When I was a student at NCSSM, the educators encouraged us to look for questions that we might want to spend significant time researching and answering. The idea, of course, was to get students starting to think about their college careers and beyond, especially those students who were a good fit for academia.
I listened to the advice and I looked. But I never found my questions.
All of the questions I came up with were either already answered, or didn’t interest me enough to sustain several years of my life.
This was hardly surprising, of course; I’d known since late middle school or early high school that I wasn’t suited for a pure research or academic career. I was more interested in practical application. But I still was frustrated, because research questions and practical applications aren’t mutually exclusive.
In the end, I gave up. I figured that I just was going to have to graduate and start my post-high school career without one. At the time, I was hoping one would pop up early in my college career so that I wouldn’t lose any time. So I kept looking.
That’s not quite what happened. I ended up dropping out of college, partly because I couldn’t find any subject that captured me enough to want to dedicate my life to it — and, at seventeen, I didn’t realize that most people change careers at least once during their working lives. Neither of my parents had done so, at least as far as I was aware. (That actually wasn’t quite correct, but I didn’t understand it at the time.)
So, instead, once I started working, I drifted toward the work I knew how to do: clerical and administrative. And I discovered I was good at business. In fact, I was so well-suited that the only person who was surprised to learn where my best talents lay was, in fact, me. I’d always dismissed the business world as being all about money — and I was still idealistic enough to be repulsed by the idea of that as a focus.
And then, at the age of twenty-one, I stumbled into the business subfield that captured my attention: human resources. By the age of twenty-five, I’d already started specializing in benefits. But it was always hands-on work, and I was primarily self-taught. I eventually went back and finished an associate degree, but in my case it was a situation of getting the degree after I already had the job.
Decades passed, and I went back to college several times. But I could never stick with it long enough to finish the bachelor’s degree. It already was failing a cost-benefit analysis — the bachelor’s wouldn’t increase my income that much — and I saw no point in the classes I was taking.
Intellectually, I understood the purpose of general education, but in actual practice I found it as frustrating as hunting a question was: generally, when I want to learn something, I just go learn it. The spoon-feeding approach I kept running into in my general education classes drove me crazy, and when Georgia State tried to force me into in-person math tutoring despite already having a 97% grade average in the online class, I threw up my hands and declared I was done.
Or so I thought.
Some time later I set up the Network Contract Watch after discovering that one-stop resources for provider network negotiations were lacking. It wasn’t an academic decision at all; it was a professional one. But as I kept working on aggregating these notices, I began to notice patterns, and those patterns led me to questions. Does appealing to the public really help settle provider network negotiations? Is there any way to predict whether a contract negotiation is likely to spill over into the public media? Do publicly reported disputes contribute to the general public’s negative view of health insurers?
I’ve been able to find some answers, but not the in-depth ones I’m looking for — and I’ve found no long-term studies on the matter. (This doesn’t mean they don’t exist; it just means they’re not easy to find.) And I’d like to know. I’m willing to design and conduct the research to find out.
Thirty-four years after finishing high school, I’ve finally found my questions.
I’ve also discovered I have no idea how to arrive at repeatable, replicable answers. I need academic resources and tools I don’t have, and can’t pick up just from self-study.
The next discovery absolutely blew my mind: there’s a perfect university program for that almost literally in my own back yard, and it recently transitioned from an in-person degree to an online degree. I reached out to the program director, who responded surprisingly enthusiastically to my offhand mention of the Network Contract Watch — including questions about its design and execution.
In other words: I haven’t just found my questions. I’ve found a way to answer them.
Hopefully, then, in Fall 2027 I will be enrolling at East Carolina University, in their Professional Writing and Information Design program, with a minor in economics. The practicum requirement will likely let me research my questions, and there are some other opportunities within the program as well.
I’ll admit I’ve had some second thoughts about enrolling in college again. I’ve dropped out too many times not to notice my own pattern. At the same time, though, I’ve never had a reason to go back that wasn’t a variant of “I’m an NCSSM graduate, which means I’m at least supposed to get a bachelor’s degree.”
I do now.
And I think (hope, pray) that’s going to make all the difference.