From The Mean Streets To The Ivory Tower

This is not my first fundraiser. It is, by far, the most ambitious. To put it bluntly, it seems almost impossible for it to succeed. But if you know anything about me, and it is very likely you do not, you would know that it would not be my first impossible success.

Around ten years ago had you found me waking up at three in the morning in an abandoned parking lot to go hunting for recyclables in rat infested bins before going to my job as a personal chef to a drug dealer (until he got raided while I was making him a frittata), you wouldn’t have put long odds on me graduating with a Master’s degree in forensic psychology today, which is what is happening. I am graduating with honors in fact, also unlikely as the online university conferring my degree recently lost a class action lawsuit for fraudulently failing students for specious reasons to make them repeat classes, and thereby extract more money per student. Far from being a diploma mill, it was a dream killing factory, where failing students for the improper use of commas and insufficient paragraph headings was an covert strategy to get more and more tuition payments. It is a sleazy institution, but not for being an easy school. Quite the opposite. I ran into these problems myself. Teachers who rather obviously wanted to fail me, and I was very confused as to why until I very recently learned about the class action suit.

But I am nothing if not a fighter, and at least in this case, I won.

It’s funny how useless a Master’s degree can be, unless it is extraordinarily specific.

In psychology, everyone hiring wants to see that you have earned a clinical psychology degree, even for those jobs that don’t really involve clinical psychology. For forensics, a Master’s is really just an aperitif. Without a PhD, you aren’t taken particularly seriously. So that is exactly what I intend to do, and I am hoping that as part of the charitable spirit that arises around the holiday, that you will help me do that, and I thank you for even coming this far to consider it.

I will be making a lateral shift from forensics, which focuses most heavily on crime, to the psychology of social policy. Something which strikes me as desperately important as we move into four more years of an authoritarian Trump administration after a devastating rebuke of the Democratic party. It’s important work, and how I hope to make my contribution to building a more equitable America. If you’re not particularly eager to support me, I do understand that, but perhaps you would be more interested in supporting that.

If you don’t mind, I would ask you to continue reading to see what I have overcome to get where I am now. There’s not much more to say about my time being homeless, which lasted several years and is ever present in my mind. This is just about my most recent struggles on the way to earning my graduate degree.

Another way of looking at them is that they are my most recent victories, and you can help me have more of them. Nobody likes a loser. I am not a loser. I have been down. I have never been out. That will not change.

Beyond even the simple panic-inducing difficulty of attempting to change my career in my fifties, necessitated by the collapse of my physical strength after getting vaccinated for COVID, things had not gone well. Before I even started I had to finish my undergraduate degree at the tender young age of 51. Honestly, I really only did that because it felt like unfinished business. Had I not had what my doctor called a massive inflammatory response to the vaccine (and I am not anti-vax just chronically unlucky, as these things happen to some people with all vaccines, in this case it happened to me), which weakened my arms I very much needed to be a chef, causing me a bad tremor which sometimes made it difficult to shave much less carry 30 lbs of ribs on a sheet tray with one hand over my head, I would likely still be cooking for a living and my prospects in that field were quite positive.

I earned my Bachelor’s in Interdisciplinary studies while I worked as a chef, a job I maintained through the pandemic until my poor health forced me out. This challenge continued after I became a bouncer at a busy bar for a boss who was frankly a jerk, and had me getting out of work at three in the morning only to have to do homework. Twice through severe bouts of COVID which the vaccine did not entirely protect me from. It continued again through a job as a security guard at City Hall, where I was threatened with violence on a regular basis and was eventually fired from because a video wound up on Twitter of me merely raising my voice against a junkie who had been shooting up on the steps of City Hall. All I did was shout at him after he shouted at me in response to my initially polite request that he not use intravenous drugs on the steps of City Hall. Pretty much exactly my job.

That was just undergrad.

Then I got into a Master’s program in Jungian psychology, which after 9 extraordinarily expensive months of traveling back and forth from California I decided wasn’t for me because it did not seem terribly practical, felt more like an indoctrination than an education and had a much more hostile vibe than I thought was necessary for academic rigor.

During this time I learned that both of my parents had died, and even though we had been estranged due to their tendency to compound the difficulty of my homelessness by being abusive, I was absolutely shocked that no one had even tried to contact me. I had not been allowed to attend either of their funerals even though I was no longer homeless when they happened. Indeed, my mother’s occurred only a few miles from where I was working as a chef. When I attempted to establish contact, my surviving brother (a convicted felon always favored by both my parents), had responded only to be sure that I knew that I was unwelcome in any way, at any time. There is very likely inheritance money that I was prevented from receiving.

I also had to move because rents in Vermont had exploded, and even though I was renting from someone I thought was my friend, my rent doubled. Vermont is a very expensive place to live that pays very low wages

There would be two more moves as I found a different psychology master’s program, the third move because the building I was living in caught fire two days before Christmas, destroying many of my belongings, particularly my wardrobe.

Walden University, which is where I wound up, eventually lost a class action lawsuit for artificially failing students for specious reasons to make students repeat classes in order to extract more tuition money from them. I once failed a major paper because the teacher said I hadn’t used enough paragraph headings, even though I had used six paragraph headings in a ten page paper (my grades were otherwise good enough to pass the class, and I eventually went on to earn honors).

I had moved into a new apartment after the fire with no furniture, no clothes and a severely mentally ill neighbor who plainly stated that she fully intended to drive me out of the apartment through a harassment campaign. She would eventually be caught vandalizing my mail, which got the police involved and finally brought her terror campaign to an end after 10 months. Mail that was a certificate for having been inducted into an honor society (pictured above, damaged by rain) despite Walden’s efforts to give me bad grades (most of my teachers were in no way dishonorable, and one was actually quite excellent, but looking back a pattern does emerge which only makes sense in the light of the $35 million judgment against them).

On top of all that I do suffer from organic mental illness: Tourrette’s syndrome, crippling anxiety and an occasionally terrifying tendency to suicidal ideation.

To put it mildly, getting my Master’s has not been easy.

Nonetheless, I have persisted.

I still do.

This next phase is likely to be the hardest phase yet, nor am I in a very good position to accomplish it. Having said that, they ain’t found a way to kill me yet. I am sure they are working on it, but I might just be starting to get the hang of this. Still, I could really use your help.

Countering the next Trump administration is going to require exactly the kind of scholarship I intend to pursue with my PhD. Understanding people’s psychology in relation to public policy, the law, government and community systems has never been more important. For now his side is using the psychology of fear and grievance, stoked by blatant lies, and they are winning handily. Beating that requires more than simply being judgmental. Just being right, and patting ourselves on the back for it, is not enough.

Though I have not settled on a topic for my PhD I am very interested in the concepts of distrust and defiance, both factors which played very heavily in this last election. Some of the work I have done in my Master’s program has touched on the latter idea, and it is a highly understudied phenomenon ripe for providing insights we do not currently have.

The $5,000 figure is not small. It may well be unobtainable even though if only 10% of the people following my social media accounts gave the minimum donation of $5 it would be easily achieved, and could be easily exceeded if I am underestimating people’s generosity, which of course I hope I am doing.

The money would go to rent, currently paid through March 1st from an honors scholarship I received in my last quarter, and some utilities. Even though that date is out a ways, I am frequently wracked by the absolute terror that I will become homeless again.

Though I have physically improved I continue to be extremely prone to debilitating injury, and as long as I continue to try and get a degree, things like disability are off the table as are most other aspects of public assistance.

There is a debt collection of about $1500 dollars which prevents me from getting Grad+ loans without which the entirety of my PhD plans could be quickly and easily derailed. There are more scholarships I will likely qualify for, but the uncertainty involved makes that impossible to depend on.

Despite being constantly surrounded by electronics, they are all very low quality and often quite unreliable. A better computer system that might allow me to make edited videos for my YouTube channel would be a significant boon. That is unlikely to be any sort of income source for the foreseeable future, likely forever, but I am trying to get my name out there as a psychologist through social media and publishing books. I would like to build a trial consultant business which could allow me reasonable financial security into the future.

Your donation would help make all these things possible. If you would please consider donating as generously as you can as part of the holiday season charitable giving common this time of year I would be extraordinarily grateful. Sharing this fundraising effort with friends and across whatever social media platforms you use could also be very helpful.

For now, all I can do is simply say thank you for the time you have taken to read this and the consideration you are giving to it. It may seem unrelated to fighting the next Trump administration, but I do not see it that way. It is part of what keeps me going.

And I fully intend to keep going.

Thank you, and happy holidays.

Warm Regards,

Mac McGill