A Very Berry Remake

 

Previously: having lost my second teaching job, having met little success as a circulation manager and radio ad salesman/ad writer, I had the epiphany that I would not be able to earn money from my creative abilities and that I would return to college to improve a more business-oriented background.

The time is circa 1982.  One of the closest colleges to Cartersville was Berry College near Rome, Georgia. It had an excellent reputation and a gorgeous campus on 27,000 acres, making it the largest school in the United States (by land area, not by the number of students). In addition, it had an extensive student work program, which I would need.

There was a program you could take that combined business, math, and computer science courses. I forget what they called it - business systems analyst? Sad that I've forgotten, but I have.

I don't remember much about the computer science courses. COBOL? Is that a computer language? Stuff like that.  

Math was a challenge. I had taken no math at the University of Michigan. I was not a great math student in high school. Nevertheless, I was going to give it my best shot.  

I started with College Algebra. I had never worked so hard in a class in my whole life. Even though I only got a B, it was the grade I was most proud of in my academic career.

The next class was Precalculus. But I had limited time, and my algebra grade gave me the big head, so I decided to skip Calculus.

I got my posterior handed to me. I should have quit the class, but I was stubborn. By the time of the final, I was utterly lost. Instead of solving the exam problems, I wrote a dissertation on how calculus was actually magic. I got my only academic fail.  

Business classes, however, went swimmingly. Economics, business writing, business statistics, marketing, business theory - all went well. But the course where I barely had to think and still shined was ... accounting. I don't know why it came so easily to me, but it did.

The final exam in one of the accounting classes was to do a business tax return from start to finish. After it was graded, the professor told me I was the first student to do the return absolutely perfectly.

My student job was at the library. I managed a system that lent and received books across the nation's entire library system. This was done via computer, and once again, I have forgotten the system's name. I loved it. Searching the library for requested books, mailing them, and receiving and processing requests that our students made, I could have been very happy with doing that, and other library work for a living. But, alas, Berry had no Library Science program.

The academic walls were closing in. If I was going to get any value from my academic sojourn, I would have to go in one direction... accounting. Not because I loved it, but because it was easy for me and the quickest way I could make a decent living for myself and my family.

Ultimately, my two years at Berry did not result in an additional degree. They only had Bachelor's degrees, and I would have to go a while longer, taking physical education courses and other strange things to get that second Bachelor's. The result is I have over six years of college and only a Bachelor's degree in Education to show for it.

Nevertheless, I had the equivalent of a business and accounting major, and by the spring of '84, I was ready to go out and make my mark in the accounting world.

And that's when losing my work soul really began.