6990 WEEK 2. Sad Face.

This has been the most discouraging week.

I have learned that I am not job material. I have too specific a degree that over qualifies me for a lot of work yet makes me unqualified for a lot of work at the same time. It’s like that song from Avenue Q – “What do you do with a B.A. in English? What is my life going to be? Four years of college and plenty of knowledge has earned me this useless degree. I can’t pay the bills yet cause I have no skills yet. The world is a big scary place” (Lopez & Marx, 2003,track 1).

  To make matters even more confusing, I was living in the illusion that earning a Master’s degree increases my financial opportunities. This is not true. See, I have this silly dream of being able to move out of my childhood home and still afford to buy food and gas. Crazy, right?

Apparently I am still only eligible for center jobs which is not what I want to do, and those jobs pay the same as when I was stopped working. [I resigned from work so I could focus on just on school] I have always known that jobs that care for human beings are bad paying jobs because we’re a country that doesn’t value humans the way it values business. However I am of a generation (I just learned) that values money (Nilson, 2010).  I imagine this would not be as big a deal if I was married because there would be two incomes to live off of but I am not married – no where even close to married so it’s just me earning money for me to live on. As of now, this seems very unlikely.

My dream would be to work as a teacher at a community college. (I realized very quickly I will never work at a four year University as I do not have nor do I want a PhD.) I love my course materials and thinking about classroom life and I like the idea of using what I know from life and school and teaching others. And in the dream I would earn $40,000 a year.  But that is not real life.

Another job I would be interested in having is to work at a museum either on the planning team or the outreach team. I remember in school when museums would come to school or we would go visit museums and there would be a person there to talk to us and teach us about what was going on. I could be that person but apparently not according to the job search websites.

Oh there are lots of interesting jobs out there that I would like to do but I am not able to apply for them as I don’t have this or that. I don’t have a Phd. The idea of pursuing a Phd makes me want to vomit. I don’t have three or more years of experience in teaching. (I kind of do in that I worked in a daycare center for almost three years but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count. 

As I searched around for jobs I realized that I should not have changed my mind in the middle. I thought I knew what I wanted to do but then I changed my mind. I hate having more than one interest. So basically the lesson is don’t get a Masters degree unless you are 120% sure you want that exact job. 

References

Lopez, R. &  Marx, J. (2003). What do you do with a B.A. in English. On Avenue Q, Music from the Musical [itunes]. New York, NY: RCA Victor Broadway.

 Nilson, L. B. (2010). Teaching at its best: A research-based resource for college instructors (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.