Why I Chose to Attend Community College

When it comes to taking our own unique paths in life, I don’t need your permission and you don’t need mine. But we each need to offer permission generously to ourselves. I couldn’t sleep the other night (new baby, what is sleep anyway) for thinking about this topic, specifically regarding educational choices. Maybe someone needs to hear this; I know that it would have helped me to hear it a few years ago, and I’m always encouraged when people share stories of unconventional career and life paths. It’s so good to be reminded that not everyone fits into the same box.

Both of my parents earned master’s degrees and my dad has a doctorate. My sister has a master’s plus a law degree. Education has aways been valued in my family, which isn’t bad, but along the way I became a bit of a closeted academic snob with an entrenched belief that having special letters after one’s name is essential to success. That is wholly true in certain professions, but for most creative paths, believing that a specific degree is required in order to do good and valuable work is a lie from the pit. I always just assumed that I would earn more than one degree. During my last year of college, I started applying to grad school and was accepted to two MFA programs - one on the east coast and one on the west. Then I did the math. $100,000 of debt is one thing if you’re training to become a surgeon; it’s entirely another if you plan to be an artist. I said no to both opportunities, and I went to work at Starbucks instead. After a few other short-term jobs, I started a cake business and again considered going back to school. Because if I could run a thriving business without a degree, how much better would I do with one? Tessa Pinner, artist and pastry chef. “Chef” is never a title I used for my work because I haven’t earned it. Artist, yes. Chef, no. I applied to French pastry school but once again decided not to go, and I’m glad that I didn’t. The itch to go back to school and earn a title and a gold badge of approval for the work I was already doing very nearly cost me a lot of money and a lot of time. One thing I learned from the wedding industry is that strong professional relationships are the most valuable currency there is. No one would care two cents about a fancy pastry degree if I didn’t do excellent, dependable work or if I was difficult to work with.

The path to where I am now has definitely not been linear. I turn 30 this year and I’ve only recently discovered a passion strong enough to make a career of. (The idea that a person should know what she wants to do with her life at the age of 20… also a lie from the pit.) Without the last decade of life and work experience, I wouldn’t be ready. I talk about that journey a little more here. For this conversation, the pertinent fact is that a new career direction brought up the topic of more schooling for the third time, and I started the application process to several landscape architecture programs. I was right back to calculating the monetary cost and time I would need to invest in another degree.

So, community college. I have one semester left in a horticulture degree at a community college one town over. The program was recommended to me by a landscape design firm that I highly respect after I reached out for advice at the end of 2018. Based on the weight of that recommendation, I abandoned my architecture applications and signed up for classes at Spartanburg Community College on the very last day registration was open for the January 2019 semester. Since I already have a degree in art, a two-year horticulture associates’ was a simple way to get a lot of hands-on experience with plants and construction processes for a fraction of the cost and in half the time as an architecture degree - quick and dirty, if you will. I took the program on its own merits of excellence and perhaps because it’s at a community college, the lack of pretense and practical focus has been so refreshing. I’m grateful for the push to even consider it as an option. It is not the same path that most people who want a career landscape and garden design take. But it’s also true that some of the designers I admire most have no degree. Take any creative field and you will find the same thing: some people at the top have every shiny credential in the book, and others have not a one. There are plenty of people who have fancy degrees and either no job or a whole lot of confusion about what they actually want in life, like a new car sitting useless because it doesn’t have any gas. Schooling can be positively life-changing, but it also often means a very big number in red. Life experience can be just as valuable as any letters after your name. Here are just a few of the incredibly successful interior designers who don’t have design or architecture degrees. And there are plenty of world-class contemporary garden designers, ditto on no garden design or architecture degree: Jinny Blom, Fernando Carucho, Isabel and Julian Bannerman, Arne Maynard, and Piet Oudolf, to name a few.

If you (like me) ever struggle with the feeling that you’ve taken an unconventional career path or that Ivy League bragging rights would be awfully nice, I hope that this is a gentle reminder that the box you imagine actually doesn’t exist, and ultimately it’s never any degree by itself that determines success.