Back to school

I’m genuinely excited heading into 2026, and a big part of that is because I’m going back to school. I haven’t been in a traditional classroom in about a decade, and I’m more excited about it now than I ever remember being before. There’s something appealing about returning to structured learning, deadlines, and the challenge of engaging with ideas on purpose again.

Doing this as an adult feels completely different. When you’re younger, it’s hard to fully grasp the weight and relevance of what you’re being taught. You’re learning theories without much lived experience to test them against. Ideas exist in a vacuum, sealed off from the messiness of how the world actually works. Everything makes sense in a textbook, but real life rarely follows those clean lines.

Back then, I treated learning as something abstract. How the world should work instead of how it does work. And when reality didn’t line up with the lesson, it was easy to dismiss one or the other without understanding the gap between them.

Now I’m bringing years of experience with me. Wins, failures, wrong turns, and hard-earned lessons. I’m hoping that when I sit down in a classroom again, I’ll be able to apply that experience to what I’m learning. To challenge ideas, connect them to reality, and build something more concrete and meaningful out of the process.

This time, I’m not just learning for a grade. I’m learning because I finally understand why it matters.

One class at a time,
K