Corrections or additions?
This article was prepared for the August 15, 2001 edition of U.S.
1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
Between the Lines
Maybe the U.S. 1 office is an oddity, but around here
most of us have no idea where, or even if, our colleagues went to
college. The subject rarely comes up at our job interviews and in
our fast-changing industry, what you learned last week is usually
more important than what you learned last year.
Given the plethora of educational opportunities for working adults,
listed in this issue beginning on page 8, U.S. 1 may not be an oddity
at all. We did an informal survey of our group and found that almost
everyone had a night school tie.
Survival Guide editor Kathy Spring, who edited the listings, had the
most compelling night school success story. Spring took a four-month
paralegal certificate course some 20 years ago when she needed to
boost her parochial school teacher’s salary. The course, at the
Institute for Paralegal Training in Philadelphia, was intense, but the
four-month commitment resulted in a three-fold boost in her salary
within one year.
Barbara Fox, senior editor, went back to school to learn a craft.
A decade or so after graduating from college (Duke, we know, from
her volunteer work interviewing high school applicants), she decided
she wanted to be a journalist. Rather than enrolling in a school,
she acquired skills through writing workshops, meetings, and seminars.
Arts editor Nicole Plett reports that, years ago, after being accepted
for a clerical job in an architect’s office, she went to the library,
checked out instructional records, and made herself into a passable
typist in a week. Later her firm was audited by the IRS, which
insisted that someone on staff learn basic accounting. Plett took the
courses, which, she says, helped her conquer her lifelong math phobia.
Community news editor Lynn Miller took an introduction to computers
class way back in 1982 that turned her into a self-described
"computer
addict." A much later course in HTML now allows her to post Web
pages for the community theater clubs and cat clubs in which she is
interested.
Brenda Fallon, accounts manager, took courses in human resources,
collections, and management throughout her years with Citibank in
New York, Africa, and Australia. "I needed them to do the job,
and I needed them to get promotions," she says of the in-house
courses. She also took a course in speed reading. It helped in getting
through business documents, she says, but isn’t something she would
want to use for the novels she reads for her book club.
Vaughan Burton, production assistant, is a fine arts graduate who
wanted to get into commercial art. He turned to an advertising
illustration
course. Charlotte Dey, also a production assistant, took a course
in PageMaker at MCCC. Out of school for several decades, she was
paired
with "a young girl with a spiked necklace." The two of them
got along fine, Dey says.
And editor Richard K. Rein used to have a life, thanks in part to
continuing education. In 1970, just out of college and working for
Time magazine in Chicago, Rein took a night course in film criticism,
taught by a writer for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert. Rein
recalls
that Ebert was as engaging in the classroom as he is now in front
of the national television audience. For the kid in all of us,
teachers
can still be heroes.
Corrections or additions?
This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com
— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
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