Category Archives: Applying

Applying, Deciding, The Journey, Uncategorized, Working

Should I Stay or Should I Go?: How I Came to My Final Decision to Leave My Full-time Job to Pursue Full-time School

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by Ebony Davis

Happy spring semester to all of you GOATs out there on a journey to pursuing higher education! Whether it is a master’s or a Ph.D. program you are in, welcome to the chat. Over my winter break, I spent a lot of time pondering, questioning, reassuring myself, affirming myself, challenging my thoughts and habits all while in the midst of getting some serious well-needed rest (I literally drooled on my pillows every night) and catering to my inner adventurous self by having a little fun. The last two weeks of winter break consisted of me overthinking one plan of action: whether I should stay at my current full-time job or leave.

I currently work full-time at a social service agency in Chicago. The agency is a non-profit and is contracted through the Department of Children and Families (DCFS) here. My undergraduate degree is in Social Work and my graduate degree will be in Social Work as well. I have been working in the field for a little over a year now and my master’s degree program entails two full-time internships at two social service agencies all while spending time in class unpacking more layers of the field and what it means to be a social worker and working. All in all, my life is social work piled on top of social work piled on top of more social work and it has been that way for a while. Last semester, when my last class of the night was over, I was going home to prep and gear myself up to go to work.

Oh, did I mention I work during the day and overnights? My work schedule is pretty jam packed. I spend most of my time at work with the children I serve.

Well, over winter break, I started thinking to myself how different I wanted my spring semester to be.

First of all, I knew I wanted to switch over to being a full-time student, and I knew full-time work would not mesh with the demands of being enrolled full-time. This commitment resulted in me having to make a decision. A hard one. If I did not want to be exhausted, I knew I had to give up working in order to pursue and focus on school but my decision boiled down to a few things:

  1. I knew I was never happy with where I was. The pay this place started me off at was terrible. I literally had money to pay ONE bill a month, which was rent. Aside from that, it was just me consistently living check to check for the first five months I lived in Chicago. That feeling was miserable. Having to divide up my check to see which bills were going to get paid in a month and which were not was probably one of THE most humiliating things I have ever experienced. Do not be like me and settle for something like this.
  2. The work environment was extremely toxic, distracting and unhealthy. You all don’t know, but my friends heard how much I wanted to leave every single day. It was so hard trying to ‘do the right thing’ and serve a vulnerable population in the midst of unwarranted chaos. Drama between staff unfolded every day and some of the employees were borderline verbally abusive to the youth at this agency. It started to become concerning, and no one seemed to see that there was anything wrong.
  3. The final reason why I decided to leave and knew that it was time to go is because I never felt supported at my job. Yes, there were good days, but I took it hard when I was not receiving adequate supervision and support from my team. It’s like everyone was just stuck on ‘DUH’ and did not care about growth and the effectiveness of how the agency is run.

Even with these reasons in mind, it STILL was hard to leave the job. I felt so much resistance and through myself for a loop every time I got ready to submit my formal notice. A lot swayed my decision. I thought about that flow of income I would be cutting myself away from, I thought about my bills, I thought about what would happen to the children I served and worked with and how my decision to leave would affect them, and I thought about what people would say about me.

When my mind started to become heavy, I prayed and asked God to send me a sign or vision that would reveal the best decision for me. I prayed over my sanity and mental wellness and asked God to remove resistance and remind my mind and body that I am okay currently, and I am going to be okay in the future. I prayed about the contemplation and unrest the decision to stay or go was causing me.

Ultimately, God gave me a sign. He gave me a sign a long time ago and He is giving me another sign now. I am writing this because this is your sign. If you are not well because of a job, leave. If you are pursuing school and work full-time and cannot seem to find time for yourself, your children, your family or your partner, leave. If you have been putting off taking care of yourself for a job, leave. If the work environment is toxic and you do not see growth, leave. Because 1) the work you are putting in now, while in school, is going to create and expand opportunity for you. 2) Work will always be there, for all of us. Our peace, sanity and joy are things you and I cannot afford to sacrifice anymore.

You are still a Queen if you choose to leave. It’s going to be okay.

download (2)Ebony Davis is a 23-year-old from Kansas City, KS. She recently relocated to Chicago, IL to embark on her graduate school journey, and pursue some dreams she has had in mind for herself. She attends Loyola University Chicago, and is in school for her master’s degree in Social Work. She has been working in the social service field for a total of four years now, and she feels like she right where she needs to be.

Working in this field is her calling. Ebony enjoys being a source of support to other people, and she loves challenging and uprooting individuals into the very best version of themselves. Aside from all the social work she does, Ebony also writes and has been writing since she can remember. She enjoys journaling in her free time, and is working toward being a freelancer all 2020.

Applying, Mental Health, Ravynn: Act 3, Ravynn: Act 3, Scene 1, Uncategorized

Week 2: On Rejection and How to Deal

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Let me begin with a moment of transparency: I have been rejected more times than I care to count in the last three months. A professor I wanted to work with on Comps rejected my request. In a moment of intense vulnerability, I submitted two stories to literary magazines for the first time in my life and was rejected by both. I submitted an abstract to a conference at Princeton on the Black Impossible, thinking there could be no better place for my scholarly work on Black superheroes, only to be rejected weeks later. To rub salt in the wound, I also dealt with a personal rejection, which resulted in the dissolution of a long standing friendship.

And that is just in the last three months. If I go back further, the list of rejections might seem endless, peppered with deserted abstracts, denials from grad schools, and papers with biting feedback that, despite the grade, made you feel as if you had failed. I think of my rejections in grad school, my most spectacular failure was submitting three different blog posts to Black Perspectives, only to have all three promptly rejected within five minutes.

This list not an invitation to commiserate with me on my failures. It is not an invitation to pity me. It is an attempt to be transparent about a fact of graduate school: you will apply for things that you will sometimes not receive. You will be disappointed sometimes. And I am here to tell you that it is okay.

Fortunately, the list of triumphs outnumbers the failures for me. For every misstep, I found two more to guide me in the right direction. I have to believe that life is about balance, that even if I am having a season of rejection, it means that a season of “yes” is coming my way soon.

So, if rejection is inevitable at some junctures in your life, how best can we deal? One way is to be open about what you are going through. It may feel that the best way to handle it is to hide the rejection letter in a box under your bed and bottle up the feelings. Short term, that’s reasonable, but ultimately not sustainable. I’m not advising you run through the streets screaming that you’ve been rejected; however, it might be a good idea to let a few, trusted people in to share in your frustrations. Sharing your feelings will make you feel a little better and, if you have the kind of friends that I do, they are going to let you cry it out, but then hype you up and insist that you try again. Sometimes, just hearing someone say that they believe in you can go a long way. Seek out those who will support and encourage you, but also make a point to return the favor when they need the same from you.

If opening up to people is not your style, I still recommend you find someway to rid yourself of the negative feelings that come with rejection so they do not fester. Try having a long conversation with your pet, journaling it out, or writing a strongly worded letter and then tear it up.

Make sure you allow yourself some time to feel the sadness, to mope and to declare you will never write/apply/submit/create again. Watch a sad movie, eat a pint of ice cream, cry if you need to, but then when you are done and you are ready, tell yourself that you are going to be resilient and that you are going to try again. Ask yourself, what can I learn from this experience? Be vigilant in this process. For example, one of the literary magazines I submitted to offered me some positive and helpful feedback on my story. I took heart in the fact that there were aspects of the story that they liked, but that they also took the time to identity the features which weakened it. I can take that information and go back to the story and rework it. Even if I never submit it anywhere else, at least I know I will have made it a stronger story than it was before I first submitted it.

While I have placed a lot of emphasis on getting validation outside of yourself (leaning on friends and positive feedback), I implore you to also seek internal validation. Affirm yourself. For me, affirming myself was taking an evening off from everything, grabbing a journal and a pen, and writing a long letter to God and then a long list of things that I liked about myself. I wrote that I loved my hair, that I was an excellent writer, that I was smart, that was compassionate and a go-getter. At the end of the list, I reminded myself that even if these literary magazines or conference committees did not want some aspect of me, it did not make me any less of the amazing things that I listed. When I am feeling down, I come back to that list and even add to it, because it is such a beautiful thing to be able to lift yourself up.

Finally, the last thing that seems to help me is to have a mantra, a phrase, or a few, that you can come back to that consistently give you energy. For me, those phrases are: “I am deliberate and afraid of nothing,” (Audre Lorde); “Someone, somewhere is waiting to read my words;” and “I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalms 139:14). Put your mantras somewhere you can always see them– on your mirror, next to your bed, on your desk, or in my case, on my body. (I have “I am deliberate and afraid of nothing” tattooed on my wrists.) Allow yourself to be moved by those words.

There is no magic potion for recovering from rejection. Dealing with rejection is an act of courage and requires extreme vulnerability, courage because you choose to be resilient and vulnerability because you made the radical decision to share a sometimes very private part of yourself with those who have the ability to judge you. It takes time and a willingness to be as kind to yourself as you would be to someone else in your position. Allow yourself to feel everything that comes with a rejection, but then be resilient enough to learn from it.

And most importantly: always, always try again.

Applying, Guest Posts, Intermission 2, Mental Health, Uncategorized

Black Girl Does Grad School… Eventually

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By Branika Scott

Sometimes you know exactly what you want to do in life, you just don’t know when you want to do it. Sometimes you realize you have to take time, not only for logistics, but simply for yourself. As you can see by the title, this is for the black girls who will go to grad school…eventually.

Since I was a child, I’ve loved school. Yeah, not liked… loved it. I loved everything about school and everything that had to do with learning. I was that one kid asking all the questions in class. The girl who dressed up as Condoleezza Rice for the elementary school Halloween parade. When I wasn’t in school, I was at home playing school, taking on the role as teacher to my little siblings. So naturally, from a young age, higher education has always been in my “big picture”.

We all know everything doesn’t always go as planned…

I was filled with hope at the beginning of my last year at the University of Virginia. I’d just had the best summer of my life, and life, in general, was perfect. This was my last year and I was going to make it count with all of the memories that I could. I also started planning for grad school. Although the profession I want doesn’t necessarily require a graduate degree, I always feel one should never stop learning. Also, due to UVA’s unique Drama program, I felt there was way more I could learn within the realm of acting. Grad school applications, along with audition planning was soon in my horizon…or so I thought.

Within my first week of school, I found out I had a heart condition that was not curable. That same week I also ruptured my Achilles’ tendon. These two events completely changed both my life and my path. I was now on bedrest for about three months and medicated heavily for almost two of them. Because of the effects of the medication, I was not reading or writing very much, which meant I wasn’t filling out applications and applying for fee waivers. It also meant I wasn’t looking at dates, locations, and times of auditionsto book. Because I could not walk, this also meant I could not act at full capacity, I could not rehearse, so I would not be able to apply to grad school due to the audition process held inJanuary/ February. I had to put my life on hold, as well as my dreams of grad school.

I’m not going to lie, at first I was devastated. I couldn’t understand why God had allowed this to happen to me in my very last year of undergrad. I cried a lot in the beginning. I felt like I had been robbed of my last semester, as well as all the memories I didn’t get to make. Most of all, I felt hopeless because I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life after graduation.

Since I didn’t apply to grad school, I didn’t have a Plan B. But I guess I learned that that’s the point. God has a plan for everything, and His timing is unpredictable to man. This setback made me realize that maybe God was telling me to take a break; maybe God was telling me I needed to take time for myself. I mean, when you think about it, I have been in school for 17 straight years. So I decided this gap year would be my blessing. I decided to stop feeling bad and sorry for how things turned out; I decided to stop feeling scared, and I have decided to follow my dreams.

In my gap year, I’m moving to Los Angeles. I’m going to audition, work, spend some time trying to put myself out there in this acting industry, and see where life takes me. Who knows, maybe I’ll get booked right away on a hit show, maybe I’ll end up moving back to the east coast within a few months, but regardless of where life takes me, I still dream and plan for grad school. No matter what, I still want that Masters Degree with my name on it. And one day, I’ll have it.

So to all my black girls who will eventually go to grad school, don’t feel bad for taking a break first. Don’t be scared of the direction God takes you in life. Everyone’s journey is unique and theirs for the making. You’ll get there when you’re ready, so be free and take your time.

Branika Scott is a recent graduate of the University of Virginia with her BFA in Drama. She is in the process of moving to Los Angeles, where she will pursue her career in acting. Glitter is her spirit animal and gold is her metal of choice.