works on the federal level, so he wouldn't have been with the Arkansas group anyway. And Bill thought that Ralph was a Virginia Guardsman, but he's a Kansas Guardsman. Nevertheless, they did bump into each other in the hall on the last day and Ralph checked him out for me. When I visited Gayle next, Ralph came by and told me that he'd met my boyfriend. When I told Ralph that Bill wasn't my boyfriend because I hadn't yet met him in the flesh, Ralph said, "Trust me, he's your boyfriend. And he's a very nice guy. Don't worry." As it turned out, Bill discovered that when Ralph went to Kansas on business, he actually worked out of the same building Bill did. They had probably passed each other a hundred times and not even known it!

So Bill came to Columbia in May 2001, after the semester was over and I had nothing to do but go to work at my graduate assistantship. I was nervous as I waited for him to show up at my apartment to take me out to dinner. It was a little bit like going out on a blind date. When Bill knocked on the door and I opened it, I was very relieved to see that Bill looked just as cute as he had in his pictures (he had only sent two because he doesn't think he looks good on film). The first thing I noticed were his brilliant blue eyes and the fact that he's not a whole lot taller than I am, which is a good thing (I'm only about 5'2"). He gave me a big, warm hug and took me out to dinner at a nice restaurant called the Blue Marlin. I could tell he was nervous.

I remember that our conversation flowed as easily as it did online and Bill seemed very happy, although he was plainly anxious to make sure that all went well. Once we were finished with dinner, Bill and I drove around Columbia and I showed him some of the sights. We took a walk at Riverview Park, which is a pretty area by a canal. I got a blister on my ankle, thanks to a pair of Birkenstocks with a rusty rivet that had bent inward. Bill took care of it for me, like a true gentleman soldier. Then we got lost in a part of Columbia I had never seen before and it took awhile before we managed to find our way out again. Talk about a cheap way to spend time together! Unfortunately, we had to end the date early, because Bill had to get up at the crack of dawn for work, but he was in town for a few days. We went out twice more before he had to go back to Kansas. Before he left me, he said "You know, it's going to be really hard to go back to typing on the computer after meeting you."

As it turned out, he didn't have to type as much after that date. Bill was expecting to be in Kansas for one more year, but he ended up getting orders to move to Virginia to work at the Pentagon a year sooner than expected, which happened to be during my last year of graduate school. I had busted my butt during the first two years, taking heavy loads and summer classes so that I could take a light load during the third year. That strategy paid off big time, because Bill was in Virginia during my last year of school and we were able to visit each other. I drove up to Virginia whenever we had a long weekend, or he came down to South Carolina. The lovely thing about going to college in South Carolina is that we actually got state and federal holidays off. When I went to college in Virginia as an undergraduate, we didn't even get Labor Day off! And Bill, as an Army officer, got long weekends regularly. Those long weekends allowed our romance to blossom.

I should mention, however, that our romance was almost snuffed out before it ever had the chance to bloom because of Osama bin Laden and his brand of terrorism. Labor Day weekend 2001, I had decided to visit my Aunt Gayle in Natural Bridge, Virginia because I felt a burning need to escape Columbia. Bill had just moved to Virginia. I told him of my plans to come to Virginia. He mentioned that he had no plans and that he'd like to go camping, but he had no gear. So I invited him to Natural Bridge. He demurred, saying he didn't want to impose on anyone. I assured him he wouldn't be imposing, since my Aunt Gayle and her husband, my Uncle Brownlee, welcome everyone. They don't even lock their doors. So Bill came down and met me in the flesh for the second time. He met my then 95 year old grandmother, who is still alive and very sharp minded. She met Bill and loved him on sight. We went swimming at Goshen Pass, which is a gorgeous rocky gorge near Lexington, Virginia and I took Bill to some of the better swimming holes in the area. We had a fabulous time. And then the following week, September 11, 2001 struck. Bill was only a couple hundred feet from where the plane crashed through the building. Obviously, he survived-- but that day was pretty surreal for both of us. We ended up engaged within six months.

I don't know if 9/11 pushed us closer together, thus making us decide to get married sooner, or not. I do believe that we were destined to be together. Ralph works here in northern Virginia. In fact, Bill is preparing to take a job that will regularly put him in contact with Ralph. Chances are, had Bill not met me online, Ralph would have brought him down to Natural Bridge some weekend and we would have met. Or I would have ended up getting a job up here and we would have met. There's no question in my mind that we were meant to be together. We seem to fit together like puzzle pieces and make each other very happy. And the odd thing is, we met online-- and not even on a dating site like match.com or eharmony.com. We just had a common interest and entered a chat room that was dedicated to that interest, which strangely enough, no one in the room was even chatting about.

So even though the actual experience of graduate school seems to have been, thus far, dare I say it-- a complete waste of time in terms of my professional development-- well, maybe not a complete waste of time... that remains to be seen... *SIGH* It was very useful to me in terms of timing. What if I had only gone to school for two years? The timing would have been thrown off. I also had the chance to go to Illinois for grad school and very nearly did-- thank God I didn't, because that would have screwed everything up! I wouldn't have met Bill when I did because he never went to Illinois, especially not where the school was where I would have gone. I also would have hated the school (I didn't like it when I visited it, but almost went there because of money).

The lesson I'm trying to learn in all of this is that it's not so wrong to trust your heart and your instincts. Right now, my brain is screaming at me to get off my @ss and find a job NOW so I can use those hard won degrees! I was the only dual degree MSW/MPH graduate at USC in 2002, I've been looking for the right job for a LONG time, and I should feel like the ultimate loser. I certainly didn't go to graduate school to stay at home, be a housewife, and write. But my heart is telling me that I'm doing the right thing. It's not such a bad thing to have an MSW, an MPH, and an MRS, and just use the MRS for awhile.

I don't know how it is for the rest of you, but whenever I look back on my life, everything always fits in the grand scheme of things. I firmly believe that I am exactly where I'm supposed to be right now, even if it doesn't seem quite right at the present time. There will come a time when this time in my life that I've only been using my MRS. will make a lot of sense, just as it makes sense now that I earned two master's degrees that I currently don't use.

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