The Working Life: College and Educational Opportunities

While it's suggested that premorbid adjustment determines outcome, my contention is that while this is true in some cases, the opposite is also true: it's possible to do things after you got sick that you couldn't do before the SZ hit.

This blog entry is devoted to educational and college opportunities that can lead to paid employment. Also, I know of people who get an education for self-enrichment, and that's a valid goal because nobody can take that away from you once you get the degree or diploma. Other kinds of self-improvement need to be looked at here as well.

In the early 1990s, before my writing career took off, I would attend the Learning Annex in Manhattan. I took classes in personality type, magazine writing, handwriting analysis, and image consulting. I consider myself a student of life, too, and it is by working every day in the world that I learned valuable skills, such as interpersonal dynamics, and that will be the topic of the next blog entry: success on the job.

So how can you make the jump? Vocational training or college can do the trick. First, if you have the desire to go to school or work, approach your therapist, psychiatrist or other professional you deal with, and tell him or her. When I was in the day program, my social worker sent in the application for OVR-the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation, now VESID-a New York State program.

When I saw my OVR counselor, she suggested I could be a teacher, and I nixed that because I wanted to work in publishing. Either way, before I could be trained, I had to be examined by a psychologist. He had me repeat back a series of numbers that were faster and longer, do weird things with pegs inside a board, and gave me a questionnaire. It was a checklist that asked me to self-report certain tendencies, like, "I go to church on Sunday" or "I do drugs and alcohol." I had to give the definitions of words such as sepulcher. He asked me how I could tell time if I was lost in the woods.

Surely I would fail, yet a week later my OVR counselor cleared me for vocational testing. I spent three weeks at the International Center for the Disabled [ICD] doing things like taking apart and assembling a lock, connecting electrical wires, sorting envelopes into mail slots, and adding up sales receipts. My OVR counselor analyzed the results, and I had the option of attending ICD's six-month clerical training or possibly getting a supported job. I chose the first, where I learned to operate a calculator, file documents alphabetically and numerically, type 65 words per minute, and do word processing. This enabled me to find my first job as an administrative assistant.

Education and work are two activities that are helpful in recovery because as much as possible, young people need to get back into the swing of life. My contention is that a day program should be a stepping stone, not a life-long option, for those of us able to consider school and work.

I wouldn't recommend you do what I did while at Pratt: work full-time, take two courses a semester, chair the law librarian lecture series, and write, report for, edit and publish to deadline twice a semester Keyword, the library science newsletter. All that came at a cost. Do what someone I know does: he takes one course a semester, maintaining a B average, and has a part-time job where his boss loves him.