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Finishing My Degree
It's a running joke within FORGE that the Executive Director (myself) is the least-educated of all of our staff. It's funny, but sometimes it becomes pretty clear that I need to finish my education. I was a junior at Stanford when I started FORGE, and by the end of my junior year I had decided to stop out of college and dedicate the entirety of my energies to growing and improving the organization.
I spent a full 2 and a half years out of school before finishing a few more units of credit in the first half of 2007. I am now only 13 credits away from finally obtaining my bachelor's degree…and I'm about to do it. Needless to say, developing FORGE has returned a savvy unlike any I could learned elsewhere. But… formally completing the education I started is an important milestone.
Spring quarter starts tomorrow, and then graduation day is just 10 weeks away. I live and work in Oakland and Palo Alto is a good 45 minutes away with no traffic – it's a weird thing to be commuting to school. Worst of all, I hate spending meaningful time away from FORGE. While I will continue to put in my full-time work weeks, I will of course have to spend less time than I otherwise would.
I've always loved academics and thrive on conceptual thinking. However, I only care about philosophies to the extent that they can be actualized and pursued. Thinking to me has always been a tool to inform intelligent action. In university, all too often, thinking is often treated as an end unto its own.
My Public Policy degree has actually been very good at preparing me for an action-oriented approach to life and society: how to recognize problems, analyze them, and create best-fit solutions. I've appreciated the rigorous analytical framework that it it has given me, and the extensive economic and mathematical emphasis that it has incorporated. At the same time, I can't escape the feeling that I am learning more (and accomplishing more) by doing work rather than problem sets and papers.
But yet I am reminded that it is just 10 weeks, a mere 13 units, and that Oprah will be the graduation speaker. Wish me luck 
!
