Connections

Hi! I am Doug Cooper and I am an advisor here at Granite State College. I have worked here at GSC for two years now, and I am still learning new things about the college. I think I have always wanted to be an advisor at a college. As an undergraduate, I worked at summer orientation at my university, where I helped new students who were overwhelmed with the new information and paperwork and decisions in front of them. To see some of the tension disappear from their eyes and shoulders meant a lot to me, and I think I have tried to carry forward that spririt of helping out and explaining how things work.

I love coffee, and I drink coffee at pretty much any hour of the day, which is something I have in common with many of our students coming in for their evening college classes. I try to convince myself that I genuinely enjoy just the taste and warmth of coffee rather than relying on the caffeine; more likely, it's both.

In my spare moments, I enjoy documentaries, crossword and sudoku puzzles, and trivia - very geeky stuff to be sure, but I am always up for a chance to learn something new. As this college used to be called the College for Lifelong Learning, I feel like the lifelong learning applies just as much to me as an advisor as it does to our adult students. I find that there are things I can learn even about things that I thought I already knew well. For example, on of my favorite movies is "A Christmas Story," and even after watching it a couple of times every year for twenty or more years, and about 50 or 60 times total, I still get some lines for just the first time now, and it enhances my enjoyment of future viewings.

Having something to say and helping to explain something, such as how a new student can take college classes online, or what behavioral science classes make the most sense for electives are important to me, so I hope this blog can help do that.

Recent events in my life, including the birth of my second child, remind me that there is a certain danger in being comfortable.

Please know that by comfortable, I am referring to a sense of complacency when the basic necessities have been met. By no means am I referring to comfort in the furniture sense of the word. If that were the case, this would be more about Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition sketches - "bring out... the comfy chair!"

Comfort here is referring to the complacency in the progress of personal or human endeavors. Even though I knew from an early age that I wanted to have children, I was still terrified of my first child until she was about eight weeks old. I thought I was going to injure her if I held or burped her improperly, and the slightest cry from her room at night would send my adrenaline into overdrive. And yet, after all that, here I am some four years later, and she's best kid ever (but everyone thinks that about their kid).

The birth of my son was a similar situation. We knew we wanted to have more than one child, but having an infant at home throws me right back into that constantly on-alert and sleep-deprived state.

Mind you, I am not complaining. It's tempting to, at times, but the idea here is that doing the right thing is scary and uncomfortable more often than not, and the ease and comfort of keeping things the way they are can become a road to perdition.

Although changing my son's diaper is millions of miles from advising students at Granite State College, in the figurative sense, it made me think that many of my students probably struggle with the temptation to just keep on keeping on. At first, it's difficult to figure out why my students voluntarily make their lives more hectic by taking on adult college courses alongside all of their other responsibilities: job #1, maybe job #2, senior parents to take care of, kids, soccer practice schedules, and everything else.

But in the end, it's because it's better to push and challenge yourself and take more behavioral science classes rather that sitting there watching Gilligan's Island reruns or playing Bejeweled for the eleventy-billionth time.

Following the ethos of voluntarily moving out of the comfort zone is seldom fun, but I have learned that it demonstrates character and willingness to keep moving forward that pays off in most walks of life, including professional development, family life, and personal betterment.

There must have been a time when livestock was expensive enough that it was currency unto itself, hence phrases like "bring home the bacon." I am pretty sure the term bucks came to mean dollars in the frontier days of the U.S for the same reason. There was probably an era, when prosperity and success in life in the developed world could be correlated to the amount of bacon a particular person ate, or at least had access to.

This however, is not the bacon I have in mind; instead, I am thinking of Kevin Bacon. In particular, I think that Kevin Bacon should get his own unit of measure, not shockingly called Bacons.

Let me back up: ever since 7th grade, I thought it would be the coolest thing to have my own unit of measure (after I took chemistry in 10th grade, I added that having my own chemical element would be awesome, too). The greatest names in science, as a tribute to their contributions to knowledge, were made synonymous with units of measure in their fields of endeavor. Some of the are familiar and heard every day, like Fahrenheit, or Newtons, if you've ever taken physics. There are dozens more, and they can get totally obscure, like angstroms, gauss, roentgens, farradays, etc. Since I changed my major in college from chemistry to psychology in my sophomore year, the odds of getting my own element or unit don't look good. Almost everyone else alive today won't get one either, but each of us can make a difference in the world with our Bacons.

The idea is to play off the "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" game, so that your one-Bacons are the people immediately around you: family, friends, colleagues. The two-Bacons and beyond are somewhat harder to measure, but it could certainly be done. Focusing on the one-Bacons, I believe that the well-being of your one-Bacons is a direct measure of yourself. The best part about this is that everyone you've ever seen, spoken, or been around is one of your one-Bacons, and anyone that they've ever seen, spoken to, or been around is one of  your two-Bacons. Similarly, you could very well be a two-Bacon to two complete strangers, who turn out to be within four or five Bacons of each other....whoa, hang on... I'm dizzy.

This all hit me at the Granite State College Commencement ceremony a couple weekends ago. Even though I have been to a dozen graduation ceremonies before, both as a spectator and a graduate, I just realized a couple weeks ago that an elusive concept like success can be easily measured as your one-Bacons. Each speaker at Commencement, including GSC President Dr. Karol LaCroix, Governor John Lynch, and the faculty and student speakers, more or less made this point from different perspectives. When the students thanked their husbands and wives and children and families, they spoke volumes about being the one-Bacons of their family members. The award recipients basically said the same thing - that their personal achievements were possible only because they are the one-Bacons of their families and colleagues.

I also had a great day that Sunday on account of my one-Bacons. For the first graduation since I started here, I had a number of students graduate that "came in" with me, which is to say I was their advisor from their first day, to that Sunday where they graduated. My one-Bacons are everywhere, too. Some of them had been to multiple schools in the University of New Hampshire System, but finished at GSC. Others have a career for years, even decades, before deciding to finish with online classes for criminal justice.

All of this was huge for me, although to be fair, it's sort of rigged: each of my advisees who graduated are some of my one-Bacons, and it felt really good to have helped in the success and graduation of that many folks. The families and friends assembled that afternoon must have also been proud, so that my two-Bacons also had a great day.

Please know, this is not all about me, or about any one of us, individually. Instead, I think the true measure of the success of any one of us can be measured by our Bacons. Ask yourself, just as I do everyday (wait, that's not true; it's not every day, how about a few times a week):

How did I make my organization better today?
How did I make my spouse's/child's/friend's/neighbor's life better today?

Your one-Bacons (and two-Bacons and three-Bacons, and so on) can be your most trusted friends or total strangers on the bus, and any one of them or all of them can be vastly upgraded by the simplest or silliest things. And even though it's true that we have an opportunity to better ourselves by actively bettering the lot of our one-Bacons, it always helps to have a ceremony or event that broadcasts the betterment of your one-Bacons, like when a number of my students walked across that stage when their names were called at Commencement.

It wouldn't be accurate to say that I fear change. Instead, my tendencies to be hesitant and skeptical cause me to tread slowly on change. This indicates that I am introverted, not much of a traveller, and a vigilant checker on how a change will affect me.

Several episodes in life remind me of times where I hesitated from getting up on stage and singing, or going on that roadtrip with buddies, and my reason/rationalization was often some form of, "this isn't a good time for me." I became quite skilled at thinking about other things I could be doing, or what might be neglected by making a seemingly impulsive decision.

The point is that it has taken me a long time to learn that there is never a perfect time, or even a good time, to solve a nagging problem, or to make a change, or to take on something new. Fatherhood in particular has taught me that just when you think you've got it all figured out, the kid will go through a "I don't WANT to put my shoes on!" phase, or the getting-ready-for-bed routine is going take even longer than usual this week to give the kid her conjunctivitis medicine.

Any walk of life can get bogged down in this not being a good time, and school is no exception. There is no doubt that deciding to take college classes online is going to be challening, and that the schedule of life is going to get tougher with foster parent classes to take after work, but one of the keys to making that leap is knowing that there never is a good time, and waiting for the perfect time is just nonsense.

To me it's a lot like a game of double dutch, or with another dated idiom, those parts in Super Mario Brothers where you have to jump over the spinning fire stick. There is no perfect time to jump in. If it gets messed up or complicated when you do, then hey, it happens. At Granite State College, we've tried to set things up so that even when things do get complicated, that we can help. So give us a call.

Now that we have been here for a few months, I can say without reservation that our new Manchester Center of Granite State College is beautiful. If you haven't seen it or taken a class here, I recommend you do so. It's in a converted mill buidling, and our windows face west, and with the sun settign behind St. Mary's, it's quite a nice place to have a class or meeting. To be a center of adult education, but to have a center like this seems to be the best of both worlds.  

I bring this up because as beautiful as our suite is, the parking lot is not so much. Actually, to be more accurate, the corner of the parking lot where I pull into it is not so great. I pull up to the building from Allard St., and pull into the parking lot right in front of Planet Fitness. Although it's arguably the closest entrance geographically, it's full of potholes, cars backing out of spots, other cars waiting to get into those spots, and pedestrians seemingly unaware of the four-wheeled metal-and-fiberglass vehicles going back and fourth.

While chatting with a colleague the other day, I mentioned how lousy that part of the parking lot was, to which he replied, "just go to the entrance at the top of hill on the corner."

Lightning had struck - how simple an answer. And the problem is that I consider myself to be fairly intelligent, but the idea of driving another 80 feet to a wider, less crowded part of the parking lot never occured to me. Perhaps my auto-piloting the morning commute didn't free up the brain power needed to try out that simple and yet highly effective solution to the mess I always pull into.

It goes to show that sometime the solutions to problems are simpler and more accessible than we think. Of course, if driving another 80 feet in the morning would make my bills less expensive, that would be neat. But it made me think that perhaps Granite State College, especially when measured up against the alernatives, can be that solution right around the corner. If classrooms choked with kids not taking things seriously look like the only route at first, maybe there are adult college classes that might be a better fit that make life easier.

That, and if you decide to take a class here, you can check out our snazzy new center.

Like any other chemical, mechanical or technological change that has ever been discovered, the internet can be used for well or for ill. Naturally, the misuses of the internet make more headlines, and the good things fade to the background. For this reason, bullying-induced suicide, breaking news stories about poorly updated sex offender registires, and $50 gift cards to Olive Garden just for you! are more likely to occupy the collective attention than credible reference material, banking and bill-pay features, or a college with online classes ever could.

As I mentioned before, there are several websites that I visit regularly, almost daily, and I get excellent and reliable information from them that is either just for my own geeky benefit or for a very practical purpose, or both.

For my unabashed love of maps, I rely heavily on Google maps at maps.google.com/maps . That maps will show any square mile of the Earth's surface that you want, and I have on several occasions used it in real time, as recently as yesterday, to guide a lost or uncertain friend or student to a particular destination.

In fifth grade, I was accused of reading the dictionary for fun. Although it started out as a joke (I think?), it was also persistent interest to know what particular big words meant, so that I eventually did flip to random pages of a nearby dictionary just to see what was there. For several years now, I have regularly visited dictionary.com to check on spelling, definition, and etymology of all kinds of words. It even has a Translator on there, which although imperfect can still give you a pretty good idea of what is written in another language.

I have something of a love-hate relationship with wikipedia.org. While I am in it all the time, I am bummed that it suffers from such a bad reputation in higher education. It seems pretty clear now that it's not a good idea to rely on wikipedia for research papers, but it can still point one in the direction of scholarly research, indisputable information and trivia, and for conventional wisdom, too.

Other things I have been into lately are:

ted.com/talks - Interesting lectures on a variety of topics

www.aldaily.com - Recent articles, criticism and essays in all kinds of scholarly subjects.

This where we bring it back to Granite State College. Much like going online to figure out the difference between a frittata and quiche, and what's the temperature going to be like tomorrow, an online school for adults can be the answer that you didn't know where to find, or that you didn't know you were looking for at all. As part of the New Hampshire University System, we make sure to have our stuff together and the our credits are as reliable as looking up a word in the dictionary.

One last thing - I am not a salesman. If GSC doesn't have quite the right program or degree you're looking for, I and any advisor here could point you in the direction of a school that does. As I tend to say in emails to my students: Let me know what you think. Thanks.

I first heard about top-flight college and universities topping the $50,000 per year mark a couple of weeks ago. The first one to announce corssing this threshold was Boston University (I think), followed quickly by Dartmouth (unique among NH colleges & universities to cross this benchmark), Mount Holyoke, and Tufts, among others.

Most folks that mention this on talk radio and other media do so with overt disgust and contempt.  The cost of higher education is portrayed as an extortion with impunity by unscrupulous professors and bloated administrations. One could even argue that the announcements of astronomical cost to attend the aforementioned institutions and their ilk is to some extent fashionable; certainly, if I were running Brandeis University and neighboring Wllesley College announced that they cost more than $50k, what would it say about Brandeis if we don't cost more than fifty? 

Expressions of pity for the parents of high school graduates usually follow, but I feel there are two important points that commentators miss, whether acciedntally or deliberately. First - the very parents for whom they express their spendthrift sympathies are likely to be the ones demanding the state-of-the-art facilities and accommodations that have contributed heavily to the steady rise in these tuition and room-and-board totals. That top-flight schools and even some state schools have sushi bars and world-class fitness centers is demanded by the marketplace, rather than artificially dreamed up and foisted upon the higher education public.

The second point that commentators seem to regularly pass over is that there are still far more ways to obtain an affordable bachelor degree than an inaffordable one. It reminds me of the joke where a guy goes to his doctor and says, "Doctor - it hurts when I do this," and the doctor replies "Well, don't do that." If attending Holy Cross and staying on campus and having a meal plan costs more than you can afford, then don't go there. The idea that if you don't go to Holy Cross or Amherst that you won't get a decent education, or worse, that if you can't afford to send your child to one of those places that you are somehow inadequate or a failure, is stupid at best and destructive at worst.

Maybe this kind of discussion gets my hackles to stand up because I attended a public college myself - not a New Hampshire state university, mind you - but the flagship of a nearby system. I wouldn't trade my undergraduate education and experience for anything, and it would be a shame if folks, whether straight out of high school, or looking for Adult college classes, didn't consider public schools, i.e. Granite State College, which are particularly designed to be affordable, accessible, etc.

Fifty thousand a year? Really? Even when a students comes into my office starting from scratch, we can work out a  plan that can finish off the degree for less than $35,000 total.

If that works better for your budget and prevents you from having to take out a second mortgage, drop me an email, and we can talk about that some more.

Recently, my wife and I took a short weekend-getaway trip to the Lake Winnipesaukee area. Although most of the seasonal attractions were closed like the Castle in the Clouds and two-thirds of the restaurants, we did take a leisurely drive around the entire lake.

For a flatlander originally from Massachusetts, I need to say that the views of the lake and the mountains were simply stunning. For the afternoon, we were "those people" who were suddenly pulling the car to the shoulder of the road to snap some pictures of the snow cap or lake vista in view at that moment. 

While driving around the lake, I had the additional and unexpected joy of driving through a number of different communities. Each time we crossed into a new town, I found myself saying aloud, "one of my Granite State College students lives in this town." As we rolled through Meredith, Center Harbor, Moultonborough, Tuftonborough, Wolfeboro, Alton, Gilford, Weirs Beach, and back to Meredith, my mind was involuntarily calling up the Plans of study in my head: "oh yeah, Buford, he lives in Alton, he's going to take college classes online to get finish his Associate's degree... and oh yeah, Martha, she lives in Meredith, and she is an RN who wants to complete her Bachelor's, and she also teaches some of our foster parent classes..."

It made me think that if I were to take a map of New Hampshire and stick push-pins into each town or city that one of my students is from, I could probably cover the entire map. And as I've said before, I am a total map geek, so even if there were some towns left off, it would still be fun. 

Note to self, though: gotta get back up to Castle in the Clouds. Just to see that thing sticking out of the side of the mountain from Rt. 25 in Moultonborough is amazing enough. The view must be incredible. Now, if only I could rig it so I could see those map push-pins from the view off that mountain, that would be cool.  

I briefly mentioned in my introduction blog that I am always interested in learning new things, and working at an adult online college such as GSC has given me new perspective on what it means to learn.

When I speak with new students, the variety of professional and personal experiences that these folks bring to the table always amazes me. Past and present students of mine have started on the factory floor and moved up to Vice-President of the company, and others have racked up substantial credits from police academy training, or through the military.

No matter where we come from, it reminds me that learning is all around us. If I am looking up a word at www.dictionary.com or checking Google maps ( maps.google.com/maps ) to figure out how to get to our Lebanon NH college center or seeing someone on tv who wrote a textbook I head read in college, it's all about connecting bits of information together in new ways.

There is no doubt that all of the distractions and responsibilities that life presents us can take our attention away from all the things we can learn that are right in front of our faces. Right alongside juggling all of our day-to-day things is making sure that those things help us learn, rather than get in the way.