RISK -- and reward

Recently, I had my family over for a game of Risk. For those of you unfamiliar with the game, it's basically an attempt at world domination. You take the cards you're dealt and try to strategically take over the countries and continents of others. You see a caricature of peoples' personalities, for sure.

I'd say that, much like in real life, I make a lot of big plans in my head about what I want to do -- doable plans. But as soon as other peoples' plans and influences interact with mine...I become a lot more conservative.

Strangely, this kind of behavior was discussed at length in a Suze Orman special on PBS: "The Money Class."

I watched the special the morning after our endless game of Risk, and a lot of dots were connected. Orman discusses how the financial truth for so many American's is that they are simply ignorant about their money. In an information age where there seems to be so much to know, the mere IDEA of finances become so overwhelming that we instead decide to do nothing. 

But there is no reward for taking no risk.

We all make big plans in our heads: about the diets we're about to go on, about running every morning, about our finances, about everything. Yet, when the task becomes overwhelming, we feel safer in our ignorance and just try to get by on whatever we know how to do.

Orman's special made me realize that -- yes -- I do feel this way about money. Fortunately, I'm young enough to rectify my mistakes. The apathy that has been on my back for some time now, however, is grad school.

During a time in our economy when taking on any additional debt seems inadvisable...is it such a risk to invest in yourself? Or is the real risk investing in the notion that graduate school will take me someplace I couldn't get on my own.

I do think that a lot of my undergraduate work focused on skills best suited for the ivy towers of academia, and not for the real world. I worry about entering more debt only to find that I am wasting my time on skills I might never apply outside the classroom. One would imagine that grad school, attended laregly by people already in the professional world, focuses more on concepts that will help propel them into the future. 

But like Suze Orman suggests, feeling safe in our ignorance yields no reward...so why waste valuable time?

Today, I emailed Eastern Michigan University about their graduate program in Written Communications. Hopefully they respond with the same enthusiasm as they would for freshly-plucked high school seniors.