By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

I HATED school. From the very first day of Kindergarten when my mom had to drag me from the chair in front of the TV (“Sesame Street” was on) to the waiting school bus to the day I graduated from college, I hated it. And I hated college the most.

Work was revelatory for me. I savored working on my own, judged by the last and the next thing you did, and, most of all, I loved getting paid. In the back of my mind, it seemed weird to pay and be forced to work — in other words, like being in school.

I returned to school a year after working, but to teach, not to study. Ironically, I enjoyed teaching and got better at it (after the first years of being incompetent at it, of course). It had a lot to do with the fact that I could remember what I hated about my teachers — and tried to get away from that.

Going back to school for my master’s degree was something I kept juggling in my head. I always dismissed it because of the time and monetary constraints. It did occur to me that a master’s degree would be very useful in the teaching career — plus the MA toga is way cooler than the AB toga.

I finally got my chance in 2003 when I did finally go back to school. The opportunity came when the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the Ateneo Center for Journalism offered its first ever Masters in Journalism program, a melding of traditional classroom instruction and progressive online instruction. I approached this with huge trepidation, of course. The big thing that drew me in was the generous scholarship that came with being part of this pilot program.

I should have known when I took the entrance exam for grad school (yes, you have to take another one) that some things never change. Case in point: the math portion of the exam completely stumped me. Luckily, I still made it to grad school but, man, math tests are still the bane of my academic existence.

Online classes took some getting used to, and the computer glitches that came with hilariously frustrating. But it was very cool to have classmates in other countries, as well as instructors who braved the difference in time zones with aplomb. I also realized that meeting deadlines as a grad student made me every bit as neurotic as when I was an undergrad. In one word: arrrrgh.

If I thought sitting still for the online classes was hard, it had nothing on actually sitting still in actual class. As an undergrad, I desperately avoided any class before 10:30 a.m., as I would literally be a zombie prior to that. So it only made sense that, as a grad student, I would have a 7:30 a.m. class. Luckily, my teachers were awesome, the classes cool and the work diverting. It was still hard, but I have to say that I learned more in my two years as a grad student than I had all the years I spent in school prior to that.

The weird thing was that I would sometimes regress into old habits to keep my mind from wandering: I still talk too much in class, then and now. I often hear people in grad school say this: “If I was this diligent as a student back when I was in college, I would be an honor student.” It’s true. Grad school takes a completely different sense of organization and cerebral work ethic. The biggest element is that nobody will bug you to do it. You have to figure it out or just fall away altogether. The fact that I was part of the start of something really big (Ateneo’s MA Journalism program) really pushed me.

That day I marched to get my MA diploma remains one of the proudest of my life. Seriously. I was also ridiculously happy to be done with school again. Three years later, I find myself a different teacher as well, as the time I spent in grad school actually changed me as an instructor, hopefully for the better.

Hmmm. A doctorate sounds interesting…Argggh.