Category Archives: Work

Sometimes Starvation

12 Thursday May 2011

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Me (at 185 lbs) & Mark James (Cropped), Pan-African Graduate & Professional Student Association, University of Pittsburgh, February 27, 1993. Lois Nembhard.

My last semester at the University of Pittsburgh as an undergrad (Spring ’91), I took a one-credit Weight Training course. I wanted to learn how to use free weights and weight machines so that I could build muscle tone. I wanted a course that would be easy for me to pass, one in which I could burn up my anxieties while awaiting word about my graduate school future.

Over the course of the semester, I did build muscle. I weighed 175 pounds in January. By my last class on the twenty-third of April, I weighed 183 pounds. I was proud of the fact that the eight-pound gain was all muscle.

But with the end of the school year and undergrad at Pitt came a crisis. Even though I’d start work on the twenty-ninth with the PAARC project at Western Psychiatric as a full-time employee, I wouldn’t receive a paycheck that Friday, the third of May. Instead, I’d have to work for three weeks before receiving pay. After a year of underemployment as a student (I only worked ten or twelve hours a week because I couldn’t pay the other half of my tuition via student loans and keep my work-study allotment at the same time), I thought I was finally over the hump.

It was bad enough that despite my degree, which qualified me for $8.50 an hour, Andrea Hegedus and the other PAARC  bosses only saw fit to pay me at $5.20 per hour. Now I knew that I’d have to figure out how to live on $30 for the next three weeks.

The first week went well enough. I brought lunch from home, consisting of a dried-up hamburger on wheat bread one day, leftover spaghetti the next, and a couple of days in which I didn’t eat lunch at all. That was because I saved my baked chicken and spaghetti leftovers for dinner. I also conserved money by walking the two and a half miles between my apartment on the East Liberty/Shadyside neighborhood border and the Oakland neighborhood in which Pitt and Western Psychiatric are located. Each way.

My Route To/From Work, 6007 Penn Cir S, Pittsburgh, PA 15206 to Atwood St & Forbes Ave – Google Maps, May 12, 2011.

By the end of the second week, I was down to my last $5. It was the tenth of May, and I had another week before payday. It was bad enough I walked five miles to and from work every day and skipped lunch all that second week. The PAARC folks used me to do everything from going to Giant Eagle to buy half-and-half for their coffee to running across Pitt’s campus hunting for books and making 3,000 copies of X and 2,200 copies of Y. Mind you, they hired me to design databases and input data. Surprise, surprise, I had a headache at the end of every work day.

That Friday, I got a call from my old job at Westchester County Department of Federal Programs. It was my boss from the previous summer and holiday season, Joe Carbone, wanting to know if I’d come work for him another summer. Working for him had been a wonderful experience. But the reason I stayed in Pittsburgh was because I wanted to explore the option of grad school as far as possible, even if it meant getting doors slammed in my face. I couldn’t do that while working in White Plains and living at 616 all summer. So, reluctantly, I said, “No, I can’t do it this year,” knowing that I’d get an earful from Mom once I told her my decision.

The one and only time in my life I dined on these, May 12-16, 1991. Source: http://www.stevegarufi.com/ramen1.jpg

It seemed a ridiculous decision two days later. I was down to my final $2.10. I went to Giant Eagle that Sunday, bought a six-pack of ramen noodles for a dollar, and two packs of Kool-Aid for forty cents more. I had enough to by a can of soda, maybe some candy, and that was it until the seventeenth of May.

What compounded my confounding decision was that I remained sixth on the teaching assistant fellowship waiting list in Pitt’s History Department. What made that worse was the fact that no fewer than four students had passed me on the list since I’d first seen it four weeks earlier, all White and male.

Somehow, though, I had faith beyond my circumstances that things were going to work out just fine. I guess all those years of malnutrition at 616 helped me. By the week after my first paycheck for the summer, grad school at Pitt was a done deal, and I had food to eat again.

I weighed myself about five days after my starvation diet at the student athletic center. I weighed 167 pounds, which meant that my weight had dropped to nearly 160 pounds by May 17, and had only begun to recover. I could see nearly all of my ribs, front and back, not to mention my collarbone.

By the Wednesday after three weeks of little and no food, none of that ordeal mattered. For the miracle that I’d hoped in happened just days after my infamous “No” to Joe Carbone. (to be continued).

Hail To Pitt

27 Wednesday Apr 2011

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University of Pittsburgh Logo, April 27, 2011. http://www.pitt.edu

I can be hard on people, places and things, especially the ones I like and love. That’s as true of my undergraduate alma mater as anything else. Twenty years ago this date, I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh. I didn’t attend the cattle-call ceremony at the Civic Arena that Sunday in ’91. Almost none of my immediate circle of friends attended, either. My mother and my younger siblings, still in the midst of welfare, weren’t going to be there to see me anyway. The Penguins were on that day, in the middle of a dominant playoff run, with Lemieux scoring at will. And I had other things on my mind that day and weekend. Like, will I be able to go to grad school without taking out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans?

This was a time of major transition for me. Two years removed from the end of the reign of my ex-stepfather at 616, and four years after I graduated from Mount Vernon High School and my obsession

My B.A. degree, University of Pittsburgh, April 27, 2011. Note that this was Wesley Posvar's last graduation signature. The university president would retire the following month amid a $3 million golden parachute scandal.

with Crush #2. I was essentially the same person, and yet there was something inside me that had started clawing its way out over the previous year. It was a drive, a determination, a rage that I’d buried since my first year in Humanities and the summer of abuse that followed in ’82. I was going to graduate school, at least I hoped that I was. Or I was going to have to find a real job, something that made me feel like I had diarrhea.

I knew on my Pitt graduation date that the departments of history at NYU, University of Maryland and Pitt had accepted me into their masters programs. But NYU wanted me to make a signed commitment before they awarded me any financial aid. The University of Maryland conveniently lost my application packet during their graduate fellowship decision process. By the time my packet resurfaced, the department had awarded all of their fellowships, and decided to put me on provisional status. Not based on my grades, mind you, but based on how late they were in going through my application. Pitt had accepted me a couple of weeks before my graduation, but I was sixth on the alternate list for teaching fellowships that would cover my tuition and provide a stipend.

I felt a lot of anxiety about all of this uncertainty regarding my immediate future. It helped to have friends, even with my friends in the middle of their own uncertainty. My friend Marc was working at a Black newspaper, dreaming of law school but uncertain about his prospects. Three other friends, including someone I was sort of dating, were taking their last classes or unsure about grad school or law school. Even my summer job working for a project at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic was shaky. It only paid $5.20 an hour, and I could’ve easily gone back to Mount Vernon and New York making $8 an hour or more doing the same work.

But as uncertain as I felt about things, this much I was certain about. The four years I spent at Pitt were ones that cocooned me in a way that none of my time growing up in Mount Vernon, New York did. I began to heal while I was there, academically, socially, emotionally. I was far from done learning how to connect to people, but I wasn’t the twelve-year-old neophyte keeping only the most rudimentary connections to humans either. My education was a valuable part of that experience. The friendships and other bonds I forms, the lessons I learned about trust, the efforts — however limited — the university made toward creating a campus climate that embraced diversity were all appreciated.

Even at the time, I felt comfortable at Pitt because it was the first place I learned to be comfortable in my own skin. It was a place where my friends, my acquaintances and others around me didn’t look at me like I was a freak because I listened to U2, sang in high-falsetto or walked at Warp Factor 3 to get across campus.

Those are the feelings, those good feelings, that I have about my four years of undergrad and two years of grad school (more on that in May) at the University of Pittsburgh. So, “Hail to Pitt,” and to my Pitt friends and folks from the classes of ’90-’94, Happy Graduation Anniversary Day.

Dumb Ass Communications, Inc.

08 Tuesday Mar 2011

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Lion and Sun, December 30, 2006. Original by [http://www.cais-soas.com/News/2006/December2006/30-12.htm CAIS

Of all my one-time stepfather Maurice Washington’s get-rich-quick schemes, the one that was the most elaborate, most expensive, most ridiculous of ideas was one that initially had some promise. In the year after he and my mother reconciled while making us all into Hebrew-Israelites in ’81, he concocted the idea of beginning a media entertainment business.

His great vision was to start a business that catered to Blacks audiences in TV and radio land, one that would redefine how media would in fact reach niche audiences. Maurice wanted to call it Sun-Lion Communications, partly after his Hebrew-Israelite moniker, Judah ben Israel, a lion of Jehovah. Of course, the dumb ass didn’t know that he was following a combination of Babylonian astrological, Persian and

Sun Lion Coin, 13th Century, Seljuq Turks. Source: http://mehmeteti.150m.com/thamara/index.htm

Islamic traditions in the process.

The plan grew from an idea at the end of ’81 into a full-fledged business proposal during ’82. So much so that my mother took $2,500 of the precious and pitiful few funds we had and bought a business license to incorporate this Sun-Lion Communications. In fact, she did that this time twenty-nine years ago. The one thing that my mother did right in doing so, that stuck in Maurice’s craw for years afterward, was to get a business license in her name, not my stepfather’s.

That was one of the underlying reasons for the Memorial Day ’82 incident in which Maurice drop-kicked my mother into unconsciousness — besides him being an asshole, of course. My mother may have made many dumb decisions over the years, but she wasn’t an idiot. Maurice had plenty of ideas before. When we first met the blowhard in ’77, Maurice told me and my older brother Darren that he was “a writer, a lawyer and a doctor.” All while driving a Reliable Taxi cab in Mount Vernon. Even at the age of seven, I wasn’t that naive. I knew enough to ask, “So how many books have you written?” But he did write. Street poetry and a few half-worked out plays. With time, focus and a lot of hard work, who knows?

Maurice, though, never wanted to work that hard. After losing his cab driver job on April 30, ’79 because he was literally caught sleeping at the wheel, he’d been unemployed for more than three years. At one point prior to him and my mother separating before becoming a Hebrew-Israelite, Maurice had the idea of starting a restaurant, to which my mother said, “Yeah, if you wanna eat us outta business!” in response.

I digress. After Memorial Day ’82 and spending most of June and July abusing me — I was a witness, to domestic violence, after all — Maurice finally got a job. It was as a part-time security guard for the closed Vicks plant in the middle of Wilson Woods (it’s a school now, I think). Within a few weeks of working the night and weekend shifts guarding the empty building, Maurice found inspiration. He had a “vision from God” that this empty shell was where Sun-Lion Communications would be headquartered, with studios, satellites, soundproofing, and so many other things a media business would need.

Although the idea still had promise (Bob Johnson had started BET only three years earlier, mind you), it was a high-risk business, with national cable in its early toddler stage. Not to mention our own growling stomachs, my mother consistently three weeks behind in rent, and us facing Con Ed’s warnings of our electricity being cutoff because we were $180 behind on that too.

That led to one of my mother and Maurice’s classic 616 arguments at the end of October ’82. In the living room, with all of our run-down furniture, Maurice was bellyaching about my mother’s refusal to put the business license in his name and her lack of emotional support. “I support a candy shop if we had the money, but we don’t,” she said. With Maurice yelling, demanding, “Give me the license, woman!,” I started worrying, as I was in the kitchen, drying dishes from the wonderful dinner of Great Northern Beans and rice. It was the standard meal when the idiot decided that he should play the role of stepfather and father and help feed us.

“How much you think this gonna cost?,” my mother finally asked.

“A hundred million dollars,” Maurice said.

“Man, you must be a fool!” my mother yelled. “With that kind of money, why would I need to start a business? You must think I’m pea-brained idiot!”

“You are!” Maurice yelled as he walked out the living room, went into the master bedroom, put on his clothes and coat and then came back up front, and left.

That was the last time I heard about Sun-Lion Communications. My ex-stepfather was and remains a dumb ass, never having found his way in this world, and about as good at business as he’s been as maintaining a proper diet and good health.

Fried Green Toenails

19 Saturday Feb 2011

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My Right Big Toenail Pre-Op, February 17, 2011. Donald Earl Collins. Note the black color of and the White Cliffs of Dover effect underneath my nail. Yuck, right?

Right Big Toe Post-Op, February 19, 2011. Donald Earl Collins. It feels like it looks right now, but I hope it becomes passable in time for sandals this spring and summer.

Well, not exactly green toenails, but a toenail story that might turn your face green. It’s a story that begins on Monday, June 26, ’89, my first day working for Valerie Johnstone at the Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health’s Mount Vernon Clinic on First Avenue and First Street. My first week without my stupid ass ex-stepfather at 616, my first time feeling like my future was truly my own.

I was hired to help get the clinic’s Medicaid and Medicare re-billing in order, as they had a five-year backlog in unpaid bills for psychiatric treatment, and not enough staff to do the work. That’s what I was hired to do, at $5.90 an hour. To eventually and successfully re-bill $371,000 worth of diagnoses and treatments to New York State, all the while learning DSM-III codes (that’s the Diagnostic Statistical Manual for Psychiatric Disorders for those of you who are not psychologists or psychiatrists) and the drugs that went with them. Xanax and Thorazine were among the most commonly prescribed medications to patients. I learned, sadly, that there were a few folks I knew who were also in need of psychiatric help. It was a sobering and valuable experience.

But that’s not what the boss woman had me do on my first day. Johnstone was pissed with her boss, Bob Beane, the director of clinics for the county, who had hired me because the Mount Vernon clinic was easily the furthest behind in billing, re-billing, and in covering their expenses. And she took her pissyness out on me, as well as a man I called Mr. Charles. He was in his mid-sixties and within months of retirement, but at least looked the part of a strong ex-athlete, very stout in the chest and muscular in the arms. His son had graduated a year or two before me, a trophy-winner on the Mount Vernon High School wrestling team.

Mr. Charles should’ve been taking it easy. But not with Johnstone as his boss. She berated him, yelled at him when he made mistakes, and generally treated the man as if he was less than the dirt that needed to be scraped off the bottom of her shoe. She sent the two of us to the warehouse in Tarrytown to pick up some old furniture — for her office! They had folks who worked for the county whose job it was to move furniture, but she sent a sixty-four-year-old man with arthritis and a nineteen-year-old who weighed 175 pounds to move cabinets and heavy wooden tables around. The two Black guys in the office, of course. Mr. Charles was still angry at Johnstone, though he tried to act as if he wasn’t.

I could tell anyway, because he was moving way too fast with the furniture for slow and weak young me. He moved so fast that he yanked a piece of heavy furniture out of my hands as we were carrying it downstairs, with part of a fifty-pound table coming down on my right big toe. The impact split the nail almost completely in two.

I should’ve gone to see a doctor. No insurance, no longer a regular resident, my mother and family still on welfare, and me being nineteen, I didn’t give it a second thought. I was mostly angry at Johnstone because she was an asshole of a boss. So I worked through that summer on a sore toe. It had bothered me all that fall when I went back to Pittsburgh and Pitt as well. Finally, in the middle of a snowstorm on Friday, December 15, ’89, I felt a popping sound on the top of my toe. The cold and snow had caused my toenail to fully crack, revealing a two-layer, ingrown toenail that had developed in the six months after my run-in with a wooden table.

I removed that nail, but I’ve had problems with that right big toenail ever since. Between basketball and hundreds of pickup games, with big guys stepping all over it. Years of walking everywhere, with me tripping on it. And a year of turf toe in ’05-’06, where I constantly played on it, that toenail grew darker and darker. Finally, in ’08, after dropping another, much smaller piece of furniture on the nail, it became susceptible to fungus, and that took over the growth, color, and thickness of the nail.

After removing it myself twice, I finally went to podiatrist, who told me that the best solution was to remove the nail and cauterize the nail root to stop it from growing — permanently. On Thursday, February 17, ’11, at 4:28 pm, after twenty minutes of bloody surgery, my right big toenail was gone. I’ll miss you. You didn’t deserve this. What should I do now? Maybe I should send pictures of it to Valerie Johnstone, thanking her for driving the office pool crazy, literally!

USAID suspends District-based nonprofit AED from contracts amid investigation

16 Thursday Dec 2010

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I learned from a friend last night that my former employer, Academy for Educational Development (AED), was suspended by USAID for mismanagement of millions of dollars http://wapo.st/gIhw8Y. I’m mostly unsurprised. But it’s still shocking and very disappointing to learn that a place that I worked so hard for between December 2000 and February ’08 might’ve been involved in corruption, and on a fairly large scale.

The slogan for the organization for most of the time I worked there was “Connecting People, Creating Change.” It seems to me that if this investigation holds water, the C’s for corruption (obvious why) and chaos — for the futures of most of the staff — should be added to its fifty-year legacy. I was never a big fan of the organization, as its corporate structure wasn’t particularly appealing to me. But I did have quite a few friends and colleagues who I enjoyed working with over the course of my seven years. It’s those folks that I feel for the most right now. Especially in our current economic and job climate.

Slumming Lords Spinning Stories Out Of Suffering

15 Wednesday Dec 2010

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New York City – “Doing the slums” – A scene in the Five Points / from a sketch by a staff artist, Policeman leading upper class people through the Five Points neighborhood, Published 1885; December 15, 2010. Source: http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3c20000/3c22000/3c22600/3c22660v.jpg

In July and August ’83, my family’s first summer on welfare, then US Secretary of Agriculture John Block decided to do an experiment involving food stamps, at least as reported by USA Today at the time (unfortunately, USA Today’s archives only go as far back as ’87). He had himself and his family “live” off of food stamps — $58 worth — for a week.

Official Secretary of Agriculture Photo, John R. Block, December 15, 2010. Source: http://news.siu.edu/news/April04/040104pr4039.htm

Mind you, Block didn’t move them out of their comfortable home in NW DC to live in SE Washington or off North Capitol Street and New Jersey Avenue. They didn’t stop buying clothes, driving cars or paying their other bills. No, for a week, the Block family — including their nineteen-year-old daughter and the daughter’s equally anorexic nineteen-year-old friend — bought their food with food stamps to show how hard (or easy) it was for a family of four to budget for all of their eating needs on the government welfare dime.

Last week, Mediabistro.com reported on twenty-three year-old Daily Caller reporter and American University grad student Matthew Boyle’s work to do a three-story account of his food stamps experience. “You wouldn’t think I’d qualify….I don’t meet the traditional definition of a poor person, and in fact I’m not poor. But that didn’t matter to the District’s Department of Human Services. They approved me anyway,” Boyle said. Then Boyle gave his income. “I make $600 a month writing for Daily Caller and another $493 as a teaching assistant at AU. My rent is $1,365.”

Sorry Boyle, but by income alone, you qualify for food stamps, because unless things have changed since my grad school years, only your part-time reporter income counts as traditional income from a workforce standpoint, enabling you to qualify. By definition, you are poor, no matter your middle-income and elite university sensibilities.

But there’s a more important point than shattering Boyle’s socioeconomic views of himself that I need to make here, though. It stems in part from these strokes of Boyle’s keyboard: “The arrangement works because most of my rent and other expenses are covered under my student loans or paid by my parents (thanks, Mom and Dad).”

Vintage Food Stamps. Source: http://slashfood.com

Yes, this is what makes your situation a middle class one, your loans and your parents. As if millions of other people who are poor or solidly middle class haven’t received help from loans, parents, or, God-forbid, food stamps. That someone with Boyle’s background shouldn’t qualify because his parents have the dollars to bail him out.

It’s downright idiotic to complain about qualifying for food stamps. There are millions of other people with similar incomes, including grad students, who are grateful to have the program to supplement their income so that they can eat and pay rent. It’s also a bit arrogant to see the system as flawed from the contrarian perspective of a White middle class outsider — one who is technically poor at present — who thinks that it’s too easy to get food stamps.

This goes beyond John Block or Matthew Boyle, though. I took a creative nonfiction writing class to help kick-start my transition from academic writing to other, more literary forms in September ’01. The class was mostly made up of folks who saw themselves as middle class, many of whom were White. For one particular personal literary account assignment, four of these students decided to interview homeless men and women, all of whom were of color. I think that was the last class I showed up for, to hear these students talk about how touched they were by the horrors that had affected their subjects.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to understand or even help others less fortunate than us. The need to go slumming so that you can tell a story, though, is all too typical of a superficially minded society and journalism community. I didn’t need Block’s August ’83 experiment to know that it was hard to shop with food stamps — I shopped every day for my mother with them, and usually with a tinge of bitterness about using them. Boyle’s slumming to uncover inconsistencies is an example of yet another wannabe journalist making their name off of others misery.

These are stories that would be much better told by someone who’s either lived the experience or is extremely knowledgeable of the people and subjects involved. But in our screwed up world, people like me are too biased to tell these stories, in articles and in books. And people wonder why writers like James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison became expatriates or bitter later in their careers.

A “Keepin’ It Real” Cover Letter

06 Monday Dec 2010

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When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong - Vernon Franklin, Screen Shot from Chappelle's Show, December 6, 2010. Donald Earl Collins. Though this image is subject to copyright, its use is covered by the U.S. fair use laws, because this image is used as the primary means of visual identification of the article topic and is of sufficiently low resolution to not be counterfeited.

Dear Human Resources:

I am applying for the Program Officer, Postsecondary Reform position with the XYZ Foundation, as advertised by the Chronicle of Higher Education UselessJobSite.org webpages the week of 25 October 2010, enabling you to fulfill your EEO requirement by giving you the rare opportunity to interview a Black guy with a Ph.D. who’s not yet middle-aged and your curiosity regarding my career background. My work in the nonprofit sector and in higher education has provided me with significant skills in program development and management, strategic planning, technical assistance, collaboration, and grantwriting/grantmaking, making me a viable candidate for this position, except with The Urban Institute, Social Science Research Council and the American Educational Research Association (AERA), who prefer Yes People to critical thinkers, who want people who look like them or only people they’ve drank a Bud Light with in an important job.

My overall work history includes ten years of project management in various capacities with projects funded by the Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and Lumina Foundation. For more than four years I served as Deputy Director for the Partnerships for College Access and Success Program (PCAS) at the Academy for Educational Development (AED). I know that you don’t know what AED is, but please keeping reading, dummies. PCAS was an initiative that assisted community partnerships in addressing college access and success issues among low-income youth and youth of color nationally. This work put me in contact with school administrators, college presidents and deans, high school and college students, and executive directors of nonprofits. Yeah, I know I haven’t done much work with boards, CEOs and admissions officers, but don’t you think it’s idiotic to suggest that I’d need to work with all of these people in order to manage a project?

Over the past thirteen years, I have also honed my curriculum development skills as either a project manager or adjunct professor. This includes my work as an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Duquesne University, George Washington University, and the University of Maryland University College. But I know that none of this matters, since I haven’t taught at nor attended an Ivy League school (at least as a full-time faculty member – I did teach at Princeton for two summers). I have taught undergraduate and graduate courses and worked with talented high school youth, first-generation college students, adult learners and graduate students. What? Never been chair of a department or have managed a student’s dissertation process? I guess having taught 2,000 students since 1991 has made me as inadequate as you.

My work history also includes five years of technical assistance — I know, I know, what’s that? It’s acting like a strategic planning consultant, except I actually know what I’m doing work through AED New Voices and AED PCAS.

I also possess seven years of experience conducting research-based interviews, developing interview and survey instruments and protocols, developing profiles and case studies, and coding qualitative research. But you dumb asses only want to hear about quantitative research, crunching numbers, multivariate regression analysis, as if this is the end-all and be-all of doing work on education reform and social change. God, being able to tell people what these numbers mean is so much more important than the numbers themselves, but you Vulcans won’t listen.

Additional relevant experiences include:

▸        Previous experience in conducting a grantmaking process, including a request for proposals, selecting a suitable selection committee with extensive academic/professional knowledge and field experience in their respective fields, and sending members of the selection committee out in the field to interview the potential grantees. What? I’ve never worked for a foundation? My bad – I thought that skill sets were transferable! Oh, that’s right – I lack the I know lots of important people skill set!

▸        With PCAS, foundation relations/fundraising work  raised $1.2 million for PCAS. Surely I should’ve raised more, right? At least $10 million? But I know you won’t hold that against me, right? Yeah, right!

▸        Have published works on multiculturalism and diversity, race and identity, education, and social justice including my book Fear of a “Black” America: Multiculturalism and the African American Experience (2004) How scary! Another angry Black male sticking it to the Man with a book about diversity. Of course, this shows how little people who react to the title think about educated folks of color anyway, looking for any excuse to confirm their own ignorance as wisdom, as well as articles and  reviews in Black Issues in Higher Education, The Washington Post, History of Education Quarterly, Radical Society, Teachers College Record, and Academe Magazine. Dude, you’ve fallen short — where’s your New York Times op-ed or Atlantic Monthly piece?

I believe that my experiences in the nonprofit sector make me a qualified candidate because they have provided me a rich understanding of nonprofit management, social justice, policy advocacy and program development in the transition to higher education. I look forward to hearing from you soon. But in some cases, I’d die from asphyxiation trying to hold my breath.

Sincerely,
Donald Earl Collins

#####################################

I’m hardly bitter about my experiences in the job market. But working with people who are clueless, dishonest and obfuscate at every turn can make looking for another job frustrating beyond belief. Maybe this is too honest, even for me. In the past seven years of applying and interviewing for a bunch of jobs, I’ve learned so many times after the fact that I wasn’t selected because I wasn’t a friend of the director or a certain senior program officer. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, they say. Which explains why there are so many people with questionable skills in high responsibility jobs.