Just Call Me the Dream-Crusher
Being the executive director of POCA Tech is, to say the least, an interesting job. I love 95% of it. The 5% I don't love involves meeting prospective acupuncture students who are either looking into POCA Tech alongside other acupuncture schools, or looking into POCA Tech without really knowing what it's about. Those meetings go something like this:
Prospective Acupuncture Student: Hi, I am a Prospective Acupuncture Student! I am so excited to meet you!
Me: Hi, I'm Lisa. I am here to crush your dreams.
Prospective Acupuncture Student: Oh.
I could probably write another whole post about the way that our culture confuses work with personal identity, and the way that an educational program gets perceived (and often marketed) as a ticket to a whole new life. People want to be different and they hope that some kind of schooling will make that happen for them, will change not only their place in, but their entire experience of, the world. This is an especially cruel phenomenon when it comes to acupuncture school, since what so many acupuncture graduates don't get is a new place in the world, and what they do get is an identity that isolates them even more. It seems like a lot of people are hoping that going to acupuncture school will solve their problem of how to relate meaningfully to the world in the arenas of work and money.
I end up telling them, no, acupuncture school often does the exact OPPOSITE of that. And so I crush their dreams. Which is no fun for them or for me.
I'm hoping you guys want to help minimize this part of my job. Super-volunteer Gloria J took pity on me, did a lot of intricate computer work, and created a beautiful flow chart titled, “Is Acupuncture School Right for Me?” I would be very grateful if you would share it around the internets and do some proactive, dispersed dream-crushing on my behalf so I don't have to do so much of it one-on-one where I can watch people flinch every time I open my mouth.
And let's keep imagining the day when prospective POCA Tech students one and all are only dreaming about the reality of being a punk.
I love the flowchart! <3 You're the best.
I really love this quote!
"I could probably write another whole post about the way that our culture confuses work with personal identity, and the way that an educational program gets perceived (and often marketed) as a ticket to a whole new life."
Yes, yes , yes
If you're stuck in your life, unhappy, avoiding facing something, going to acupuncture school will not save you!
I love what I am doing, now that I’m through all the hell that was school, and especially the NCCAOM exams. AND what I’m doing now is the scariest, hardest thing I’ve ever done. If I had seen this chart, I think I could have found something else to make a living that I could have loved just as month, without the huge pricetag.
Can you email that flowchart to the “2007” me? Calling the TARDIS!
Which of the two prospective acu-students will I send this to? Neither. I have already been adamant that they check out POCA, and this blog in particular. I think they ignored my advice, as they are both applying to acuskools as I type.
I want to write this in Sharpie on their bodies when they are asleep: “If you’re stuck in your life, unhappy, avoiding facing something, going to acupuncture school will not save you!”
Haha! I remember that conversation. Although, I was already in school. It was in the back office. In my memory you were silhouetted by a bare light bulb. It was cold. I’m glad I made it through.
Was I wearing an East German military uniform and slapping you? See, if we’d had the flow chart back then, we wouldn’t have needed all that.
Imagine a world where acupuncture schools told the truth and posted the bad reasons to go to acu school. Hard to do. Well, we do have POCA tech.
Sometimes in life we need a crowbar to get out of whatever situation we’re in. That crowbar does not need to cost $100,000. Thanks for being the Dreamcrusher, Lisa!
“Owning your own business means MORE
responsibility, not less. That translates into less
flexibility.” No kidding!! The number of times people have said something to the effect of how much better it is to be running a clinic on my own instead of being “just” an employee — like I must be revelling in the supposed increase in status or revenue or something?? — I don’t even know where to begin with them. Lisa, I hope you are showing prospective students this flowchart before you even engage with them. Call it the first filter.
And Gloria, you rock.
Good blog. Gloria J, that’s a cool flow chart — will save POCAists time and aggravation discussing this w/ starry-eyed acupuncturist wanna-bees.
I especially like the ff. in response to ‘I had acup. and loved it’:
“Getting acupuncture is not like being an acupuncturist or an acupuncture student. People who like getting pedicures don’t think that they’d like to become nail technicians; however, a lot of acupuncturists are earning the same as nail technicians, despite their massive student loans.”
haha. I think we had a similar discussion re: midwifery. Thanks Lisa.
“If you’re stuck in your life, unhappy, avoiding facing something, going to acupuncture school will not save you!”
So true.
I loved the analogy to pedicures. Beautiful Gloria. What’s frightening after seeing it though is I’m not sure if I would have went to school if someone had given me the flow chart, yet I love what I do. At least if I had decided to continue on with school I would have been saved from being angry about being lied to by the school.
Lisa, I don’t think that you’re crushing a dream, just weeding out the practitioners that weren’t going to be practicing in five years anyway with a mountain of debt. Someday they will thank you for this.