[August 22nd, 2007]

The Pious Scholar

Amanda Ng , 21, claims her college experience is pretty normal: On weeknights she’s busy studying, but in her spare time she watches movies or shops on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard with her friends.

She’s never been drunk, doesn’t have sex and has no interest in experimenting with drugs—the holy trinity of the American college experience.

“I’m not really a party person,” she says.

Ng is a junior at Multnomah Bible College in Northeast Portland, where she’s working on a double major in journalism and the school-required “Bible and theology.” Four years ago, her mother, father and younger sister (who also attends MBC) moved to Portland from Singapore while her father attended Western Seminary. Although she was a pastor’s daughter and became a Christian at age 4, she never thought she’d go to a bible college.

“I thought it was for, like, really old people,” she says of MBC. “I mean, it was a seminary, and I never heard of Bible colleges for people my age.”

It wasn’t until Ng visited the nearly 80-year-old campus with some family friends that she changed her mind. She said the students were welcoming and friendly—which must be true, since 90 percent of students who visit the college end up enrolling—but had her doubts about spending four years studying the Bible. She prayed about whether or not to enroll and was given a sign from God: The school was starting a journalism program, Ng’s major of choice.

Despite Multnomah’s youthful atmosphere, Ng is by no means a typical college coed. Nearly all of her friends are Christian (including her fiancé, whom she met at school and won’t sleep with before their wedding night), and she spends Friday nights leading a high-school youth group at Chinese Faith Baptist Church.

Ng doesn’t plan on a career in ministry, even though she attends a college whose mission is to “develop biblically and professionally competent servant-leaders of Jesus Christ.” She wants to be journalist, and she’s not worried about entering an industry dominated by secular non-believers.

“A lot of Multnomah students are not necessarily working in the Christian environment, which I think is a great thing,” she says. “For me, I can share my beliefs with people around me.”

The Nine-to-Fiver

It is a universally acknowledged truth that most employers don’t give a monkey’s tonsil about your liberal arts degree. To cope with this sad reality, or perhaps out of a truly disturbed sense of humor, undergraduates at Southeast Portland’s Reed College take perverse pride in the prospect of joining the ranks of America’s liberally (and overly) educated unemployables.

Pride or no, though, no one envies the MALS students. MALS stands for Master of Arts in Liberal Studies, a program Reed’s website describes as an interdisciplinary post-graduate degree “with no specific professional or vocational orientation.” In other words, it’s not exactly a résumé booster.

Fortunately, MALS student David Bragdon , son of former Reed president Paul Bragdon, already has a really good job: He’s currently serving his second term as the president of Metro Council, a post he has held since 2003. When he isn’t hard at work creating more jobs in the metro area (for which, no doubt, liberal arts students will not be qualified), Bragdon can be found on Reed’s bucolic campus wrestling with Plato’s dialogues or exploring the role of racial identity in narrative. “It’s like a book group on steroids,” he says.

Next semester, Bragdon’s enrolled in a class on the literary pioneers of the Bloomsbury Group. He hopes to graduate in 2009, about six years after he started in the MALS program. Why head back to school? Bragdon says it’s to make up for his lackluster undergraduate experience at—get this—Harvard. “Harvard was pretty mediocre compared to Reed,” he says.

Like most overworked Reedies, Bragdon doesn’t look at his grades, but he admits he is a “mediocre” student. Surprised? Don’t worry, Bragdon has an excuse worthy of any savvy, overextended undergrad: “Sometimes I get distracted by my job.” Somehow, that makes us feel a lot better.

The Single Mom

For having just turned 32, Erin Libby ’s resume does not look like your typical overachiever’s road map to success. With master’s degrees from the University of New Mexico in both dance and theater, the carefree Portland native went to New York City to make her name as an actress. Working by day at an all-girls school through an NYC teaching fellowship in Brooklyn (“one step away from a mental-hospital setting,” as Libby explains it) and pursuing her acting career on the side, she was hit with an extreme reality check: With no experience teaching and no support network in the city, her living and working situation was a nightmare.

Then came a surprise pregnancy, and her visions of becoming an actress suddenly took a back seat to her decision to become a mother.

“Nobody wants to hire a fat actress,” Libby remarks, half-jokingly.

With that decision, Libby’s lifestyle radically changed. She now lives in Vancouver with her mother and 9-month-old daughter, Marley, and is going for her third master’s degree—this time in education, through a correspondence program at Loyola College in Maryland. At the same time, she’s earning Montessori teaching certification from the Montessori Institute Northwest in Portland, a school affiliated with Loyola. In the coming year, she’ll be juggling her responsibilities as a parent with an intensive 40-hour-per-week practicum to earn her certification and, of course, her master’s thesis.

It seems absurd for a struggling single mom to sign up for such a heavy load, but Libby is convinced that all the work is a small price to pay for the reward of being able to give her daughter a Montessori education at the same school where she will be teaching.

“Things have completely shifted for me,” Libby explains. “I’m creating a stable life for us. I really enjoy the fact that I can make all the decisions for my daughter’s upbringing and that I am the one who gets to be involved in witnessing her growing and learning and changing every day. I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

The High-School Dropout

“Sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll and goat-milking.”

That’s how Madeline Enos describes her educational history. Over the past few years, the 21-year-old community-development major at Portland State University has run the academic gamut from disenchanted dropout to PSU’s equivalent of Rushmore ’s Max Fischer.

Madeline began her education in the redwoods, studying at a Waldorf school, focusing on arts and play. But when she moved to Gainesville, Fla., things took a dive.

Suddenly thrust into public school, Madeline struggled to find her place. “My skills didn’t translate,” she says. “It was diluted and dumbed-down.”

Madeline relocated to Ashland as a freshman, where she enrolled in Ashland High’s Wilderness Charter School, focusing on environmental science (and the aforementioned goat-milking). But when the program ended after one year, Madeline was back at Ashland High—and boy, was she pissed.

“I was problematic,” she says. “I was disengaged with education.”

After floating through school for two years, she dropped out, earned her GED and headed off to Italy.

While in Rome at age 17, Madeline was coaxed by her parents to return to the Northwest and apply for college. That same year, she was admitted to PSU.

She’s been busy ever since. In addition to her full class load, Madeline was elected chair of ASPSU’s student fee committee. She also works as a coordinator of student groups and a peer mentor, founded the Pathos literary magazine, and volunteers at the Women’s Resource Center.

Somehow, she still has time to work two jobs and play guitar in the all-chick punk band the Fakers.

After graduation, she plans to continue on to grad school and eventually get a Ph.D.

“I’m compensating for being a good-for-nothing miscreant,” she says. “This wasn’t my plan. Now I realize there are niches within academia where you can do what you love.”

The Shark-in-Training

In 2004, Hood River native Misty Fedoroff , then working as an interior designer in North Carolina, had an epiphany as she sat on a plot of picturesque forested land one of her clients planned to raze for a new office building.

“I realized I really hated what I was doing. I couldn’t stand it anymore,” she says.

The next day Fedoroff applied to the University of North Carolina’s environmental studies program. Several years later, with two bachelor’s degrees in hand, she is in the thick of her third year in Lewis&Clark Law School’s top-ranked environmental law program.

Fedoroff’s heard horror stories about other high-profile law schools, where people steal each other’s outlines and hide books in the library to slow up the competition, but she digs the “supportive, and not combative,” community at L&C.

“It’s still total and complete hell,” she says. A typical day involves at least 12 hours of reading, writing, lectures, and a bare minimum of 32 ounces of coffee. It’s a tough, un-Portland-like existence, but Fedoroff’s quick to point out that a healthy dose of alcohol usually helps the material stick.

“The thing about law students is, you work really, really hard, and we’re all usually stressed out. So we all go out and drink a lot. I think lawyers have just about the highest alcoholism rate of any profession,” she jokes. “I definitely drink more in law school than I did before.”

Fedoroff works part-time for the U.S. Department of Justice Natural Resources Division, and plans to continue “pushing government agencies in the right direction” after graduation. For now, though, she’s busy dealing with summer classes, another year of school, keeping her marriage healthy.

“I don’t balance being married as well as I should. Law school is a huge stressor on relationships. Lots of people get divorced in law school,” she says.

“My husband says that I’m a completely different person during the school year. To him, I appear that I’m handling everything fine, and I’m relatively normal, aside from being a little bit cranky or tired. But really, underneath, I’m just barely holding my shit together.”