Today on my lunch break, I sit in a server room in Sitka, Alaska.

Six months ago....

...I finished up an amazing Teaching English as a Foreign Language certification program in Plzen, Czech Republic that enabled me to teach for my first time.

...I received a Master of Arts in ESL

...I begin work toward a PhD in linguistics with a Fall semester where I taught English Composition to freshman students.

I loved that experience—walking down the corridors of brilliant minds, delivering an arena rock showmanship of teaching, and dreaming the possibilities of what I might do and where I might go in 3-4 years. I wanted to pursue tangible, real research—work that had pragmatic application and not lost in the dusty confines of a PDF archive on JSTOR.

Beyond the self-serving intellectual delight, my main focus of pursing academia—the reason I chose to do it— is for my family. That's it. At the time, I felt an IT generation or two removed from that career and thought I was no longer employable in the field.

Six months ago, I was poor with a big-ticket mind no pawn shop would take.

As I became increasingly involved into the discipline, it became apparent that its pursuit would not effectively meet its objective. Even after earning a doctorate, there was no hope of anything that I could not already achieve in the private sector. There was no promise of a better tomorrow to pull my family out of an economic quagmire today. At the end of the day, we're talking about risk assessment and payoff. I could have stayed where I was. In the solace of oblivion, I could have kept my nose stuck in the books as the world rages on.

But, I didn't. I rolled the dice.