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Twilight

Michael Althouse
5 min readJan 17, 2025

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It’s About Time and… Money

Next week, classes begin for the spring semester at California State University, Sacramento (Sac State). It will be the beginning of my 20th semester teaching there since returning from my four years of PhD coursework at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge. While I had completed my coursework, my comprehensive exams and advanced to doctoral candidacy, I was not yet finished. But I was finished in Baton Rouge, and it was time to find a job. I ended up with this gig in the fall of 2015 and, while I never did finish the work necessary for the PhD, I did manage to get another master’s degree (and the unofficial degree of “ABD” — all but dissertation). But that is a story I have told many times, one I will likely tell again, but not now. The point is that, although I am beginning the end of my 10th year as a faculty member at Sac State, I was teaching undergraduate college students as a graduate student since 2008 (at Sac State) and 2011 (at LSU).

When I enrolled in Sac State’s communication studies MA program, I did not know, for sure, what I wanted to do with that degree. All I knew for sure was that, among the things I discovered since getting sober in 2004, I am good at school. That was never the case before. There are several factors that played a role, not the least of which is the fact that my brain was no longer polluted by drugs and alcohol…

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Michael Althouse
Michael Althouse

Written by Michael Althouse

Lecturer/professor of communication studies at California State University, Sacramento. www.michaelalthouse.com

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