Tag Archives: job

the drawing

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on sunday, i’m drawing my future out of a hat. no lie.

i am still uncertain about what to do with my future (especially as regarding a job), but the time has come (the walrus said) to take action.

so, over the next few days i am collecting slips of paper from friends (one per person) with an idea for my future job/path on it on it. i’ll be dropping the slips of paper into a hat, and sunday i will draw one. whichever thing i pick will be the path i take. if, after 6 months, i find it’s not as good a fit as thought, i will draw again.

we’ll see what happens…

dangling

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i don’t normally post on the weekends (because i normally post when i’m stuck idly at my cube at work) but i’ve got a little bit of “waiting time” at the moment, and so i  thought i’d make some notes.

today is the day i will go out on a limb. several limbs actually. at the same time. dance, monkey, dance. aaaaanyway. i’ve been working on a couple of creative writing pieces for a while, and today i’ve decided to send a sample of 2 of them to a literary agent to see what she thinks.

this guy i knew once told me that he collected rejection slips — as evidence not of failure, but of his achievement in trying something new, in putting himself out there. i like that philosophy. i don’t think i’ll literally collect the slips, as he did, but i do like the idea that even if i get rejected, i’ve succeeded in another, arguably bigger, way.

i was also planning to send out resumes to some private high schools in the area — in light of my “i can’t work at H– for another year” rant from a few days ago. but i told my boss i would stick it out for another year, and he’s already been making plans in light of that, and i would feel bad leaving the ship at this point. and to be honest, i think i was just having a few bad days earlier this week. the end of the week went a bit better and i think i feel ok with staying at H– until next summer. its still not a dream job; but the workload is about to increase — because a lot of people are taking early retirement and so job duties are being shifted (that’s one reason my boss wanted to know if i was staying; so he could put a little more on my plate) — the whole my-brain-is-atrophying disaster may well be averted. anyway i think for now its back to the take-the-teaching-license-exams-in-the-fall-and-become-a-teacher-fall-2010 plan.

all of this sounds good, feels fine. the only thing is… i’m still without a collaborative group. and i still really want one. i don’t mean friends — i feel blessed to have so many good friends — but i mean a day-to-day, work-it-out-together group. a team.

maybe i’ll send out a few resumes and cover letters to some ad agencies, project mgmt groups, etc — just in case. never hurts to try, and if i’m gonna be out on all these limbs today, anyway, what’s one more? :)

narrowing things down

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those of you who have followed this blog for a while may remember (or maybe not, i don’t know) that i am always in the middle of a career crisis. there are several posts about it lying around somewhere (here and here, actually).

so here’s the latest in the what-should-i-do-with-my-life roller coaster.

i had recently been thinking seriously about becoming a high school teacher — teaching english and political science/government. my tentative plan was to take my licensing exams in september and october, continuing working for H–, and begin applying for jobs at schools. hopefully in fall 2010, i would be able to actually begin teaching.

but then the other thing is this — i really want to work on a small fun creative team. the jobs environments i’ve liked best have been team-oriented. and office work at H– is mostly a siloed-off (sp?) job. i work near people, and i work for people — and both groups of people are fairly fun. but i don’t work with anyone. there is nothing collaborative about my job. and i’m not sure how collaborative teaching high school would be.

for this particular ailment, my family suggests getting into advertising. which could also be fun. team-worky, creative, etc.

so what to do?

teaching sounds fun — but honestly, i don’t know if i can stick it out at H– for another year. i mean, yes, its a great job. and playing bejewled on facebook for 3-4 hours a day does have a certain appeal to it, not gonna lie. plus, i can blog on here, read the news, spend many hours getting introspective and over-thinking my life, and watch the students play volleyball in the afternoon. what’s not to love? it’s just ya know, sometimes i worry my brain will atrophy. and sometimes i worry that ship’s already sailed.

and i have no experience in advertising whatsoever. i’m a ferocious copyeditor though, maybe that will count. (i guess really it’s not advertising necessarily — its anything with that creative, team-oriented dynamic. that i can start looking into now instead of waiting a year).

i dunno. this week i’m in the kinda mood where i think i will just send out scores of resumes and cover letters — to schools and ad agencies and see if anything comes of it. i’m not expecting anything to, but i’m thinking that action itself takes the sting out of stagnancy. even if its not a productive action. like driving farther out of your way rather than sitting in traffic for half the time.

anyway. anyone wanting to weigh in on any of this is more than welcome to.

this working-day world (2)

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(this is part 2 of a blog about my job/career. for part 1, click here).

Think not of yourself as the architect of your career but as the sculptor. Expect to have to do a lot of hard hammering and chiseling and scraping and polishing. -BC Forbes

There’s a bunch of careers that I have seriously considered — and would still consider given the opportunity, money, and depending on what mood i’m in. and although i still feel a strange fondness for these career choices, my “realistic list” has gradually been pared down. here’s the run-down (in no particular order).

neuropsychologist: i love love love the human brain. so fascinating. in fact, i suggested to my parents (a few months ago) that i could go back to school and be a neuropsychologist. but the idea was promptly, and with little sympathy, crushed. apparently (as perhaps this blog is evidence of) i have a penchant for picking careers that have nothing to do with my former training and aren’t cheap. and apparently, i change my mind a lot.

advertising agent: i was all excited about this idea after watching How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. so, maybe not the best reason for a career change. my parents thought i could do this pretty well, to be honest, but after a few days later (and another movie or two), the sparkle had died.

lawyer: i was kinda pre-law for a while in college, but one day realised that if i became a lawyer, it would definitely make me a jaded person. i’m already pretty cynical at times, so i decided i didn’t want to go that route. I did enjoy the pre-law classes i took, though.

JAG corps lawyer: this might have ameliorated some of the potential for jaded-ness. it’s more of an ethical approach to the law, etc. but you can’t join the Navy after having sustained a head injury like the one i did. also i realized that as much as i wanted to be Mac in NBC’s award-winning JAG, i couldn’t carry a gun and shoot someone if needs be. (I did go so far as to minor in Naval Science, though).

constitutional law researcher/professor: essentially i love Constitutional Law because im a literature major. and we’re an entire nation who live by literary analysis. so reading the text, finding the meaning, finding the application is as much fun with the US Constitution as it is with literature. more fun if that literature is something like Heart of Darkness. truth be told, i often toy with the idea of going to law school and doing that. that’s right before i toy with the idea of winning the lottery.

supreme court justice: i know, i know.

writer: i go back and forth on this. but i think i’d need to have a “real” career and maybe do this on the side. not sure i have the discipline to do it full-time or successfully.

high school teacher: i got back and forth on this one, too. and my obsession with high school musical doesn’t help dampen the inspiration. i feel quite strongly about teaching, about education – and i love the dynamics of classrooms. i get inspired about helping young people, about shaping a future, about literature and writing, and about bursting into song in the hallways with Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens. but (and this is a big but to me) i don’t know if i have the emotional capacity to help the kids outside of the classroom. i want to teach, but can i also handle the social-work side of teaching? maybe a prep school. but then there’s the parents. i don’t know.

college professor: teaching, but without the high school drama. but… gotta get the PhD for this. which is trickier than it sounds (like it didn’t sound tricky?). anyway it’s a route i never really discount, but have strong reservations about.

construction project manager: for what’s it worth, i actually did apply to get a degree in this, got accepted, and then realized it wasn’t worth taking out even more student loans to get another bachelor’s degree. this was another plan my parents looked at quite askance. and i did have the thought that it might end up as more stress than i wanted (what if my building collapsed?)

literary agent, children’s book editor: i’ll combine these two, because the crux is the same – the fact that i just don’t know if i could sit at a desk all day reading. my reading attention span (despite what you may think) is about 15 minutes. in fact, i’ve already stopped reading this blog entry. i wrote my master’s thesis on a really really (really really) long novel, and it took me MONTHS to read it: 15 minutes of reading, 15 minutes of a break. back and forth. forever. it took flat forever.

bookstore owner/buyer: that’d be fun, but people who own their own business work a lot harder than people who work for companies. i’m kinda against doing too much hard work. it’s the french blood in me.

event planner: a fun thought. don’t know how or why but i like the idea. i toy with it. complete lack of experience is the big hang-up, generally. although, as you may have noticed — it hasn’t stopped other people (read: obama, palin, k-fed) from trying to make some pretty big career changes.

heiress: still definitely interested in this. let me know if you hear anything.

so the point of all these details (aside from the fact that it’s a blog and i don’t even NEED a point — woot!) is to say that the one thing i come back to again and again is a high school teacher. it’s not an office job, it would allow me to do some amount of research, it’s with young people, and even bearing in mind the downsides - i think it’s something i would find really fulfilling.

but to do it, i would need to get into a certification program and student teach full time. which means being without a job for a while. which, for some reason, is super super scary to me. scary enough that it paralyzes me every time.

this working-day world (1)

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O, how full of briars is this working-day world!

So says Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (I.3), and although I’ve identified with this sentiment often before, for the past few days I’ve been feeling it uber-intensely.

I wrote an email to some old professors and work colleagues yesterday – just attempting to keep in touch with everyone – and at one point in the email I mentioned my job here at H–. I called it like it is — a nice job (good work environment, etc.) that keeps me pretty busy without actually requiring much brainwork. In the email I said something cutesy about having a job like this because I don’t want to have to choose a career and embrace real life (or something to that effect).

Which is usually what I say when people ask me why I keep ending up in aimless jobs that I am overqualified for. I’m not trying to be cocky here. I literally spend my day making photocopies and mailing letters for professors. Occasionally, I do some data entry. It doesn’t require much to be overqualified for this job. And some people are happy doing things like that — and I gotta say, I can respect that. But I’m just restless now. Once I heard someone say (it was probably on The Office) that he had a job and if he stuck with anymore it would become his career, and he couldn’t handle that. That’s how this is — so far, just a job. But when it becomes a career, I’m going to panic. It’s been a month and I’m kinda ready to be challenged. Might be worth mentioning that it usually takes me about 6 months at a job before I feel this way. So.

So I’m wondering if maybe I oughta just buckle down and face real life: choose a career and start looking into what I need to do to get into it. I’ll probably give myself a year at this job — get entrenched here at H– and with what’s going on in Boston/Cambridge, get comfortable, etc. But in the meantime, maybe I should begin paving my way into something else.

But what?

- end of part 1 -

for part 2, click here.

same old, same new

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it’s my second day on the job here at H– and (and i can’t tell if this is surprising or not, even to me) it’s much the same as working at UT. don’t get me wrong – it’s exactly what i love about working on campuses – the faculty, students, the dynamics, etc. the fact that campuses are campuses, academes are academes, and the summer is the summer no matter where you go, as long as you’re on a campus and surrounded by academes.

i guess before i launch into a reflective prose on my day, i should give you the facts. the facts are these: i, ndr, am now employed at H–, in the School of Government, as a faculty assistant. all faculty members here are entitled to a part-time assistant, and depending on how much the faculty needs his or her assistant (i.e., what percentage of the assistant’s salary the faculty member is willing to pay for), each assistant has several faculty members to care for (a few people have one-on-one assistants, but most of us cover for several people; i have 6).

Dr. FT1 (full-time faculty #1) buys 11.5 hours of my time; Dr. FT2 buys 6 hours of my time; Dr. FT3 buys 8 hours of my time; and Drs. ADJ1 (adjunct faculty #1), ADJ2, ADJ3 each buy 3 hours of my time. What’s that, you say? Those numbers only total 34.5 hours/week? Why, yes; yes, you are right. Because in the great and amazing Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 35 hours/week is considered full-time. I know, crazy, right!?!? no wonder the Pilgrims came here.

Anyway, I digress. The facts continue: its not as structured as it sounds; I don’t keep 6 separate time sheets, I don’t log in my work by hours or anything like that. It’s just a rough estimate of how much of my workload is devoted to each faculty member.

so back to my less factual observations (which, i ought to point out, are just as true as the facts themselves): because these six faculty members are like all faculty members everywhere, they’re not here for the summer – overseas, on vacation, researching, or just out, as it goes. so there is very little work (as in, none) for me to do. which, it seems, is the norm in the summers. i work near two other girls, both of whom are stretching for things to do as well. the department lets us take short lunches so we can leave early, or start earlier/later and leave earlier/later. the grad students who are here are wandering around, looking slightly lost but no less intelligent for it. i got sent home early yesterday because there was literally no work to do — the IT guys hadn’t had a chance to hook up my computer or phones. it is, as i said, pretty much the same as any other campus job.

except, of course, for the secret service and state police details which are here because a high-ranking Navy Admiral is visiting for the day.