That’s right, everybody. I have officially quit school.

“Why?” you ask, “Why would you move all the way to Hawaii for graduate school and then immediately quit?”

My response:

Yes oh yes.

But seriously, I got to Honolulu (which is a pimpin’ city) found an apartment, went to the beach, and got ready for school to start. I attended the graduate orientation and…. well it sucked. First of all the program isn’t what I thought it was going to be. I wanted to study new media, the Internet, and communication in a digital age. The program at HPU it turns out is very traditional, theory-based, communication rhetoric, and the professor in the department that specialized in Internet Marketing Communications left the college as of this semester.

Second of all, the brochure of campus looked like this:

But the actual downtown campus looks like this:

Ok, it wasn’t that bad, but it definitely was a disappointment. Apparently they have a beautiful campus on the windward side of the island, but the Comm department is in the downtown campus, which consists of a few floors in a couple of the big buildings in downtown. Kind of a shocker.

But the main thing was that the program didn’t have what I wanted, location and campus aside. So, with a couple of days to think about it before school started, I decided I needed to chart out my life plan. Here is what I came up with:

The orange arrows indicate the path I’ve chosen to go with. It seems like the shortest way to arrive at the same destination.

And actually, I had a phone interview with President Kim Clark this morning (at 4:10 a.m. Hawaii time!), and he recommended me to skip my master’s and go straight for the doctoral program at Harvard. So that’s what I’ll be working on applying to in the next little while.

In the meantime, however, I’m going to learn to surf. For real.

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