Professional Identity Crisis

In therapy today I talked a lot about how I really don't know what I want to do with my life at the moment. I had always thought that when you go to grad school, you start to develop some sort of professional identity and will find a job in that field afterwards. It never occurred to me that I wouldn't want to stick in this field when I finished grad school.

Well, that's not entirely true. It's not that I don't want to stay in this field particularly. It's just that I'm tending to be fairly choosy about what projects I'd like to work on. I'm still stuck on the question of how/why anoxia develops on the ocean floor in some areas, which was going to be the heart of my dissertation, had I still been able to go on for my PhD. (Yes, I'm still slightly bitter about this.) So, I'd really like to find a job that involves studying this problem. Granted, it's not a widely studied problem yet, even though I think it should be. I am slightly biased, though, so you may want to take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Of course, this whole identity crisis I'm having also sort of stems from the fact that I finally heard from Rutgers, and I didn't have the job. They were nice enough to say that I was ranked highly in the applicant pool, but they ultimately decided to go with someone with more experience doing the types of things the job required. I kind of figured that I wouldn't get the job, because of my lack of experience, but it's still disappointing.

That makes me go back to the time when I was looking for a part-time job when I was in high school. I had applied all over the place (grocery stores, department stores, restaurants) and most of those places wanted people with experience in whatever job I had applied for. I never really understood that. How is one supposed to get experience in a certain job if no place of business hires someone with no experience? I just can't get a good grasp of that. Eventually I did get a job as a busperson at Perkins, which was not ideal, but it helped me pay for my trip to France my senior year, so I can't complain too much.

Anyway, now I'm back to searching for jobs, not really knowing what kind of job I want to do. I have found a few teaching jobs in the midwest (Madison, WI and Springfield, IL) that I'm applying for. I think those would be the most ideal, because I actually like teaching, and they're much closer to home. I'm hoping those will pan out well for me, but I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much.

I've also been thinking of just moving home for a while and getting a crap job in retail or something while I figure out what I want to do with my life. It would be nice to have a roof over my head that I wouldn't have to directly pay for. Sure, I'd help out with groceries and such, but it would be nice to live somewhere rent free for a while.

I'm also playing around with the idea of not doing anything related to meteorology or oceanography. The main idea floating through my head at the moment is being a writer. Not in the novel sense, but more like writing reviews of TV shows and the like. I mean, I watch entirely too much TV, and I have lots of thoughts about the various shows I watch (especially Lost), so I think I'd be pretty good at it. Granted, I don't have a journalism degree, but who says you need one of those to be a writer? Again, it's just an idea right now. In fact, I'm seriously considering launching a second blog and try my hand at writing about the TV shows I watch. If I do that, I'll post another entry on here linking to that blog.

Anyway, my main point in this entry is that I have no idea what I want to do with my life. I feel like I'm in this quarter-life crisis I've heard about. At this point, I just want a full-time job that pays relatively well so I can not have to live paycheck to paycheck.

In other news, I finally converted my driver license to Pennsylvania. I was actually surprised at how efficient the DMV is here. It took me less than an hour to go through the line, fill out the paperwork and get the license printed. It probably helped that I went relatively early in the day, but still, I was impressed.

And to end this post, I got a Halloween card from my mom earlier this week that I keep chuckling about. On the front there are three ghosts, and they're all yelling "OOB!" Underneath, the text says, "Dyslexic ghosts," and inside it says, "Halloween Happy." I got a kick out of it, because it's from my mom, and sometimes she talks somewhat dyslexicly (if that's a word). In writing this, I realize it's probably not funny to anyone else, but I don't care. It's funny to me, and that's all that matters.