You Can't Get There From Here by Emma

You Can't Get There From Here by Emma - March 2018 Scholarship Essay

I'm a photographer by trade; it's a bit different than being something useful like, say, a registered nurse.

When you're a nurse, some of the tools necessary to do your work will be provided by your employer, such as syringes, sterile swabs, and cotton gauze. The most important professional implement in any nurse's arsenal, however, is his or her base of knowledge; this they take with them everywhere they go, and that fact allows them to save lives regardless of how ill-equipped they may be for the task at hand or how far they are from the hospital they work at normally. Obviously, in order to be able to do this, a significant amount of time must be invested in educating themselves in the field and practice - after reading multitudes of textbooks, spending a seemingly endless number of hours studying, and taking exam after challenging exam, through hard work and perseverance they elevate themselves from ordinary people into healers in the truest sense of the word. This is the transformative power of education; it acts as a bridge between who you are now and what you wish to become in the future.

I suppose anybody can learn the Heimlich maneuver, and, if it really came down to it, bandage a badly-bleeding wound in an emergency. The expertise necessary to perform these tasks consistently, on people of all varieties, every single day, however, is something that the average human being simply can’t teach himself or herself. Regular people with no background in medicine will need the guidance and instruction of somebody who has done it, many times, to be able to accomplish this goal successfully. Not only that, but they need the resources an institution of higher learning provides; you can't learn how best to brace a fractured bone if all you have to work with are the sticks and stones in your backyard.

As a photographer, one thing I've learned on the job is this: no matter how well you know your craft, no matter how beautiful your work is when you get a chance to do it, if your camera battery is dead or if your strobe won't fire off, none of those previously-mentioned factors matter, because you simply cannot take the photo. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to make it in the arts; quantifying what makes one individual more qualified than another is more often a matter of the friends one has made in the industry or the state of the equipment being used rather than in the inherent intellectual ability of the photographer; as such, it is not an especially academic line of work and is therefore not very respectable objectively. Being a truly educated person in a tangibly important field protects one from this problem; it frees you to take comfort in the certainty that no matter the circumstances, you will be able to do good for your community as long as you make a commitment to the curriculum in front of you. Education is the promise of always having a place in the world, of being connected to people in a fulfilling way, of having a role to play in society, not only for others, but for yourself, too.